A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The late, lamented DJ Tony Fenton was a very funny man. Only he didn’t really know it and he wasn’t trying to be. It was just that he entered a room like a ray of sunshine – but only if that sunshine was a band that had KC front of stage belting out the hits.

Truth be told, Tony’s peak times weren’t in the sunshine at all – they were after dark when the nightlife came into full swing; the king of the clubbers was in his natural habitat when the cool people were doing their thing.

Tony had a radio persona – the original Smashy and Nicey patter on the H-H-H-Hot-Hot-Hotline – and he might have swallowed every cliché in book, but he was fundamentally a lovely man who went too soon.

Perhaps his was already a different time in radio – it certainly was in terms of new media – but he was ahead of the posse on interaction with the audience. Because if you wanted to hear a particular song, you just dialing the hotline and you got to hear it.

And in a week when RTÉ has come under the cosh like never before, he was a throwback too to a time when these radio voices were household names, not a million miles from the stars whose songs they played on the radio.

For all of his namedropping – and he did it without even realising he was doing it – the turn-out at his funeral just over eight years ago was testimony to his showbiz friendships. U2 don’t play on the altar at too many Requiem Masses.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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