Danny Kelly is a titan of British journalism. Having started writing for the New Musical Express (NME) in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade he was editor of the iconic music magazine. He later edited rival musical publication Q before turning his attention to sports broadcasting.

Forming a much-loved duo with Danny Baker, he has appeared across the BBC, BT Sport, and TalkSport.

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He now also hosts The Athletic’s Tottenham Hotspur podcast, The View From The Lane, and Monday marked his 100th edition at the helm.

He sat down with The Athletic’s Jacob Whitehead to discuss falling into broadcasting, the relationship between football and music, and why he had his photo taken with Sol Campbell…

Listen to The View From The Lane – The Athletic’s dedicated Tottenham Hotspur podcast – twice a week for free on Apple, Spotify and all other podcast platforms.

What is your first love, football or music?

Oh, this question, it’s impossibly difficult. I’ve been a very lucky man, making my living out of two of the three things that I really love. I love popular music. I love football. And I love history — but I don’t suppose anyone really cares about my opinions about the Anglo-Prussian agreements of the 17th century. People say, ‘Well, which one would you choose?’ I can’t imagine my life without either.

I take great pleasure in the way football is now part of our national life again. People find this hard to remember, but during the 1980s, hooliganism reduced the game to just a hardcore of supporters. It had also become almost anathema to talk about football in polite society. Nobody liked it. When I worked in the music press — alongside people who would now be called hipsters — you just couldn’t mention football without people thinking you’re a Neanderthal.

Now, I hate the way football has removed cricket from the back pages of the newspapers, even in mid-summer, but football is a glorious thing to watch and to play. And I’m delighted that so many more people are playing it now.

I would never try to separate music and football because in my mind they are the same thing. My football radio shows — and sometimes View From The Lane — are interspersed with the most obscure pop music, rock music and reggae references because to me they bring a similar kind of pleasure.

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Growing up, did you want to be a musician or a footballer?

You know, when I was growing up, I had no illusions at all about being anything. It may be that the immigrant working-class community I came from didn’t have that kind of aspiration. So I knew pretty soon that I wasn’t going to be much of an athlete. I played football until an ankle injury retired me in my early 30s at a really pathetic level on Hackney Marshes on a Sunday morning.

My benefit to the team was that I knew how to organise a bunch of lads. Every other team on the Marshes played their best player up front. I played our best player, Mickey Donnelly, behind us as a sweeper. Nowadays, I wonder whether Mickey enjoyed it as much as he should…

I was no kind of footballer at all, and as for music, I literally haven’t got an ounce of talent in my whole body. I own a drum kit. I own a lovely guitar. But when I touch them, it’s as though somebody is belting them with a claw hammer.

At 13 or 14, the first ambition I remember having is after reading a piece in Melody Maker, a rival to the NME. It was about a band called Mahavishnu Orchestra, who were playing at the Royal Albert Hall. I thought ‘Wow, this is amazing, the way they put those words and those pictures together!’ Other than that, my ambitions didn’t run much further than owning a pair of Solatio shoes or two-tone tonic trousers when I was a teenager. I was suddenly launched, for better or worse, into a five-decade career in the British media.

What was it like starting at the NME? Was it really as wild as the stories suggest?

The music press in the 1980s was incredible. You were just so privileged to work there, although the mad excesses of the 1970s had changed slightly. The money sloshing around the music industry then was quite extraordinary and the atmosphere in the 1980s was still fantastic.

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People who write about music tend to have very vivid imaginations and they are paid to exaggerate human feelings. We were like kids let loose in a sweet shop. I was slightly older when I got into NME, so I was the responsible one.

That passion was so fantastic. As for the other stuff — I’ll leave most of that to your imagination. All I will say is that on more than one occasion when I was editor, I was dragged to the top of the 27-storey building that we worked in to explain to the managing directors what was going on in the cleaning cupboard below them…

So how did you get into covering sport?

Luck and fate. I started off at Radio 5 Live. They had an early morning breakfast show in which they needed someone to review the papers. I did it for a few months and they liked it. Then the host got shoved out the door and Danny Baker turned up!

We have worked together for the subsequent 40 years, Danny and I, but we’d never met before that. We got along like a house on fire. Gradually we got taken off the morning show, (football phone-in) 606 happened, and I became a sports broadcaster almost by accident.

My love of sport came to the fore on the radio and they liked it. Then I was offered the chance to present a late-night sports show that was called Under The Moon. It was an attempt to do a phone-in on television; it’s a radio show on television. I’ve certainly got a face for radio, but people still remember that show — the students, taxi drivers, and junkies who listened to it then! It was a mixture of luck and kismet.

We’re talking the day after the north London derby, which Spurs lost 3-1 to Arsenal. Does football still affect your mood?

I love Spurs and they do affect my life, but nowhere near as much as they used to, for two reasons.

