THIS IS ’30’: NO DISCO, DONAL DINEEN AND CORK, 1993

Thirty years ago, tonight, long after the watershed, I was in a suite in the old Jury’s Hotel on Cork’s Western Road with a handful of colleagues from work. We’d been out that evening to mark the broadcast of the fruits of our recent labours, a music television clip show that was about to set sail.

But in keeping with the laissez-faire approach that pockmarks much of the history of that series, which was called ‘No Disco’, not one of us had thought about where we might be able to watch it. I assumed an awful lot of things in those days and, in my naivete, thought that every pub in Cork would be calling silence before falling in behind such an important national event, and tuning-in.

Jury’s was Marty Morrissey’s idea. Now one of Ireland’s best-known broadcasters, Marty was a local delicacy back in 1993, a jobbing newshound with dreams of a break ‘on national,’ attached to RTÉ’s Cork Local Radio service. But even at that stage he had a unique ability with people: I heard it said one time that he had more connections than the old telephone exchange in Churchfield. So, with Marty leading us, we found ourselves in the bosom of what was a playground for Cork’s merchant princes, and we were glad to be there.

The influential American artist, Prince, had briefly stayed over at Jurys the day he played a lacklustre set at Páirc Uí Chaoimh three summers previously, so I suppose the setting was appropriate. He couldn’t wait to get out of Cork and himself and his entourage beat a hasty retreat immediately after the show, distinctly unimpressed by the city. As a fun-sized production unit ourselves, we too had fetched up in Cork to spread the gospel for quality popular music. And although our show was far less sophisticated and lasvicious than that of Prince, ‘No Disco’ too would cause no little offence among the great and the good.

A criticism you’ll sometimes hear about the excellent music series, ‘Other Voices,’ is that it goes out far too late at night. Notwithstanding the way people now consume media, this kind of thing still exercises an awful lot of regular box-watchers. It’s an issue I’m also very familiar with: decades ago, I too was that soldier and ‘No Disco’ was that animal. Music television, especially that featuring the new, less obvious material that defines ‘Other Voices’ like it once did ‘No Disco,’ belongs in the graveyard. This has long been the gospel.

At 11.20PM on 30 September, 1993, ‘No Disco’ first fell onto the air with little or no hoopla on what was then Ireland’s second national channel, Network 2. RTÉ wanted to draw as little attention to it as possible and deliberately landed it below the radar. I can’t say I blamed them, either. Regionally-located production was an experiment, and the team named for Cork was comprised of absolute novices. As such, the entire enterprise stood a fair chance of falling flat on its face and there were many, I suspect, who willed that to be so.

Hosted by Donal Dineen, from Rathmore in County Kerry, it was the first RTÉ series to be produced and aired from outside the national broadcaster’s base in Donnybrook. Unbeknownst to us, it was also a political hot chip: in the early 1990s, RTÉ was a heavily trade-unionised place of work and a source of rumour and speculation on an industrial scale. For some, the idea that a couple of unknown oiks were busy pumping the airwaves with locally-produced content on the cheap, didn’t sit easily.

The whole thing had come together quickly enough. I was working as Jeff Brennan’s butler in The Rock Garden during the summer of 1993 when I was summoned to a meeting in Donnybrook and asked if I’d be interested in returning to Cork. RTÉ was planning to develop a television production base on Father Mathew Street and there was an opportunity to assemble something interesting and lateral from scratch. That was the pitch.

My qualifications were basic enough: I was familiar with the streets around Union Quay and Morrison’s Island, where RTÉ’s regional facilities in Cork were located, having free-lanced in and out of there for several years. I was available, had a bit of previous and I was cheap. I’d worked as a part-time researcher and local stringer for a couple of big entertainment productions and had once fronted a weekly music bulletin for a Saturday morning youth show called ‘Scratch Saturday’, using scraps of left-over facilities in the Cork office. It was on this model that more formal production was now being planned: sweating the asset, as it were. A longer piece about the colourful and often ridiculous history of local radio and television broadcasting in Cork is here.

I’d spent several years wandering, flitting in and out of Cork, Dublin, and London and, the odd time, leading short and invariably half-cracked tours of Europe with various rock bands. I’d been involved with Keith Cullen’s emerging Setanta imprint, had worked with a variety of newspapers and magazines and didn’t really have much of a clue what I might do with myself longer-term. Like many of my peers, I was living on my wits around the fringes of the music and media worlds, pulling strokes and dreaming: a couple of my friends used to refer to me as Jimmy Rabitte.

It was in that context that I first met Donal. We’d both been involved with a free, music-based broadsheet called Dropout, a fanzine with notions that started life as a college newspaper in the old NIHE in Glasnevin. That fine publication was part-funded from the proceeds of a regular club night held upstairs at The Rock Garden, at which Donal manned the decks alongside a cluster of hip communications graduates. Like the documentary-maker, Marti Di Bergi, after he’d first encountered the metal band, Spinal Tap, I remember being knocked out by his exuberance, raw power, and punctuality. So, when it came to nominating a co-pilot to work with me on an off-Broadway, left-field music series on tv, he was an obvious call.

