Danny Kelly broadcasting for TalkSport

TRIBUTES have been paid to Islington-born broadcaster Danny Kelly, who grew up a passionate Tottenham fan deep in Arsenal territory, after his death at 69. His funeral is taking place today (Friday).

Mr Kelly edited the NME and Q, co-founded Football365 and became one of talkSPORT’s best-loved voices. He died peacefully at St James’s Hospital in Dublin on Tuesday after treatment for oesophageal cancer.

His Requiem Mass is at 11am at St Patrick’s Church, Ballymurphy, on the Kilkenny-Carlow border, followed by burial in the adjoining cemetery.

Born in Islington in December 1956, he was one of six children of Irish parents, Josie and Andy. “I grew up in Islington, literally in the shadow of the old Highbury stadium,” he told The Athletic in 2022. “Everybody I cherish supports Arsenal.”

He went to the Sacred Heart primary school, linked to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church in Eden Grove, Holloway, and then to St Aloysius’ College in Highgate.

During the Troubles, after a bomb in a King’s Cross post box, his father taped up the kitchen window, fearing a backlash, he once told Buzz.ie. “Really, who was going to put a brick through a window on this estate where everyone is called Kelly and O’Grady?,” he said. “But he was genuinely frightened.”

Like his father, he worked on the railways, as an announcer at Victoria, and his gig reviews in the union newsletter led him to the NME. He edited the paper until 1992, then took over Q and was named British magazine editor of the year.

Football365 also began here. “In 1997, me and three others launched it from a single room in Islington,” he told The42 in 2020. “My recollections are that we had no windows, we were literally in a box room.”

Radio brought him his greatest partnership. Mr Kelly was reviewing the newspapers on an early-morning BBC Radio 5 show when Danny Baker arrived as its presenter in the early 1990s. Both were NME alumni, yet they had never met.

“We got along like a house on fire,” Mr Kelly told The Athletic.

The “two Dannys” went on to share the airwaves at Radio 1 and, from 1996, on Baker & Kelly Upfront on Radio 5 Live. When the BBC sacked Baker in 1997, the partnership carried on at Talk Radio, and the pair were back on 5 Live in 2002. They covered the 2006 World Cup in Germany together, wrote the book Classic Football Debates Settled Once and For All in 2009, and in 2013 fronted a Friday night BT Sport show, Baker and Kelly’s Vaguely Sporting Phone-Out.

Mr Baker wrote on X the morning after his friend died: “My great friend, supreme broadcaster and funniest man I ever knew, Danny Kelly, died yesterday afternoon. I cannot believe I will never hear his voice again.”

Later he added: “We were genuinely like brothers with a shorthand understanding and in-jokes that now is lost forever to me. Music, football, life – we shared an absurd private universe of turmoil.”

He recalled how at Radio 1, Mr Kelly would tear pictures out of the papers, scrawl “TURMOIL” or “WE FEAR CHANGE” on them and pass them over. “It was breathlessly helplessly funny,” he asid. “Nobody knew why.”

“Danny Kelly and I tried to forge another path for football punditry. One based in hoopla, voodoo and toasters.”

Sharing their last photo together, taken the morning after a sell-out first live show in London last year, he wrote: “A Baker & Kelly tour was planned. It never happened.”

At talkSPORT, his home for nearly two decades, his best-known moment came when Spurs snatched a 4-4 draw at the Emirates in 2008 and he told co-presenter Stan Collymore: “I love football, Stan. I love it.”

Mr Collymore wrote that Mr Kelly picked him as co-presenter while he was struggling with his mental health. “Danny gifted me that. Without that I know I wouldn’t be writing this today.”

Tottenham Hotspur Football Club has paid tribute and said: “The entire Tottenham family mourns the loss of one of our own, broadcasting legend Danny Kelly.”

In 2018, Mr Kelly moved to Ireland with the journalist Alex Clark, then his partner and later his wife, to be near his mother. Ms Clark wrote on X: “He was just remarkable, and I was the luckiest woman to have had him for so long.”

He leaves his wife and his brothers and sisters, Mag, Michael, Andrew, John and Joanne.