Everything's Gone Greene

Not for the first time in recent months Hot Press finds itself admiring the gleaming Pilsner Urquell beer tank that greets you as you walk into Bridge 1859, the D4 watering hole co-owned by Ireland rugby internationals Jamie Heaslip, Sean O’Brien and Rob and Dave Kearney who one imagines may have had the odd lager shandy there to celebrate winning the Six Nations.

Jamie and Rob also joined Glenda Gilson, Jason Byrne, the Original Rudeboys and Dustin The Turkey – do crews comes any more motley? – for the party Nicky Byrne and Jenny Greene threw in the Bridge last month to celebrate the 1st birthday of their 2fm morning show, which has a none too shabby 140,000 people tuning in every day.
Prior to her on-air hook up with the ex-Westlife man, Greene had been part of the specialist dance music team at 2fm, which she admits was in need of the major shake-up it’s been given by new head Dan Healy.
“When he took-over, he brought us all into the boardroom and was like, ‘These are the rules, this is what’s happening. If anyone’s got a problem with that you know where the fucking door is’,” she recalls. “It was the first time I’d seen everyone just totally silent. I thought it was what was needed. You had commercial stuff during the day, then from 7pm it was a different station. There was no structure to it; you didn’t know what you were going to get when you tuned in. Even though it annoys a lot of people, there needs to be a structured playlist, it’s a commercial radio station. There’s stuff we play during the day that I don’t like, but the listeners do which is what it’s all about.”
So Dan did a bit of a sergeant-major job on them?
“He did,” she smiles. “He came into a room full of egos and personalities and needed to make his mark and not look like he was afraid to do. We all walked out shitting ourselves, and that wasn’t a bad thing.”
The impression I got being out at Radio Centre at the time was that everybody was still struggling to come to terms with Gerry Ryan’s death.
“Yeah, I think so. I’d always listen to Gerry’s shows. He was funny and really engaged with people; you felt he was talking to you personally. Everyone
was always giving out about him and then when he died, it was, ‘Oh no, there’ll never be anybody as good.’ You can’t like for like replace Gerry Ryan because he was unique. We were given a talk about defamation and guidelines last year and they used clips from Gerry’s show to highlight various situations and scenarios. You could hear a pin drop as they started playing them. It was like, ‘God, I’d forgotten how brilliant he was.’ A lot of stuff was written about him after he died, which I thought was unnecessary and would never have been said if he’d been around to defend himself.”
How did Jenny react when she got the call from Dan Healy saying, “I want to stick you and Nicky Byrne together on a show?”
“Dan had come up to me on a Friday night and said, ‘I’m going to use you on something new’, but to be honest I’d been promised so many things over the years that I didn’t get too excited,” she recalls. “The next thing was he asked me to come in late one Tuesday – ‘Don’t tell anyone, we’ll see you in the studio.’ I didn’t know what it was for, went in and found Nicky sitting there. They were like, ‘We just want you to bash it out there for half-an-hour and see how it goes.’ Even though it was obviously very rough, there was a chemistry there that either exists naturally or it doesn’t. You can sit in an office with somebody you don’t like, but you can’t go on air five days a week and have banter with them.
“If I hadn’t been happy with the pairing, I could have said,‘No’.As it was I felt it was a bit of a challenge. We’ve got a brilliant producer, Alan Swan, and I knew from the run-throughs that it could work. Which if you look at the JNRL figures, it has.”
Adamant she doesn’t mind it being called The Nicky Byrne Show – “It made obvious commercial sense because he was so much better-known than I was” – Jenny appears genuinely fond of her radio partner who she points out was on the verge of going into broadcasting when the Westlife gig came along.
“He auditioned for and was offered The Den, but Louie told him not to take it because the band was kicking off. Financially, he probably doesn’t need
to work again but he’s only 36 and wants to build another career. Nicky going into radio was actually quite brave because people were just waiting to knock him down. He’s really had to prove himself.”
There’s been much gnashing of DJ teeth in relation to the number of people with no prior radio experience landing primetime shows. Is that something, which annoys Jenny?
“There have been people – I don’t mean on 2fm, but in general – that I don’t think should have been given the gig, but ultimately you live or die by your ratings. The nature of this buisiness is that you have to deliver almost immediately or you’re out.”
Headlines were made last year when Greene revealed she’s in a relationship with a lady named Kelly Keogh and that one day they’d like to marry. Writing for the LGBT Noise website ahead of August 2014’s March For Marriage, Jenny said: “I don’t want to be treated any differently to my sister or my best friend for that matter. Who I choose to spend the rest of my life with doesn’t affect anybody but me and all I wish is to be able to live my life, the same as everybody else, with the same rights.
