In the Headstuff studios in Dublin, Garron Noone is recording some intros for his new podcast, Listen, I’m Delicious. This food-themed interview show is named after his TikTok catchphrase: “Follow me, I’m delicious.” The rock star Stevie Nicks namechecked Noone as “Mr I’m Delicious” from the stage at 3Arena this summer.
“That Stevie Nicks even knows who I am is something I could take to the grave,” he says.
Noone, a burly, bearded Mayo man with a sleeve of tattoos, came to fame on TikTok and Instagram with short comedy videos. You’ve probably been forwarded some of these. They’re very funny. He reviews biscuits or explains Irish phenomena or gets a driving lesson hilariously.
A couple of years ago Noone was a musician with a little-viewed Instagram page on which he largely posted music and sporadically uploaded some wildly whimsical thoughts. Someone suggested he put one of these videos on TikTok. It didn’t quite work, so he did it again. And again. Eventually, a video in which he ranked ice creams got 40,000 views. He was blown away at that point, he says. Now his videos average 1.2 million views.
The set for his new podcast – podcasts tend to have a visual component these days – is decorated to look like “your granny’s kitchen”. It features floral curtains, a James Galway record, a lamp with a figurine attached, a porcelain teapot (“the photographer was very enthusiastic about me pouring tea”) and a plate of biscuits. “We’re actually in the process of ordering fake biscuits for the set, because there has been a biscuit thief,” Hilary Barry, his producer, says.
“That feels like a big step in my career,” Noone says of the fake biscuits.
A woman sticks her head in the door to tell him how much she loves him. She has been recording some sort of mystically themed podcast down the hall.
“I was manifesting you,” she says.
“Well, here I am. Manifested in real life,” Noone replies with a big grin.
He’s getting used to being recognised. “It happens a fair bit, because I’m very visible. There’s a fella somewhere in Dublin who keeps getting mistaken for me. He’s got free food and everything out of it. I’d do the same if I was him. He looks exactly like me. It’s impressive. He could be my stunt double.” He pauses and adds sadly: “But he’s probably not very good at stunts.”
Noone was obsessed with creativity from a very young age. His mother plays guitar and would sing songs to him. “I thought it was really just amazing that somebody could sit down and a song could come out of them ... I could sing The Streets of New York the whole way through when I was three.”
He started making videos when he got his first camera phone. He uploaded them to YouTube when he was just 12; he had a small audience for his channel. “All my friends in school found it. They were nice about it, but I just got self-conscious and I deleted the channel. I think it was a creative outlet for me that I felt was mine, and then when people were in on it I felt like it took something away from it.”
He thinks his creative instincts come from being alone a lot as a child. “When I was eight or nine me and my mother moved, and I wouldn’t have had close friendships for a couple of years. And then I kind of got out of that again, and then we moved again.”
Later he explains a bit more of the context. “My mother had bipolar [disorder], and when I was younger it was quite severe. I don’t want to go too much into her life, but she would have manic episodes and she would have depressive episodes. She wasn’t very present, because at that point – this is going back 15 years – there was no understanding of what it was. She’s doing great now. She has her own business. She’s flying it. But back then there was no help for her ... It was difficult. It was difficult on her. I’m glad there’s a lot more mental-health understanding now.”
Garron lived alone with his mother. He also has three half-siblings who lived with their father’s side of the family. Garron’s own father died of a drug overdose when he was three. “I thought my brothers and sisters’ dad was my dad, but I found out when I was eight or nine that my dad was actually this other person. Then I went to meet that side of the family, and then we moved away. I only met my cousin two weeks ago for the first time in 22 years.”
In short: “There weren’t really many people around.”
When Noone was just 16 a close friend died by suicide. “I had had anxiety issues before that, but that kind of sent it into overdrive,” he says. “I thought he had been to hospital, maybe a week beforehand, and that they knew what was going on, but a lot of that wasn’t true. So I had a lot of guilt after he died that I didn’t say more.”
Can he see, looking back, that he had nothing to feel guilty about? “I can see that now. But I wish that I’d picked up on the signs that things weren’t as they were being said to me. I still regret not being able to see it.”
That trauma triggered panic attacks, and the panic attacks led to agoraphobia. Noone dropped out of school. (He did his Leaving Cert with Youthreach when he was 21.) He had many jobs over the years – as a cleaner, in a phone shop, in a call centre – as well as working as an online music teacher and pub musician.
“But I was pretty much fully housebound outside of going to work,” he says. “I would get a taxi to work and a taxi home. I could still do gigs sometimes. But I couldn’t do social events. I couldn’t really go to the shop ... It was five years straight, and then probably 10 years overall, where my life was very limited. You’re having panic attacks every day. You literally feel like you’re dying all the time. I don’t think people understand how real that is to the person that’s experiencing it.”
Noone got out of it with the help of cognitive behavioural therapy, he says. “You’re training your brain out of something that it does not want to be trained out of ... I would walk out of my house and I would walk 10 or 20 steps in a circle in the front garden. I would go back in and I might have done that three or four times a day. And then every now and again I’d do something big that I was terrified of. I’d go do the shopping by myself ... So it’s kind small pushes and a big push. And if you get set back you do the small push again.”
He thinks it’s important to talk about this publicly, especially given how many people got in touch after he spoke about it on The Ray D’Arcy Show, on RTÉ Radio 1. He wants to let people know they can come through it. He’s still learning a lot of social skills, he says. “Like how to develop and maintain friendships as somebody who’s not a kid, because that’s essentially where my life got cut off. I didn’t really know how to go out and have a night out ... I was quite good socially when I was employed working at a shop or when I was talking to my students. But when I was outside of those contexts my social skills would just fall off a cliff.”
