Dave Fanning has a man bag. It’s a battered brown leather satchel full of notebooks containing playlists and ideas for programmes, the notes written neatly in longhand. “Old school,” he says.
We’re in The Mercantile Hotel on Dame Street sipping a latte and when I ask how he’s doing he says “Ah, sure, you know yourself, I’m working in RTÉ – have you heard about it lately?” He very much wants to keep working there – “I love what I do” – so he’s careful about what he says about the broadcaster. “I mean sometimes you have to say something, I’ve done that a few times over the years and there’s one or two things I wish I hadn’t said, but such is life.”
We’ll come back to some foot-in-mouth moments later but for now we’re interrupted by a middle-aged man at the next table. “I recognised your voice,” he tells Fanning. “It was a pleasure growing up with you.”
This kind of thing happens to him a lot. Turning 70 next February, he has been playing music for audiences since the late-1970s. “People say they grew up with me but they’d no f**king choice, it was 1980s Ireland; it’s like when there was a really bad movie on a plane, you had to watch it,” he says. He makes the point that when he started playing records on RTÉ there wasn’t much else going on. “I mean we weren’t bad, I’ll say that, but we were only doing what Joe Bloggs would have done, playing records. Like, it wasn’t science – we were just lucky to be the ones doing it.”
And he’s still doing it, nearly 50 years later, which is something he doesn’t take for granted. He finds it hilarious that for the next few weeks there’s a Dave Fanning show on seven days a week on RTÉ radio. He breaks it down. There’s his RTÉ Gold show from 6pm to 8pm Monday to Friday. On Saturday, he has a show that is his take on music through the decades. (He gives 16 hours to each decade so that one will go on for a while.) Then on Sundays, for the next several weeks, he has an hour in the evening where 24 Irish bands or artists will pick one favourite album and discuss it. “So that’s me, seven days a week for the next while,” he says with a laugh.
The other programmes are more chatty but his Monday-to-Friday gig, Dave Fanning on RTÉ Gold, is just about the music. Across the two-hour programme you’ll hear his voice, and he’s timed it, for a mere five minutes. “There’s no news, there’s no sport, there’s no ads, there’s no demo tapes, there’s no weather,” he says.
Here’s his pitch to listeners, who he is well aware are a specific demographic. “I’m saying to people, listen, you know that record collection you have at home, the one you are going to buy a new turntable for? You’re never going to buy a new turntable, with all due respect, blokes, and anyway your wife has put your record collection in the attic. Or in the skip.” If this resonates, Fanning’s message to you is: “Worry not. I’ll play your record collection for you. I’ll play the music you like and I’ll shut the f**k up.”
At this point, another person approaches, a younger man this time. He wants Fanning’s advice about whether he should go to see Paul Weller or Van Morrison play live this summer. Fanning gives him a five-minute answer but the short version is “Paul Weller, because Van Morrison is hit and miss and 80 per cent of the time he’s a miss”.
[ From the archive: Dave Fanning moving on from 2FM after 44 yearsOpens in new window ]
He describes himself as a music veteran from an early age thanks to the record collections and excellent taste of his older siblings. The youngest of six growing up in south Co Dublin – “well, my mother would say youngest of seven; one brother, Brian, died at the age of nine months”. Fanning had an “idyllic” childhood and went to Blackrock College. A fully paid-up member of the official Beatles fan club since he was eight, at 11 he went to his local record shop and put a “10 bob note down as a deposit on the Beatles’ new album which wasn’t due out for six months”. Fanning remembers the record shop assistant asking him what it was called. “It’s called Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” 11-year-old Fanning declared.
He’d read about the album in his brother’s NME magazine. The publication was on order in the Fanning family’s local shop for six decades. While he went on to train to be a teacher in UCD, his musical education continued in the college’s Theatre L where he saw everyone from Paul Brady to Thin Lizzy. Then there was an ad on the back of The Irish Times, “editor wanted for Scene Magazine”. His mother saw it and said “give it a bash”, while friends encouraged him. He got the job.
