Mike Concannon
It started out with his business, Round Tower Travel, which specialized in trips to Ireland. Mike Concannon had been running ads on The Irish Hours radio show on WVCH 740 AM, hosted by the legendary Will Regan.
When Regan passed away in 1995, Concannon placed a call to the station to find out about his ad, and when it might start running again. The answer: As soon as we get a new host. Without hesitating, Concannon asked: How about me?
The station owners met him at Cawley’s on West Chester Pike for an interview, at the end of which they told him, “get a show together on cassette tape, and we’ll see from there.”
As anyone who listens to Irish radio in the Delaware Valley knows, Mike Concannon got the job. “Since ’95, that was it. I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Concannon has a compact studio setup in the basement of his Delco home, an old-fashioned brick of a microphone dangling on a boom over the countertop of a corner bar, stacks of CDs and cassette tapes sharing space with bottles of Jameson and other Irish libations. The walls are festooned with Eagles regalia. A piraña-type fish, about the size of a saucer, is the lone occupant of a large aquarium off to the side. There used to be other fish in the tank, Concannon says, but they didn’t last long.
In the early days, it took hours to put the two-hour show together, splicing cassette tapes over the course of four or five hours. The recordings were then dropped off at the station for play on Saturday. For the past three months, Concannon has been recording electronically and emailing the show in. It now takes exactly as long as the show to produce. Pre-recording hives him an advantage over Regan’s live broadcast. “I can rewind if I get it wrong.”
Sitting on a stool behind the bar and wearing a tweed Irish cap, Concannon seems just as thrilled doing the show as he did way back at the beginning. “Mostly I do it because I love Irish music, and now I’m hooked on it,” he says. “It’s a nice way to get in touch with your Irish roots.”
We interviewed Concannon recently. You can watch the video, above.
