"I certainly feel I’m in a better place – which I know usually means you’re dead! – but it’s all about music there.”
John Kelly is speaking about his move from RTE’s Radio 1 to Lyric FM, after the controversial axing of his Mystery Train programme – a night of the long knives that also claimed Rattlebag’s mid-afternoon slot and replaced it with yet more yak radio.
“Musically it’s gonna be different,” Kelly says, “it wouldn’t be appropriate at Lyric, as it’s currently constituted, to play White Stripes and The Sex Pistols, so I’ll miss that, but I am looking forward to putting classical music into the mix, electronica, music from all around the world, medieval church music – ecstatic nuns from way back! – fitting it all together so nothing will jar.
“I’m getting a lot of goodwill from people who are surprising me actually, people you meet at a Joan As Policewoman gig or something, they say they listen to Lyric all the time. Some of them are interested in classical music, and some of them can’t find anything else on the dial that isn’t yabber-yabber-yabber. They don’t know much about this Mozart guy, but he sounds better than anything else on there. People are like that. They get pushed and shoved around and advised and cajoled and manipulated by the market and the media, but they make their own choices in the end.”
Although he was far from happy with the demise of Mystery Train, Kelly claims he’s had his fill of re-reading the entrails.
“The Irish Times did a piece at the weekend which went through the minutiae of the sequence of events, which is presumably very boring for people,” he says. “Unfortunately I had to answer very obvious questions such as, ‘I thought you turned down the job at Lyric FM?’ And I didn’t actually; I hadn’t been offered one at that point. I’m kind of fed up explaining what happened, I’d like to get more constructive than talking about Ana Leddy.
“I’m not setting up the rallying flag for some great cause or something, but I think one of the reasons that a lot of people reacted strongly – some would say a disproportionate reaction for a half-past-eight programme on Radio 1 which didn’t have a whole lot of listeners – was it triggered what a lot of people who were interested in music and books and movies were feeling. I think for a long time those sorts of people, and I’m one of them, would look at television, for instance, in total disbelief at what’s going on.
“But the sense I got from the letters I received, and what people said and continue to say to me, was an impotent rage against the powers-that-be these days. There’s a conflict between the sorts of things that prosper and are promoted and get pushed, and the sorts of things that are given less and less wriggle room. And the people who value certain things feel that they’re being dismissed as a bunch of freaks. I’m not talking about letters from people who are mime artists or run theatre companies or are a lobby group who see Rattlebag as a shop window or my programme as a place to get their record played when nobody else will play it. These are letters from regular people.”
Kelly strongly refutes any notion that Mystery Train catered exclusively to an elitist audience comprised of esoteric musicologists.
“I’ve been playing pop music from when pop music began,” he says, “but the broader you get, the more you’re treated as if you’re doing something incredibly narrow. I could do a programme which might typically have Kylie Minogue, Miles Davis, The Sex Pistols, Johnny Cash, Mahler and music from Ethiopia, and somehow it’s viewed as narrow, whereas if you went on and played half an hour of country ‘n’ Irish music, that’s fine. The people that didn’t like the Mystery Train, either in or out of RTE, would say, ‘Oh yeah, he plays Chinese music,’ and that’d be it. Music from every genre dismissed in one sentence, in a kind of lazy, insular, xenophobic way. If you see music now in terms of television, it’s presented to young people as a talent competition. And it’s about the music business. The real stars of the programme are the judges and it seems to be getting more appalling. I just wonder what it promotes, what it does to talented young people. They must think, ‘There’s nowhere for me to go. I’m not like that. I’m not an extrovert. I don’t talk this American psychobabble about, ‘If you wanna make it you just do it.’
“But I think when Mystery Train and other programmes came off, it was almost like a last straw for some people. It was the one thing left that they listened to on the radio, it came to symbolize something that appeared to be declared of no value, and so the people who listened to it felt personally insulted as well, that the things they care about passionately are currently of no value in this world. There’s a public service issue there, and it was typical of a lot of letters that complained to say, ‘I’m not paying my license fee anymore!’ I suppose it was people who thought the money was being spent on minority sports like mine, when you clearly couldn’t have a Mystery Train on 98FM or Today FM, and they saw it as RTE’s job.”

