John Kelly is angry about the way RTÉ axed his show but he is looking forward to getting back to basics, writes Shane Hegarty
'This is very boring," sighs John Kelly, "but I'll tell it anyway." It's worth pointing out that the story of the Mystery Train presenter's departure from RTÉ is not at all boring, largely because it has hardly been told. Kelly is sitting in his Monkstown local, ostensibly to promote his new show on Lyric FM, but he understands that people are still more interested in how he landed there in first place.
He's been "axed" before - from the BBC, a decade ago. This summer it happened again. With military precision. There were two simultaneous meetings: one to tell him and one to tell the station's producers. "I mean, doors were closed, checked, there were people asking, 'Is he in?' High drama." More followed when the axe was swung by new head of RTÉ Radio 1, Ana Leddy. There were questions in the Seanad (Mary O'Rourke said she liked his "quirky voice"). The small but perfectly formed audience got out their headed notepaper. And on the night of his final Mystery Train, Kelly had a rather odd moment when he looked at the telly in the corner of the studio and the Nine O'Clock News was reporting on the demise of the show. Here, he thought, was RTÉ lamenting the passing of a programme that RTÉ had taken off the air.
Granted, all this came alongside the axing of Rattlebag, the afternoon arts show with which Kelly would have shared a certain amount of listeners, and also the end of presenter Val Joyce's half-century at the station. "Val Joyce is the story!" Kelly insists. "Fifty years. Surely you could devise a dignified exit for the man. There was a bit of a party, but he should have been celebrated. There's a statue to Gay Byrne in Montrose, and he still works there!"
Which cuts to the core of Kelly's feelings about the episode. He does not, he insists, have a problem with the decision. It happens. Managers make editorial decisions, and whether they are right or wrong can be debated afterwards. That's the nature of the business, and he's been around too long to delude himself otherwise. But the manner of how it was broken - that's another matter.
"I don't remember a whole lot about the meeting, because my first reaction was 'how am I going to tell my wife', who was eight months pregnant with twins at the time. Having been axed before I knew it was going to unleash a whole lot of press, with photographs in the paper saying 'Loser' and 'Axed' and all this kind of stuff. I knew it would follow and for years to come any piece about you would include the phrase 'controversially axed'. So I was worried what my wife would make of all of this."
He recalls being given a reason: that the station wanted to increase the speech content. And he remembers being told that he could expect a call from Lyric FM. Yet, at the same time, an internal memo was going around saying that he was confirmed as moving to Lyric. He put a halt to that. It was too late. "If you send out an internal press release in RTÉ," he smiles, "you might as well fly it across the sky over south Dublin." So, by the time a public press release was fudged to say that he was concentrating on "other broadcasting commitments", word was out that he'd not only been axed, but that he'd turned down a job with Lyric FM. Half way into a three-year contract he was supposed to be offered something else, but not in this way. If RTÉ had only given him a month's notice, it could have been so different.
"It's bewildering. Because on a personal level, on a professional level, on a corporate level and on a contractual level, it made no sense whatsoever. All this fuss in the newspapers and RTÉ and the Seanad and the Nine O'Clock News, all that was unnecessary. It was the last thing I wanted when my wife was about to have twins. And RTÉ didn't need it. The reason why things were done in that order, I've no idea. I've been offered numerous theories but I just don't know yet."
IT BUGS HIM that in previous interviews he has come across as a little too magnanimous about the whole affair. "I'm hurt, or angry, or whatever way you want to put it, as anybody would be if treated with professional discourtesy. Personally, you're angry with someone you've never met before who arrives in from Radio Foyle and potentially ends your career during a five-minute meeting. There's no point in me pretending that's a pleasure."
He leaves a station quite obviously suffering from an identity crisis, one that has too long attempted to be all things to all people and that finds itself under attack from competitors and seems increasingly punch drunk.
"If the calling card of this person [ Leddy], as referred to in newspapers, is toughness and steely nerve and all that stuff, it's quite bizarre that I was the first target." The "Blood on the Floor" headlines were a little wide of the mark, he adds.
"There were clearly bigger fish to fry on Radio 1, and this is where the toughness we've talked about is required. But look, I'm 41 years of age, I've got four kids, I've been in the business 20 years. That kind of thing doesn't impress me. I've walked into a hotel room and sat in front of Nina Simone. She's tough."
He repeats it was not the editorial decision that stung. "I'm one of the people in there who always believed that RTÉ needed to be re-aligned in a radical way. Ironically, given that I had to be axed first, I always thought the likes of me should go to Lyric and they should take on someone like [ Today FM's] Donal Dineen and put him on Lyric. Make Lyric a music station and let us get on with it so we're not looking over our shoulder for people who don't know what they're doing, who wouldn't know the difference between Johnny Cash and Daniel O'Donnell."
There are plenty of those, he says, people from "different planets. With different ideas, or no ideas at all of what Radio 1 should be. And it depends who's in the ascendancy or in majority at any time as to which way it goes".
In throwing him from the Mystery Train, RTÉ also aroused the ire of a small but dedicated audience. He averaged almost 30,000 listeners a night, and they knew how to complain. "You have this small dedicated audience, which to my mind is much more appealing to me than an enormous audience that couldn't care less. So if you take off a show like mine, that small but dedicated audience takes it personally. That's what happened, that's why it ran for months. People took it personally, as an insult to them, to their sensibilities. It was like they were being told that what they liked was worthless. And people who like music know music is far from worthless, so they took it very seriously. I suppose RTÉ would say, 'that's the chattering classes who like these programmes'. But what's wrong with that?"
KELLY, THOUGH, HAS always been a target for those who saw his small audience and big wages (€188,000 a year according to most recent figures) as disproportionate. He has occasionally been caricatured as a guy who gets paid for playing Tuvan throat music on the radio, and who, through TV programme The View, prattles pretentiously about the arts.
"Look, I don't like pretentious windbags. I meet them all the time in my business, there are loads of them. But it's wrong that anyone who writes a book or a play or anything is treated as some kind of snob or something. Because I know from my own experience, the broader my radio show got the more they'd call you elitist. How am I being elitist if I'm playing country music, jazz, world music? How is that elitist? The same people slag off anyone who attempts to have a thinking approach to life."
He's happy to go to Lyric. One phone call with station head Aodán O'Dubhghaill convinced him of that at a time when he considered walking away from radio. And because it will be an afternoon show, he's getting his evenings back, meaning he can catch the mid-week football, but more importantly spend time with his wife and the newborn twins that bring the Kelly tally to an exhausting four kids under the age of five.
The Lyric show will include classical music, and omit some of the wilder genres that featured on Mystery Train, but will remain adventurous. "I hope people who liked the Mystery Train will like it and people who listen to Lyric won't go, 'who's this guy?'" It'll be an escape, an opportunity to do what he knows best, and listen to music instead of questions about the recent past.
"Again, one of the consequences of an axing is the clearing up that needs to be done. I was talking to one journalist and he thought I was being sarcastic about saying I was looking forward to going to Lyric. And I asked him why he thought that. 'Because you went there at gunpoint.' But I didn't. I wanted to go there ages ago, and if I'd only had one meeting before all of this happened I might have been able to say that."
The JK Ensemble begins broadcasting on Lyric FM on Monday Oct 2, 2.30-4.30pm
Ana Leddy interview, Magazine, p12