The Blindboy Podcast - Bun Dungeon

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

A chat on a porch in Los Angeles where I chat with Legendary hip hop photographer Brian Cross/B Plus Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. As you can hear, I'm not in my studio. Right now I am on the 48th floor of a hotel in San Francisco. And I am looking down at the city of San Francisco. I'm right in the middle of the fucking city center with skyscrapers all around me. I'm up on the 48th floor. Very surreal for me. That much concrete, you know.

So, here's the crack. I'm in San Francisco now. I was in Los Angeles last week. As you know, with me, right, I am obsessed with the film Blade Runner uh Blade Runner if you don't know it occurs in Los Angeles in November 2019 so we are living through the events of Blade Runner right now and I used to look at Blade Runner as a kid um like I didn't get into the film I got into the video game first when I was about 14 and then I got into the film like the film was made before I was born so I got into the film many years after it was made but it just spoke

to me I don't know what it was something about the aesthetic or the mood and I used to always re-watch it and say to myself wow I wonder what I'll be doing in November 2019 so I didn't deliberately come to Los Angeles on a Blade Runner pilgrimage what happened was just pure chance of fucking luck there was a thing called Ireland Week which is it's like a thing to promote

Irish art in America I think the Arts Council run it or something so I was invited over as an Irish writer to Los Angeles with a load of other Irish artists just to kind of talk and showcase what I'm up to. And also, I'm in San Francisco now because I'm doing the same thing here now in San Francisco.

So a lovely stroke of luck. So, yeah, I did the Blade Runner shit last week, and it was really interesting. So I came to LA going, right, okay, I'm in LA, November 2019. Does Blade Runner live up to the predictions? Not really. There's no flying cars or nothing. What I did find interesting is,

so I was going to places like the Bradbury Building and Grand Central Market, which are kind of, they feature in the film Blade Runner. And there was a load of Blade Runner nerds in cosplay, like dressed like Deckard from Blade Runner, and dressed like Pris. So people in costume just casually wandering around LA, obviously in LA in November 2019

because of the film Blade Runner. And there was also a pop-up bar that I was going to go to, but I didn't because it looked kind of shit. It was a pop-up bar, that was supposed to be, Blade Runner themed, but it was like, 60 quid a fucking ticket,

and what happened was, they weren't allowed, to use the Blade Runner branding, so then it became, a futuristic bar, I didn't bother going, but the mad thing, that I'm noticing,

is that, people are here, it's like, like, Blade Runner, for many people, people like that was the vision of the future that was like Blade Runner was set in 2019 and we all kind of went that's the future like Back to the Future was set

in 2013 but it's Back to the Future wasn't being serious about really trying to see what will the future be like but Blade Runner was it was a serious attempt to go here will the future be like. But Blade Runner was. It was a serious attempt to go, here is the dystopian future of 2019. And some of it's right and some of it's wrong.

But what's interesting is we are now living technically in the future. As in, throughout the 20th century, the version of the future that we had in our heads would be 2019. And we're now living it. So what people are fetishizing, myself included, the people who are celebrating Blade Runner, they're celebrating and fetishizing a future that never happened. So it's like Blade Runner's 1982, so it's not a celebration of fetish, like Blade Runner's 1982. So it's not a celebration of the future right now in Los Angeles.

It's a fetishization of the past. But it's a past vision of what the future would be. And it's really strange. I've never experienced that. It's new. It's nostalgia for something that happened like 1982 is what, fucking nearly 40 years ago

it's a nostalgia for the fucking 80s vision of the future but it's now and that future hasn't happened so I don't know what to call that but it's certainly new, that's a new thing I don't know what to call that but it's certainly new that's a new thing I don't know what to call that

so I've got an incredibly long podcast for you this week because actually before I move on is there something I have to plug

yes I have to plug this I'm doing a thing called SciCom S-C-I-C-O-M in the Aviva Stadium in Dublin on the 3rd of December. I'll be doing a short little chat about creativity.

I don't know what the deal is for that with tickets, whether it's open to the public. It might be, look it up, SciCom, S-C-I-C-O-M, Aviva Stadium, 3rd of December. Right. So, I have a very long podcast for you this week because I got to sit down and chat with a fella called Brian Cross and Brian Cross he lives in Los Angeles

he's been living in Los Angeles since the late 80's Brian is from Limerick and I'd never met Brian Cross he's someone, when I started with the Rubber Bandits releasing Limerick Hip Hop Brian would have given me an email, so I've been in correspondence with him

for nearly 10 years, but I never properly met him, so we sat down for a chat Brian is if not the most important, one of the most important photographers in hip hop Brian found himself in

Los Angeles in the late 80s from Limerick and he was one of the first people to properly photograph like NWA, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac, like

some of the most iconic hip hop album covers going, it's possible Brian Cross took the photograph on the front. He's a legend, but I use the word legend a lot. This is someone who's hugely important to the history of hip-hop and hip-hop culture, and he's from Limerick. And for me, Brian has always been one of those things that made, when I found out about him

10 years ago, it just made hip hop to me that little bit more accessible to know that there's this African American art form that I hugely admire and enjoy, but the thing is is that when you're listening to an artwork like that, you're trying to appreciate it

you love it but you're very conscious and aware that you're listening to an artwork like that, you're trying to appreciate it. You love it, but you're very conscious and aware that you're an outsider and that it's not yours. Like, hip-hop isn't mine. Hip-hop is African-American people's cultural expression. And I'm a guest. And as a guest, I'm allowed to appreciate it and enjoy it. But it's not mine. and I'd enjoy it, but it's not mine.

But the fact that Brian Cross from Limerick is so ingrained and important into the visual culture of hip-hop, into the photographs of how Tupac was represented in a photograph, how Biggie was represented. Brian Cross took photographs of all these artists and was present in their earliest careers. He was present with NWA when people didn't know about NWA, when NWA were laughed at, when hip-hop wasn't taken seriously in any way,

when it was considered a novelty. Brian Cross was present for all of that. Not just the West Coast, but Biggie Smalls and the East Coast and the likes of OutKast in the Southern States of America and Damien Marley too down in Jamaica. So me and Brian sat down on a porch

in Los Angeles and I recorded it with quite nicely two a mic for each of us on our lapels and then a full stereo mic to record the ambience so it's quite a nice ASMR conversational podcast too the reason it's three hours

why is it three hours long? because it's engaging for three hours this is a podcast, it's not radio you can stop and pause and move as freely as you like you can listen to half an hour today and come back to another half an hour tomorrow

so for that reason I chose not to edit it down because editing shit down that's radio language, that's radio talk radio has to edit things because they've got a certain amount of time on air this is a podcast, I don't need to do that and as well it's it's it's a it's as a way of preserving and putting out what's essentially kind of historical document i speak to brian for

two and a half hours and it's him telling me about him being present in history in the history of an art form that I greatly admired and that shaped my life and a lot of people the same age as me. This is him telling stories about what it was like being with NWA, what it was like with Outkast, what it was like with Tupac, and then at the same time bringing it all back to Limerick City and his identity as a Limerick person, but as well many, many tangents

because the thing with Brian too, he's an esthete, he's a lover of art, he's a lover of history. So it's a conversation between the two of us that goes on to many tangents and explores hip-hop and culture in general. So let me just double-check now that I don't have anything I have to plug or say.

