Not everyone gets to hear you when you're on 'Late Date'. But Lilian Smith has built a loyal following with her velvety voice and eclectic mix of music, writes Barry Roche
It's the Bournville voice that does it: deep and dark and smooth, it melts across the airwaves to night owls throughout Ireland and beyond. It's little wonder that Lilian Smith connects with so many in the wee hours with her engagingly eclectic mix of music and chat. Many of Smith's most loyal listeners on Late Date, the RTÉ Radio 1 programme she presents each weekend, are men who may hear in her languorously velvety tones some hint of Marlene Dietrich asking the boys in the back room what they will have. "I do hear from females, but it's primarily from males of a certain age. I think they may have some image of me that I present the programme in satin evening gloves," she says, arching her eyebrows and rolling her eyes in mock shock.
Smith, who is 33, has wanted to work in radio since she was at pupil at St Aloysius School, in Cork, when she would come home and tape songs from Gerry Ryan's late-night show, then record her own links to introduce them.
A radio course in Waterford led to jobs with Radio Kerry and then RTÉ Radio Cork, doing everything from news to hospital requests to sport. After RTÉ Radio Cork closed, in 1999, Smith began filling in for Radio 1 presenters; she also compiled The Irish Collection, editing down the day's output for a highlights show broadcast overnight. Then, when The Irish Collection turned into Through the Night, a series of condensed programmes, Smith joined the veteran broadcaster Val Joyce on Late Date.
Four years on and, between regular stints filling in for John Creedon and Ronan Collins during the day, she's enjoying Late Date as much as ever, bringing her diverse tastes in music to her loyal listeners. "I always loved music. I was a teenage goth," says Smith, adding that, as the youngest in a family of five, she had an early immersion in everything from Led Zeppelin and Whitesnake, courtesy of her brothers, to Kate Bush and Janis Ian, courtesy of her sisters. "And then Mum and Dad are both big music fans. Mum would have been into the 1950s crooners - she said she doesn't remember The Beatles, as she was too busy rearing children - while Dad is a big Johnny Cash fan, and then they are both into opera."
Smith's taste is broad. What would she take to a desert island? U2, Puccini, Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, The Beatles and Emmylou Harris. "And a radio, too, of course," she adds. "Most of my musical heroes are dead. The one person I would love to meet now is Emmylou Harris," she says.
Not that it's just established artists Smith will play. She gets a lot of CDs posted to her at RTÉ's studios in Cork, from where she presents the programme, and when she comes across a gem she shares it with her listeners. "Occasionally, you do get stuff that blows you away. Last summer I got some stuff by Mick Flannery from Blarney. Does Tom Waits know that somebody else has his voice? But then Mick is very much his own man as well: he's fantastic."Smith's selections invariably elicit letters, from everyone from fishermen to factory workers and taxi drivers to the police - "Don't mention gardaí; they're not supposed to listen to the radio when they're working," she says.
They tune in from some unusual spots. "I hear regularly from a guy in Croatia who likes listening to different music; I think he's practising his English on the e-mail. I also hear a lot from expats in Australia, Beijing, South America and LA. We seem to be big, too, in Texas and Arkansas. And there's a guy who listens in Antarctica; he's originally from Cobh, and he's on a research vessel. He told me he used to e-mail me years ago, on The Irish Collection, when he was on a fishing boat in the Arctic. Now he's down the other end of the globe. That's pretty cool."
Recently married, she loves to cook. "I buy a lot of cookbooks as well. Give me 40 people to cook for and I'm a happy girl. I'm doing the new Anthony Bourdain one at the moment. It's a brilliant read." She loves cars, too. "I'd love to do a big road trip sometime: stick 3,000 songs on an MP3 player and take off across the United States, do Route 66; I've done the coastal highway from Los Angeles north to San Francisco. Or I might do Paris-Dakar someday."
Smith admits that working in Dublin might help her career, as she would be more visible and therefore be a more obvious candidate for other work. But ask about a possible move into television and she strikes a note of caution. It comes, she says, from seeing what has happened to other radio presenters. "I've seen a lot of people come and go. TV seems to chew people up and spit them out a lot faster, whereas with radio you have a longer shelf life.
"I wouldn't mind doing TV if it was something I was interested in. A programme on cars: that would interest me," she says, breaking into a mischievous smile and adding: "Preferably, in faraway exotic locations with a bit of cooking thrown in. I think I might be able to cope with moving into TV for something like that."