While working there he was also with pirate station Big D Radio and DJing three nights a week in McGonagles. That’s when his relationship with U2 began. He’d play them more than any other band “because they were good but they also had more demos than anyone else”.
In 1979, RTÉ decided they had better start a pop station to target younger listeners and RTÉ Radio 2, now 2FM, was born. Until then people were “listening to Radio Luxembourg with the radio out the window but they didn’t have to do that any more because we were playing the music”. I think about that 11-year-old putting down a deposit for the new Beatles album. Could he believe playing records was his actual job? “I can hardly believe it now,” he says. “There are people who say ‘never make your hobby your job’. F**k that.”
U2 were the first unsigned band to record one of his Fanning Sessions where up-and-coming bands were paid to come and record songs. “Public service broadcasting at its finest,” Fanning says. This was the start of the tradition where the band let Fanning be the first DJ in the world to play their new releases.
He was considered a “good luck charm” by the band’s former manager Paul McGuinness. He still gets invited around to Bono’s house for a listening party every time there’s a new album. Why does he think Bono gets such a hard time from some? “He wears his heart on his sleeve and some people don’t like that.”
The other obsession that he managed to turn into a profession is cinema. He has presented film shows for decades and for the past 40 years he has watched a minimum of a movie a night. His wife Ursula is about to go away with friends and this means he will probably watch two. Hitchcock’s Psycho is a favourite. He saw a list of top 100 movie stars in Empire recently. “I had interviewed 84 of them,” he marvels. He mentions Ursula, a solicitor, a lot. He says he wasn’t keen to settle down but that getting married “was the best decision that was ever made for me”.
Fanning makes a living from talking but sometimes his mouth gets him into trouble. When Aslan’s Christy Dignam died, he made comments about the singer’s earlier heroin use which understandably angered and upset his family. He made a heartfelt apology at the time. He’s reluctant to get into it again, only saying: “Christy was brilliant, I loved him”.
He got into trouble when the RTÉ payments scandal broke, tweeting: “I think we all need a distraction from that nonsensical Oireachtas Nuremberg trial … So listen to our Rory Gallagher special tonight.” He later apologised unreservedly, saying he did not mean to trivialise proceedings.
He is friends with Ryan Tubridy, and they are both represented by Noel Kelly who was a central figure in the RTÉ scandal. He doesn’t get into the detail of the controversy but says “the way Ryan was treated was appalling. He was a scapegoat … he’s paid enough of a price and was hounded out of this country in many ways. I felt very sorry for Ryan, he was vilified.”
Conceived in the pandemic, his Fanning At Whelan’s showcase for Irish music on Virgin Media is a sort of family cottage industry, with his wife, son and daughter involved in production. He’s never been staff at RTÉ which has allowed him work for other organisations and, crucially, being a contractor meant he did not have to retire at 65.
He’s in good health? “Yes. And I think I look OK, but then you are out for a pint and you go for a pee and look at yourself in the mirror and think, who the f**k is that?”
He still plays his records at home – the record collection is not in the attic – but he streams music too. Best new Irish act? “A. Smyth.” He hates how difficult it is for bands now, how financially impossible to hit the road and find an audience. “It’s terrible.” He gets wound up by injustice and follows US politics closely – he can rant for Ireland about the current state of affairs. He’s not a rap fan but on the Kneecap furore he says: “I can’t understand it. What’s wrong with saying you are against genocide?”
Our lively Fanning session has lasted more than two hours. I could talk to him all day. If you are interested in music or film or whether Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles – “she definitely did” – time spent with Fanning is pure entertainment. He interviewed David Bowie five times. Paul McCartney six times. His enthusiasm and energy are impressive. He really can’t believe his luck, still getting to do what he does all day – seven days a week, in fact, for the next while. He throws his battered bag over his shoulder and heads off into the Dublin sunshine. “I never want to stop,” he says. “I mean, why would I?”
Dave Fanning on RTÉ Gold runs Monday to Friday 6pm to 8pm