Oh shit, yeah, what else happened, I nearly went on the, yeah, one part of my Blade Runner tour was going to go to Warner Brothers to the studio to get a look at the back lot where some of it was filmed, but as I was about to go out there, Warner Brothers Studio went on fire. There was a forest fire in Los Angeles, so I didn't get to do that. My book, yeah, my book Boulevard Rain, it's out in the shops. It's number one in the charts. Thank you so much for everyone who's buying it. Thank you for the lovely fucking feedback I've been getting from you, that you're enjoying it.

That's really encouraging. And if you bought it, if you wouldn't mind, if you're enjoying it that's really encouraging and if you bought it if you wouldn't mind if you did like it if you wouldn't mind going on to fucking goodreads or amazon or whatever and writing a little uh positive review if you liked it um so that's just one thing one little call to action if you could do that and i can't remember if i put a fucking patreon request in this interview so look this podcast is supported by you the listener via the Patreon page if you want to support the podcast

and help me get a wage really for doing it and make it my job which it is patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast and if you can't afford it give me the price of a pint price of a cup of coffee once a month if you can't afford it you can listen for it, give me the price of a pint, price of a cup of coffee once a month. If you can't afford it, you can listen for free.

All right. One last check before I go into the interview because obviously this is done on a balcony and I can't fucking edit it. Yeah, that's it.

All right. I hope you enjoyed this interview. It's very long. So, either listen to the whole thing or take it in segments. Yart. Yeah, very nice guy.

I like that record, man. That EP is good, man. Yeah. It's great to fucking... The thing is with Kojak and those younger lads, they're able to fucking... When I was doing my shit, it was only ever received as a joke.

Like when we were rapping, even though it was a joke, but at the same time, I fucking cared deeply about the beats. I cared... Yeah, but it's... But it was... It's a... There's a...

I mean, there's a serious aspect to it. You know what I mean? Even if we want to say it's satirical. Yeah. That's serious. I mean, that's not disconnected or... You know what I mean? It's not idiocy. It's serious, but there's a thing... Like, it's mean that's not like disconnected you know I mean it's not idiocy

it's serious but there's a thing like it's it's a strange thing with music and it always bothers me as soon as and music is unique

in an art form I find as soon as you introduce humour or comedy into music specifically it tends to drop in its artistic value whereas you can use humour

in painting you can use humour in painting, you can use humour in literature and all of a sudden it can be elevated, like satire often sometimes I get pissed off at the word satire, if I label something as satire it's like saying it's funny but it's smart, instead of going hold on a second, you're allowed to

laugh at it but at the same time there's a serious message behind it and it's different levels and I don't know it was something like a song like Up the Ra allowed to laugh at it but at the same time there's a serious message behind it and it's different levels and I don't know it was something like a song like Up The Ra Up The Ra is fucking

bizarre and it's funny and you're allowed to laugh at it but at the same time I knew what it was exploring like yeah do you know what I mean

no I mean I completely I mean I was in shock because I was like you know when you see somebody say something that you've been in company

and said and no one ever said it like really said it out loud yeah and it's one of those moments where you're just like that's a piece of speech that's like

needed to be like there was a we needed that you know what I mean like someone needed to say that and that was the feeling of it

like I was like fucking hell I remember seeing that shit at Dolan's and being the tears were running out of my fucking face with the fucking

the balaclavas on the drummers and shit yeah people didn't know how to feel about that at the time they didn't now it's grand

now you've got like a band from Belfast called Kneecap have you seen Kneecap? no Kneecap are they're young lads from Belfast

and they're full on balaclavas and they're just they're fucking up the raw on stage but tongue in cheek as well but in a way when we were doing it

people didn't know what to do they didn't know is it okay to laugh at it are they really into the raw but that's the tension in that is what makes it interesting

the tension in it and one thing I always learned and it was it would have been Paul Webb that said it if you're doing a gig because the earlier gigs if the audience are clapping that's a good thing if the audience are throwing shit at

you that's a good thing if the audience have their back to you and they're at the bar that's the only bad thing yeah yeah do you know yeah for sure um so brian i so what i did for this interview is i've my own questions obviously, but I went to the internet and asked them some questions too. Yeah, I saw some of the fucking questions, yeah. The main one is, so you're from Limerick City, same as myself. Yep. And somehow, a man from Limerick is one of the most iconic and important photographers

in fucking the history of hip-hop. Me growing up in Limerick as a huge fan of hip-hop, I was leafing through all your photographs not having a clue that a Limerick man was behind them. Like, I'm talking fucking photographs on my wall and I didn't know a Limerick man was behind it. So how does a know a Limerick man was behind it. So how does a lad from Limerick

in the late 80s, early 90s end up photographing NWA? There's a pitbull just gone past there now with a fucking with lights all over his neck, which is the maddest thing I've seen in LA so far. So

yeah, I mean that's it really. I guess that's the fucking so far so yeah I mean that's it really I guess that's the story or whatever

but grew up in Limerick grew up in Park basically grew up up on the

Dublin road and was interested in art basically my old man was good at drawing you know he was one of those type My old man was good at drawing. You know, I was one of those type of people that was good at drawing.

And I was good at drawing in secondary school. I studied at St. Clement's. There was a great art teacher there, Mrs. Brown. Someone even on Twitter was, like, asking about Mrs. Brown. And I fucking, I don't know. I have this weird like I have this weird I had this weird thing where

on some levels it was like there was a lot of things about Limerick that were like of great interest ah the storytelling

and the fucking history like the history that you could taste it in your fucking mouth in the morning you know what I mean like that kind of shit like that I love that like that was that you could taste it in your fucking mouth in the morning you know what I mean like that kind of shit

like that I love that like that was that's completely informed everything I've ever done really but there was also this kind of

real desperate need to fucking get out you know to understanding that like there was other things going on in the world

and before that Brian like like okay so I would have found hip hop and limerick in the mid 90s and that was tough

that was hard I accidentally got given a copy of Home Invasion by my brother then I had a friend from New York who gave me

36 Chambers Wu-Tang Clan that was it do you know and other than that there was Golden Discs and if you were lucky I literally had to

buy albums I didn't know who Snoop was I had no way of finding out I didn't know snoop tupac i had to base it on who has the coolest album cover and if i'm lucky yeah and luckily i ended up picking the best ones based on covers yeah uh warren g regulate like something about him against the lamppost yeah made me say right i want that do you know? How were you, like, so let's, like, the 80s in Limerick. How the fuck are you even here in hip-hop?

