Oasis fever appears to grip the airwaves this week, with talk of the brow-blessed five-piece never far from a listening ear.
Standing in for Claire Byrne on Monday’s Today (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), Colm Ó Mongáin quizzes Damien O’Mara of RTÉ Sport, the Irish Times journalist Nadine O’Regan and the meteorologist Cathal Nolan about their Oasis fandom ahead of the band’s two sold-out reunion gigs at Croke Park this weekend.
O’Mara is energetic in his enthusiasm, charging the group with responsibility for “the best gig I’ve ever seen, and the worst”, and relating stirring tales of “sweat dripping off the walls” at the old Point Depot.
Nolan reminisces about his time belting out Oasis hits in a tribute band, which included driving one audience member into such a flurry of ecstasy that he somersaulted himself into needing medical attention.
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Such a segment may make it seem as if you can’t throw a rock in the RTÉ canteen without hitting a paid-up member of the Oasis fan club, although O’Mara tries, and fails, to deny such rumours.
“I bristled slightly when your producer described me as a ‘superfan’ over the phone,” he says, “and then I realised it’s like having a personality disorder: if there’s 10 criteria, I probably have 11 of them.” The first step, Ó Mongáin quips, is admitting it.
O’Regan, who wrote about Oasis last weekend, describes herself as a grunge fan first and foremost – one who originally resented these new kids on the block. Soon, however, she fell under the spell of Live Forever and Champagne Supernova, and the band who “held Britpop by the scruff of the neck” while also producing some of the era’s funniest interviews from Noel Gallagher, their dependably voluble driving force.
Anyone wondering what she means need only tune into The Fanning Files (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), where Dave Fanning dedicates an hour to his archive interviews with the band, the second of three Oasis-themed programmes he’s broadcasting in successive weeks.
If you’re expecting puff pieces, you may have forgotten the cutting teeth of the broadcaster in his mischievous pomp. “Let’s face it,” he says to Gallagher about the band’s slightly less well-regarded third album, Be Here Now, “it wasn’t very good, was it?”
“It suffered from the fact that it wasn’t Morning Glory,” Gallagher replies, somewhat on his heels.
“It suffered from the fact you had a big head,” Fanning retorts, barely 60 seconds into the first interview of a bracingly listenable, and quotable, hour of programming.
[ Dave Fanning: ‘I felt very sorry for Ryan Tubridy. He was vilified’Opens in new window ]
Elsewhere, on Monday’s Breakfast (Newstalk, weekdays) the financial-crime expert Mary D’Arcy tells Shane Coleman’s listeners how to avoid scam tickets being widely touted in the capital ahead of the gigs, and on Tuesday’s 2FM Morning (weekdays), Laura Fox has the media tutor Simon Maher on to discuss Oasis’s history with, and in, Ireland.
If your feelings towards Oasis are less “definitely” and more “maybe” you might be tempted by the more sedate environs of Sunday Miscellany (RTÉ Radio 1) and its typically varied roster of first-person narratives.
Those tuning in late will be cheered by Maeve Edwards’s evocative paean to the distinctly non-Britpop sounds of the Finnish composer Sibelius, woven through with contemplations on hand-holding as a sign of love, and song itself as an act of communal defiance in post-Soviet states.
There’s also a meditative treatise on comfort food by Denise Blake, which begins with a tear-inducing moment involving Paddington Bear’s marmalade sponge cake before developing into a thesis on the nostalgia engendered by beloved meals from childhood; a stirring short survey of the eventful life of Leonard Cheshire, the British wing commander who once rejoiced at bombing Germany to smithereens but renounced war after witnessing the detonation of the atom bomb, embraced Catholicism, dedicated his life to charitable works and is now en route to being named a saint; and an intriguing literary treasure hunt in which the theatre director Conor Hanratty tries to unpick the mystery of whether Oscar Wilde ever published an 11-volume translation of Aristophanes’s satires.
It’s a great listen, spanning a range of subjects that would seem hectic in less safe hands and delivered, as always, in the softly compelling tones of a friendly lay pastor offering a gratifyingly secular Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
But the show opens with David Coughlan’s engaging essay The Only Guinness in the Gaelic Club, which tells of an evening the author spent, while backpacking in 2006, attempting to catch a glimpse of The Strokes at the titular venue in Sydney, Australia.
Harrumphing at his lack of success at gaining entry to the hottest ticket in music, he turns to see a familiar face sinking some Guinness – a drink that was not, at the time, available at the club. It’s none other than Noel Gallagher, enjoying a pint he’d purloined from a different pub before decamping to the Gaelic Club with his band so they could catch The Strokes themselves.
The elder Gallagher appears volubly impressed to meet people “who aren’t phoneys”, and Coughlan and his pals strike up an unlikely evening of camaraderie with the rock superstars – who inveigle him and his mates into the gig so they can watch “the biggest band of the noughties alongside the biggest band of the ’90s”.
It’s a sweet, well-told tale of a celebrity encounter, and proof, for Coughlan at least, that some heroes are worth meeting, and lionising, after all.
Moment of the week
Second Captains Saturday (RTÉ Radio 1) hosts Brían F O’Byrne, the Tony- and Bafta-winning actor, star of such films as Conclave and Million Dollar Baby. Of more pressing interest for the programme’s hosts, Eoin McDevitt and Ciarán Murphy, is his unlikely moment of sporting infamy years before his board-treading success.
We’re taken back to the summer of 1994, when Jack Charlton’s Ireland soccer team were beating Italy at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, at the Fifa World Cup, and the well-known image of a pitch invader handcuffed on the turf, his green hair cradled by Charlton’s huge, fatherly hand.
This young man, it turns out, was O’Byrne, who’d arranged a break from his first Broadway gig so he could catch the match of a lifetime, before becoming part of its history himself.
The stunt earns him a brief stint in lock-up, a lifetime ban from Lansdowne Road and scalding disgrace once the photograph is plastered over front pages back home, causing his own father to tell him he “let Ireland down”.
O’Byrne’s thoughtful delivery of the tale allows for natural laughs while still being clear-eyed about the damage all this caused to his younger self. And he speaks movingly of how, many years later, it formed a turning point towards the sobriety he has maintained for 20 years.
As for that ban from Lansdowne, it lasted until he won a Tony Award, when some unnamed FAI representative happened to be glued to the wireless. “I was doing a radio show,” he says, “and they got a call saying it had been rescinded.”
A salutary lesson on the power of radio, if nothing else.