I suggest that, maybe because of his life experiences, there’s a real sense of kindness in his videos. It feels as if he’s trying to take care of the viewer as well as make them laugh. “Yeah, it’s deliberate,” Noone says. “I get sent video ideas all the time, but I am very particular about what I’ll do. I will never single anyone out unless I’m being positive about them. I don’t generally attack any group of people. I think you can be funny without making somebody in the audience feel bad about themselves.
“I’m not against a bit of edge ... but a lot of people think it’s brave to say the offensive thing – and I honestly think that’s boring. I think a lot of the time the easy way out is just to say the obvious offensive thing. I’d rather try and do comedy within the confines of not making people feel like s**t. The goal of it is to make people feel happy. I’m not going to have somebody watch the video go, ‘I feel like s**t now, after watching that.’”
When Noone was younger was he consciously using comedy and music as forms of consolation? “When I was a kid I was struggling with my weight, and we were very poor, so I often didn’t have the stuff for school,” he says. “There were a lot of things that made me feel embarrassment or some form of shame. And I felt like, if I could make people laugh, that I could circumnavigate that to some extent. No matter what my obvious flaws were, if I could make you laugh I was sort of showing my value up front, and we could work past all of the other things a bit quicker. I think that’s why that developed.”
And music? He thinks for a moment. “Comedy is like your active thoughts and music is like your subconscious thoughts in a lot of ways. [With music] you can express yourself in a way that’s just impossible to do otherwise. If somebody writes a piece of music, even if it’s instrumental and has no lyrics, I feel like I can almost see how they see the world. I’ve always felt music that way. I struggled to have a platform to express myself when I was a younger, so that’s why I love both of those things.”
It’s fun to chat with Noone about making stuff. He got so good at music production that he ended up teaching it to postgraduate students at the University of Chichester, in England. “I can make any sound,” he says. “If you give me a spaceship sound, and it goes like” – Noone makes a futuristic spaceship sound that I can’t approximate in language – “I’m hearing, ‘Okay, in there we’ve got a descendent sine wave and we’ve a layer of white noise that darkens with a filter.” He laughs. “It’s very niche.”
He has similar focus when it comes to his comedy. He talks about how the specifics of a word choice can be the difference between being mildly funny and hilarious. “Instead of saying, ‘Oh, this is really fancy,’ I might say, ‘Oh, it’s very exotic.’ You’re telling the audience about the person they’re dealing with in that word choice.
“If I say ‘exotic’ you’re going, ‘Okay, here we’ve got somebody who is just totally set in their ways, never tries anything new and is probably very sceptical of pretty much everything.’” You’ve only got 60 seconds on TikTok, he says. “If you don’t make the words count for something then you’re lost.”
Is Noone’s online persona him or a character? “It’s a version of me who takes himself really seriously,” he says. “I’m bringing this news to the people, and it’s very serious to me and I don’t want any joking. I’ll sit down eating a chocolate biscuit of a brand I’ve never had before and go” – he adopts a very serious voice – “‘But do they really stack up to Jacob’s, though? What are you offering that other biscuits aren’t offering?’ Everybody has that part of them that’s unbelievably serious about trivial s**t.”
After years of playing music in pubs, Noone has been doing live comedy. He recently performed to a few thousand people at Electric Picnic. “I was mainly doing music gigs [at first], and then, to build up my confidence, I would just start telling stories between the songs. Gradually, over time, the funny bits got longer.” He thinks for a moment. “It’s actually, strangely enough, the same way I got over agoraphobia: subjecting yourself to something for a small space of time and just slightly growing it out. It’s the same method.”
Noone thinks a lot about what he does. As an “influencer” he only endorses things he actually likes, he says. “I say no to most stuff. When you get a lot of views [online] you get offered a lot of money for certain things ... Some of the money is insane, and it’s hard to say no to it, but I do have a moral boundary.” He laughs. “I think it’s perfectly fine to sell out as long as you have some boundary on it.”
He’s thankful his success came when he was a bit older. “I’m 30 years old. I’ve been broke most of my life. I’ve done every s**t job under the sun. I’ve cleaned up people’s puke for money. Success is a transient thing. Nobody deserves it. It’s just something that happens to people. And if I wasn’t popular on social media tomorrow, I’d go back playing and teaching music and it’d be fine.” He laughs and adds: “Though I’d probably miss the money.”
How does he feel about attention from strangers? “It was a massive adjustment to go from hardly ever leaving my house to, every time I leave my house, I might take pictures with 20 people.” It can be strange, he says. People feel as if they know social-media stars more intimately than they do other celebrities. “For the most part it’s good. But I’ll be honest, I have had some people cross the line. I’ve had some issues where I’ve had to go to the guards about things.”
What does his family make of his career? “My mother works with me, because she has a booking agency now. She does a lot of my booking ... I think all my family are happy about it.” He laughs. “We’re Mayo people, so we don’t get too excited about anything.”
He has little advice for people who want to become social-media stars. “I think one of the reasons that it’s gone well for me is because I wasn’t trying to do it,” he says. “If you’re actively trying to be an influencer, I don’t know what to tell you, because my growth in that world has been very accidental. I am the most random inclusion in that world.”
But he adds that to be successful at anything you have to be genuinely interested in it. “I don’t believe in talent,” he says. “I think that’s all horses**t. I think it just holds people back. I believe if you do anything long enough, and you’re self-aware, you’ve got no choice but to succeed. It’s inevitable. If somebody’s wondering why they’re not doing well at something, and I ask them about it and I don’t have to shut them up, that’s my answer. ‘You’re just not interested enough. You should do something you’re more interested in.’ I think it’s that simple.”
Listen, I’m Delicious launches on Friday, October 4th, on Headstuff and Spotify
