Blindboy: ‘All I want is to live a boring life… I have no interest in fame. I couldn’t give a f**k about it’

“It used to be illegal in the 1600s in Ireland to kill a white butterfly,” says Blindboy Boatclub at one stage over our rambling, rainy-afternoon conversation in his native city.

“Because people believed a white butterfly was the soul of a dead child. Also, you didn’t f**k with bees in ancient Ireland, because people believed that bees belonged to the goddess Bridget. You see this in mythology all over the world. Colonisation eradicates culture – it removes the language and the beliefs. I think mythology exists in the human brain to keep us in line with systems of biodiversity.”

Anyone who listens to the Limerick man’s podcasts will be familiar with his ability to drift between obscure history and pop culture without pausing for breath. He has brought a copy of Topographia Hibernica, the notorious travelogue from 1188 in which Gerald of Wales portrayed the Irish as a barbaric people, with an unexpected talent for music. Blindboy has taken that thousand-year-old title for his new collection of short stories. His thoughts flit easily between the dastardly motivations of old Gerald and how the stereo sound system, now playing Future Islands, might affect the recording of this interview.

“There’s tonnes of bestiality in there,” he says brightly of the book, before shooting a concerned look at my phone, which is set to record.

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“I’d say if you’re worried about the sound, now, they’ll turn it down. But yeah, Giraldus came here with Prince John, who became King John. The castle is there behind us. And that book is a document about what wealth can be extracted from here. And it’s about: how do we make the people live here seem so savage that they are not human?”

We’re meeting upstairs in the Treaty Brewery, a new-ish pub in a gorgeous old building with local artwork on the wall. Climbing the stairs, I see Blindboy in the process of removing one of those artworks from an exposed brick wall, to help Brian Arthur, the photographer, get set up. The three of us yap about the golden age of television, a salvation during lockdown.

[ Blindboy Boatclub: ‘I had the choice of being a psychotherapist or a mad bas***d’ ]

[ Michael Harding: Blindboy is maybe one of the most gifted writers of his generation ]

“2020 was when I rewatched Mad Men and 2021 was when I rewatched Sopranos,” he remembers.

“In ‘97 when it came out, I was the same age as AJ. And now I am the same age as Tony. I didn’t relate to Junior Soprano when I first watched it, because he is an older man and is going through dementia. But I bet I will.”

[Costello’s] was the type of place that was a sh**hole but what you had in there is genuine atmosphere and culture that can never be bought or replaced

He makes for a relaxed subject in front of the camera, helpfully vaping on request, sitting and standing as directed and always, always chatting away. As his legion of podcast regulars know, the boy can talk. He’s got that inimitable Limerick city accent which contains a symphonic musicality beneath the surface flatness. Because this is an interview situation, the plastic bag he has chosen has bigger eyeholes to allow for more expression. “It’s the eyes what tell it,” he explains. Besides the bag, he’s wearing a black hoodie, loose-fitting jeans and white trainers, with the vape close at hand. Outside, the afternoon is comically cliched; dismal skies have fallen over the city and the incessant rainfall is lush and straight from the Frank McCourt school of weather. In Katie Daly’s, the patrons had advised not to worry about buying a parking disc. “They’ll not be out in that.”

We are in what Blindboy describes as “the medieval quarter of the city”, where pubs and cafes have begun to pop up. Through his audience reach now, he has become an unofficial ambassador for Limerick.

“I adore Limerick,” he nods.

“I adore it. If you said to me: blow my mind with something from Limerick now, I’d take you up to the Chicken Hut. It’s just a takeaway that sells fried chicken. But what’s fascinating about the Chicken Hut is the dude who opened it, Pat Grace. Back in the day, Pat Grace used to sponsor the League of Ireland football. That used to be called Pat Grace’s fried chicken league. Pat was just a businessman from Limerick. And he went over to Canada and had a pint at a bar in a hotel. And while he was there, a man sat beside him… an American man with a white beard. And this American man starts talking to him about his fried chicken business. And it turned out to be the actual Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken. But he had just sold KFC to a big corporation in the ‘70s. And they changed his original chicken recipe when they built all the restaurants. Colonel Sanders was pissed off and Pat Grace says: I’ll open a KFC in Limerick and I’ll take your original recipe.

“So Pat Grace opened an unofficial KFC in Limerick with the literal colonel’s recipe. And then big KFC shut it down. But now it’s called the Chicken Hut. So, what I say to people is: there’s a place in Limerick where you can buy fried chicken and it’s the actual colonel’s recipe that’s supposed to be long lost. And it’s right here. I mentioned it on my podcast, and there’s tourists who come to Limerick. You get people from Australia, f**king Glasgow, people from Norway – I’ve a sold-out gig in Norway coming up. It’s nuts. And some of these people come to Limerick and they visit places that I mentioned in the podcast, including the Chicken Hut.”

