At Home With David O'Reilly

As one of the presenters (along with Donna Legge) of the hugely popular BBC Northern Ireland radio and television show Across The Line and a much in-demand club DJ around town, David “Rigsy” O’Reilly is quite a busy man.
In fact, domestic bliss is the last state you’d expect to find him in these days. But that’s exactly where his head is at right now – when he’s not working of course. Having just moved into a new pad, he has been busily transforming it into a comfy nest for himself and his band of buddies.

“It’s the first home that I’ve ever owned,” he beams. “I’ve rented places before but I’m well chuffed with myself that I’ve now got to the stage that I can have a house of my own. It’s nothing too fancy, just a semi-detached, second-hand house in the Cregagh Road, a nice part of East Belfast which is just a few miles from the city centre.”
Sharing his fab new abode with a couple of his mates, or as he describes them, his “rent boys,” Rigsy confesses to being more than a tad house-proud. Not exactly your typical bachelor pad, then?
“My life’s ambition is either to appear in the Simpsons or to be on MTV’s Cribs,” he laughs. “I can’t see either happening but usually I can be found up on the Boucher Road – where all the interior design and furniture shops are – browsing for stuff for the house. I’m always on the lookout for nice picture-frames and things like that. I even know some of the shop assistants by name. Donna [Legge] and I would often swop home improvement and décor ideas between playing records. It wouldn’t be strange to find us saying things like, ‘Now where did you get that nice sofa again?’”
While O’Reilly takes full control of the interior ambience of the house, one of his housemates – who just happens to be a professional gardener – looks after the room outside. “I even bought him a little shed for storing all those gardening implements,” he says. “I’ve never looked inside it but he does a very nice job so I leave him at it. But it’s nice to have a garden – eventually I want to be a crazy old man pottering about outside all day. Another of my many ambitions is to own a hot tub out the back, which is not beyond the realms of possibility.”
As David earns his living through playing music, it takes up much of his space at home but not to the extent that you might expect. “I’m quite organised," he explains. “I’ve just finished filing my CD’s alphabetically – there must be 4,000 of them altogether. There’s a big shelving unit in the living room, which I fully expect to collapse under the weight of it all one of these days
“People come around to my house and expect to hear music 24-7 but it’s nothing like that at all. I don’t have too many evenings in anyway as DJ-ing takes up most of my evenings and there’s the social life that goes with that. When I was a student I used to throw insane parties with bouncy castles and a big sound system. A perfect evening is watching loads of television that I’ve probably seen before. I also play an unhealthy amount of Playstation – Pro-Evolution Soccer is the only game I play.
“I can only cook one thing, Mexican fajitas, which I do listening to music and downing bottles of Corona or some other imported beer – because I’m a snob. I tend to put on quite a lot of new music. I like things to be upbeat so it’ll be Flaming Lips, The Arcade Fire and a bit of old-skool hip-hop like DJ Shadow.
“I spend most of the evenings watching DVDs – not movies but mainly 30 minute comedy shows: Family Guy, Alan Partridge, Big Train etc. My two heroes are Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews – those two guys have had so much influence on me I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for them. I’ve got Sky+ in now and I can watch most things. I watch too many episodes of The Sopranos and I walk around pretending I’m a gangster. Apart from Frasier and Cheers I’m not too keen on older television series. I need things to be based in the present. I’m not into classic rock or classic anything – I’m always looking for something new.”
Now that he is comfortably ensconced in his new home O’Reilly says he is fully intent on staying put for as long as possible.
“I’ve always been a real homebird,” he says. “I’m not interested in going away on holidays for longer than a week. I feel like I’m missing out on something. And I can’t see me leaving this house or Belfast for a long time, if ever.”

David "Rigsy" O'Reilly is part of The Across The Line team that can be heard weekdays from 8.05pm on BBC Radio Ulster.