Well, there'd be the occasional song. Well, breakdancing was kind of a thing. You know what I mean? There's footage of breakdancing in Limerick. There's breakdancing in Limerick, yeah. Danny Bullman, Danny Bullman. When he was young for that. Shawnee Bullman's younger brother whatever

but so so there was there was I mean breakdancing was kind of some kind of a cultural phenomenon

I was telling him when I was in finishing primary school the two biggest things that happened to us in our world was one was punk rock

and the other thing was roots came on television roots okay and In our world was One was punk rock And the other thing was Roots Came on television Roots Okay And In our school

In the schoolyard There was two gangs One was the Paddy Punk Rockers And one was the Fucking Chicken Georges Who were the

Chicken Georges The Chicken Georges The Chicken Georges The Chicken Georges There was a gang in Limerick Called the Chicken Georges Oh this was There was a gang in

St. Patrick's Fucking primary school Of young fellas Like ten years old That were calling themselves The Chicken Georgians There was a gang in Limerick Called the Chicken Georgians No this was There was a gang in St. Patrick's Fucking primary school Of young fellas like Ten years old That were calling themselves The Chicken Georgians Cause that was like The most

You know like When he was He was hung up And they were whipping him And they kept asking him What was his name And he kept saying his name Was Kunta Kintik

And eventually You know I mean that was like Momentous like You know like That's a strange thing That happened in Limerick as well with Kunta Kinta's name. I knew nothing about roots, but I knew that people would call other people not Kunta Kinta, but Kinta Kunta. In Limerick, it had turned into Kinta Kunta.

And I thought it was a bad word. I thought it was about cunt. Well, I have a friend in Limerick, an Afro-Caribbean girl who was there at that time and she she she'd tell me like Michelle she'd tell me that you know like no one ever recalled her to n-word yeah until roots wow which is a crazy flip when you think like you know it's Alex Haley it's the guy who wrote the Malcolm X autobiography. It's a really important narrative in terms of, like, the last sort of 30 or 40 years for African-American culture or whatever.

And when Roots came out as well in America, it was the first time slavery had been discussed openly as a discourse on media, wasn't it? I mean, yeah. I mean, I don't know. Like, I moved here in 1990. So, like, I mean, but yeah, it seems like that's the case, yeah. I mean, I don't know. Like, I moved here in 1990. So, like, I mean, but yeah, it seems like that's the case. Yeah, it seems like. In terms of mainstream media, yeah, it seems like for sure.

What hip-hop were you hearing in Limerick in the late 80s? I mean, all the good shit. I mean, you know, I mean. Was Public Enemy making it to Limerick in 87? Yes. Who was listening to Public Enemy? Barry Warner would have had it. Barry Warner as well, just said.

Barry Warner is a very important person for Limerick who doesn't get enough mentions. Nearly enough credit, yeah. Barry Warner was sampling in 1977. He ended up remixing Sound and Vision for David Bowie. Yeah. A real fucking musical pioneer. My older brothers remember Barry as just like kind of the weirdo goth in town

who just knew about everything before it happened and everyone would wonder how does Barry Warner know about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre how does he know

about this band because there's no internet no there's no internet but here's what there was is everyone who went into Eason's on a Thursday or Friday

and you could buy what Tarpey used to call them the music comics yeah and it would be the Enemy Sounds Melody Maker like all those magazines Thursday or Friday and you could buy what Tarpe used to call them the music comics. Yeah. And it would be The Enemy, Sounds, Melody Maker,

like all those magazines and then they would have like bullet reviews. So it's like you'll never hear the music but you'll know the name of the band. You know what I mean?

Like Throbbing Gristle. That's how I thought. You know what I mean? I never heard their music but I knew about them because I skritty palitty. Like years later

I heard the music but I read about them and that's how I found out like years later I heard the music but I read about them and that's how I found out about Foucault you know what I mean like all that stuff you heard about Foucault through Scritti Politti dude

yeah wow yeah I mean and it was that kind of but you'd know Google to go to so you just know

there's someone called Michel Foucault and Scritti Politti and I haven't even heard Scritti Politti because I yeah my brothers talk about we had some type of Levi's rock and roll anthology at home.

And I'd have grown up in a house with Dylan and Bowie. But my brother, there was a photograph of Sly Stone in it. And he used to stare at the photograph of Sly Stone, wondering what this man's music sounds like. Because the photograph of Sly Stone was so crazy. But he had no way, like, what's he going to do? Ring up 95 FM and go, have you any Sly Stone was so crazy. But he had no way. Like, what's he going to do? Ring up 95 FM and go, have you any Sly Stone?

They didn't. I remember ringing Big L, asking him if I could come down there. And I knew that this Motown thing was a big deal. I just was trying to find out more about it. They were laughing me off the phone. But I was like 13 or something. You know what I mean?

What does Motown sound like? Yeah. Having read about it. Having read about it, I maybe heard one or two things on Big L. What was Big L? Big L was like a pirate station. There was a pirate station in...

There was a boom in pirate stations in Limerick in the... I suppose this would have been the early 80s. So you had like LBC, Big L. That's like John the Man. John the Man was a legend. One of the highest compliments I ever got from an older Limerick fellow. He said you're John the Man. He listened to my podcast and said it reminded him of John the Man John the Man was a legend John the Man got us John the Man would come on in the morning One of the highest compliments I ever got from an older Limerick fella

He said you're John the Man He listened to my podcast and said it reminded him of John the Man John the Man was classic man He'd get on there and read the obituaries every morning out of the newspaper

and I mean people religiously listen to that you know like people of a certain age He used to say as well like my brother used to tell me John the Man used to go on the pirate radio and say

I'm dying for a bag of chips would someone go into Luigi's and bring me a bag of chips and a bag of chips would arrive at the studio I and bring me A bag of chips And a bag of chips Would arrive at the studio I don't even think Luigi's was there yet What would have been

The Golden Grill The Golden Grill yeah The Golden Grill for sure Yeah And it was You know But it was Owen Devereaux

For example Of course Owen Devereaux Do you know what I mean And then We have a lot of legends In Limerick There's a lot of legends In Limerick man

Fucking Come on man legends in Limerick there's a lot of legends in Limerick man fucking come on man it's Limerick yeah Eoghan Devereaux I know Johnny Marr listens to this podcast

so Johnny I know knows Eoghan Devereaux Eoghan Devereaux is I seen Johnny Marr at the fucking Savoy I don't know what year it was 80 fucking I don't know

83 or 84 and we'd seen him at the SFX the night before and I knew Morrissey was going to come back out and throw his shirt

at a particular moment so I fucking I was I went up right up I knew where he was going to throw his shirt and I sure enough

went up to the front The Savoy in Limerick if you don't know was it was this incredible venue in Limerick that had an old organ

in it and international bands before they'd do the European tour would often just do a warm up gig in Limerick that had an old organ in it. And international bands, before they'd do the European tour, would often just do a warm-up gig in Limerick. So Limerick had these amazing... And he used to wear... His whole thing was... What is it called? NHS?

