At Home With... Conor G

If you find yourself still stuck at home with your parents watching on as the property boom continues to blow up in your face, don’t despair, you’re not alone. Countless others feel for your situation, not least 2FM and club DJ Conor G, back at the parental homestead after a spell of renting.

“I’m back with the folks to save up for a deposit for my own place,” he chuckles. “Everything’s very, very temporary. There are thousands of records in the front room stuck in boxes. I’ve been here about a month and I haven’t really got anything sorted.”

How does that affect his work? “It means going searching through my records week after week. I kind of know where everything is by this stage, which box is which”.

Chatting away, it turns out that Conor has been a radio aficionado since his youth.
“I used to be a mad radio fanatic years ago. Instead of doing my homework I’d be in my room flicking up and down the bands,” he says. "I used to ring up and annoy DJs on stations quite a lot. I did it to one guy called Kevin Brannigan on a Stillorgan pirate station. I’d ring him every Sunday night and win loads of prizes that never turned up. Then I decided to go for this DJ course at Kiss FM and he was running it and recognised me as the same person. I did the course and they asked me to stay on as a spinner, doing overnight shifts and weekends when I was 15, just playing records back to back. Then I moved to Pulse and went on from there”.
Does he still consider radio an important medium in the age of iPods?
“I do, I do. I love nothing more than a bit of banter in the car. TV and technology is all well and good but you don’t get any humanity off it. With radio, you don’t know what’s coming next most of the time. The variety is good, people are real and that kind of realism is good for me.”
The big difference, of course, tends to come between the general daytime shows and the more specialist nighttime slots that Conor inhabits. Could he ever see himself moving into the former?
“I’ve done limited daytime stuff but at the moment I don’t think it’s really for me,” he admits. “I’m more for the music than the talking but there are people who do it really well. Maybe in the future I’ll do it, but not for a while”.
One assumes that, even while back with the family, Conor would have a more than adequate sound set up.
“I have two or three separate sound systems,” he says. “One for the decks and one nice one for listening to albums and stuff. You have to have the decks you know, the Technics”.
Conor reckons his musical taste is reasonably varied, but that dance has always been his first love. How does he view the state of the Irish scene at the moment?
“It’s good. A year or two ago everybody thought it would fall flat on its face and it did go into a bit of a decline. There was a downturn and hip hop and R&B came more to the forefront. For years dance was mainstream stuff, but it will always be around. It started off as an underground movement and people jumped on it, but it will always be there in the underground. Whether or not it’s at the forefront is a different story. A lot of people got bitten by the bug when they were younger and it depends how long they want to hang around.”
Does he still go out clubbing?
“When I’m not working I do. Where’s a good place to go? I’m generally working Fridays and Saturdays but Spirit on a Sunday is good, you get a lot of DJ types there. I run my own Friday night in The Vaults, Saturdays I’m on the radio. I haven’t seen a Friday or Saturday night off for a while but that’s part and parcel of the job”.
Outside of music, Conor has one other big passion. “I’m not a big reader,” he admits. “School was a bit of a chore for me. I never really got into books, I’d watch a couple of DVDs throughout the course of a week but video games would be the next best thing to music.”
What does he like to play?
“Mostly the sports games when you can play with other people. I don’t like locking myself in my room for ten hours.”
Video games, playing records in the bedroom of his parents’ house – we put it to you Conor G that you’re still only fifteen. “I am,” he laughs. “I’ve actually never grown up”.

You can hear Conor G on 2FM every Saturday evening from 6pm – 9pm. He plays the Oxegen Dance Stage on July 9 and the Global Gathering at Mill St Cork on July 31.