Dave Fanning: 'If music stopped today, would I really bemoan it?'
Dave Fanning in Whelans. Pbotograph Moya Nolan
According to Dave Fanning, he was away the previous weekend as his old friend Joe Elliott renewed his wedding vows with his wife, Kristine.
It’s a safe bet that Elliott, the frontman of English metallers Def Leppard, might have choked on his cake if Dave had released this pearler over dinner: “So, maybe rock has had its day...”
Say it ain’t so, Dave.
To be clear, Fanning’s poser on the state of rock and roll is more of a question, even if you feel the answer is in the affirmative.
A totemic figure in Irish music, never mind Irish broadcasting, the 68-year-old Dubliner is not easing up when it comes to his workload, which includes a new season of Fanning At Whelan’s.
The new run features acts including Amble, Kingfishr and David Gray, along with special guests such as Guy Garvey from Elbow.
It once again reminds us of Fanning’s enduring status as Ireland’s answer to John Peel, even if the format is more Jools Holland. But the times, as one of his all-time favourite musicians put it, are a-changin’.
“Even when you say, ‘Who are we going to see?’, have a look at the way Ireland is in music,” Dave says in response to a question about the line-up for the new show, now in its fifth series and having featured almost 100 acts.
“The top one, say, would be U2, then the second one is Hozier. It starts to get very murky around C and D.”
For this reason, he says, the show is a mix of established and new acts.
And by God, do they need it. “It’s a pain in the arse now,” Dave says of much of the modern musical landscape and, more specifically, the travails of bands setting out with a diminished prospect of being able to eke out a career in music, never mind hit the big time.
“There was one band we had on last year and they were doing a five-day tour of Ireland,” he explains.
“Usually, I always said, ‘Jesus, fair play. Did you make enough to get a single or an album out or whatever?’ Now, I say, ‘You didn’t lose too much, did you?’
“Can you imagine five guys having to go down the country to five different places and maybe stay overnight and get their instruments — there’s no money in it any more.
"There is no record company backing. Years ago, it was about getting deals. There is no getting deals any more. The record company don’t put money into that kind of thing any more.
“It’s just really difficult. It was easier years ago — easier if you got that deal.”
As he sees it, there are still lots of bands, and venues, prepared to put on gigs, but “maybe you’re looking for a scene. No matter what anybody says there isn’t much of a scene.”
He then unveils a glorious factoid: while there were 144 bands who made the British number one spot in the charts between 1980 and 1985 and 140 bands who emulated those acts between 1990 and 1995, between 2020 and 2025, the figure was just three — and one of those was The Beatles.
And yet, if rock is on life support, Dave isn’t quite keening at its bedside.
“If music stopped today, would I really bemoan it?
“There’s so much that I want to hear again, so much that I haven’t heard at all. There’s enough to keep me going for another 50 years. You might say, ‘Come on, it has to keep evolving’, but maybe it isn’t evolving.
His own edge has not been dulled, with his micro-digressions and sentences within sentences. There’s clearly something of the eternal adolescent about Dave, even after all these years. It’s not just the rapid-fire delivery, it’s also his sense of vim — he even sounds enthusiastic about the things he’s not enthusiastic about.
And then there’s also his very fixed sense of what’s cool. He recalls the days of cycling 15 miles to a fella’s house to listen to an album.
“I judged somebody at school. They might have an album under their arm and if it was from somebody I didn’t like, I’d say they were a moron. It was pretty absolute.”
He admits to missing some of the elements of music from decades past — the vinyl sleeve, exchanging physical copies of albums with friends, the needle in the groove — yet also says that for all the music he has on the shelves, he listens to music all day on Spotify.
Dave still pops up on 2FM, the station he first joined back in 1979, and has a regular slot on RTÉ Gold. 2FM’s very existence has been debated for a very long time, but it’s not necessarily something which exercises Dave too much.
“I can see what they’re doing. It’s the younger station,” he says. “And it’s all young people doing young person’s music. I think it’s probably fine. It’s not for me. I don’t listen to it. I wouldn’t be listening to daytime radio anyway, I never did.
"It is what it is and I get the impression it’s probably not doing as well as it used to but I have no idea really. I still do some stuff on it. I like doing what I do but I do it myself.
“Radio has changed completely, obviously because people aren’t as reliant on it — I mean young people that is.”
By contrast, when the subject of movies and his lifelong passion for them is brought up, he locks on.
David Puttnam told this newspaper last year that he couldn’t believe Ireland, with its fertile and ever-growing cinematic heritage, does not have a dedicated programme on a TV station here.
Dave presented for over a decade on RTÉ — he can tell you the exact number of episodes — and its unceremonial axing still rankles.
“I don’t think it should have been cut,” he says. “I thought it was good public services in some ways. It was me ranting, giving my opinion. It wasn’t just facts, but I thought it was good. One of the reasons why they should [have such a programme] also is that it’s not expensive and that’s one of the biggest considerations these days.”
As he sees it, the under-35s aren’t really watching TV any more, which might explain his verdict on what does get to air: “It’s all lifestyle, all selling houses or plucking turkeys.”
But another aspect of forever being that lad on a bike seeking out the latest album by a favoured band means you can never stay miffed for too long. And so it is with Dave.
Two of his peers from the first days of 2FM have passed on, Larry Gogan, and Dave’s great friend, the taken-too-soon Gerry Ryan.
Their passing is a reminder that music is possibly one of the closest things we have to time travel, with a song, a chord, a note or a chorus having the potential to take us right back to a different place.
If the voice holds up, the DJ can remain, in their own way, ageless.
“I don’t even think of retirement,” he says. “The idea of not doing this... A friend of mine is teacher — I was a teacher. They’ve retired five, six, seven years and great, whatever turns you on, but there’s absolutely no way I’m going to do that and there’s no way I’ll ever have to do it either because even if I don’t do the things that you see, like RTÉ or 2FM, there’s enough things to keep me going forever.”
By way of example, he’s just penned a 5,000 word essay at the request of New Order for the reissue of their album, Brotherhood, while he is also compiling an audio history of rock for the radio and a separate history of Irish rock. He might even do a podcast, he says.
“I’ll get divorced if I don’t get a podcast. Every single Tom, Dick and Harry’s onto me so I’m going to do some podcast thing, but I’ll be one of a million. I’ll just talk to rock stars or something.”
As another of the greats, Neil Young, put it: rock and roll can never die. Or as Dave has it: “I won’t be doing sudoku, that’s for sure.”
- Fanning At Whelan’s, in association with Guinness Live & Rising, airs on Saturday, December 7 at 10pm on Virgin Media Two