Is that what they call it in England? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was NHS chic. So he would wear a a government issue hearing aid. Yeah. Like, you know, where you have the little white, like little, like pager looking thing in his pocket. And he'd have a hearing aid and then he wore the National Health glasses. And it was, it was.

It's a terrible change the way he's gone now, isn't it? It's a fucking disaster. But he's, you know, the thing about people like him, dude, is that they're contrarians. The thing about people like him, dude, is that they're contrarians. And I think it's one of those things where, like, he's... I find it difficult to believe that somebody as intelligent as him says this shit that it's as stupid as it is. It's a shame. I mean, I think contrarianism should stop when it comes to people's rights.

Be contrary about art. For sure. But contrary about... For sure. Yeah. For sure. But in any event, he's a sure but in any event he's a very I mean he's a

he's a compelling I mean you know the story of the smiths in Los Angeles now that's where it gets fucking interesting to me that's where you get

they've got a huge Latino following don't they they do and I'm well I'm blowing my own fucking whistle

but I'm the first person to photograph that scene you're the first person to photograph yeah become. You're the first person to photograph? It'll become a book afterwards, but I'll tell you the story. Why are the Smiths followed by young Latino people? So here we go, okay? So I'll just tell you the story first. So I knew this.

There's a peculiarly 80s moment for young Chicanos here. So Depeche Mode and like... We had this radio station here called K-Rock but somehow the Smiths more than any other thing like

still like is a thing you know it's like it's a very peculiar connection that young Chicanos have

like you hear it in you're familiar with the Deftones yeah so like Chino Moreno lead singer of the Deftones, like his biggest influence is Marcy. There's another group, I think they're from East LA, called Prayers.

Prayers are fucking unreal. They do kind of goth, goth rap. But again, you ask the lead singer of Prayers, who's your influence? It's all Marcy. Yeah. who's your influence it's all modesty so they used to have this

just like they used to call it the Smith's tribute weekend and weirdly enough it was the weekend of fucking Paddy's Day I remember this is like

1997 or 1997 98 I guess and I convinced Dazed and Confused so at that time I was shooting a lot of like I would shoot editorial like editorial editorial was how, editorial was the Instagram

of those days for photographers in the sense that like how you let people know you were out there and active and what you were doing was through editorial. And I convinced him to let me do the story. So I went there anyway and it was at the palace which is a venue in hollywood big big venue and i went to walk in anyway and i'm just like man this is crazy all mexicans there isn't a single white person anywhere this is all mexicans and everyone's like that rockabilly but like not quite rockabilly because they're chicanos but then you don't understand the the history of rock and roll. Would you connect it in any way with, do you know the way within lowrider culture, Chicano

lowrider culture, there's the love of all these songs and kind of crooners and that type of thing. Do you see a connection there? Not so much. I mean, it's a connection with, there's a kind of nostalgic aspect to it, for sure. Yeah. But then when you look at like uh the roots of rock and roll in this country mexicans are there man yeah i mean that's what la bamba is about that's all

real like they're a big part east east la sound in terms of rock and roll like frank zakba and them came out you know i mean that they were they were in interaction with that it was a they're they're you know there's a they do guitars good you know yeah but the funny shit with this thing anyway was that uh the the so it's not really the mink deville mink deville yeah yeah another interesting case but uh the the band isn't uh the smiths obviously it's this smiths tribute band called theseming Men yes okay so you know they gig in Dolan's so maybe you know

where this is going so so they come out and of course they have no idea what they're facing into either

like this is their first time in Los Angeles and they're just like uh fucking hell like who are these people and then

about the third song in I was up close to the stage and I was photographing this fucking huge Chicano guy jumps out of the crowd, onto the stage, takes a Mexican flag out of his pocket, holds it up like this.

The fucking place goes fucking mental. He jumps back into the crowd and these charming men were kind of shook. Yeah. And so they were donning the kind of Mancunian, do you know what I mean? They had the accents and the whole shit soon as the mexican guy jumps up and puts the puts the flag up and then he puts the flag on the on the drum kit the the these charming men stop the lights lads and then the mancunian accent goes off and then it's like they're from fucking

fingless or somewhere yeah yeah he says yeah Like We're these charming men And well We love the Smiths As much as you do But we have a secret too And then he fucking I don't know where He got the tricolour dude

But the fucking He pulled out the tricolour He pulled out the fucking Tricolour dude And put it on the drum kit And it was like I mean there was a little Tear appeared

In my fucking eye I couldn't believe it Here's the deal, okay? Morrissey is an immigrant into the dominant culture there. Steve and Patrick Morrissey. Steve and Patrick Morrissey. Johnny Maher. Johnny Maher into the Queen, the fucking Moors murderers, the Krays, British popular culture writ large.

Yeah. But they want writ large yeah but they they want to fit but they don't fit they're never going he's never going to be fucking English there's no way for him to be English

but he have this it's queered Englishness somehow that's what he's done this is the same issue for fucking young

Chicanos man like the lure of rockabilly feels right on like it's like our hair looks good this way like we like the nostalgia vibe rockabilly feels right on like it's like our hair looks good this way like we like

the nostalgia vibe and is it looking at like Elvis and these icons of America yes okay and then the twist

of it is and this was the thing that was like if I was an anthropologist that would have been really interesting for me it was like wandering around

that night and talking to kids and just asking them to take their portrait or whatever and all that kind of stuff is the asexuality which was his that was his narrative is the asexuality which

was his yeah it's his narrative at the time um they all bought it and so it was all these young chicano kids with like uh uh plucked eyebrows with perfect quiffs and perfect leather jackets that were asexual and it was like i it was yeah it was because yeah because the thing is now when i was saying about prayers who are the east la kind of was fascinating because the thing is now when I was saying about Prayers who are the East LA kind of got band their whole thing is your man from Prayers

goes I'm from East LA I'm in a gang and I wear nail varnish and this is how it is and if you have a fucking problem with it I'll let you know what the problem is

like I don't know if you read Marlon James do you know that guy he won the Booker Prize there a few years ago but he wrote this book called History in Seven Killings.

It's about basically what it is, it's like a fictionalized account of the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1975 in Jamaica. He imagines that the most brutal guys there, at the top of the gangs, are dudes that are queer but repressed. And this plays out in the kind of violence that they're capable of. By virtue of the fact that they're dealing with these kind of inner struggles that are momentous or whatever. Marlon James himself is queer and the book is but it's this notion of like the inner

like what you were talking about the other night really resonated with me but the notion that like the only way we're able to express our anger is by going outside the bar and slapping each other and calling each other homophobic slurs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's masculinity in some crazy...