The yarn sounds better than it reads because Blindboy delivers his stories in a voice that contains a fast-changing combination of authority, delight and amazement. Any question will lead to unexpected detours which surprise him as much as his audience. When we talk about vanished Limerick nightclubs, for example, his thoughts turn immediately to Costello’s.

“That closed down over Covid and that was a real loss to the city. It was like a man had a mid-life crisis, cut a hole in the wall, and only played Nirvana and Sonic Youth for 20 years, solid. And never changed the carpet. It was the type of place that was a sh**hole but what you had in there is genuine atmosphere and culture that can never be bought or replaced. If you were goth or punk or wanted to do something weird, you went to Costello’s. It was always a fiver. You can’t replace…vibe. It’s a spontaneous energy. Hipster bars try to manufacture that. And you f**ken can’t. You really can’t.”

Blindboy’s Limerick is at once the vanishing city of his adolescence and the durable medieval framework which has travelled through the centuries. It’s the stomping ground of an eclectic imagination and range of interests. Although his real name was really published in a New York Times profile and Limerick is a small, curious city, Blindboy says he can go about his day-to-day life in happy anonymity. His podcasts cover every topic imaginable (a random sample of recent ones include The Colonial History of Fish Fingers, Housing Protests, The First Man To Smuggle Hashish Into Limerick), but several episodes are devoted to describing the extreme social anxiety that he has managed throughout his life.

Economically, we are in this strange thing where there is a bang of Celtic Tiger and a bang of recession at the same time

—  Blindboy

He’s a big believer in therapy and told his listeners late last year that he was returning to visit a psychotherapist, as the tools he had acquired over the years were no longer working for him. In a way, his life is a contradiction: he yearns for quiet anonymity and likes nothing better than to wander the streets for hours, headphones on and mind fizzing. But his strongest urge – to create – means wrestling with a public profile and the word that makes him squirm, “fame”.

“I prefer notoriety,” he says.

But that doesn’t quite fit either. Since forming the Rubberbandits in 2000 with his friend, Mr Chrome, he has had a national profile since finishing school. He’s now in his late 30s and is familiar enough to Irish households that he is no stranger to the Late Late Show couch. In 2016, he appeared on one of those Late Late state-of-the-nation discussions and gave this bleak synopsis when asked which generation he belonged to. “The current one! My generation can’t afford houses, my generation can’t afford to have children, my generation are either leaving the country or jumping in rivers. And my generation is dealing with neoliberalist economic policies that are similar enough to the economic policies at the time of the Famine. It’s a laissez-faire system where the resources of the country are being sold for private interest and my generation is screwed.”

Seven years have slipped by since then and Blindboy says he is “no longer in tune” with the mood among the young Irish. He’s reached that iffy in-between land of the late 30s and finds it hard, sometimes, to read what is happening on the streets.

“It’s a tough one now. Economically, we are in this strange thing where there is a bang of Celtic Tiger and a bang of recession at the same time. There’s a load of people leaving but the pubs and restaurants are full.”

These days, his thoughts stem more from personal experience. He remains a powerful communicator, as evidenced on his turn on Tommy Tiernan’s riveting confessional interview series in 2018. If there is a danger of losing the anarchic spirit by becoming a well-known face – well, bag – on mainstream television, then it’s a risk to which Blindboy is alive.

“The thing is, I have to respect… it is about the business of what I’m doing. My podcast is up to 1.2 million listens a month. I don’t need to do anything else. But if you stick with independent media, then you kind of disappear. Some people ask, why don’t you just put the [short] stories out on the podcast. And the truth of it is that I just want to make sure I have a career in ten years’ time.”

He is genuinely surprised and grateful that he has been able to continue to devote himself to creating stories in a crowded field, and describes it as a happy accident. After he’d published a few stories, Gill books approached him. “They said: do you want to chance that. I said: f**k it. I thought it would be a flop. Who would read that?” He then started the podcast partly to promote the book. “I thought I would do maybe four episodes.” Instead, the long, rambling, often incantatory episodes quickly drew a diverse and loyal audience.

To his listeners, it doesn’t so much matter what Blindboy is talking about, it’s that the material comes in the form of strange sermons spoken with a sincere and fiery passion. Podcasting has become a saturated game for a twitchy global audience, and so much of it sounds the same. Blindboy has, from the beginning, broadcast from a space and worldview that is entirely his own. He has the skill to present what is usually the result of intense research, sound like a trippy, spontaneous meditation on whatever. Patreon – where the audience can give donations, like alms, or listen for free – has given him a degree of financial stability for the first time in his adult life. A few times, he describes what he does as a “career”. But “vocation” seems a more accurate term for any artist who commits to the highly uncertain life of independent creative output.

