The best of Sean Rocks

For Culture Night 2025, we asked Guest Editor Belinda McKeon to select some highlights from the hundreds of interviews and performances hosted by Séan Rocks for RTÉ Arena over the years – she introduces her selections below…

For Culture Night, I spent some time going through the Arena archives on rte.ie, which are an amazing resource. So many interviews, discussions, excerpts, in session recordings; an audio journal of where the arts have been over the past decade and a half, but also of where life has been, and of where artists can take us. I could have chosen hundreds of excerpts to weave into a mix: I’ve chosen just a small selection of some things – readings, conversations, tunes moments in time – that speak to me, and that I hope will speak to you, too.

Dineen on Moroder:

I’d listen to Donal Dineen read an instruction manual, the football scores, the terms and conditions of my car insurance: anything. Since No Disco and Here Comes The Night in the 1990s, Dineen’s broadcasting has been a treasure chest, just like that of his fellow broadcaster, John Kelly, and like many, I was in heaven this summer when they were briefly docked once again at the same station, with Dineen guest hosting The Blue of the Night (ordinarily hosted by the wonderful Bernard Clarke) directly after Kelly’s Mystery Train. I don’t think I could ever repay my debt to these broadcasters – the music they’ve played over the decades has gotten me through so much, including a lot of my writing. And it’s not just about the music, but about how they offer it, contextualise it and curate it. Unquantifiable riches. In this Arena item, Dineen profiles composer and producer Giorgio Moroder, ahead of Moroder’s Electric Picnic appearance in 2013. In here are moments of profundity as well as hilarity, as Donal Dineen tells Séan Rocks about the early moments of disco which left him breathless in the right ways, as well as the wrong. Listen below:

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Sarah Clancy

The poet and activist Sarah Clancy, from Galway, is currently on the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, carrying aid, on a mission to open a humanitarian sea corridor in spite of Israel’s blockade. Sarah is providing regular video and photo updates on her instagram at @sarahmaintains. In this clip from 2015, she reads her poem ‘Explaining Borders To Your Children’. Beir bua, Sarah and colleagues; wishing you strength and safety.

Amanda Coogan on her show “I’ll Sing You a Song From Around The Town”

Always mesmerising, performance artist Amanda Coogan talks with Séan about her 2015 show at the RHA, which built six durational performances into an ongoing loop. Such work is not easy to understand – or perhaps what’s not easy to understand is how the artist, and the artist’s body, can bear the strain that such performances demand – but this is an interview which makes of that difficulty a thrilling, and richly fascinating, thing. Listen here.

Amanda Coogan

Jim Carroll on Jeff Buckley’s Grace

On its twentieth anniversary (Arena has always created interesting items out of anniversaries, and there are scores of them in the archive), music journalist Jim Carroll spoke to Sean about Grace, the only studio album recorded by Jeff Buckley. Carroll recalls seeing Buckley live at Sin É in NYC in 1993 (and amazingly, doesn’t sound smug while he’s doing so), and offers a pretty compelling analysis of the timbre of Buckley’s falsetto-adjacent voice. There’s a lot of poignancy in Carroll’s closing question – how would things have turned out for Buckley and his art if that night in Memphis had not gone the way it did? Listen to the conversation here.

Anne Enright on Maeve Brennan in New York

“I’d say, I’m going up to talk to Séanie Rocks,” Anne Enright recounted herself saying, of her own past appearances on Arena, during that tribute show in July. Here she is in 2016, as she prepared to deliver her first lecture as the new Arts Council Laureate for Irish Fiction; to be delivered in New York, at NYU, the lecture was also about a New Yorker, the mid-century fiction writer and columnist, Maeve Brennan. As well as talking about Brennan, Enrght talked about the welcome shift in “manners” in fiction by Irish women, but also about the “semi-pathological” discrimination which continued in male discourse about writing by women – listen here.

Anne Enright

Country Time’s Sandy Harsch profiles Hank Williams

After her sudden death in 2018, one fan tweeted of broadcaster and photographer Sandy Harsch, who presented RTÉ Radio 1’s Country Time, that her voice “picked you up, flew you over the great plains, dragged you into real America and brought America into your home.” Here, upon the release of the film I Saw The Light, Harsch profiled the film’s subject, the Alabama-born singer-songwriter Hank Williams. Like so many Arena items, this gifted listeners with an expert’s perspective, delivered in the relaxed and informal tone of a chat at the kitchen table – listen here.

Palestinian jazz singer Ruba Shamshoum in session

Accompanied by the Venezuelan guitarist Orlando Molina and the Irish double bassist Barry Rycraft, the jazz artist Ruba Shamshoum has a stunning voice born of the melding of Levantine song, Arabic opera and 20th century jazz. She performs two breathtaking pieces and talks with Séan about the layered elements at play in her own style. As well as an immersion in the gorgeousness of Shamshoum’s work, this interview is also a classic example of how Séan Rocks, with his endless curiosity about the creative process, could cover – and go deep into – a remarkable amount of ground in a few minutes, even when conversing about an artform about which he did not pretend to have much advance knowledge. This item is from 2017 – listen below:

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Eimear McBride on Frida Kahlo

Where else would you get this? A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing author Eimear McBride talked to Sean in 2018 about a Frida Kahlo-focused exhibition at the V&A in London, and about Kahlo’s influence on MacBride’s own formation as an artist. A conversation full of intelligence and insight which allows the listener to feel like they’re not just walking through the V&A show, but also that they’re getting a sense of what Kahlo and MacBride themselves would have been like in conversation – listen here.

Eimear McBride

Tracy K Smith, US Poet Laureate

“There is a sense of wanting to get toward something that feels mysterious, and I think I’m just trying by any means possible to do that,” says the former US Poet Laureate, Tracy K Smith, in this interview from 2019. Smith talks about her poetry and reads two poems – ‘Credulity’ and ‘The United States Welcomes You’ – listen here.

Darragh Byrne and John D Ruddy talk Frank Pig Says Hello

I was fortunate enough, in the early 1990s, to see Séan Rocks in Frank Pig Says Hello by Patrick McCabe, a stage adaptation of McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy. He played every role except that of Francie, and there was an incredible scene in which he played, at the same time, the mother and son Mrs and Philip Nugent: mother squawking, son squirming. In this item for the 25th anniversary of the play, Darragh Byrne and John D Ruddy of Commotion Theatre Company talk with Séan about the play and its marvels – listen here.

Listen to more from Arena here