You know what I mean? That's how it works. That's how it works. That's why it's difficult for somebody like Tupac to recognize who he did or for Nas to be able to hear it and to be able to accept that and know that if I make a bad move right now, this is all going to go pear-shaped because he's actually able to understand the geography of how this should... You know, those kind of tacit kinds of ways that people organize themselves.

And it's this. It's absolutely this. I mean, that's what's so interesting about the kind of work that you're doing, man. It's very important work because of this reason. Because I ask the question, like, well, what's behind that, actually? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, are you all right? Are you suffering right now?

Jesus, huh? The postman coming up. There's a postman there and he's got a fucking... You know, what I love about this is, like, so we're here in Los Angeles, November 2019. Yeah. And it's a very special... It's very special for me because this is like so we're here in Los Angeles November 2019 yeah and it's a very special it's very special for me because

this is the have a good night boss thanks pretty much cuz I love being in Los Angeles 2019 November

is very special for me because I'm a huge fan of the film fucking Blade Runner right so I'm always I'm here going

where are my Blade Runner moments right there is my Blade Runner moment we're here in a suburb of fucking Los Angeles. The postman comes up, and he's got a giant glowing light on his forehead like a cyborg. Yeah.

And we're going, what the fuck is this? It's just the postman. And it's Chicano guy. With a light on his head. Here, have you a fag in you, or are the fags inside? Fags are here. God bless. I'm smoking American Spirit, Which apparently is a healthy cigarette

Yeah That's how they market it Sort of Healthy in as much as tobacco can be I go light I do There's a fancy one for you Alright, God bless

So What made you decide I'm going to Los Angeles In 1990 What made you go Do you know what I'm going to Los Angeles In 1990 What made you go Do you know what I'm going to go to Los Angeles Basically

I finished at NCAD In 89 I think Your Someone said to me On Twitter today Your Two things they said About your final degree show

On NCAD Firstly What they found interesting was You photographed the Plassy River Yeah Which my listeners Will understand as It's Yorty's couch It's a place where I go to meditate and I look at an

altar called Yorkley Ahern. So you photographed this area as your NCAD piece, as your final year piece. I did. I'll tell you what I thought was interesting about it, and maybe this is a thing that you'll get a kick out of, but the thing about Plassey during the occupation of Ireland was that Plassey was a kind of a no-go area because it was pastoral, very beautiful, but the British troops wouldn't go for a walk there because they were too easily ambushed.

Was it because of the river? It's just because there were too many ways to get away. You could go over the old bridge, you could jump in a boat, you could go north, you could go south so it was pastoral it had this kind of classic Irish touristic

kind of trope like Dunas or whatever beautiful river, green but then it was also a kind of autonomous zone so what I was interested in is like how do you make photographs of a landscape that are peculiar like to somebody who's really familiar with it with that landscape like is it possible to make a landscape where you can tell

that the that it wasn't an you know in a sense that photography a lot of times can be used by like occupying forces as a way to map or measure. What's the inverse? How do you make photographs of somewhere where it could only have been made by somebody who's really familiar with the territory? Yeah. And I took Plassey as the example.

So I would go down... Did you take a photograph of the Castle Troy? I did. It's in the main, the kind of frontispiece or whatever. But you know, what I heard about that is, so if you look at the castle that is Castle Try

in the Pansy River, there's a huge hole in the side of it. There is, yeah. Because it was a garrison. Apparently Cromwell himself blew that hole with a cannon

as a kind of a sign. That's what I heard. Now again, it's one of these little facts I heard in a fucking public. Yeah. Which is pub facts. Which is good though. I like pub facts because how do you, you know, that's one of these little facts I heard in a fucking pub like yeah which is pub facts which is good though

I like pub facts because how do you you know do you want to know the maddest pub fact I ever heard what

that if if a pig ever and I heard this where did I hear this it was a pub near fucking Gary Owen in Limerick and a fad has said

that if a pig goes into water the pig would slit its own throat with its trotters no yeah no where was that into water the pig would slit its own throat with its trotters no yeah no where was that

like what's the name of the pub opposite the Marcus Field the Black Battery yeah yeah yeah Black Battery Facts no I don't yeah I guess

I mean in the notion but no and someone said you were focusing on the Limerick Soviet in the late 80s yeah which no one fucking knew about no one no I tried to write to these people that were celebrating And someone said You were focusing on The Limerick Soviet In the late 80s Yeah Yeah

Which no one fucking knew about No one No I tried to write to these people That were celebrating it this year And be like Hey you know like We were actually celebrating this

In the 80s You know like Because if people don't know Limerick In 1919 Yeah Tried its hand At becoming an independent

Independent Soviet state And it didn't It worked for about two weeks Printed her own money the whole shebang the thing you were saying to Tuberty the other night you know

and this fucking he's back but anyway the thing you were saying to him was you know why aren't we why can't we be

the fucking you know like why can't we be the fucking the good example like for the world you know

we're only this tiny country. What does it matter about plastic bags? Man, when you look at people like Terence McSweeney, when you look at people like the Limerick Soviet, they're just like, come on, man. Our cultural group. Terence McSweeney, man. But even, look, going around this neighborhood,

people have their Halloween decorations up. Halloween sound. It's a fucking Irish and fucking Scottish holiday, like. Hey, good ideas. You know, that's a real currency. We have that. We do that well. We should do more of it.

You know what I mean? Why would we not want to do that with everything? Yeah. For example. What the fuck is that? Because when we start thinking the other way and we start monetizing and we start acting like and thinking like accountants, that's when you end up with the fucking cervical fucking shit. Yeah, direct provision.

Complete direct provision. Another fucking perfectly good example that you're pointing out. Well, the thing is with direct provision and what I try and point out to people, direct provision and emergency accommodation in Ireland, like, the important thing for people to realise

is that it's a for-profit system. Yeah. There are huge corporations invested in direct provision and if direct provision leaves, a lot of very powerful people stop making money. And it's the taxpayer's money that goes into feeding these giant corporations. Same with emergency accommodation. You look at emergency accommodation, all these fucking hotels were built at the time of the Celtic

Tiger. Recession hits, there's no one there for hotels. Miraculously, a lot of hotels have full occupancy for years and years and years with either direct provision or people in emergency accommodation instead of building them houses. It's a racket. But tax money funded so it's neoliberalism. Privately funded prisons in this country.

And the cunts who are doing the private prisons the people the big corporation are Aramark. They do all the catering for direct provision in Ireland. They also do the catering for the private prisons in America. And they do a lot of the fucking universities. For ICE. And for the fucking universities, yeah.

