My friend Nick Kelly, who has taken his own life aged 52, was a music writer, journalist and photographer who managed to combine critical acumen with good humour and kindness, an uncommon skill. Nick worked for various publications in the UK and Ireland, conveying his huge knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, various bands and artists in crisp and entertaining prose.
I first met him in 1993 at University College Dublin, where we bonded over a shared love of what was then called “independent” music, of books and writing, and of talking gibberish in Dublin’s bars.
Nick was born in Dublin, and educated at Terenure college, then University College Dublin. He was one of the five children of Yvonne (nee Wheaton), who had worked in a tailor’s before her marriage, and was originally from Southend-on-Sea, and Donal Kelly, an accountant. Nick and his older brother Joe, his gig-going comrade, must have been to every music venue in Britain and Ireland.
His first gig – the Smiths, in 1984 – was one of those adolescent events that form the adult life, a before/after moment that in retrospect can be understood as pivotal. He remained a lifelong fan of Morrissey, but he loved all sorts of music, from the jangling guitars of the cult Dublin band the Revenants to the wry melancholia of Americana artists such as Richmond Fontaine.
On leaving university, Nick started his journalism career at Hot Press magazine. After time freelancing for publications including the Times, Melody Maker and Word, he became a staff journalist at the Irish Independent in 2003, writing a well-regarded music column along with pieces on travel and comedy.
Eventually, Nick moved on from the Irish Independent and took his journalism to various online publications. He did, however, miss the people and solidarity he had so enjoyed while at the newspaper. A move to Barcelona in 2021 re-inspired him, and he spent happy days photographing that city, getting quiet joy, as he always did, from observing the small things: the morning sunlight dappling a building, how a tree might bend in the wind.
For personal reasons, he returned to Ireland and moved to the town of New Ross in Wexford. There he rediscovered, and found some consolation in, the rituals of the Catholic church that had been so important to him as a boy.
Nick was utterly without affectation or swagger; he had to be prompted to tell anecdotes of his encounters with the famous and of his journalistic adventures. A genuine romantic and idealist, he retained, as a friend of his wrote, something close to, but more hard-earned than, a childlike wonder for the world and the people in it. Modest and self-effacing, he was always ready to talk, laugh and to take a day as it came.
He is survived by Joe, his sisters Anne, Catherine and Teresa, three nieces and two nephews, and will be missed by the many friends that he made and kept through his life.