Back in Jury’s Hotel, ‘No Disco’’s opening credits rolled and the series was kicked into life by it’s first ever video clip, ‘Cannonball’, by The Breeders. After which there was an uneasy shuffling on the chaises longues. To many of those who stumbled onto that first chapter, the programme was a difficult watch: some of the music was far too left-of-field and abstract. And now here I was, live and in the flesh among some of them.  

Outwardly, Marty was as kind and complimentary as he always is but I knew that, behind the eyes, he was struggling with what he’d just seen. ‘No Disco’ was as far away from Sting doing ‘Fields of Gold’ on a tear-jerking closing sequence for RTÉ Sport as it got. We all went home shortly afterwards and there was no hanging around looking for a resident’s bar.

An awful lot has been written about ‘No Disco’ in the thirty years since, much of it very flattering and much of it well wide of the mark. Like most media that’s rooted in popular culture, it was defined by the times in which it was made and, to this end, it hasn’t dated well. The series was also spectacularly under-resourced and, while we presented this at the time as a unique selling point, the years since have not been kind to its body. Nostalgia can only mask so many short-comings and, if you look closely enough, you can actually see some of the stitching.  

This despite the fact that, as television shows go, ‘No Disco’ was at the more basic and simple end of the scale, tailored to make the most of its lack of resources. Its home-spun, d-i-y ethos sat comfortably with much of the material it show-cased and of course neither Donal or myself ever regarded it as a television programme. Bizarre as it sounds, we saw it as a radio show with pictures and approached the production from this perspective.

But ‘No Disco’ had Donal and, when you have one outstanding player on the field who can fetch from the skies and carry, you’ll always have a chance. And it’s not as if we didn’t have our champions back in Donnybrook. Eugene Murray, a serious Current Affairs producer-turned-manager who was leading the invasion out beyond The Red Cow, was a sterling supporter of ours at senior cabinet level. A couple of other notables – Áine Healy and Donal Scannell – covered an enormous amount of ground around the campus for us on a daily basis. Apart from everything else, they made sure we had enough tapes onto which we were recording the various episodes.

We’d nail Donal’s links every Monday night, often waiting hours for the crew to return from wherever the demands of the Newsroom had taken them. In the empty, industrial spread of the top floor of the RTÉ offices on Father Mathew Street, we’d rig lights and gels and place props into shot, perfect those artfully constructed scripts, and go for it.

We’d sometimes repair to Bully’s restaurant on Paul Street after we were done and horse into large portions of Bolognese and garlic bread, just about getting our orders in before the kitchen closed. We’d malinger over our plates, interrogate the existential crisis of the week and be the last to leave. It was in those moments, I think, that we were able to seed out the theory from the harder realities, and where I was hopefully able to shield Donal from an awful lot of the political messiness that underscores far too much of media, old and new. Those nights were essential confessionals between friends that felt far more important than anything we put out on air but that ultimately informed an awful lot of it.

Mainlining is a term that features prominently in the great lexicons of rock ‘n’ roll. The term also figures centrally in the story of ‘No Disco’: one of our most important collaborators during those first seasons was another state body, C.I.E., Ireland’s national rail service. It was the mainline train from Dublin to Cork that brought Donal onto site every weekend and, after the show had settled down, any number of musicians and interviewees who were kind enough to travel down and expose us to their art. More fundamentally, it was via train that the programme itself was physically delivered to RTÉ in Dublin every week.

It all sounds quaint now I suppose but, in 1993, when we still operated on tape and physically played out programmes for broadcast on large cassettes, we’d copy the final master cut late on Wednesday afternoon and send it onwards to Dublin on one of the [ir]regular rail services out of Cork. That padded bag would be collected from Heuston Station by courier and delivered into the transmission suites for viewing and then for broadcast via the systems out in Dublin 4. I have no idea how we made air half the time, but neither do I recall us ever missing our slot, sometimes despite our best efforts.

And initially, that was the summit of our ambition: to make our slot. After that, we wanted to see out the first month and not be disappeared from the schedules prematurely which, after a couple of episodes, was a real possibility. The reaction of some of RTÉ’s senior editorial figures after those first,  nervy episodes, mirrored the response that night in Jury’s and wouldn’t have re-assured us. There was talk at one stage about swapping Donal out for any one of a number of patter-faced jocks from 2FM. But we just kept going, ignored the noise and held our ground: our location in Cork was a real advantage in this regard.

As things turned out, a couple of favourable reviews in the newspapers and the constant support of Alan Corr, the Prince of Irish music journalism, in the RTÉ Guide, saw us reach safe harbour. By the following Easter we’d even won an award and a handful of viewers had started to write to us. One day, the phone in the office even rang: it was a fan of the programme and he wanted to talk to us.  

