Larry Gogan Donal O’Donoghue meets a broadcasting legend as he prepares to hang up his 2fm microphone
As he gets ready to leave RTÉ 2fm for RTÉ Gold, iconic broadcaster Larry Gogan talks to Donal O’Donoghue about fame, his dear wife Florrie and meeting Bob Geldof
“I’ve been here a long time I suppose,” says Larry Gogan, iconic broadcaster, living legend and modest to a fault. We’re talking about the DJ’s imminent move to the digital station RTÉ Gold from 2FM, where he was a stalwart from its 1979 Radio 2 beginnings. The news was greeted with an outpouring of goodwill from pop stars, politicians and the public, with Joe Duffy inviting him to open his Liveline show. On January 31, 2FM will mark Larry’s departure with a day of programmes dedicated to the station’s longest-running DJ. His eyes roll heavenwards at the thought. Forty years on from playing Radio 2’s opening track, Like Clockwork by the Boomtown Rats, he will sign off with a number from U2, his favourite band. “But I don’t know what it will be yet,” says Larry.
We meet in the RTÉ Radio canteen. On one wall is a collage of recent newspaper clippings dominated by Larry. ‘I’m Not Done Yet’ cries one headline above a smiling image of the evergreen DJ. Then Larry arrives, wheeling his walker, speaking softly, his voice occasionally lost amid the rattle and hum. “Do you have an office Larry?” I ask. He laughs as if this is the funniest thing ever. Larry’s desk is in an open-plan prairie of desk spaces, where I met him earlier shooting the breeze with his producer, Michael Cahill, and his old buddy, Marty Whelan. “You better be careful, Larry, you might end up on the cover of the RTÉ Guide,” quips Marty. Larry grins. Hereabouts, everyone loves Larry. And when I order a cup of tea the woman knows exactly how Larry takes it, a half cup with a good splash of milk. “That’s for Larry,” she says, no charge.
Physically he is a bit shaky. “Arthritis has me this way,” he says, nodding to the walker that is now a constant companion (in 2017 he had a lengthy hospital stay). “My kidneys are also in a bad way so that’s why I have to go to dialysis three times a week. It’s not painful but just time-consuming as each session is three hours long. The problem is the arthritis runs in the family. Two of my daughters have arthritis as do two of my brothers.” Yet his voice is still golden, the tone and timbre of a man many years his junior (even if no one knows his true age and Larry’s not telling). “My voice hasn’t gone but the rest of me is falling apart,” says the ageless Larry and he laughs again, that infectious musical chortle. “I’ve been lucky with my voice I suppose.”
Luck is only part of the story. Larry Gogan grew up in the Dublin suburb of Fairview, listening to American Forces Network (AFN) and Radio Luxembourg and dreaming of becoming a DJ. “I became what I wanted to be,” he said years later, a believer in fate and destiny. His father, John, who owned the local newsagent, died when Larry was ten, so his mother, Mary, had to raise their eight children, aged from 17 to three. By the age of 14, Larry was already an actor, appearing on stage in a play called Life with Father and also a touring production of Juno and the Paycock alongside Milo O’Shea. He left school before his Leaving Certificate, worked in CIE for six months and via the Eamonn Andrews Studios, ended up on radio, his dream destination.
He joined RTÉ in 1961 on the same day as Terry Wogan. Terry was staff, Larry was on a short-term contract. Over the years, the two men’s paths would frequently cross at various Eurovision Song Contests, where Larry hosted RTÉ’s TV and radio coverage and Wogan was the voice of the BBC. “I remember one time when we were in this really hot country and Terry shouted down to me from his press box, ‘Gogan! I have a fan up here to cool me down – what have you got?’” In 2005, Wogan presented his old pal with a special IRMA Award for services to Irish music (of all the awards, that one meant the most to him).Terry Wogan is gone now, as are other names Larry recalls, like the groundbreaking DJ Vincent Hanley and his old radio boss, Bill O’Donovan.
But the greatest loss was his wife Florrie. They first met when he was 15, when he was sent on an errand to her family’s shop. For Larry, it was love at first sight. “I’m not so sure about Florrie,” he cracks. He tied the knot with his childhood sweetheart at 21 and they were married for 39 years until Florrie’s death at the age of 60 in 2002. That was Gogan’s annus horribilis. He was having a heart bypass in one Dublin hospital while his wife was dying of breast cancer at another. “Our last Christmas together was in hospital,” he says wistfully. “I talk to Florrie every day. Some people
I talk to Florrie every day
might think that’s madness but in our home all the things Florrie bought are still there. She was great fun.” Of course they didn’t share the same taste in music. “Florrie liked all the romantic songs from people like Sonny Knowles and Dickie Rock and Cli Richard,” says Larry with a wry smile. “You know I had to go see Cli with Florrie a few times. And she was also mad about Daniel O’Donnell. When Florrie was dying she wanted to see him but the medical sta said she was too ill. Now I don’t know who told Daniel but one day the door opens and in comes Daniel.” A er Florrie’s death, he considered chucking it in, but his religious faith and his love for his job kept him going. “What else would I do?” he asks. “I don’t play golf or anything like that. I never regarded what I did as work, just playing records and such. What would I do if I retired? Sit at home and look at the four walls?”
