Culture That Made Me: PJ Coogan of 96FM recalls Queen and Chandra's
PJ Coogan, radio presenter on 96fm. Picture: Karl Hussey
PJ Coogan, 57, is a radio presenter from Ballinlough, Cork. During the 1980s, he worked for several pirate radio stations and RTĂ Cork. In 1989, he joined Corkâs 96FM. He has won several awards for his news reporting and broadcasting. He currently presents The Opinion Line on 96FM.
 In my teens, a couple of friends arrived in hospital a day or two after I had surgery. They brought me a tartan scarf and a copy of the new Bay City Rollers single because we were all Bay City Rollers freaks at school. Let's not put too much of a tooth in here. These boys had had very little discernible talent. Most of their recordings were done with session musicians because they weren't great musicians, but the boys carried off a hit record really well.
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I saw Queen at Slane Castle in 1986. Everything they say about Freddie Mercury is true, but then there's more. He was peerless as a performer, as a frontman, as a vocalist, as a stage presence. I was in a crowd of 80,000 people â in the open air, in a packed field, in the mud â and everyone was hanging on his every breath. I can still feel it to this day.
I got my first gig as a DJ at the Grand Parade Hotel in Cork. I spent seven years there. Thatâs where I met John Creedon and Alf McCarthy, who were DJs at Chandraâs at the same time. If thereâs something in my life that shaped me, and what I do today, itâs Chandraâs. It was a magical place. I consider myself more of an entertainer than a broadcaster because I provide entertainment of a particular kind. Even in my deejaying days, I would have said I'm an entertainer. I use records to entertain.
For a nightclub like Chandraâs, youâd start at 10.30pm. By 12.05am, if the dancefloor wasnât packed, over in the back of my DJ box I had maybe a dozen songs guaranteed to fill a floor: Yazz and the Plastic Populationâs The Only Way is Up; You Spin Me Round by Dead or Alive; The Whole of the Moon by the Waterboys never failed; Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark, the 12-inch version, the dance mix; Pride (In the Name of Love) by U2. They would get you dancing at a state funeral.
 I admire live DJs who can engage with their crowd. People don't remember how good the late, great Gerry Ryan was with a crowd. He was a firecracker. He would do anything. He was a bit of a liability sometimes, but an incredible entertainer. He used to do 2FMâs Beat on the Street. His personality with a crowd was phenomenal.
God knows what Vincent Hanley could have achieved if he didnât die so young. It was a tragedy. We had only gotten a taste of what Vinny was able to do when Aids took him in his thirties. He brought music television into Ireland. He was a great communicator. He was incredibly enthusiastic. It was almost a piece of religion: if Vinny said this was gonna be a hit â a song you'd never heard before â it was gonna be so. Those of us working in pirates at that time would watch Vinny on a Sunday and then you would go to, say, Golden Discs on a Monday and demand the single.
The greatest of them all was Larry Gogan. He wanted to do nothing else with his life except to be a DJ on the radio. He did it until he was 84 years old. I remember his radio show Discs-A-Gogan at night. From that show, when he was only a boy until his last few shows on RTĂ Gold, he never changed. He was just Larry.
 In his career, he made mistakes, he annoyed people more than once, but there will never be another talk-show host like Gay Byrne. We call him âThe Masterâ in the business. He could be talking to Mary in Dungarvan about a budgie that's gone missing or a husband who was beating her. In that moment, she was the only person in his world, and he was the only person in hers. That was his gift. We clung to the radio. You would stop what you were doing. Youâd turn off the kettle for fear youâd miss a word.
Romano Macari was an Italian. He had a chicken shack restaurant, Romanoâs, on Cook St in Cork City. He opened a pirate radio station called WBEN in the middle of town. He was on at night. He had a deep, booming voice like Barry White. Women loved him. He tweaked the compression on the sound so the little transistor radios at the time vibrated when his voice came on. He used to flirt with women on air. Then people started coming to him with more serious things, with problems. The kind of radio I do â and the talk radio Niall Boylan and Neil Prendeville and RTĂÂŽs Liveline do â was invented by Romano in Cork.
I like podcasts that take a different approach, or that get under the fingernails a bit. The West Cork podcast was one of the best of all time. Not even so much for the content, which is remarkable, but the producersâ technical expertise in putting it together was brilliant. It was a feast of audio, woven together into this incredible thread. The secret was the narrative input from the two presenters was kept to a minimum. The way they knit the audio together carried it.
I love intimate interviews. Iain Dale is a broadcaster in London and he has his own podcast called All Talk. Itâs brilliant. It has a featured guest every week, generally other broadcasters or writers. It can run anything from 40 minutes to two hours. They don't stop until the conversation is finished. He gets behind their stories. Itâs a bit different.
I first heard the song Music by John Miles â who only recently died â on a pirate radio station called KCR in Kilkenny in the mid-70s. I bought the record on single. Itâs the song that I want them to play when they're closing the gates on me in the crematorium: âMusic was my first love/And it will be my last/Music of the future/And music of the past/To live without my music/Would be impossible to do/In this world of troubles/My music pulls me throughâŠâ
