Martin Bridgeman

I was born in Castlepollard, County Westmeath in the Republic Of Ireland, was adopted and spent most of my early life (until my thirties anyway) in Dublin. I sang and played piano as a child and I have always been fired by music but really became interested in music just before my teens, The Beatles and David Bowie being my major influences although Radio Luxembourg, the BBC World Service and the great RTE broadcasters added to my store of music.  My cousins’ collective record collections helped as did my friends and a growing store of cassettes (now long gone, some special mixtapes gone too).

In 1978, radio took hold directly, producing and presenting my first shows on the pirate radio station Radio Dublin for a time. I was eclectic back then, Steely Dan and The Bothy Band in the same show. How I lasted I’ll never know…long evenings behind a suburban house door with steel plates…

Playing music then took me away from radio and I spent some time in the music scene in Dublin in various bands and styles before moving to Kilkenny in 1993 with my Kilkenny-born wife to raise our children. Over time I became involved in the thriving arts scene there, working at the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival, the Kilkenny Arts Festival and, in recent years, the Kilkenomics Festival and the Subtitle Film Festival and Kilkenny TradFest.

I also restarted my musical adventures with a number of local bands. Hard to keep that down…

A chance conversation led to my return to broadcasting on Carlow/Kilkenny’s local radio station, KCLR, in 2005, producing and presenting a chat show called “People In Profile”. This was a weekly show with a single guest chatting about their lives and work and their musical choices. It proved to be a firm favourite with listeners. It finished its run in 2014.

I produced and presented two other music shows on air from 2006 to 2014; on Saturday evenings, the show was called “The Eclectic Light Programme” a show which featured non-mainstream music with a particular focus on Irish and local talent; on Sunday evenings, I turned to my other musical love, folk and traditional music, for a show called “Blas Glas”.

I presented an Irish language music programme “Ceol Galore” featuring Irish artists and presented the Sunday Breakfast show “Bricfeásta An Domhnaigh” as Gaeilge for a year in 2014.

in August 2014, I presented a specialist music show called “Folk/Roots” on Tuesday nights, a mixture of folk and Americana music. I also presented the Saturday Breakfast show from 2015 to 2020. Around that time, I was also anchoring Sunday Scoreline, a mix of music, chat and sports, which ran from August 2014 to November 2017.

Since December 2017, I’ve produced and presented a show called “Ceol Anocht”, an eclectic mix of alternative, indie and Irish traditional music and more besides, perhaps the truest reflection of my musical adventures, broadcast as Gaeilge. It has a strong emphasis on Irish acts and airs every Tuesday and Thursday nights and is available online on the show page.

I  provide voiceovers for radio ads, theatre productions and a growing number of corporate videos in both English and Irish. I’ve also produced a number of podcasts.

I’ve been involved in songwriter and open mic nights for a while now and am open to opportunities.

I’ve rekindled my interest in writing in the past few years and plan to inflict it on people increasingly in the next while.

(In a parallel life, I was employed for over 33 years in the Irish health service, almost exclusively in the ICT sector from programming to systems analysis and senior ICT management to major project management in the hospital and clinical systems sector. I retired in 2013).

If you want to submit music for my Ceol Anocht shows, please send it to me via this email: martinbridgeman@kclr96fm.com. I’m also available via twitter via @odroichid and via Instagram at @odroichid2018

You can also make contact via my website