RUSH HOUR, being what it is these days, extends well beyond 7 p.m., but you can spot the drivers making the most of their time when you see them laughing incredulously to themselves, singing loudly to no one in particular, or bopping to Little Richard as they inch their way homeward.
People idling at home with the radio on may find themselves in similarly high spirits if they've tuned in and turned over. John Kelly's evening slot on Radio Ireland - the Eclectic Ballroom - is one of the most inventive programmes on the airwaves, a celebration of authentic music and an entertaining earful of both the wonderful and the woeful.
It's unpredictable, it's funny, cool and engaging. Eclectic is putting it mildly.
The programme has already attracted a certain cult status, helped along by its cast of drop-in characters. There's Barbecue Bob, the food historian with a weakness for chilli peppers; Mr Gloom, who excels at a particularly Northern brand of misery; and the programme's own cultural attache, Mick Heaney, who reviews films, books, exhibitions, concerts, whatever's going.
It seems effortless - but never slick. Despite Kelly's vast collection of music, his certain knowledge and uncanny gift of recall, he never lectures (except, perhaps, about Elvis). Best of all, he never sneers. "That's a remarkable piece of music," he might say. "Remarkable. And there's plenty more where that came from, don't you worry.
He might be talking about the Pahinui Brothers who sing in Hawaiian. (He's been to Hawaii, then? "No, I just give that impression.") Or it might be the Flanagan Brothers, a New York Irish act from the 1920s whose song
From Galway To Dublin was, Kelly assures us, way before its time. Just listen to these train sound effects," he warns affably.
Kinn-e-gad shout the Brothers Flanagan. May-noo-oo-oo-th!
Stranded motorists scratch their heads. The house-bound drop their forks. Where does he get this stuff?
Yet it's not gag radio. The Eclectic Ballroom is not about funny voices, novelties and gimmicks. Instead, you're in the company of a likeable zealot going through his record collection, picking out, the gems, plucking out the curiosities, picking up strands in the story of jazz and cajun, country, traditional. blues, R&B, roots and soul. And there's a dash of the contemporary, here and there. Is there no limit? "I tend to stay clear of loud guitar noise," he shrugs.
People ring in with unlikely requests. Some imagine him to be an older man, huddled over a collection of 75 rpms. So who is this man with the wry Northern voice?
He's 32, from Enniskillen, long-limbed, lanky and, as he says more than once in his book, big-eared. A touch of James Dean and Lyle Lovett. Quick-thinking and independent. As soon as he'd gone to the trouble of completing an honours degree in law at Queen's, he took up media freelancing instead.
He is a practised broadcaster, accomplished in both radio and television, having presented, written or produced current affairs, consumer, education, arts and music programmes for the BBC, UTV, Channel 4, RTE, Telefis na Gaeilge ... He has won Sony and EMA awards.
His love of music has grown along with his ears. At school he listened to what everyone else was listening to at the time: Thin Lizzy, Horslips, Rory Gallagher, "Van Morrison. Then he heard Morrison singing a song by Leadbelly and he started following the trail. Eight or nine years ago, he says, he got stuck into heavy texts on blues and jazz and became a student of American cultural and social history (pre-Elvis). Muddy, Lightnin' Wynonie, Brother Ray, Bird and Lady Day became his motley companions. He read Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and Mezz Mezzrow, a white man who thought he was black. He played their records on the radio - the Chords, never the Crew Cuts; Little Richard, never Pat Boone. Word got around, his audience grew and he even won a prize.
He keeps excellent company. Among his mentors - his "encouragers" - is David Hammond, Belfast singer, producer, broadcaster and raconteur, who shares his interest in music, painting, books, the natural world and "a lot of nonsense, too". They've worked together at Flying Fox Films; they recently traipsed around Lough Erne in search, of hares; they "engage in sending funny postcards", Kelly and the wee Falourie man himself. ("Whatever you do, don't make this sound like a testimonial,"
urges Hammond. "He's great company, and I like him for his good manners, his interest in people. And he loves the place that he comes from.")
Conversation with Davy always leads to something else or somewhere else," says Kelly. "You mention a tune by Big Bill Broonzy, for instance, and Davy, it turns out, once stayed in Broonzy's apartment in Chicago." He met Broonzy's mother and aunt who were 105 and 107 at the time; both had been slaves."
Anecdotes in Kelly's book include escapades with Pete Hamill, Stephen Rea, Van Morrison - the whole Northern league, so to speak. Seamus Heaney is an encourager too, of his poetry as well as his prose-writing.
KELLY would rather not describe his new book, Coal About The Ankles, as autobiography. "I'm too young ... besides, this business of writing about yourself is dangerous." He prefers to call it part diary, pail travel-writing part memoir.
