At Home With... Nikki Hayes

Being a DJ was Nikki Hayes’s dream since she was 12. She began on pirate radio 11 years ago, then hip-hopped, skipped and jumped her way to 2FM over a year ago, moonlighting as a compere and doing voiceovers along the way. Recently promoted to four nights a week but still playing her blend of urban and chart music, the timing couldn’t have been better.

She recently did the grown-up thing and took out a mortgage for a four-bedroomed semi-detached in Baltinglass, County Wicklow after living in Dublin for four years.
“I decided to buy a place about two years ago but only got to move in last August,” says Nikki. “It took a while for the builders to finish, as I’d bought it from the plans. That was scary.”
The wait – and the risk – appears worth it. The place is kitted out with a modern feel, and it’s a roomy pad for the couple.
“I like it,” she muses, “but I’ll like it a lot more in a year’s time when it’s all come together.”
There’s remaining bits to buy, boxes to unpack, and plans to action – one of which is building a purpose-built studio at the bottom of her garden. “I’m applying for planning permission at the moment,” she explains. “I’m hoping to set up a voiceover company, and the studio will allow me to send recordings via ISDN which will make my life a lot easier. So all I have to do is convince the people at 2FM to let me do my show that way, then everything in my life will be sorted,” she laughs.
Her CD collection remains in boxes until the studio is built, but a select few are left out for playing.
“I like a good song, so I’ll listen to anything. I’m a bit of a groupie when it comes to boy bands like D-Side and Westlife, but I’m into Rn’B. Also the Doves, Bon Jovi and Lionel Richie, who I met at the Meteors last year. I went up to him and I said ‘I love you so much. I want to wrap you in a blanket and sing to you’. He ran away.”
Thankfully, this effect doesn’t extend to her new neighbours. Nikki speaks of them with great fondness, whether it’s discussing the carpenter who offered to make her anything she sees in interiors magazines, the random gentleman who mowed her lawn when she couldn’t, or her friend who makes a lethal but magnificent cocktail known as The Fromage. Surely the wrong understanding of ‘neighbourhood spirit’.
“I get along with them brilliantly,” she enthuses. “We’ve had some really good nights, especially towards the end of the summer when the weather was warm. We’d all sit around drinking in someone’s garden.”
But with a drop in temperature and her radio slot shifted to weeknights, Nikki’s evening routine has changed somewhat.
“My whole day is music, music, music, music so as soon as I get home now, I sit down, have a bottle of beer, and stay up until 3am watching Emmerdale and Coronation Street on Sky+.”
Unlike the current trend, cooking is definitely not a way for her to unwind.
“I burn microwave popcorn,” she states. ”I’m completely undomesticated. The other day, I put the ashes from our fireplace into a plastic bucket and the whole thing melted. So I put a cardboard box beneath it and took it outside. I went back out after a while and my garden was on fire.”
Her lack of domesticity isn’t confined to her four walls – a very forgiving neighbour remains in contact with Hayes despite a red wine incident, which meant that the walls needed repainting and the cream-coloured carpets had to be steam cleaned. Ouch.
“I’m useless,” she admits. “I’m the kind of person that will throw everything under the bed and hope it will go away. There’s dog vomit inside my car. I tried to clean it, but there’s bits still left,” she adds, by way of explanation.
Nikki Hayes is very much the social type, as you’d expect from a bubbly radio personality. Since moving away from her parents when she was 18, she’s never lived on her own. “I’d probably scare myself because I talk so much. I’d end up talking to the walls or making imaginary friends,” she says.
When she lived in Dublin, her friends formed an important part of her life with people calling at all hours thanks to her central location. But now she’s not exactly on anyone’s way home.
“My family have been around to visit, but my friends haven’t,” she says. “Actually Andrew O’Connor [2FM sports pundit] came over one night but we never actually made it into the house, because that was one of the nights that the neighbours were out drinking in the garden. So we’ve yet to have a housewarming, but once the summer comes the parties will start.”