TodayFM’s Ed Smith on music: 'You have nothing to lose but your guilt'
Ed Smith: "We swapped CDs and records like it was treasure. It changed everything."
If there's a contemporary phrase that irks and irritates DJ, radio presenter, and podcast host Ed Smith (46) in equal measure, “guilty pleasure” is it.
Roaring the billion-dollar shame industry into life (fellow greatest hits include weight gain and acne vulgaris), Smith objects to the simultaneous elevation and denigration process, assigning moral failure to those brushing up against the Platonic ideal.
“There is no such thing as good and bad music… there’s music you like and music you don’t,” Smith says over a murky Americano he politely accepts from a young waitress.
“I think it was Tim Burgess who said that, and it’s something I stand by.”
Pushback against cultural stigma is not new. Linking honourable actions with virtues and pleasurable actions with vices was the calling card of Aristotle, who, in turn, influenced Plato to believe that higher orders of pleasure entailed an expenditure of intellectual effort.
A “guilty pleasure”, therefore, self-contained an element of gratification — of a need that’s met, almost despite oneself, rather than a pleasure one freely chooses. It’s a smear that persists; when “guilty pleasure” first appeared in the New York Times, in 1860, it was used to describe a brothel.
“The truth is I was struggling, badly, and my only way out was safeguarding this place where I could separate myself from that. Realistically, I would much rather hear someone speak about their love of Jason Derulo rather than the album they think they should talk about because it sounds cool.”
Born in 1976 in London, before moving to Kilcorney in North Cork at age seven where his father bought a pub, Smith lived an adolescence marred in difference. His accent lent itself to poshness (“little did they know”), resulting in years of bullying. His escape was music.
“It wasn’t until I went to the Gaeltacht for the first time and found that music was currency,” he shares, his eyes lighting up like that 15-year-old in a bottom bunk once more.
“We swapped CDs and records like it was treasure. It changed everything.”
At 17, he put Law down as his first choice on his CAO to please his parents, before a pivot to DIT Aungier Street’s new Communications course, a degree he found in a dog-eared prospectus. “I had my Road to Damascus and thought… that’s it.”
The final two years of his degree specialised in broadcasting, leading to a job in Radio Ireland’s new, year-old venture, Today FM, in 1999.
“Everyone was in their early 20s and dying to make something of it,” he says. “We took risks and worked evenings and weekends and chanced our arm until something stuck.”
In the early 2000s, a time when it felt like anything was possible in media, Smith was called into his boss’ office to pitch a show.
“He knew my shyness was holding me back and I could give more,” he nods, his hands gesturing around his now-cold coffee mug. “So within minutes, I was given a gig. Which actually isn’t a very advisable plan for any up-and-coming radio people — to go to your boss and go: “I’d like my own show”, but I think I’d earned my stripes at that stage and the planets somehow aligned.”
That show became , the unpredictable, broad-church Sunday evening service Smith became known for.
“It was the greatest pleasure of my life,” he says now. “Being given the freedom to share some Sunday night fear-busters in the intimacy of people’s homes as they prepare for the week ahead. Over the years, it was moved around due to various owners. Well, everything has changed there really, presenters have come and gone — willfully and otherwise — but somehow I’ve managed to stay put. Having said this, I’ll go back to an email after this and they’ll say to pack my things.”
Today, Smith has worked under four owners (“I kind of come with the house at this stage,” he laughs. “Jeeves will be with you shortly!”) yet the draw of radio remains the same.
“It’s changed and it’s evolved, but the essential appeal is always the same,” he shares, a side-smile forming.
“You’re trying to make a connection with somebody. Intimacy is the perfect word, because you’re coming to them in the most intimate places; by their bed, in the car en route to work, at night when they’re prepping lunches or whatever. With television, it’s an appointment. You sit down in the same place every time to meet it. Radio is everywhere.”
It’s an intimacy he hopes to curate with his newest project, , the latest podcast rolled out by Irish podcast giant Go Loud ( ) in partnership with TheRecordHub.com, where Smith will interview people of note about the three records that have defined their lives.
Released every Sunday, Smith interviews names such as Shania Twain (“like actual Shania Twain, the ‘Let’s Go Girls’ kind”), Siobhán McSweeney (“the most fascinating”), Louis Walsh (“the biggest gossip”) about three defining times in their lives that have been soundtracked by three albums.
The way Smith tells the stories of his guests is characteristic of his approach: he pores over both the reverence of good music (“a perfect pop song is the hardest thing in the world to create”) and the flawed, intricate joys of those he’s interviewing about it.
True to form, throughout the first season, Smith and his guests are pro-joy and anti-snobbery; his reactions delight and surprise allowing his guests to rise and fall within themselves again and again.
He speaks with as much grace about Twain’s command of 1970s Supertramp as author and Irish Examiner columnist Séamas O’Reilly’s love of Aphex Twin, a sound his father mistook for a speaker test.
It’s perhaps his own experiences that shape this narrative, like his achingly intense love affair with REM at 14, or the 2019 heart attack (hailed by medics as ‘The Widow Maker’) he had in the hotel he stayed in throughout Electric Picnic that, according to him, changed “every fibre” of his being.
“It allowed me to take full control of my own actions,” he says, his demeanour unusually serious now.
“I was going too hard at work, at alcohol, at partying, and I wasn’t looking after myself the way I should have been. Not long after that, my partner got pregnant — which was another wake-up call. Without being too heavy about it, we all have a finite time. Some less than others. It woke me up to the kind of things I was worried about and how meaningless they are in the long run.”
The persistence of the term “guilty pleasure” is a relic of the West’s disappearing middling culture, neither high nor low, which at its best generated a desire to learn, and its worst demeans uncultural endeavours as lazy or unexceptional. But the guiltiest pleasure of all, this writer thinks, is the one you deny yourself — one that ultimately desensitises one’s own pleasure-seeking efforts into nothingness.
It’s a practice Smith forgoes (“and one that has gotten me in trouble on Twitter a few times”) leading him to think the following:
“If you want to listen to B*Witched while also buying a The Smiths album, go ahead. Just don’t try and say you know better. You have nothing to lose but your guilt.”
- Listen to first on GoLoud, or whenever you get your podcasts. Follow the show now on your platform of choice so you can get notified of new episodes every Sunday.