In the wake of the Mystery Train/Rattlebag cull, The Sunday Independent in particular wasted no time in twisting the knife. You’re A Star judge and Sindo magazine editor Brendan O’Connor wrote a column applauding the demise of the programme, while the magazine published a lengthy piece written by novelist Eamonn Sweeney, which rather inaccurately parodied Kelly’s arts review programme The View, portraying it as an elitist forum for art snobs blathering on about Beckett and video installations. Mr Sweeney’s position, given that he’s a reasonably established novelist, was baffling. One might have wondered if one of his books had received a scalding from one of the show’s reviewers. As it turned out, he was a regular panelist on the programme at one stage.
At this point I must declare my prejudices. I’ve contributed regularly to both Rattlebag and The View, and while there have been times when I’ve wanted to hurl my tea at the screen, or rise from my seat and throttle fellow panelists, I think such discrepancies are not only healthy, but debunk the notion that these programmes exist solely as the organ of some muso conspiracy bred in a D4 arts lab. For my own part, I always tried to speak about the items under review in plain language. And the producers of such shows encourage disparity of opinion and approach, not least because conflict makes for much better radio and television than consensus.
Equally, the argument that Rattlebag caters to two men and a fomaldyhide-floating dog exhibit in The Project doesn’t hold. No other show on Irish radio has asked this contributor on to talk about The Ramones, Apocalypyse Now or 100 years of horror films for half an hour at prime time. Hardly highbrow stuff. And most of the feedback I received about such shows came from fellow parents at my children’s school, or the regulars in my local.
If there is such a thing as an ‘arts community’ in Ireland it’s not necessarily some geezer exhibiting a badly looped video of himself eviscerating a dead rabbit. Its definition must also include amateur drama societies, writers’ workshops, reading groups, film fans, painters, gig goers and radio listeners. People whose definition of entertainment goes beyond watching You’re A Star, or Brian Kennedy and Smokie playing to an audience that looks like they’ve been beamed up from Going Strong circa 1979, or Joe Cuddy doing ‘Sweet Caroline’ on a showband tribute special.
Consider the following excerpt from the Terence Brown’s 2005 book Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-2002 (Harper Prennial) in which he quoted an American journalist writing about Irish literacy in the 1920s.
“At Enniscorthy it came to me very conclusively that scattered all about Ireland there is a small, highly-educated intellectual middle-class which does not coincide with the moneyed people, not with the fox-hunting people at all – a class which, quietly living its own life and unobtrusively going its own way, is not often observed by the stranger. [....] For those good and excellent people scattered over the face of Ireland, whose habits of mind force them to a certain solitude, may accept as a rather enheartening certainty the thought that when they sit alone playing Wagner instead of bridge or reading Joseph Conrad instead of someone’s palm, they are taking a place with honour in the community life of their country.”
Which contrasts rather markedly with present day middlebrow commentators appropriating a spurious Everyman posture as they advocate a dumb-it-down stance.
“150,000 people sit up until all hours of the night to watch The View,” Kelly points out. “Now, you tell me they’re all German existentialists? They’re regular people. My mother’s raging ’cos Rattlebag was taken off! With The View, or any kind of arts programme, there are people who queue up to say it’s full of pretentious people. Well, just ’cos you don’t understand what people are saying doesn’t mean that they’re stupid. Just because people are using words of more than one syllable doesn’t mean that they’re pretentious. People should be allowed to talk about whatever they want to talk about and not be dismissed as idiots.
“I pay no attention to that, because it’s only ever applied to things like music and the arts. Nobody writes articles about John Giles and Liam Brady if they talk intelligently about a football match. Nobody’s sitting there saying, ‘Oh, I heard Liam Brady banging on about the offside rule’. There are people watching that don’t know what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t mean he’s talking nonsense; he’s an expert on football, that’s why he’s there. The same with politics, they don’t cut short a programme on the Budget if it gets a bit long-winded about tax concessions or something. People complain about people pontificating on television while at the same time they’re pontificating in print. They’re all on very thin ice.”