Dan Hegarty, Dave Fanning and the magic of the RTÉ radio sessions
Dan Hegarty and Dave Fanning are among the 2fm presenters who've provided opportunities for Irish acts to record sessions.
Shows like Dan Hegarty’s The Alternative on RTÉ 2FM have long been a staple of life in Irish music, keeping the torch lit for a broad spectrum of new sounds and emerging artists.
This has especially been true over the course of lockdown - helping fill the gap made by live events and becoming even more vital to homegrown music in the process.
“I think we'll really only realize how much has changed once we're at the far end of this,” says Hegarty.
“But one of the the obvious things is I haven't had people in studio. I've been doing interviews via Zoom and Skype and whatever else.
"That's not massively taxing, or not hugely different, but it is nice to see a face in front of you.”
For a large part of the pandemic, Hegarty and co haven't been doing full sessions.
“We've had mini-sessions, and that goes across 2FM, not just my show. It's been strange, but as human beings, we kind of get used to the situation that we find ourselves in.”
In the place of those sessions - live, in-studio performances recorded specifically to go out on a certain show – listeners have been treated to a bit of nostalgia in the shape of gems from the RTÉ archives.
These include performances from the legendary Fanning Sessions archives, originally aired on Dave Fanning’s weeknight music show from the 1970s to the 2000s.
It’s impossible to overstate in modern times the importance of the Dave Fanning Show to waves of music-hungry young people at a time when avenues of discovering new artists were nowhere near as pervasive as they are today.
Hegarty was delighted to dive in and explore the history of the sessions’ archives, and the who’s who of homegrown Irish music that got much-needed early exposure on the show.
“My producer for a very long time was [RTÉ production legend] Ian Wilson. He's like an oracle of sessions, because they wouldn't have started if it wasn't for him, or at least they wouldn't have started in the way, and kept going in the way, that they have been.
“He's given me pointers in relation to, for example, Into Paradise, that brilliant session for Dave in the 1990s - 'ye should use that'.
“So much went on - if you'd asked me around three years ago, I probably would have said I’d a pretty good idea of what sessions were done over the years, because I would have listened to Dave's show.
“I realised soon enough that I really don't. There's still stuff that I haven't come across, and I'm coming across stuff still, that I'm going, 'Wow! They came in then?'. We haven't even scratched the surface. It's a wonderful complaint.”
Revisiting performances recorded for his own show as ‘Studio 8 Sessions’, Hegarty has been pairing them up with discoveries from deeper in the archive.
Although Fanning is rightly given credit for his work with emerging artists in formative times for contemporary Irish music, Hegarty has his eye out for a few bits from other shows, in case they ever resurface.
“Yes, there were the Fanning Sessions. You just can't get away from them. I don't think you can measure the importance of them. Vital, I would say. But, a lot of people did sessions.
“People forget sometimes, Gerry Ryan did sessions as well. He did some wonderful sessions on daytime, The Devlins did that really, really brilliant session in the 1990s.”
Another elusive gem languishing in the archives somewhere is a lost recording by an American star.
“Tori Amos did a session for Gerry and Paul Russell, who's now deputy head of 2FM. He just said, 'Here, you wouldn't do your version of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'? And she did. So that's in there. That has to be on at some point.”
Times change, and the relationship between listeners and broadcast has evolved with the advent of the internet and on-demand listening. That in turn creates a different dynamic in constructing the show for Hegarty.
“I used to put the show together as a two-hour or three-hour piece, because in my mind, people may listen for maybe not the whole show, but long sections.
“Now it's 15-minute blocks, because I don't necessarily expect anyone to stick around for a huge amount of time. People jump on, flick around, I do it myself. So that's changed.”
This way of consuming the show also holds the potential for reframing the humble radio session as a piece of destination listening, an exclusive listen to new artists in a different context that can be had live, or on-demand.
“Sessions are the midpoint between recording a song in a studio, like for an EP or an album, and a gig. That's the way it's been described to me by a lot of artists. You're performing live, but you don't have a crowd in front of you. But in relation to how important it is for the passing music fan who might be listening to the radio? Well, it gives them a different perspective, and a different way to listen to the artists.
“It also can be an introduction to an artist as well, because there's so much going on - how do you come across a new act? How do you get to discover them? How do you invest the time to get to know their music? It's not impossible, but with all the avenues that we have now, it's actually more complicated.”
New discoveries and archive classics... it makes for a fine combination.
- The Alternative broadcasts Sunday to Thursday at 10pm on RTÉ 2FM. Classic session recordings can be heard on Tuesday nights, with previously-broadcast episodes available on demand via RTÉ.ie and RTÉ Radio Player
“They did tracks like She's Gone on that session, which is a great track. It was also the same year that they released their debut album Emigrants and Immigrants and Me. They were very much at a similar point at that time as Fontaines DC were in 2018, heralded for great things and lauded by many people. Just a great band.”
“Just a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant session. They did an amazing version of Truncheon Song. Just the attitude. When you're listening to that session, close your eyes, and you could actually be sitting there in the studio with them. It's just the attitude, the energy from it, it's intense.”
“I think they hold the record for bringing the most stuff, they had so many pedals. It was incredible. We nearly would have had to send seismologists into the studio after the tremendous noise they created, just to check the foundations were okay on the building. That was an incredible session.”
“It was one of those sessions: young band, youthful energy, great songs, and you could really tell they were really into being there. It's got a beautiful, dreamy, late-eighties, early-Nineties guitar sound, which just makes me kind of drift off to wonderful places momentarily.”
“They came in and recorded two tracks for my show: Boys in the Better Land’ and Big. Boys in the Better Land had been released as a single already, but ‘Big’, that was the first time that I would have heard that. They may have performed it before then, but certainly broadcast-wise, I believe that was the first time that was played. It was just around the time they would have been recording Dogrel, they were in the middle of some pretty lengthy tours. So it was great to have them in.”
