RIP to Danny Kelly, one of music journalism and football’s most important voices
The legendary broadcaster passed away today after he was diagnosed with cancer.
By Nick Reilly
“I love football, Stan. I love it”. That was Danny Kelly’s immortal and emphatically delivered line to Stan Collymore on talkSPORT in 2008, after Aaron Lennon’s 94th minute equaliser allowed his beloved Tottenham Hotspur to rescue a dramatic 4-4 draw against Arsenal in the dying seconds of the game.
But for Kelly, who passed away today aged 69 after a lengthy battle with cancer, it also happened to be just one of the great array of things he loved. And which, in turn, made him one of the British media landscape’s most consistently interesting and rightly celebrated voices.
There was, firstly, the encyclopaedic love of music from a man who grew up in Islington and spent his teenage years sourcing cheap vinyl records in local junk shops. In turn, he would oversee a legendary tenure as editor of firstly the NME, where he became one of The Pogues’ most ardent early champions, and latterly Q Magazine. It speaks volumes to the esteem in which Kelly was held that, in August, he revealed the eclectic and ever-impressive list of artists who had reached out during his illness.
“As always, I thank you all for your support. Especially from bands I haven’t worked with for years,” wrote Kelly on X. “Members of Dexys, the Waterboys, The Fall, Primal Scream, The Loft, The Coral and the mighty Manics, among others, have all wished me luck. Note; only great bands; I’m humbled.”
And today, the Manics described Kelly’s passing as “incredibly sad news”.
He also happened to be one of the most beloved voices in football too, throwing himself into that world in the second half of the 1990s when he launched Football365, which became one of the leading online authorities on the game at the dawn of the internet. That knack for innovation continued in the noughties when he launched the Game, a weekly football podcast for the Times.
When he joined talkSPORT in the mid-noughties, listeners immediately took to Kelly’s thoughtful and indeed insightful analysis, offering something of an oasis of calm in that station’s often anarchic programming. Unless he was talking about Tottenham, of course. That memorable moment in 2008 showed his unbridled love for the Lilywhites, while his later work on The Athletic’s View from the Lane podcast from 2021 proved him to be no shrinking violet when it came to dissecting the reality of Tottenham’s very public struggles on the pitch.
“My great friend, supreme broadcaster and funniest man I ever knew, Danny Kelly, died yesterday afternoon,” wrote his broadcasting companion and close friend Danny Baker. “I cannot believe I will never hear his voice again.”
The aforementioned Collymore, meanwhile, explained how Kelly had been a key figure in securing him a talkSPORT gig during a prolonged period of mental health issues.
“He told me he was offered a few co-presenters but he remembered that conversation we had and he wanted me to do it,” he wrote. “A lifeline of work, passionately talking about our sport, having fun and feeling a value as a human again. Something lost for 7 long years. Danny gifted me that. Without that I know I wouldn’t be writing this today.”
The Athletic’s Jack Pitt-Brooke, his View from the Lane co-host, hailed Kelly as “the kindest man you’ll ever meet”.
The outpouring of tributes today, from his close friends and indeed legions of listeners, suggests that the sentiment is very shared. A broadcasting titan is gone, but he leaves one hell of a legacy.