Love is in the airwaves
AS HE CELEBRATES 35 YEARS ON LOCAL RADIO, MICHAEL GERRARD TALKS TO ALISON COMYN ABOUT ROMANCE, ROCK & ROLL AND HIS BRUSH WITH THE BEATLES
HIS is the voice that said hello to a thousand sweethearts across the North East and even sparked some marriages and possibly the odd break- up! And now Michael Gerrard – for three decades the man behind Radio Romance on local radio – is celebrating 35 years on the airwaves. Not only was he one of the youngest to start in pirate radio but through his job has met giants of music, including Liam Gallagher, Shane McGowan, Robbie Williams and the great George Martin, manager of the Beatles, the band for whom Michael has had a lifelong passion.
‘It’s hard to believe it’s been that long, he says with a laugh. ‘I’ve been up in the attic this past few months, sorting through piles of stuff I have; cassettes, magazines, interviews I’ve done and it brings it all back to me, and when I add it all up, I realise I’ve been around a while!’
The thing about Michael is, he started young, 16 to be exact, and dabbled with radio whilst holding down his first job in local radio.
‘I was always into radio, and even when I’d be doing my homework, I’d have one ear on Radio Luxembourg, and then when Boyneside Radio started back in 1978, I thought ‘ one day I’d like to do that’, ‘ he explains. ‘My big break I suppose you’d call it was actually in December 1983, because I remember the first song I played was
John Lennon and Yoko Ono, ‘Happy Christmas ( War is Over). I had written to the station to see if I could help out or push buttons, and before I knew it, I was thrown into the deep end and the rest is history.’
John Lennon is to be a constant theme throughout Michael’s life and a radio career, but more of that in a minute.
As Michael got more comfortable behind the mic, he was to pick up more gigs than he could handle!
‘Michael Comyn was working there are the time, but decided to move on and I landed his Saturday slot, and then Niall O’Brien left too, and I took his place, and I filled in for Jim Agnew a few times, and next thing, every time someone left, I’d take over and I was on seven days a week,’ he laughs. ‘I was also working during the day, and starting to do DJ gigs in the Boxing Club, warming up for bands like The Stunning, The 4 of Us, and even Bad Manners, so it was a busy time for me.’
It was when love came knocking on Michael’s door, so to speak, that he became a local legend and household name.
‘It wasn’t really my type of music, but in 1985, the slow sets were a big thing in the discos, and I started doing a spot at night called Radio Romance, playing love songs, and reading dedications,’ says Michael. ‘ These were the days when there was only one phone in the house, there was no internet and no texting, so if you wanted to tell someone you fancied them, you had to do it on the radio! ‘You’d have say Susan running down to the local phone box and playing a song for some fella she fancies, and running back to the house so she could hear the request. It was mental, and when we moved it to LMFM, it was massive – we would just get piles of requests by post as well as the phone ringing all night. I even heard there were marriages out of Radio Romance, and no doubt babies too!’
Michael did almost 30 years of love songs, before hanging up his Cupid’s arrow in 2012, but he had already established himself as a great supporter of local music and with a reputation for interviewing international bands who came to Ireland.
‘I would always try and feature a local band at 9.30pm, and they would send me in their cassettes for me to play,’ he explains. ‘In fact, I won the award ‘Fairplay for Airplay’ in 2012 for promoting Irish music on radio.’
But there were some well-known names too, and Michael can quite casually and modestly name-drop a legend or two!
‘A friend of mine rang me from Sony Music and says look, I’m going to play you this song down the phone, and see what you think, and it just sounded like noise to me!,’ says Michael. ‘And my mate says that’s a band called Oasis, do you want to interview them, and so I interviewed them, actually about three times, and then his Mam found out, and I used to have to send her the interviews to her house in Manchester!’
He interviewed them three days before the Slane concert in July 1995, when their second album was still in the pipeline.
‘When I spoke to Noel, he was still in the studio mixing ‘What’s the Story, Morning Glory’ and when I asked him how the new album is coming on, he said it was grand, he just hoped it was going to be as popular as the first one,’ he recalls. ‘ And the rest is history, as it went onto be one of the biggest selling albums of all time.’
Then there was the night on the tiles with Robbie Williams over a ‘ mad weekend in Manchester’!
‘I went over with one of the Gallagher cousins from Drogheda, and we went to a small club, where Liam got us into the VIP area and Robbie Williams came in and we chatted away for half an hour. I bought a round of drinks, and Robbie scarpered off before he got one in, and I’m still waiting for my pint!’
He also partied with the Pogues in a snooker hall, where he played a ‘messy game’ with Shane McGowan, hanging out with Blur at an award ceremony, and meeting Sinead O’Connor and Sterophonics at their gigs,
‘ The problem is, back then, you didn’t have a camera with you to take photos, and there were no mobile phone cameras, so everything is just
a memory, if you can remember the night,’ he says in true rock ‘ n roll style. ‘I’d love to have a recorder when I spoke to Van Morrison for 45 minutes at a gig, but I wasn’t allowed.’
But the most memorable person Michael has met and interviewed - and thankfully for which someone had a camera - is the ‘Fifth Beatle’, record producer George Martin. As a lifelong fan of the fab four, it was a dream come true.
‘A friend of mine was working for a PR company who was involved in bringing George Martin to Ireland and knew I was a huge fan’ he expains. ‘I spent all week preparing what questions to ask him. as I didn’t want them to be obvious, and eventually got to spend about two or three hours in his company, along with his wife and other legends Neil Sedaka and Roy Keane! It was an odd mix.’
One of the questions he asked George, which tickled him pink, was what does he do to switch off in his spare time?
‘No one had asked him that, and he told me he has a shed down the bottom of the garden, and I do some DIY there,’ he says with a laugh. ‘He even did me some jingles for my show, which was brilliant.’
What Michael loves about radio is the intimacy of it, and also the unpredictability.
‘It’s not so much like it now, but years ago, you’d sit down in the studio for a four-hour slot, and you’d have a mostly blank canvas in front of you,’ he says. ‘ You’d have a lot more freedom in what you could play, but that said, all the records were in the library in another part of the building, so if you were looking for something that had been requested, you had to leg it down the corridor while a song was on and try and find it! It kept me fit.’
Michael found his own romance when he met his wife Colette, whom he married in 2011. They have two children; Lennon is 14 and Sadhbh (13), and yes, his son is named after the Beatle!
‘It could be worse, he could be called Ringo,’ he laughs. ‘ We thought of Harrison too, and when he was born, I wrote to Yoko Ono, and she sent me back a letter with a sketch congratulating me on his birth. I still treasure it.’
Michael was tempted on several occasions to ‘go national’ and leave local radio, but he says it is a cut-throat industry and he prefers the security and community of regional broadcasting.
‘I turned to journalism for a while too, working for the Fingal Independent and The Argus on a freelance basis, but six or seven years ago, I saw a gap in the market with social media, and got into managing Twitter for businesses, and now that has really taken off,’ explains Michael. ‘I started off managing Gavin Duffy’s account and branched out into small to medium businesses and now with Michael Gerrard Media it is a full-time job.’
So does this mean Michael has hung up his earphones for good?
‘I’ll always keep a foot in the door of radio,’ he says. ‘I still do an afternoon show in LMFM ‘Saturday Anthems’ between 5.30pm and 8pm, and I’ve been really getting into podcasts too, which is definitely the future of broadcasting.’
You get the feeling Michael will be a voice of the airwaves for many years to come.