Kildare producer returns to the radio with ‘For The Record’

KILDARE Town TV and radio producer, Pat O’Mahony, returns to RTÉ Gold’s series ‘For The Record’ for the third instalment, visiting ten well-known Irish figures who are also avid record collectors including one with Kildare connections.

Some of the ten are directly or indirectly involved in the music business, while others have nothing to do with the business at all, but are huge music fans afflicted with the record collecting bug.

Pat will go through record shelves and hear the stories behind their treasure troves and all about their love for records.

Pat’s guests are: David Puttnam, the London-born retired film producer, and now educator and environmentalist, Fiona Looney, newspaper columnist, playwright, and scriptwriter, Peadar Ó Riada composer, musician, choir director, producer, broadcaster on RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, Tracy Clifford: The voice of weekday afternoons on RTÉ 2fm, Maynooth resident Brian Brannigan singer, songwriter and big kahuna of Dublin post-punk roots band, A Lazarus Soul, Paul Lynch the Booker Prize-winning author, singer Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill, comedian, TV presenter, writer and actor and well-known for his character Sim Card in Hardy Bucks, singer-songwriter Leslie Dowdall, and finally former RTÉ Sport presenter Michael Lyster.

Pat, who is an avid record collector himself, described his own record collecting experience.

“When I bought my first three-in-one stereo in the autumn of 1979 – a treat from the proceeds of a reasonably well-paid summer job the months before – I had one major problem: I only had a handful of records. I’d bought the occasional 7” single over the previous decade that I’d played on the parents’ old radiogram and I had possibly only one album, maybe two.

“That December so I made a wish-list for the family of about ten albums that they could choose from as their Christmas presents for me.

“This got the ball rolling. From there I became a regular rummager in record shop bargain bins, the next few years regularly arriving home with bags of discounted albums that helped form a formidable foundation until I was lucky enough to start getting the odd freebie record-company promo in the late 1980s that grew into a welcome avalanche throughout the ‘90s when I was doing a lot of music radio.

“All these years later record company freebies are mostly a distant memory but I still now beg, borrow and occasionally purchase the odd vinyl or CD album, particularly new or previously missed ones.”