Summertime always spells such a notable windingdown in Irish broadcasting, but this year is a little bit different. It's not just that some of the summer shows are pretty good - that's been frequently true on radio here (though, I know, certainly not on telly).
The oddity this year is that a new programme for the long haul has been introduced with the summer reshuffle, and "a new sound" has been launched on a longstanding favourite.
The new sound is on 5-7 Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), and the novelty mainly consists of Rachael English's enthusiastic voice. The first week of the show also seems to have moved some segments into a longer, more considered interview format, with more flagging of reaction from listeners. In other words, it's rather more like the competition.
The new programme is Rattlebag (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), which is certainly bravely named. I find those three-syllable titles so long and awkward, and I'm sure I can't be alone in tending to drop the fiddly little middle tle, can I?
I would love to say more about Myles Dungan's arty new vehicle, which has sounded just fine and a little familiar when I've managed to tune in amidst my busy day-job schedule. However, in spite of its presenter's apparent technophilia, as of Thursday all efforts to hear the programme via the link on RTE's should-be-wonderful "audio downloads" web page have met a stubborn "the requested URL was not found on this server". Oh dear.
While presumably summer couldn't come soon enough for media magazine Soundbyte, Saturday mornings have picked up another provocative programme. Under the Influence (RTE Radio 1) sees Joe Jackson interviewing people about their musical forebears, but anyone who knows anything about Jackson knows his idea of "influence" doesn't stop at "where'd you pick up that riff?"
Given that penchant for psycho-biography, it was fascinating and a little surprising to hear Christy Moore turn up as the first guest. And sure enough, Christy sounded a bit nervous starting off, when Jackson told us Hound Dog was the first record Moore ever bought. "It's not a great lyric though, is it?" asks Joe rhetorically.
"It seemed pretty good at the time, though," says Christy.
While Christy has been absent from the country's stages, ironically enough he's been a feature on the airwaves, with both The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) and The Usual Suspects (RTE Radio 1, Saturday) using his highly imitable style as a vehicle for satire. The real Christy, happy to say, soon had that spontaneous narrative bounce along the flat landscape of his Kildare accent.
He recalled his musical road-to-Damascus. "One night I was listening to Chuck Berry going down the back of a pink Cadillac, but I was on a Raleigh bike, trying to get a young one up on the crossbar . . . . So I thought I needed to look out for something a bit more organic, something a bit more macrobiotic, and then one night I was twiddling the dials on the old Pye, and there I found it. It was comin' in from Hilversum . . . Fine Girl You Are . . . ."
Christy and Joe, clearly well acquainted, had a bit of a laugh, even as Jackson guided him straight into meditations on Catholic guilt. Better still, Christy broke powerfully into song, whether singing along with Elvis, Paul Anka or Mountain records, or demonstrating the new verses he'd added to Ewan MacColl's Move Along. In a brave and extremely effective move, Jackson let the programme's seams show, leaving in some of the studio talk about what Christy might do next.
As for "influences", Christy was wide open: "Pete Seeger said the first thing a folk singer should do is learn the skill of plagiarism." It was brilliant to hear that, even in "retirement", Christy doesn't demand reverence. He simply commands, well, love.
Christy made the plagiarism remark apropos of his "borrowings" from Woody Guthrie for his ballad about the Stardust fire. So it was funny that Billy Bragg rolled into town this week, playing the part of what you might call "licensed plagiarist": his Mystery Train Live session at Dublin's HQ (to be broadcast via John Kelly's show soon on RTE Radio 1) was a two-hour explanation and demonstration of the strange and wonderful collaboration that has seen him root through Guthrie's archives and write new music for never-previously heard songs - an irreverent exercise if ever there was one.
Same goes for the show. This was well rehearsed, occasionally beautiful and almost always good fun, even if the radio-giveaway audience wasn't necessarily a typical Billy Bragg crowd: he managed to get only a few cheers for Woody's communist principles and today's McDonald's-busters, rising to applause from perhaps a third of the house when he watered it down to the need for "a compassionate alternative to consumerist capitalism" or some such.
Guthrie's own plagiarism was a theme for Bragg, who preferred to call it "recycling". Bragg himself was guilty, I think, of a far greater sin - namely an apparent contempt for the culture from which Guthrie comes. Most things American were the butt of cheap (yeah, pretty good) jokes - "what's laughingly referred to as the American left . . . [are] the people who drive in the carpool lane . . . that's why they call it the left" - and while he boasted of his background research for a song like Eisner on the Go, Bragg unwittingly revealed his ignorance of the institutional history of McCarthyism, his alleged subject.
Moreover, Bragg's central thesis about Guthrie as Prophet Unrecognised, etc, before the 1960s folk boom, when Woody was too sick to enjoy it, conveniently overlooked the fact that Guthrie (and the American left) enjoyed real, if ephemeral, popular success in the late 1930s and early 1940s - not least right there on the radio.
Lovers of folk and roots music on the radio aren't too badly served nowadays in Ireland, but it's no harm for Pale-dwellers with decent antennae (on their radios, I mean) to know about LMFM on a Sunday evening. The Meath-Louth station gives 90 minutes from 7.30 p.m. to a beautiful mix of global/local sounds that gives John Kelly, P.J. Curtis and Philip King a run for their money. And do you know what? They even play Christy.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie