Friends from music industry bid a final farewell to Reynolds
SOME of the best known figures in Irish showbusiness braved the cold yesterday to pay their final respects to music promoter John Reynolds as he was laid to rest.
The 52-year-old, who was one of the country’s leading concert promoters, died last week at his home.
Attending the funeral service at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook in Dublin yesterday were the leading lights of the capital’s music and entertainment industry.
Louis Walsh, whose concept of a boyband received financial support from Mr Reynolds in the 1990s, attended the Mass.
RTÉ 2fm broadcaster Dave Fanning, film director Jim Sheridan and model and presenter Glenda Gilson, attending with husband Rob Macnaughton, also travelled to the south Dublin church for the service.
Former 2fm DJ Marty Whelan also attended, as did Fianna Fáil TD Timmy Dooley, artist Guggi and writer Victoria Mary Clarke, partner of Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan.
They joined the Reynolds family, including brother James, in bidding a final farewell to the man credited with shaping Dublin’s club scene in the 1990s, and influencing Ireland’s music festival industry in more recent years.
Mr Reynolds’s death notice on rip.ie noted that he would be deeply mourned by the Reynolds family and ‘his POD family’, a reference to his groundbreaking Dublin city centre nightclub of two decades ago. More recently, the man who launched Electric Picnic had debuted a new music festival, All Together Now.
News of the death of the Longford native, a nephew of the late former taoiseach Albert Reynolds, had prompted a wave of tributes from across Irish public life, including a statement from An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Helped shape festival scene