He published his first novel, Grace Notes And Bad Thoughts in 1994. "Fiction is easier.
The publishers may have had something like Nick Hornby's High Fidelity in mind when they commissioned this book, some sort of comic "youff" book. What emerged is a carefully navigated memoir of 30 years in the North, about growing up in a town that is neither urban nor rural.
"For all that was going on in the place called Northern Ireland, Enniskillen remained for the most part a decent place. Not that 'oul daycency' bullshite but the genuine thing. Extremists were eccentrics and by and large people co-existed with great skill, diplomacy and manners."
He is attentive to the construction of childhood experience and bravely recounts his earliest perceptions about Catlicks and Prodesans, about relations who went away on boats, about the people you included in your bed-time prayers and those you didn't.
"Such were the internal litanies and mantras about places and people and their relationships that slowly built Lip a picture of ray world . .. Gradually I was beginning to learn the skills of living in a place called Northern Ireland. .. Be careful what you say - better still, say nothing at all. Read signs, know your ground and crack the code. Already, by four years of age, my life was complex, and I was manoeuvring and negotiating my way through it."
The structure of the book was formulated during a mad and glorious week in New York. "A week in New York is as good as six months anywhere else - such a bombardment ... in any case I feel I've been there all my life . . . I know the geography, know how to find things, we all know the language - how to ask for our eggs in the morning." Over easy?
So from the snowy heights of a hotel bedroom, and between watching Woody Allen play at Michael's, the trumpeter Wycliffe Gordon at the Village Vanguard, attending the opening of a Friel play on Broadway and hanging out with Pete Ham ill, he worked out how he might slip back and forth between New York and Ireland in time, memory, location. "Just like a regular Doctor Who."
The book was launched at the Writers' Centre in Dublin this week; next week the party moves to Belfast. Anyone who knows New York will love this snowy tour of the city; everyone will recognise the influence of popular culture as he navigates his way between two worlds, and coming to the conclusion: Ich bin ein Fermanagh man.
BUT back at the studio it's Chicken Night and Barbeque Bob is there to proffer chicken recipes and illuminate the history of the noble fowl. Kelly, meanwhile, has threatened to torture his listeners with an hour of uninterrupted chicken music. Can he do this, we wonder? Will he?
He stacks up a selection of CDs on the console - about 50 or so. He does not use a playlist. This appears wildly cavalier at first until you realise he has it all sorted and clearly stored in his head. There are no nervous tics no Stanislavskian throat exercises. His voice is his own and his ease with the technology is enviable.
He has, as a once-off, already pre-recorded the following day's show so he can attend his own book launch, so he's now effectively, starting his second broadcast. The 7 p.m. news has led with Bob Dylan's heart condition and he starts the programme with a Dylan ballad. It's not going to be easy to launch into this chicken thing on such a sombre note.
He tries to set the tone and then chain of ads comes on, one of them publicising the by-now-cancelled appearance by Dylan in Millstreet. It's a question of Don't Think Twice, It's Alright. There's no one about, the adjoining studios are eerily empty.
Moving on, he takes a CD he has bought that day at Claddagh Records out of its wrapper. "And now for the bad news," he says into the microphone. "I bought a new CD today. Wait 'tiI you hear this."
A Bahamian called Joseph Spence ("specialist in guitar and vocal sounds") delivers a truly guttural, barely recognisable rendition of Sloop John B. We fall around the place laughing. This encourages him to inflict a second track on the public, The Glory Of Love. "You'll get requests for that, so you will," says Barbecue Bob. "Aye," says Kelly. "This may not be the last we'll hear of Mr Spence." Tracks by Utah Phillips, Ron Sexsmith and Johnny Cash lead seamlessly to the next ad break with impeccable timing, I know not how.
There follows a succession of chicken songs interspersed with, chicken lore - with erudite mention of pagan crosses, the Punic Wars, Napoleon's preference for Marengo chicken and chicken soup (Jewish penicillin). Not forgetting the Teriyaki chicken, chicken feet, fowl wine, garlic, chicken, broiling, grilling, roasting and basting. The rapport between Kelly and Barbecue Bob is easy, trusting.
It works. Many squawks later and the programme is over. He did it. An hour and a half of chicken stuff.
Donal Dineen, an equally welcome voice on the radio, comes into the studio and unpacks his CDs from his knapsack as Kelly fills a box with his. He's living a nomadic existence at present; he has a house still in Belfast and he's living in a flat in Dun Laoghaire. He has another book to finish and a current affairs series for UTV to prepare for November.
Meanwhile, devotees can only hope Kelly has got this chicken thing out of his system, but then there could be worse. He could, for example, play endless renditions of Danny Boy. Or perhaps we can look forward to a few evenings devoted strictly to Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. It's hot these days, after all.