UL in Limerick. Aramark runs the canteen. I mean, you know, you get into the panoptic shit, like, you know, here we go. Hotels, universities, prisons. Well, sure. Jeremy Bentham. Jeremy fucking Bentham and his panopticon.

I went to... I actually... Jeremy Bentham, who was so mad that when he died, he demanded that I would donate my money to the hospital if you put my... No, the University of London. The University of London. Yes, I studied at the Slade.

That's what I was about to tell you. My dead corpse needs to be on the board of directors. It's still there. It's still there, and they still wheel him out every year for the Bentham lecture. A fucking corpse. A corpse. I mean, he's like, what are we saying? The bog mummies.

The bog bodies, yeah. Yeah, it's a bit like that. It's kind of like the skin seems stretched over. But then the other thing is they have he's pickled like they have his organs are pickled in jars

next to him in the cabin but the mad thing is if the Brits who consider themselves to be such an advanced colonial society

if they were to look at something similar in what they consider to be I would say a tribe in Africa oh they bring out the preserved body of the elder

the savages and the elder. The savages. And the Brits are doing it with fucking Jeremy Bentham's corpse bringing him out for the past 200 years so that a hospital or university can get money. Fucking madness.

No, they're... But we're going on a mad tangent here. People have their tongues hanging out for stories about Eazy-E. Yeah, I know, I know. And we're talking about

the black battery. Anyways. Come here. So you get to Los Angeles, 1990. The big question I was asked is how the fuck does a lad from limerick end up being one of the first people to photograph nwa cypress hill how does a lad from limerick find himself in that situation where you're entrusted with you're our photographer and you're cool uh well so i i i i went back to limerick after NCD.

I worked out in the Dublin Road. There was a fucking video shop in Frank Hogan's. I worked there and it was fucking horrible and I nearly became an alcoholic. It wasn't a good moment. And I decided I should go to grad school. And then I had done a quarter of an exchange at a at the Slade

that's at the University of London which that's how I seen the Jeremy Bentham body and whatnot as part of the mythology of that school and at

at NCAD at that time and I mean to be honest like the visual arts education in general in Ireland at that time was full of English

you know professors yeah but but people that had gotten a masters over there or whatever this is when we still had the inferiority complex or whatever and we were like they're better than us they're more advanced in their education system

and we were coming out of a kind of academic you know like in the late 60s into the 70s they weren't even teaching modern art in Irish art schools yet. No, all academic art. So, anyway, I decided going to England wasn't an option. I was offered a scholarship to go to Amsterdam to study at the Kunstacademy.

I was nervous that I was going to smoke away grad school, so I said... Hold on, is that for Brian or is that for me? Brian do you want do you want a beer or no I have a cider

you're on the cider yeah alright and so then I was interested in there was two people I was interested in studying man there was I was interested in studying

with Edward Said who was teaching at is Edward Said the post-colonial fella? Orientalism Yes I have a book

I have a book by him it's on post-colonialism in Ireland Yeah He's a Palestinian scholar amazing, amazing guy I thought his name was Edward Said

up to this moment It looks like Said It looks like Said if you agree with it I love the fact that I have a book called Edward Said Luke Gibbons

gave me that book. I mean, it was a couple of books I was given like the last few years I was at NCID. Someone gave me The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon which was a really important book and someone gave me Orientalism by Edward Said. So obviously, Frantz Fanon is dead but Edward Said was teaching at Columbia

but I didn't have the right, I couldn't go study with him and another dude I was interested in was this dude called Alan Sekula who was like a like kind of like a theory-based photographer who was teaching at Cal Arts and his whole thing was around like labor like he was interested in the relationship between I mean this is the work he was working at the time was the relationship between kind mean this is the work he was working at at the time was the relationship between kind of containerisation

as an idea and the kind of the end of a certain kind of labour politics because longshoremen were very powerful figures in labour because if you wanted to get something onto a boat you had to do a deal with them and they owned the ports

they didn't really own the ports, but like... Is this England now or America? America. Oh, sure, of course. The Wire season 2 with the Stevedores. Stevedores. Yeah. And, you know, even during World War II, like, you know, there was... They were progressive, they were interracial, they were...

I mean, they were mostly communists. I mean, they were mostly folks that got, you know... In the blacklist era, they were people that got destroyed, like, whose lives were destroyed. They were excommunicated or, you know, destroyed in American life. But he was interested in how containerization as an idea was sort of pulling the rug out from under this long, long labor tradition. He'd grown up in San Pedro,

and he was a photographer, kind of a photographer historian. I was making work about like the canal bank and thinking like my old man started work on the canal bank thinking about the canal bank thinking about plastic thinking about how do you talk about history and landscape and he like I just felt like his work resonated most with me so I said I'll go there but of course at the same time I'm listening to you know Mantronics ice tea public enemy bdp nwa whatever like that we by that point you could find like tarpey was very good at finding records this is our buddy paul tarpey paul tarpey is uh he followed scary area around and managed to document scary

areas early career early early scary air but this is long before that now um tarpey had a knack to be able to hit the virgin Megastore opened at that era down the quays in Dublin. Tarpey was the king of the 99-cent or... It was probably 29-cent bins in that era. Tarpey is... Paul Tarpey is one of the men that's... I think I know my hip-hop.

And then I speak to Paul Tarpey and he scares the living shit out of me. He's... Well, you know, like... The weird thing about hip-hop, man, of people of that generation is that it was never

it was never that kind of music where it was just enough to be a fan you had to become like the most you know you had to be

the most lit advocate you had to know everything about it and the thing is which is something that doesn't exist anymore now

because you have like back then before the internet if you knew shit about music you were really valuable there was serious cultural capital now yeah if you tell someone about fucking tell someone about bdp now straight onto spotify and the algorithm will give you rare shit yeah and it loses its cultural value yeah totally and this was an era where like yeah like you you know you know

that was a real cultural cachet to have you know to know about records like that or to know about the history of certain people and groups and for us actually you know you were saying like the record covers to be honest with you in those days the way we used to figure out like if a record was good or not was who was the special tanks on the back it's like oh they're tanking BDP that means they're cool with BDP that means it's going to be that kind of record

because there wasn't even how do you tie that in with the early 90s hip hop type of track like on Home Invasion about Ice-T he's got a track where he's literally

rapping everyone he's cool with he's going I'm down with BDP I'm down with Public Enemy shout out track he was going straight up I'm down with Tim Dog

even though Tim Dog dissed LA Tim Dog was in Ultra down with Tim Dogg, even though Tim Dogg dissed LA. Tim Dogg was in Ultra Magnetics. Tim Dogg's from the Bronx. He's from New York. Ice-T is from New York.

