Ardal O'Hanlon has told Second Captains Saturday on RTÉ Radio 1 about the time he performed the classic My Lovely Horse with Father Ted superfan Moby when the dance music star supported U2 at Slane in September 2001.
O'Hanlon recounted to hosts Eoin McDevitt and Ciarán Murphy that he was "double jobbing" that day, 1 September 2001, as his priority was to be in the crowd for the classic Republic of Ireland v Netherlands match in Lansdowne Road, not performing the Father Ted anthem from the episode A Song for Europe.
"That day, U2 were playing at Slane Castle," the comedian and actor began.
"Moby was kind of the second headliner, I think, that day, and Moby asked me... I didn't know Moby, but he asked me to sing a song with him on stage. And that song was My Lovely Horse from the hit comedy show Father Ted!
"To be honest with you, my first reaction was to say no because I was going to the Ireland match. So, then I get a call from Moby's people, and he said, 'Well look, we'll have a helicopter on standby after the match in Lansdowne Road and we'll fly you down to Slane'. So I went, 'Ok, I've run out of excuses here!'
"So, jumped in the helicopter, myself and my wife. He brought me up on stage. We rehearsed briefly in the helicopter (laughs)!"
"So you were with Moby on this helicopter?" asked host McDevitt.
"Did Moby go to the game?!" asked co-host Murphy.
"No, he didn't go to the game, no, no!" O'Hanlon replied. "I was just taken - 'whisked' I think is the word - to a waiting helicopter. It was like the last days of Saigon or something!"
"Or a Celtic Tiger wedding!" offered Murphy.
"We just rehearsed very briefly," O'Hanlon continued amidst laughter. "He knew the words better than I did, let me tell you!"
"There's a sort of a preamble to this story," O'Hanlon then explained.
"A couple of years previously, I was at a comedy festival in New York and there was a Q&A session about Father Ted at this and it was very sparsely attended. There was only about 40 or 50 people there - but one of them was Moby! He was sitting there on his own and he was just asking nerdy questions about Father Ted!"
"This is Moby in what, like, '97?" asked Murphy.
"This is peak Moby!" said O'Hanlon. "The Play album! He was one of the biggest artists in the world at the time."
O'Hanlon said getting up on stage at Slane was "kind of terrifying in a way".
"I'd be used to reasonably big crowds. You know, you play to anything from 10 people in a pub to, like, a couple of thousand people in a nice theatre - but nothing like this.
"I wasn't prepared for it, you know? Eighty thousand people... people talk about the energy, it was phenomenal. It was like a tsunami of energy and it hits you, it kind of flattens you, it knocks the wind out of you - and it made me go momentarily blind!
"So, I was up there - I don't even remember it! Like, I literally don't remember it. It wasn't until many years later, decades later - I happen to know one of the guys who was filming the backstage stuff for U2... but eventually I saw it and it was phenomenal."
Second Captains Saturday, RTÉ Radio 1, 1pm
