Huge-hearted Danny Kelly made everyone feel a bit grander

Danny Kelly was able to say what you were feeling and use his gift with words to make it beautiful. He could expand the emotional core of a thought to the point where you felt grander for having felt it, and puncture the grandeur just as easily.

He had profound gifts as a broadcaster, and that was how I first came to admire him. But what I saw as I got to know him was that the professional gifts he had – gifts that had enabled him to reach the top of not one but arguably three fields – came from his qualities as a person.

I first loved him as a major Spurs voice and wonderful broadcaster. When I was at the start of my career, doing painful hours at talkSPORT2, his great friend and co-host on Danny Kelly’s Trans Euro Express, Andy Brassell, tipped me off that this was the guy to learn from if you were serious about sports presenting.

And so I tried to figure out what exactly he was doing on air: how did everyone seem to have their best days with him? How did he summon the core idea every time and figure out how to make it as interesting as it could possibly be? How did he make those effortless music references?

The first answer of course is his brilliant mind. But the second, more important, is the size of his heart. Danny Kelly was a man who was always ferociously learning: he adopted every project and person he met with a unique combination of curiosity, kindness and vigour.

He loved to help people in the earliest stages of their career, advocating for you, checking in on you – but, most unusually of all, happy to learn from you, no matter how green you were, or how unimportant.

He lived a huge and varied life. An early job as a station announcer at London Victoria led to him becoming a trade union representative. He filled the union newsletter with gig reviews as he embraced live music with fervour fellow Tottenham fans will recognise.

Danny joined music magazine NME in the 1980s, and became the editor. After that he edited Q magazine and launched Total Sport in the 90s.

He joined talkSPORT in 2007, where he was loved – as anyone who has listened this week since the news of his death will know beyond any doubt.
In 2021, he started hosting The Athletic’s Spurs podcast, The View From The Lane, which was a triumph. It’s his voice I hear first whenever I think of Bilbao and Tottenham’s first silverware in 17 years.

Danny had so many qualities that kept him young, including his brilliant sense of humour. And he was never intimidated by the new. Indeed, as co-founder of the Football365 site in 1997, he understood what the football world was looking for online long before anyone noticed.

He could take an interest in anything that interested you, which means that no human has yet discovered a topic of conversation of which Danny Kelly didn’t have working knowledge.

When he became ill at the start of this year, The Athletic called me to ask if I could fill in on The View From The Lane until he got better. To hear that he trusted me to look after his gang for a bit was one of the proudest moments of my life.

As a result, I’ve been lucky enough to see the torrent of emails from listeners sharing their love of the great man. They’re from places as far apart as New Zealand, the US and Italy and he reached them all the same. They know him. I have never seen someone so universally liked.

It’s very hard to accept he won’t be coming back. And as I fire up the post-Europa League episode to listen to again, he’s with us just the same.
Everyone at Metro would like to send our deepest sympathies to Danny’s wife, Alex and all his family and friends. He will be missed.

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