“The way I see it, myself and my sister were both brought up in the same house by the same amazing parents. We went to the same school, had similar friends and in a lot of ways our lives are very similar. So why is it that my sister can get married and I cannot?”
She’s unable to talk ‘Yes’ votes today, though, following the issuing in March to RTÉ staff of a memo in which their Head of Compliance, David McKenna, states: “For the duration of the campaign debate, you should not state on social media
your views on either of the two referendums; this includes banners, retweets, Twitter avatars, watermarks and so on. When you walk into the polling station on Friday May 22, you are a private citizen exercising your right to vote, to change or not change the Constitution. For the duration of the campaign debate, your observance of these limits on self-expression is a necessary contribution to that right.”
Some regard this as the state broadcaster sensibly avoiding accusations of bias, while others view it as the outrageous gagging of adults who, whether pro- or anti-the Same-Sex Marriage Referendum, should be allowed to say their piece.
“I can’t talk about the Referendum, but my sexuality isn’t off limits,” proffers Jenny who publicly came out last year in an interview with the Irish Mail.
“I didn’t really consider myself to be ‘in’; most the people I know and work with were aware of my relationship with Kelly. I remember doing the Hot Press Christmas Summit and in it referring to ‘my partner’, which appeared in print as ‘my boyfriend’. It’s just a presumption that people still make.
“My only reservation was that having spent so much time establishing myself as ‘DJ Jenny Greene’ I’d suddenly become ‘gay DJ Jenny Greene’ and be offered things purely because of that. It was a sense of not wanting to be pigeon-holed or defined by something other than my work.”
Was coming out a unilateral decision or, as happened with Nicky’s ex-Westlife bandmate Markus Feehily, a case of beating the tabloids to the punchline?
“Before doing an interview with the Mail as part of all the Nicky Byrne Show launch stuff, a PR person said, ‘It’s an issue that’s likely to be brought up.’ I was a little uncomfortable about it but decided to go ahead with the interview, which I got to see a copy of the night before the paper went on sale, so I had 12 hours to prepare myself. I was a bit nervous, as were the people close to me, but the reaction couldn’t have been more positive. My Facebook that day was full of supportive messages, and I later heard that my coming out had encouraged somebody they knew to do so as well, which is brilliant.
“A week later the Rose of Tralee, Maria Walsh, announced she was gay, so my thunder was stolen!” Jenny laughs. “There have been lots of positive developments with Leo Varadkar, who you could tell was struggling a bit talking to Miriam O’Callaghan, coming out and that straight away being accepted. Then you had Pat Carey, an older gentleman, feeling confident enough to talk about it. My newsreader colleague, Aengus MacGrianna and his fiancé Terry Gill, had their wedding photos in the RTÉ Guide, which wouldn’t have happened 10-years ago. It's becoming less and less of an issue."
As a self-confessed petrol head – an Audi TT 2.0 TDI Quattro S-Line is her current motor of choice – what does Jenny make of Jeremy Clarkson getting the heave-ho from Top Gear?
“I don’t feel sorry for Clarkson or get why a million people signed the petition supporting him,” she proffers. “This is someone with money and privilege thinking they can treat a junior colleague like shit. If I punched somebody in the face at work, I’d expect to be in serious trouble. It’s not the first time he’s thrown his toys out of the pram either.”
The Nicky Byrne Show might have reached the ripe old age of one, but Jenny still has days when she can’t quite believe she’s on national radio.
“I did my first radio show aged 15 on the pirate Pulse FM because I loved dance music and wanted to meet my heroes Mark McCabe and Al Gibbs,” she reflects. “They’d just moved from a shed in Clontarf to a building in Mountjoy Square, which is where John Boy’s girlfriend in Love/Hate took the overdose. We were all texting each other when that came on the TV! A bit further down the line I was playing with Judge Jules and Lisa Lashes in the Temple Theatre, and in the Crypt with the Banana Boys. Unlike my sister who’s a chemical engineer,
I wasn’t academic and left school early with my parents’ blessing to do Weekend Breakfast on FM104. I left there because of a new clause in my contract that said if I wanted to leave I had to give them six- months notice. If they fired me, though, I couldn’t work anywhere else for six-months. My dad had a knicker-fit because I’d walked without another job to go to. I don’t know how, but two radio stations phoned me within an hour. I’ve always seemed to land on my feet. You see people giving out on forums about 2fm – ‘It’s this and that and I’d hate to work there’ – but we all know they’re the very ones who’d cut their right arms off to work there. Because of 2fm, I’ve managed to present a dance show and gig all over the country. I’ve introduced Fatboy Slim in a tiny little pub down a Cork side- street, covered the Electric Picnic for RTÉ Television and had Noel Gallagher sing a few feet away from me in the studio. I really wouldn’t want to work anywhere else.”