That regular, who stayed on for ages shooting the breeze about some of his favourite recent releases and upcoming live shows he was going to, was typical of those for whom ‘No Disco’ became an ‘appointment to view.’ In this respect, we again resembled so many of those groups we featured: those who liked us adored us except that there were never enough of them to trouble the compilers of the TAM ratings. The show, in its pomp, pulled in between 40 and 60 thousand viewers most weeks.  

From such makey-uppy beginnings ‘No Disco’ eventually ran for the guts of a decade: after I got the second series off the ground during the summer of 1994, I left to join RTÉ in Dublin as a trainee television producer. Like Marty Morrissey, I was bound for ‘national.’ My workload was taken on by Rory Cobbe, who’d cut his teeth on the local rock music beat and who selflessly devoted himself to the series for the remainder of its days. He’ll not thank me for saying so here, but he elevated that strand to places that I hardly knew existed: he not only made a silk purse from trotters but did a stellar parenting job raising, on his own, what in television terms was a troubled child.

Given how we always saw the series as an adjunct to the more interesting parts of the night-time radio roster on 2FM and elsewhere, it was no surprise when Donal was eventually lured away by the wireless. When Radio Ireland, a national independent radio station, hit the airwaves in March, 1997, as – initially at least – a rival to RTÉ Radio One, he took up residence there on a terrific late-night show, ‘Here Comes the Night.’   

Radio Ireland was formally launched in the atrium of a large Dublin city shopping centre and, with no little pomp, the station’s frontline presenters were introduced one by one and took their place on a specially constructed rostrum. If Donal looked mortified every week on ‘No Disco,’ his demeanour that night as he lined-up in his indie duds alongside Eamon Dunphy, Emily O’Reilly, Anne-Marie Hourihane, Philip Boucher Hayes and Gavin Duffy, wouldn’t have filled a marketing manager’s heart with joy. He looked frozen, a man out of time.

Donal loved Rob Reiner’s spoof music documentary, ‘This Is Spinal Tap,’ and we’d often deflect to it whenever we experienced a crisis of faith on Father Mathew Street and required spiritual guidance. And here was Donal now, in the middle of one of those marvellous scenes: ‘Hello Cleveland.

It was behind the decks, though – either in a live club setting or on the radio, that Donal came alive and ‘Here Comes The Night’ quickly established itself as an oasis of tranquillity on what was, by any measure, a brave schedule. Not for the first or last time, Donal – the perennial nightwatchman – brought a serenity to the order, a prayer at bedtime.   

Thirty years on, I still receive the odd call or e-mail about ‘No Disco,’ and sometimes a request for a contact number for Donal. Several years back, someone actually wrote and self-published a book about some of the acts that were regularly featured on the series. It’s all a bit ridiculous in one way and one cannot quantify it scientifically but it’s clear at this remove that ‘No Disco’ – and Donal, especially – forged some sort of connection with its audiences, niche though they may have been.

That connection, I think, went far beyond the music we played on the series: in the pre-internet era before technology upturned the music industry, I think he struck a series of emotional chords with viewers who maybe saw in him – with all his vulnerabilities out there – a reflection of themselves. Without wanting to over-complicate, I think Donal spoke to fellow music fans directly in a way that very few broadcasters do. He was helped in this regard by the fact that he wasn’t really a broadcaster at all: he was a counsellor who used music as a healer.

And he’s still at it: an enigmatic presence around the Irish arts and culture fringe, hard to locate on every level. Apart from his terrific DJ sets, he’s a visual artist, curator, photographer and general all-rounder who is still stridently marching to his own drum.

He’ll make the odd appearance too in what folk often refer to now as old media, where he is always good value, a fascinating conversationalist that’s generous with his insights and his vast breadth of reference. On the weekend of this year’s All-Ireland Gaelic football final, for instance, David Coughlan carried a terrific feature piece with Donal in The Star, where they discussed the importance of sport to him, his long association with his home club, Rathmore, and the general Kerry football psyche, part of that complicated fabric from which he is cut.  

David’s piece was accompanied by a file photograph taken the previous summer that I hadn’t seen before. In scanning the stands at the business end of the 2022 All-Ireland final between Kerry and Galway, photographer David Fitzgerald from the Sportsfile agency in Dublin had located in his lens, among the massed ranks, a middle-aged man in a green shirt and trendy cap, hand nervously cupping his mouth, eyes fixed on the game unfolding in front of him, anxious. Fitzgerald’s credit captions the subject as ‘a Kerry supporter’ but it is easily the best portrait of Donal Dineen I’ve seen. The photographer clearly had no idea who he was – why would he have? – so as serendipity goes, this kicks to another level altogether. 

Even at a large-scale event like an All-Ireland final, in a packed stadium with a crowd far bigger than the average ‘No Disco’ audience, Donal still manages to stand out from the crowd, a prince among his own.

It’s a rare gift, that.

One of his many.