“Yeah, I’m creating certainty, is what I am doing. You’re spot on. All I want to do is write. My podcast is writing as well; that podcast is between 10-15,000 words a week. I don’t just talk into the microphone. I research and write it and I f**king adore doing that. And I want to keep doing that for as long as possible, so you engage in a kind of contract. I can’t turn around to my publisher and say, I’m not doing any press, I’m not going on this. It is a compromise.”

The plastic-bag mask works as a gimmick, he allows. But it’s also an effective, durable veil separating him from his creation, like a Superman costume, although cheaper to maintain. He is adamant that the entire persona would crumble without it.

“You know I was diagnosed with autism? So having privacy…. The thing with me is that I am not anonymous – you can’t be and operate professionally and pay taxes and s**t like that. I don’t know how Banksy does it. But the thing with notoriety is that it is all about spectacle. So, if the spectacle is the pen name and face of Blindboy, that’s what’s there. And, after that, all I want to live is a boring life. I’m grand now here with a one-to-one conversation. But, if I was in a room full of strangers and people were coming up talking to me all the time, I would have quite a low social battery for that. Maintaining my mental health is the most important thing to me and that means a quiet, private routine life where not much happens. As well as that, I have no interest in fame. I couldn’t give a f**k about it. Neurotypical people tend to care about hierarchy, whereas it is not there in me.”

He is not the first to argue that it is impossible to be “famous” in Ireland anyhow. If Bono is the most famous Irishman, nobody pokes fun at Bono more than Bono himself. But Limerick did produce an Irishman who became extravagantly accomplished at being properly famous in the late Richard Harris.

I know that in order to be the best version of me, all praise has to come from within

—  Blindboy

“But he is someone who, as a human, was extremely extrovert. I love watching interviews with him. I think he had retrospective respect in Limerick, people respected him more when he died. The same with Dolores O’Riordan. The Cranberries were not all that popular in Ireland, in Limerick, in their time. They really weren’t. And then when Dolores died, it was as if people started celebrating them then. Which is a shame. Because – talk to any Spanish person about the Cranberries. Serious.”

Scroll through Blindboy’s podcasts and you might detect an elegiac note contained within the references to the vanishing cultural touchstones of the 1990s – Super Mario brothers, Aertel and so forth (in late September, he posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: “Trawling YouTube for old Arena documentaries”, referring to the long-running BBC arts series that started in 1975). He is hardly alone among his generation in that pursuit. Like many 1990s kids, he has a fascination with what he calls “cultural scarcity”. He belonged to the last generation of teenagers who had to save to buy an album or wait, poised, with the blank cassette for an elusive favourite song to get a turn on the radio. He was devoted to rap and also worshipped David Bowie and Bob Dylan, managing to fight through an extreme bout of social phobia to see Dylan perform in Salthill in 2004.

“Couldn’t leave my gaff. But I did it for Dylan. Ah. It was terrifying. A six-hour-long panic attack. But I didn’t give a f**k. It was a s**t gig,” he recalls. “I was in art college around the corner from here at that time. Therapy was free. There wasn’t much of a queue. And I got to see a therapist every week and speak about what social anxiety is.”

Seven years later, the Rubberbandits had a commercial hit with Horse Outside and they were off, provocative and profane and dressed to the nines in plastic bags, trackies and bling. Blindboy looks back on their collaboration with fondness. “We kind of stopped in 2017, but effectively stopped in 2013. I like to remember it as a fun thing I did in my 20s. It was so manic that to do it now would be inappropriate. But I never thought I’d have a second career. I was going to be a college lecturer or as psychotherapist.”

It is about biodiversity collapse. My book is about decolonising. Every story contains animals. I’m trying to explore humanity through that

Instead, he is bracing himself for the response to his third collection of stories. His debut collection, The Gospel According to Blindboy, was a popular success and drew a wildly mixed critical response: he admits that a review in The Irish Times scarred him a little and that he learned from the experience.

The new book opens by quoting Giraldus dismissing the Irish as degenerate – “they learn nothing, and practice nothing but the barbarism in which they are born and bred” – and Dr Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin warning the Citizens Assembly about the imminent dangers of biodiversity loss in March of this year.

“It is about biodiversity collapse. My book is about decolonising. Every story contains animals. I’m trying to explore humanity through that.”

