New 2fm lunchtime woman Tracy Clifford has Louis Walsh to thank for landing her dream job. Well, sort of!
“When I was with Spin 1038, I went over to London to do a report on the X Factor,” she recalls. “I got an interview with Sam Bailey, who was lovely, and was then introduced to Louis who said, ‘Spin? You never played Westlife. Why should I talk to you?’ He was giving out in that pantomime villain way of his, so I said, ‘Shut up, Louis! Because we’re number one among 15-35s, that’s why!’ Dan Collins, the Head of 2fm was sitting in the corner of the dressing-room, seemed quite impressed that I’d stood up to Louis like that and said, ‘Stay in touch’. Which we did.”
Has Tracy any other pop Svengalis firmly in their place during her broadcasting career?
"i'm not fierce, but when the circumstances call for it I can give as good as I get - especially when I'm on a job in the UK and nobody knows who I am!" she laughs. "I'm very good at elbowing my way through other DJs and journalists to get to people on the red carpet. James May was having a private chat with Tom Cruise at the Jack Reacher premiere and I stuck my microphone in their faces: ‘James! James! Tom Cruise, best driver ever!’ And James just turned around and gave me a look of absolute disgust, like, ‘Will you ever go away, you annoying loud Irish girl!’ But that’s how it works in England. If you stand there smiling sweetly waiting for your turn you won’t get anything and you’re going to be bollocked out of it when you get home for being the worst showbiz reporter ever!”
Thankfully, Cruise had forgotten that earlier encounter when Tracey managed to bag a proper interview with him.
“I was scared shitless of Tom Cruise,” she confesses. “He stares you straight in the face and you’re like, ‘Aaaarrrrgh, he’s looking into my soul.’ It’s a technique he’s developed to let you know that he’s in control. You’d have to be a serious journalistic hard-nut to ask him, ‘So, Tom, what’s with this Scientology lark?’ I thought Lady Gaga might be a bit like that, but she’s an absolute sweetheart. I’ve met her twice and she just gives you what you want in terms of quotes. There’s a genuine warmth about her, even though she’s got the sunglasses on. I covered One Direction for Spin right back to when they were little boys. Even if you were interview number 85 of the day, they were always lovely. It can’t have been easy growing up in public like that, as we’re seeing a bit now.”
Having served her radio apprenticeship on the pirate Hot FM – “I was shitting a brick doing my first show in a bedroom!” – Tracy got her first paid gig reading the news on East Coast FM in 2002. From there she graduated to the Wicklow station’s breakfast show where she was given a broadcasting masterclass by Declan Meehan.
“When I left the house at six o’clock to do my first East Coast breakfast show, I hid all the radios and took the keys of the friends I had staying over so that they couldn’t go to their cars to tune in. I was a nervous wreck but Declan, who’s the ultimate professional and a bit of a hero of mine, put me at my ease. I’m on 2fm now playing music, but as a kid I wanted to be Anne Doyle!”
Ending up as East Coast’s Head of News, Clifford got to lock horns with lots of political types including Gerry Adams. How did she find the Sinn Fein President?
“Err... disarming,” she says after a pause.
“He’s very, very intelligent and able to steer the conversation in the direction he wants. Gerry Adams is not the type of person to get caught out in interviews. He walks into the studio knowing what he wants to say and, no matter what questions you throw at him, he says it. There was only one person controlling that interview – him!”
You’d have thought those nerves of hers would have resurfaced when Tracy made her 2fm debut, but she had other things on her mind.
“All I was worried about that morning was getting U2 tickets!” she laughs. “I’d read a Conor Pope article saying, ‘Get online at 8.58am, not a moment later, not a moment sooner.’ So that’s what I did and, bingo, two tickets. They cost four hundred quid so I’d better be sitting in Bono’s lap for that much!
“I’m taking my boyfriend this time – under sufferance! – but I’m known for going to U2 gigs on my own, so I can completely immerse myself in what’s going on. I don’t want people blathering on about the day they’ve had at work when Bono’s singing ‘One’. I’ve been going to see them since I was a kid and each time the atmosphere’s been completely different. I enjoyed the Chemical Brothers – or more precisely, the Chemical Brother – at Longitude but you knew that the next night in Berlin or wherever the show would be exactly the same. With U2 there’s always this sense of, ‘Wow, I’m witnessing something unique!’”
WARNING: Unless you want to feel those sharp elbows of hers yourself, refrain from asking Tracy for 3Arena selfies when U2 are playing. Has she ever interviewed the chaps?
“No and it’s the bane of my life!” she sighs. “Now that I’m on 2fm I might get the chance but, then again, that’s Dave Fanning’s gig.”
It’s refreshing having a woman on national radio who’s not a newsreader or a showbiz reporter or a sidekick but a DJ bashing out the hits like the boys.
“I don’t really get into that whole ‘women on air’ thing,” she proffers. “I’ve come from radio stations where every second person on air is female. The Spin Programme Director is a woman and every day on 2fm I follow on from another radio hero of mine, Jenny Greene, who’s an equal partner in the show she does with Nicky Byrne.”
Has she hit it off with the former Westlifer?
“He’s a really, really good guy. The second day I came in, he gave me a round of applause and said, ‘Well done, Tracy. I was listening yesterday and you’re very funny.’”
One of the best radio moments of 2015 was Clifford celebrating the Same Sex Marriage Referendum victory with gusto on Spin.
“I was doing my Saturday night dance show when the Cork result finally came in, and played the Macklemore song, ‘Love’, into ‘Free, Gay & Happy’. I was like, ‘This is an amazing moment for Irish history!’ People were out on the streets cheering and hugging each other – it was just incredible.
“RTÉ took the position that you couldn’t tweet about the referendum, but at Spin we were allowed to do whatever we wanted on social media. We couldn’t say anything on air, of course, but you could tell from the kind of songs we played that we were in the ‘yes’ camp. Club and LGBT culture have always gone hand in hand.”
At 2fm she’s more or less the same age as the audience, but during her nine-year Spin tenure Tracy had to allow for the fact that most of her listeners were still at school.
“Doing the news at Spin, you wouldn’t dumb down but write it in a tabloid way that wouldn’t make it a turnoff. On other occasions you’d go, ‘Right, what was I thinking when I was 15?’ The one major difference now, of course, being social media. I’d have hated the selfie and Instagram thing where it’s all image based. There’s no privacy now. Imagine going through a breakup and people commenting about private things that are upsetting on your page. I’d have struggled with that.”
What was her childhood like?
“Good,” she smiles. “My parents, who are still together, had me when they were 19 so we sort of grew up together. There’s seven years between me and my sister. It was hard to rebel music-wise because my dad was into cool stuff like U2 and T. Rex. We were at a Christmas party and he said to me, ‘Have you heard that Benny Benassi song, ‘Beautiful People’?’ I was like, ‘Er, yeah, I’m playing it on the radio.’ I went to a Catholic school run by nuns but they were the sound ones. There was an embarrassing rave phase with the wide jeans, Giorgio tops and soothers round my neck but otherwise I didn’t commit too many crimes against fashion growing up. Well, not that there’s photographic evidence of!”
There’s a feeling that, having tried to be all things to all people for ten years, 2fm is finally back to being a no-nonsense pop music station that your parents probably wouldn’t like.
“Yeah, they’ve kind of joined the dots by adding myself and Eoghan McDermott,” she concludes. “If you like what’s going out on 2fm at seven in the morning you’ll probably like what’s going out at seven in the evening. The atmosphere going into the station every day is brilliant and you’re just allowed to get on with things. It really is my dream job so, yeah, thank you Louis!”