From a teenager with a Paul Daniels magic set doing at-table tricks to amuse restaurant customers in Waterford, to a fully-fledged star on the verge of tapping into the huge American TV magic market, Keith Barry is a man with a trick or two up his sleeve. He tells Jim Carroll how he pulled the rabbit from the hat
EVEN magicians have to practise. Last night, Keith Barry stayed up again until the wee small hours. Just him and a pack of cards. Over and over again, he shuffled that pack and tried to memorise the order in which the cards fell. He probably fell asleep dreaming of the nine of spades.
The reason for such late-night exertions is his forthcoming Irish tour. Barry wants new routines, new tricks, new feats to make the audience gasp. He's only done two dozen or so live shows to date, but he's already shunting stuff around. "I always want to do new stuff because I want to make the show more impossible to work out and keep evolving it until I can do no more with it."
Barry's debut Irish tour was in January, playing to packed houses on the back of his Close Encounters TV show. Armed with packs of cards and a foam rocket gun to coerce members of the audience onstage, Barry put a new-school spin on a very old-school form of entertainment.
"A lot of the audience know that magic tricks are largely sleight-of-hand stuff, but they're intrigued by the mind stuff," he thinks. "They understand some of the principles behind it, the psychology stuff, but they're confused by how it's all mixed together onstage, which is good for me."
Barry is one of the new breed of magic tykes. You won't find him sawing young ladies in half or relying on gimmicks and catchphrases. Instead, it's all streetwise trickery, celebrity hoodwinking, catching bullets in his teeth and driving cars at full speed down a bumpy boreen wearing a black sack over his head.
"Magic has evolved a lot over the last couple of years," says Barry. "Paul Daniels kind of ran it into the ground. He's good at what he does, but he did 15 years of TV and people just got bored and jaded. In the last couple of years, you've had the likes of David Blaine revolutionising magic and mind stuff on TV. As a result, teenagers and twentysomethings in particular are interested, so they're also coming to the shows."
There would probably be no Keith Barry without Paul Daniels. When Barry caught the magic bug as a teenager in Waterford, there was only the Paul Daniels Magic Set to learn from. "Back then, it was the only way to get started. There was no internet, no magic shops, just that kit. Most magic sets are not very good so you're not fooling anyone with the tricks."
So Barry decided to find new tricks. He wrote away to magic shops and spent his pocket money on tricks. Every weekend, he'd go from one eight-year-old's party to the next, cutting ropes in half and making eggs appear out of silk handkerchiefs. He was 14 and he was now a magician, even if his audience tore him and his tricks to shreds.
One day, he borrowed his dad's suit and went to the Wine Vault restaurant to meet the manager. He wanted to go from table to table in the restaurant, doing tricks. The manager said yes and Barry began the following Saturday night. "It's a very regular thing in the United States, where even the fast-food restaurants have magicians. But the restaurants there don't have to pay the magicians because of the tipping culture. It's a little rarer over here, so I suppose I was being very entrepreneurial."
After school, he went to Galway to study chemistry. "I wanted to get into magic full-time, but my dad's line was 'it's great as a sideline, but you'll never make a full-time living out of it'." The chemistry has come in handy. "Well, I haven't blown myself up yet."
Next stop was Dublin and a job as a cosmetics scientist making women's make-up. One night, he blagged his way into U2's Kitchen nightclub and began doing magic tricks there every Friday night. He remembers the lock-ins fondly.
When he looks back, that gig in the Kitchen was where the networking began in earnest. He even ended up getting a full-time job with Champion Sports as a result. "I'd promote their stores using magic and get a paypacket at the end of the month for my troubles. I don't think I've ever met anyone else who had a regular gig like that as a magician." A hook-up with manager Eamonn Maguire followed and the pair got on a plane for the United States. "A magician wouldn't be able to do here what you could do in New York, LA or Vegas". The pair spent six months going to every magic show on the planet. "We saw all the shows in Vegas. We flew to see David Copperfield wherever he was playing." Barry would watch and learn, taking it all in.
In Los Angeles, he'd do what he did in Dublin and Waterford. He'd go to nightclubs and he would do tricks. He appeared on TV chat-shows hosted by Jimmy Kimmel or Sharon Osbourne, but he always went back to the clubs.
One evening, he was messing around in a club doing tricks for Jack Osbourne, Paris Hilton, Eve and Eminem's manager, Paul Rosenberg. "They were all screaming and shrieking and making a commotion." An MTV executive was also in the club and came over to find out more. What followed was another break, the Brainwashed show.
He knows cracking the US will take time. "It's like a band. You see Westlife giving it a month and that's just not enough time. You have to stick it out. I've been over and back over the last few years, spending six months there at a stretch. I still haven't made it, but it seems to be going right."
Right now, he's talking to a whole shower of TV network chiefs about a new show for 2006. There's a mooted return to Las Vegas for some shows there in the Hard Rock Hotel and there's a DVD in the works. "It will have a teach-yourself guide to six or seven really deadly magic tricks, better than any shitty magic set."
Don't expect to see the Waterford man doing David Blaine-like stunts, though. That's not his bag. "Blaine really popularised magic, but then he lost it with all the publicity stunts," says Barry. "He wants to be bigger than Houdini, but that's too egotistical for me. It should be about progressing the art of magic. He says he's doing that, but he's become a stuntman not a magician."
For Barry, it's still about magic. "People would see David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear and they'd be amazed, but then they'd say: 'Sure that has to be a camera trick'. People are not stupid. When the format changed from being in the studio to being on the street, a real environment, people got the bug again. I'll put my hands up and say that 10 per cent of the stuff I do on TV can't be done live, but the other 90 per cent, yeah, I can do that live."
Keith Barry's Irish tour starts at the INEC, Killarney tonight.