Of course, yeah. Do you know, so, I mean, it was, I mean, you know, it was somehow, there was this sort of internal dialogue or cosine kind of culture

that existed in hip-hop and that was the way you well in the same way as a little bit after that when people start to really think about samples it doesn't just become who's the name of the artist on the front of the record it's like okay who the fuck's playing drums who did the arrangement who's the bass player oh the bass player is oh really oh okay well then i gotta buy this record then yeah you know is that is that same and and that's that's what hip-hop was in that period was it was a kind of like a kind of like it's a kind of proto-technology it's like a way of thinking about history it's a way of thinking about like contemporary moment

and for me it's it's the ultimate post-modern art form hip-hop for me yeah i mean we can argue about the post-modern but i would say it's probably the most important popular art since world war ii yeah that's what i that's where i would be with it but yeah i mean in terms of influence in terms of like the way it's changed the way we think about the world the way we actually interact with with information i mean everything um and so you know like so i was doing that like i was you, as curious and as engaged as Tarpey. And there's another guy, Paul McCarthy, who was, there's another dude, Mark Duggan and Valerie Connor. And then I had the chance to come to CalArts.

I had gone to San Francisco in 88 on a J-1 visa and lived in the Mission and seen, like, a lot of stuff, you know, like, up close. But, like, I never thought, like, I didn't even know that was even a job. I mean, it wasn't a job. Do you know what I mean? It wasn't a job. Even for photographers here at that time, no one was just shooting hip-hop. I mean, that didn't exist yet. Yeah.

And so I came here. And then really, it was while I was at CalArts, this urban theorist called Mike Davis came to the school. Turned out he was an Irish-American guy, really smart, and a historian. And he had a young Dublin wife who was desperately homesick, as was I. And so he started inviting me over to the house. And he was working on this book called City of Quartz. the house and he was working on this book called city of quartz and city of quartz um i mean for folks that don't know is like a really important in terms of actually books about cities it's like

it's a you know it's probably the best book about los angeles that's been written and uh anyway hanging out with mike and arguing and the other thing was mike worked as a truck driver for years it was the union that paid for him to go to university in the first place but he was an activist

since the 60s and had lived in West Belfast and everything else but out of arguments like his notion do you know he would have been like

your older brother do you know what I mean where it was like okay protest music it's either Dylan do you know what I mean going back to

Pete Seger or whatever like that that thread or it was coltrane yeah which is like a whole other thing but like this rap shit what the fuck is that like that yeah it's these a bunch of young fellas throwing money at the camera like no or a bunch of dudes with guns like no yeah and where i was like No dude Like you need to listen to this Yeah Like this is Cause I always I was asked before about Why do Irish people love hip hop And I say Listen

Cause we grew up on the wolf tones I said Come out you black and tans Come out and fight me like a man That's fuck the police For sure It's the same fucking song Dude

The Limerick Rake Is fucking too short I mean the Limerick Rake Is like The Limerick Rake by the Dubliners Listen mean the limerick rake is like the limerick rake by the dubliners listen to the lyric it's about a guy that lives off of women yeah yeah yeah i mean it's come on and too short for you if you don't know he's uh an oakland rapper and he was the first one to really rap about pimping yeah that was his thing yeah you know um but no for sure i mean you know there's i mean but i have to be honest like from you know in but no, for sure, I mean, you know, there's, I mean, but I have to be honest,

like, from, you know, in that moment, I mean, this is just one of the weird kind of circling backs that,

it wasn't like I was listening to NWA thinking about the fucking Wolftones, I wasn't, I was, I was in some weird way running away from the Wolftones, I would say,

or do you know what I mean? Like, this kind of conservative, Well, the Wolftones weren't cool in the 80s either. No. I mean, it's a good cultural kind of work in Hungary.

That'll be played in a hipster club in Dublin, though. For sure. And it should be. And I mean, what the Wolftones were doing in retrospect... I mean, you know, I don't know. There's a weird way that a lot of stuff that happened in that period is being recovered now in an interesting way

which I think is really important actually it is important because the thing is the Irish mainstream media because it was in the context of the war in the north

like the Wolftones were not being Wolftones they were probably banned you know they never got played on the radio Sex Pistols were getting to number one in Britain

and they wouldn't say that they were number one the Wolftones were getting to number one in Ireland and they wouldn't say that they were number one. The wolf tones were getting to number one in Ireland and they wouldn't say they were number one.

That happened with Christy Moore. Happened with Christy as well, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know,

like anyone that had the audacity to speak about what actually was going on in the North in that period was getting punished,

basically. And honestly, not to be fucking weird about it, but I mean, there are times because since I have the fucking iPhone and I have the RT app now

so late at night I listen to the morning news and then when I wake up in the morning I put it on again and I listen to it to be honest in this moment particularly it's actually nice to have a version of Trump from 6,000 miles away as opposed to like a version of

trump where he's like right in front of you um but you know it still shocks me actually just how derisive and um difficult it can be to actually try to speak openly and straightforwardly about that era um especially for people that were, you know, Section 31 or whatever it was, affected them directly, still don't get the... What was Section 31? So Section 31 is the Irish version of, you know, if you were considered,

if you were part of a listed organisation that was considered sympathetic to the forces of paramilitarism in Ireland, you weren't allowed to speak on TV or the radio. So that's why Gerry Adams had the fucking... So that's why you had the weird voiceover fucking... Which is the maddest thing that ever happened. It's so bizarre. But that was kind of later, that came later.

Through the 70s and 80s, those people just were invisible. You never heard directly from them. You heard them paraphrased. And, you know, this is... And unf Fablux, that was it, really? So, yeah. You either bought on Fablux in town on a Saturday or whatever pub you went to, if you lived in a working-class neighbourhood,

someone would come around and sell the newspaper and that was the only way you could find out. The funny thing is, though, is that there were so many things, like the Catholic Church, there were so many things that mainstream Irish political life couldn't explain in that moment, because there were things you couldn't say, that when you actually read Unfub looked in that area,

you were like, oh, so that's what's happening. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Have this weird, like, but I see, you know, I heard Michael Noonan on Morning Ireland, I don't know, I suppose a year ago. And the hate and the derision and the way he spoke to the lady from Sinn Féin, I was fucking appalled. I was like, man, put that guy in a hole.

Bring him back to the Crescent and put him in a big ditch and fucking let him into it. Honestly, I was just in shock. And, you know, but I mean, that was that period. I mean, and when you're used to the notion of speech somehow that is considered inappropriate or a threat to the state. Yeah. Well, then the fucking public enemy sounds like fucking money to your ears. Exactly. You know what I mean? You're like, oh, I was waiting for this.

You know, like. So fight the power for you takes on a different fucking meaning. You can contextualize it as an Irish person. My 98. My 98 was 1798. When you get to fucking to Los Angeles,

how the fuck do you end up meeting NWA? And what do NWA, people are asking, what the fuck do NWA think of a young lad from Limerick with a camera? So, okay.