We chat for a while about the stories, which feature everything from a man who rescues a mistreated donkey by driving it through Limerick in his Fiat Punto, to I’ll Give You Barcelona, an explicit portrayal of male gym culture, with the posturing and “violent nudity” of the changing room. It starts in alarming fashion and things go downhill from there.

“Listen to any of those toxic podcasts – whether it be Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, alpha male, alpha wolf. That character in the gym is listening to that bulls**t but doesn’t have the critical faculties to go through it. And he is also, quite clearly, a disturbed person. Sometimes when I’m writing... failure is a huge part of my process. One of the most frightening things is the blank page, because the pressure to do something good is terrifying. And I find a good way around that is: what if I start off with something awful. And I’ll Give You Barcelona is a story about a man biting another man’s arse. So, how do I do that for 10,000 words? What fun can I have?”

Plenty, it turns out. If there is a perception that he is gate-crashing the rarefied word of letters with his energy and persona, that’s fine with him.

“I take writing very seriously. I don’t take the writing world very seriously at all. The part of me that wants a good review; that’s the part of me at school that wants the teacher to tell me I’m good. It is human nature – we love external praise. But I know that in order to be the best version of me, all praise has to come from within. I got writer’s block for a year and then I opened up Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, which I hadn’t read in years. I just interviewed him at the weekend. We had a wonderful chat at the Kavanagh festival in Monaghan... He was writing what mattered to him, the voices he heard. It’s the same with Kevin Barry. I adore Kevin. He is astounding. Kevin’s ability to hear phrases said in a pub and take those and say, what this man said is art. He does that. The first story I wrote, I sent to Kevin. And he looked at in and said, yeah that’s good enough.”

He is also busy on the live circuit, with an appearance alongside Johnny Marr – a hero and, it turned out, an avid Blindboy Podcast listener – the highlights of a sold-out tour of the United Kingdom. All of this makes the phenomenon of Blindboy difficult to pin down. That New York Times profile ran the headline “An Outsider Takes On Ireland, From Inside a Plastic Bag.”

But when the President of Ireland’s people get in touch to express an interest in appearing on your podcast, can you still be classified as an outsider?

Maybe that doesn’t matter anymore. (That presidential interview took place in the Áras. The President’s people asked Blindboy to conduct it without the mask. He declined and got on famously with Michael D. He’s a polite interviewer and, for a born gabbler, a terrific listener when he has to be).

Once our interview was over, his plan is to slip out of the pub and then remove the plastic bag and resume his life as a private citizen. He tells me about a time he performed with Tommy Tiernan and afterwards they headed out to dinner with the crew. He had removed the bag and was perfectly anonymous. Over the course of the evening, somebody asked Blindboy if he might be able to secure Tiernan’s autograph.

“I’m not built for that. You have to be able for it. And, I’d have to dress nice all the time.”

Dig beneath the wilder departures of his fiction and the provocative language and you’ll find there is a bit of the white butterfly about Blindboy. He’s retained something of his kid’s soul. Posterity doesn’t interest him. And he claims to have a “healthy relationship” with mortality. A moment comes to him: he was out about in Limerick and had just left Dunnes Stores. He was wearing noise-cancelling headphones.

“I never use ‘em outside because it is dangerous. But I forgot about it. Like, you hear f**king nothing. And a bus went by so close to me that I felt the warmth of it on my nose. It was terrifying. But I was really glad it happened, because I immediately reflected on the impermanence of everything. It would have killed me stone dead. And it was like being injected with beautiful adrenaline. I was glad it didn’t happen. I said, never again with the noise cancellers because that was f**king dumb. And I ate my sandwich like it was the last sandwich you could ever eat.”

Before we leave, I ask him what his family makes of what his life has become. He conjures up an image of a playful, boisterous child, the youngest in the house by 15 years with an uninterrupted run of the family stage. Somehow, he has managed the trick of turning the kitchen floor into an international auditorium for his listeners, while keeping what he wants of himself for himself.

“I was a natural performer as a kid because it was a house full of teenagers and I was a baby. It was tonnes of crack. A lot of nurturing. They thought I was a bit mad. Now, I think they are really proud of me. My Ma… wouldn’t give me a lot of praise. She was always: don’t become an artist. Become something more reliable. She wanted me to quit the podcast to go teach podcasting. And I am saying academia isn’t secure anymore. Nothing is!”

And this triggers another memory and the accent lifts in register and quickens, and he’s asking if you remember the census when everyone wrote something in a time-capsule. “My brother told me that she wrote her name and then: ‘Mother of the writer Blindboy. So, she is thinking that will be relevant. I don’t give a sh** if anyone remembers me in a hundred years. But it is nice that my Ma thinks that.”

Topographia Hibernica by Blindboy Boatclub is published by Coronet.