One, I grew up in Islington, literally in the shadow of the old Highbury stadium. Everybody I cherish supports Arsenal — my brothers and sisters, my wife, until we moved to Ireland, was a season ticket holder. Most people I love are enamoured with the result we saw.

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Secondly, I got so involved with Spurs in my late 20s, early 30s that I realised it was making me miserable. We’d lose and I’d be miserable for the rest of the week. And so I took real extreme measures — I stopped going for three years. I weaned myself off the need for the adrenaline rush; it’s just too much like a heroin addiction. There are highs and there are inevitable lows. And somehow the lows were starting to outweigh the highs.

I’ve learned to put some distance between myself and the results. However, my wife would tell you that when Spurs go behind in a game, I get up and leave the room until something better happens. Often I can be found in the car. If Spurs have equalised, she’s empty-handed, telling me it’s time to come in and watch the television again. If things have got worse, she brings me a cup of tea as a comfort.

Your broadcasting career has lasted more than 40 years. What impression do you want the viewer or listener to take away?

Broadcasting is a weird thing to do for a living. If you stand in a pub giving your opinions, maybe one or two people will listen because you’re buying them drinks. But mostly, people don’t care what other people think.

I hope that what I’ve done over the years is to be honest and open about football, life, culture, everything else. I hope what I’ve done is to make people feel they’re listening to something real and authentic. Let’s not kid ourselves — broadcasting is a performance.

But I only ever give two pieces of advice. Be a version of yourself, but add an extra 15 per cent of personality. And don’t be s**t. Try not to be s**t and you’ll be OK.

How does recording The View From The Lane compare to your previous work?

I was amazed to be asked to do it because it was already well established and very, very good. But clearly, The Athletic wanted to add something to it. Charlie, Jack and James are brilliant blokes and know their stuff, so I guess, if anything, I’ve helped it face the public a bit more.

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I also insist that football does not exist in a vacuum — it is part of society, part of our lives, part of history. And I’ll try to drag that into it as well. The upshot of all that is that The View From The Lane — and I’m really going to be completely immodest about this — I think is the best Spurs podcast out there. I’ll go further. I think it’s the best single club podcast anywhere on the vast terrain of podcasts available to people and I know this because I see more and more and more comments coming from people who clearly enjoy listening to it but don’t support Spurs. I absolutely love doing it. I love the regularity of it. And the fact the drama at Tottenham never ends and you’re always feeding off the latest nuance and the latest instalment of that drama.

✔️ Extreme opinions on Hojbjerg
✔️ Life and times of Erik Lamela
✔️ Best and worst routes to the ground@dannykellywords, @CDEccleshare and VFTL listeners provide #THFC new boy @TimSpiers with an idiot's guide to covering Tottenham…

🎙️ 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗩𝗜𝗘𝗪 𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗠 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗟𝗔𝗡𝗘

— The Athletic UK (@TheAthleticUK) September 15, 2022

And finally… what’s with the photo of you and Sol Campbell?!

It was taken when he was a guest on my show, My Sporting Life, on TalkSport. I think it was the first non-BBC programme to win Sports Radio Programme of the Year a few years ago. I’ve had some of my absolute Spurs heroes on there — Glenn Hoddle, Ossie Ardiles, Graham Roberts. But the one that was most tricky was Sol.

I remember telling his agent, Sky Andrew, not long after that move to Arsenal that I would never, ever forgive Sol for what he had done.

But time passes and human beings make mistakes, and so when the chance came to do the interview, I couldn’t say no. I don’t really hold grudges.

We hardly ever took pictures of my guests for reasons I’ll never understand given that I’m so beautiful to look at. But the producer insisted on this occasion, and man did I get some grief from Spurs fans, who felt not only should I not have shaken hands with him, but I shouldn’t have been in the same room with him, never mind have a three-hour conversation with him.

Everybody has a different view on everything. And that’s why the media works and that’s why The View From The Lane works, too…

To embarrass Danny even more, we also reached out to two of his partners-in-crime on The View from the Lane – Jack Pitt-Brooke and James Maw – to ask them what the last 100 episodes have been like to work on.

Jack: Always Sunny only became the show it was when Frank Reynolds arrives in season 2, and our podcast only became what it is when Danny started to host it. Like a taller Frank, Danny has provided experience, guidance and a bit of madness, the perfect tonal contrast to our younger, more boring guests. And like that first season of Always Sunny, I can barely remember how the podcast functioned without him.

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James: Danny’s standing in the sports media landscape speaks for itself, and I had long been aware of his passion for Spurs, having heard his unhinged reaction to Aaron Lennon’s equaliser at Arsenal in 2008. With that in mind, he was always going to be a huge asset for VFTL. Once he’d remembered our names, which only took four or five months, he was able to effortlessly stitch the whole thing together and take the show to the next level.

Listen to The View From The Lane – The Athletic’s dedicated Tottenham Hotspur podcast – twice a week for free on Apple, Spotify and all other podcast platforms.