It's oddly appropriate that the studio from which Donal Dineen masterminds a programme called Here Comes the Night on a radio station called Today FM is one of the few broadcast studios in Ireland or Britain which can boast the presence of natural light. Except in high summer, the sunlight which streams through two stoutly-insulated windows high above Dublin's Abbey Street has mostly faded by the time Dineen takes to the airwaves each evening; but devotees would say that, with its constantly shifting mix of jazz and hip-hop, r'n'b and Arvo Part, Here Comes the Night has unceremoniously flung open an enormous variety of musical windows, shedding light on songs, or moments in musical history, or kinds of music which had languished in the shadows during the endless dark ages of commercial MOR radio.
Dineen would say no such thing. He talks about "the programme", not "my programme". He pooh-poohs the idea that he's any kind of expert on music - "I'm terrible on detail; I'd be useless in a music quiz; I wouldn't know what Emerson, Lake and Palmer's first album was". He's doing this interview to help publicise a series of concerts at the Olympia Theatre which are, in turn, designed to help bring the show to a wider audience; he's enthusiastic and polite, and funny and serious by turns, and when he starts to talk about music it's clearly going to be hard to get him to stop, but it's also clear that he's embarrassed - no, appalled - by the idea of becoming a media celebrity.
"When I look back on my early days of listening to radio, it isn't the DJs that I remember," he says, "but what I heard them play." In his early teens, what he heard them play was Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Albert Hammond. "Folk music, I suppose you could say, and in some ways that's very uncool right now - but why would you deny yourself the chance to listen to those sort of musicians, with the amount that they brought to bear on music? For me, growing up in Kerry, listening to the radio was like listening to a whole different world. When you're living in Kerry, it's hard to relate David Bowie to anything you've ever experienced. I always had the urge to share my discoveries, to tell people about this - this life force, really. Every day I used to sit in geography class writing out my Top 100, to see if it would change, and of course it did change. And I still feel like that about music; the joy of it, for me, is not knowing what comes next."
This sense of discovery is what fuels Here Comes the Night, and what makes it such a treat in these days of computerised play-lists and hard-sell hook-lines. "It's meant to be mixed in a way that's relatively seamless. It's an awful lot to expect of people, I know, but it's worth listening to the programme the whole way through, because the bigger picture does make some sort of sense. It has a journey aspect - there's a start and an end, it's meant to be continuous. I know when it's not working; when something just crashes, or doesn't work with what's gone before. Sometimes I just can't find something - if you hear it go from soul music to hip-hop in a jarring sort of way, it's usually because I can't find whatever I'm looking for."
Dineen's style is also informed by strong reservations about many aspects of the music business which have become so entrenched that we mostly take them for granted - the sardonic tone of much rock journalism, for instance, or the very act of writing about music at all, which often descends into a series of helpless cliches. "To use another cliche, it's akin to dancing about architecture. I prefer to let - not let the music speak for itself, exactly, but to keep my interruptions to a minimum."
He has, however, thrown himself headlong into the aforementioned series of concerts at the Olympia, intended both to celebrate two years of Here Comes the Night and to try to bring the programme to a wider audience. "The idea is that it's a better way of publicising the programme than publicising the programme, if you know what I mean. Personally I think the audience for Here Comes the Night is a brilliant size - but in the world of diagrams, let's say, there's Liberty Hall, and I'm a medium-sized Georgian house. So it would be nice if the listener-ship were to expand by a couple of thousand every now and again, and it would be great if the shows at the Olympia contributed to that.
"For me a better way to get involved with this, rather than putting my name on a poster or something, is to actually do something at the gig. So I'm trying to bring all the strands that I've been touched by over the past few years - writing, music, film and still photographs - and make them into a composite whole." Something like Wagner's idea of music drama, perhaps, in which both visual and aural elements play an equal role. It's not Dineen's first multimedia outing, by any means; he mounted his own photographic installations at Galway Arts Festival in 1992 and 1993, but this 30-minute presentation will be an ambitious attempt to weld his own still photographs of Barcelona, film footage he has shot in Co Kerry, Dublin and Spain, a written commentary and music from two years of Here Comes the Night into a coherent whole. "I don't want to make too big a thing out of it," he says, "but maybe on the night it will add something extra, give people a different memory of going there.
The Here Comes the Night concerts begin at the Olympia Theatre at 8 p.m. on Thursday with Mogwai and guests The Plague Monkeys. There are two shows scheduled for Friday: the 8 p.m. slot is taken by David Gray, who will, as this concert is sold out, also play an extra date on Sunday, March 21st at 8 p.m.; the midnight slot will be occupied by Lamb. On Saturday, March 20th at 8 p.m. it's the turn of dEUS with guests The Frames.