Early in his RTÉ career, shortly a er his marriage in 1963, Radio Luxembourg o ered Larry a job. “I asked Florrie if she would like to go to Luxembourg and she said, ‘Where’s that?’ So I told her that it was a little country beside France and she said ‘Oh no, I’m not going there!’ So I never went. I was also asked to join the BBC at another time but we had ve children by then and someone had to put the bread on the table. In any case it was always more important for me to be with my family. Down the years my children did listen to me on the radio and they still do.” And then he runs through his children’s careers, all adults now, a father proud as punch of their achievements.
His own career is punctuated with plaudits, winning his rst DJ award in 1964 and many more since. e many radio shows included Pickin’ the Pops, Discs-a-Gogan, and the long-running Golden Hour. But it’s his Just A Minute Quiz, still running, that has become the stu of legend, with its own share of apocrypha. If the questions didn’t suit, as gentleman Larry occasionally put it, the answers were occasionally priceless. What was Hitler’s rst name? Heil. Where’s the Taj Mahal? Opposite the Dental Hospital in Dublin. What star did the travellers follow? Joe Dolan. Larry was also a columnist with the 1970s music magazine Spotlight. “It was called Ask Larry,” he says. Not so much an agony uncle as a column that tapped into his encyclopaedic knowledge of music.
Highlights of his 58 years (and counting) are many. He rattles o a few: dropping the needle on Radio 2 in 1979, being there when Johnny Logan won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980 and meeting Bob Geldof of e Boomtown Rats for the rst time. “My boss said that we couldn’t have him on the show because he’d be using bad language,” says Larry. “When Geldof heard this he said, ‘If I don’t go on with Gogan I’m not going on with anyone!’ I didn’t know him at all, apart from saying that there was a great new band in town called e Boomtown Rats. He must have remembered that. He arrived in a yellow Rolls Royce, walked into the canteen and handed me a record saying: ‘Gogan I have a world exclusive for you!’ e record was I Don’t Like Mondays.”
On occasion, Gogan would provoke the ire of his superiors, in particular an Assistant Controller who considered his music noisy and carpeted him for playing U2’s New Year’s Day. “Ridiculous,” says Larry. “Larry Mullen rang me a erwards saying ‘I believe you got into a row for playing our record?’ It didn’t bother me and anyway Gay Byrne had played it on his show earlier that day and it was number one in England. I was with 2FM, the pop station and he was saying my music was too noisy. Can you imagine that? Another time my youngest daughter, Sinéad, complained about the terrible music I was playing and asked for some heavy metal and so I had a heavy half hour one day and they nearly had a heart attack here!” Larry still loves his music. A long-time champion and fan of U2 ( e Joshua Tree is his favourite album, Larry Mullen is a friend), his current favourites include Picturehouse, Mundy and e Coronas, and he marvels at the phenomenal success of Ed Sheeran. “He must have played to a billion people in this country at least!” he says. “It’s incredible isn’t it?” He has donated most of his vinyl record collection to hospital radios and such, keeping just his beloved Elvis Presley and David Bowie albums. “Of course we don’t have vinyl or CDs any more. Now you just type in a name and up comes the music. But I do believe that radio stations like 2FM and RTÉ Gold will survive. ey are great for news, music and entertainment, especially when you’re on the road.”
In 2005, in the wake of receiving that IRMA Award, Larry Gogan said that he had no plans to retire – a er all he was still young. “ at’s why
I kept saying recently that I wasn’t retiring,” Larry says now. “I was just moving to Gold.” Still resolutely young at heart, he talks of his own radio heroes, most notably the pioneering BBC DJ, Alan Freeman. “You know towards the end they had to wheel him to the microphone,” he says. “ at was sad.” But how sad, doing what you love to the end? Larry nods. “ at’s true,” he says. A erwards, as I leave the radio building, past bronze busts of iconic broadcasters like Gay Byrne and Ciarán MacMathúna, I’m thinking about the man I just met: time, surely, for this living legend to be given his own place among the stars?
What would I do if I retired? Sit at home and look at the four walls?