Let's do a little quick corrective. Earlier you posted four photos, you said. How did a lad from Limerick make these four photos? The photo of NWA I didn't make.

Is that not yours? No. Okay. And I've photographed all the members, individual members of NWA separately, but I never photographed NWA together. Okay, so it? No. Okay. And I've photographed all the members, individual members of NWA separately, but I never photographed NWA together.

Okay, so it was afterwards. Okay. No, I mean, I was photographing them in that period, but for whatever reason, I never photographed them together. And I'm not the kind of photographer that's like, I was never there with like a bucket list or whatever. I was always like, Jesus, I can't believe it. I'm getting to photograph fucking Eazy-E.

Yeah. Anyway, basically. Did you have to go down to, like you went down to Compton and photographed? I was like Jesus I can't believe it I'm getting to photograph Fucking Eazy-E Yeah Anyway Did you have to go down Like you went down to Compton And photographed Yeah Look You know

I grew up fucking From fucking I'm from the double road man I never I never looked at Any part of any city As a no-go area Yeah

I went to the north I went to fucking Brixton When people said You didn't go to Brixton When I first came to America I lived in the fucking Mission I worked in hunter's point areas that people from san francisco are like what you know i mean i i felt like that was your as an artist like you come on

man like we're supposed to go there like that was another another team of questions tonight which it's as a limerick person i could tell that some of the questions had a bar behind them. And it's something that in my early career as well was thrown at us, which is Limerick has a very gangster image. Limerick, like, look, Limerick is the way, when someone from Dublin says, what's Limerick? Like I say, Limerick's Talla. Same size as Talla, Limerick is Talla.

So Limerick has got this image, which it's not conducive with the reality of Limerick no not really not at all but at the same time people are saying I've seen crazy

I mean I did see crazy stuff we've all seen crazy shit in Limerick but like I'm not having it when people say Stab City I get very bothered by it

because it's not Stab City it makes me laugh but I'm different too because I remember kind of how it started and I remember like I remember actually you were saying started and I remember like I remember Actually you were saying

to me overnight because we were talking We should have that story We should How did So the version that I heard is that Limerick got called Stab City

because in the late 70s the IRA were training Lebanese guerrillas up in the Clare Hills on Limerick Scat off Two of them got stabbed No

What happened? No Okay So Yes or his or Nimerick and two of them got stabbed no what happened no okay so yes the Irish government was training Libyan pilots

at Shannon to be to fly commercial jets so Gaddafi had a load of of of

young Libyan pilots that were trained in military top gun type of fellas you know like that would fly those kind of planes

which isn't the same as flying a commercial jet Ireland at that time obviously you know anything at all that we could fucking glean

a few bob from into Shannon was considered like a fucking win you know like doing it now with CIA fucking

oh well I mean of course now we're like now we're like we don't give up you know now we're flying any fucking bunch of young fellas out to fucking the Middle East. It's perfectly acceptable.

CIA flying fucking people off to secret fucking torture sites and shit. But in those days, there was only two people that were using Shannon. The fucking Russians were using Shannon to fucking refuel on the way to Cuba. And the fucking Libyans were using Shannon to fucking... and they were all working out in Shannon and it was just Aeroflat. Aeroflat yeah. Yeah. And so there was so anyway I mean I was only 12 or 13 which makes it like I suppose to the late 70s early 80s. No it's definitely the early 80s. I'd say it's 82 83. I'd have to ask my old man or someone that worked. Kevin Barty would know

yeah and basically they used to come into town and of course they were you know anyone fucking different

everyone would have spotted them straight away like yeah and of course they used to hang out together there was a bunch of dudes probably didn't speak English that great

I was too young I didn't I seen them but I didn't you know but we used to all go to this bar called the Courtyard which was off before the Pink Elephant. And it was the only place you would hear what they used to call disco, but basically black

music. Yeah. In Limerick at that time was this. Buddies you would for sure. Buddies was always like it. And, but it was kind of, young fellas wouldn't wander into Buddies. Like it was kind of like, that was another Tulsi, but buddies like it was kind of like that was another Tulsi but the courtyard was kind of a new place and just kind of modern

and it was a little dance floor and it was say a disco ball and whatever you could have a drink and it was

new and just close enough to like the roundhouse like just kind of down that side and you could get in

and we were I played rugby but I was I'd say I was 13 or 14 and I was big so like they wouldn't ask you for an ID or whatever because there was no IDs And we were, I played rugby, but I was, I'd say I was 13 or 14, and I was big. So, like, you know, they wouldn't ask you for an ID or whatever, because there was no IDs.

I looked old enough, so I'd earn a few points. Have you any idea? Have an idea of getting in here? Yeah. Be wide, no, be wide. Walk in, walk in. Sit down over there, no, a larger point. Say nothing.

Anyways. That's pure trout And no crack All the other I guess And so We fucking We used to hang out there

And the Libyans Used to hang out there Because of the music You know Yeah And they were very glamorous Like There was fellas that were

Olive skin Sallow skin Looked like the head of suntan Dark hair Looked after themselves They were fucking pilots But they were pilots Fucking in Limerick

in fucking 1982 or something you know what I mean what the fuck anyways it's Christmas Eve I guess it was 1982 this Libyan cat

was get up on I suppose up there where Cusick's fish shop there was I don't know what's that Glenport Street or whatever what street that is but it was up there there was a taxi rank there I suppose, up there where Cusick's fish shop there was. I don't know what's that, Glenport Street or whatever, what street that is. But it was up there, there was a taxi rank there. And he was up there getting a taxi with his young girlfriend, young limerick girlfriend, I think she was from South Hill, I think.

And her boyfriend fucking came down and fucking stabbed her man into the eye, into his brain, and killed him stone dead, left him on the ground with the fucking screwdriver on him. And it was, you know, the 80s is a crazy time in Ireland because there is this sort of cataclysmic violence happening. I mean, there's people starving themselves to death. I mean, there's all this crazy shit. But, like, that kind of street violence was very rare.

Like, you didn't, you know what I mean? Like, there wasn't... So it would have stayed on the news for a few days. Oh, man. And it was, there was something visceral about the notion of, like, a screwdriver through your eye into your brain was kind of like, that was something,

you know, that was like beyond VHS level violent. You know, beyond exploitation. Because it's a mad thing that that survives because there's a There's a thing in Limerick Whereby We used to always say If someone had a knife

They were never going to Do anything with it It's the fella Who's got the screwdriver The fella who's got The tool That if the guards Catch him

He can say that He's a carpenter That's the person Who's dangerous But the person With the knife Is showing off Yeah And knives weren't Do you know You had to go to England To get a knife A carpenter That's the person Who's dangerous But the person With the knife Is showing off Yeah

And knives weren't Do you know You had to go to England To get a knife Yeah You didn't go up to Nestor's To buy a fucking knife I still to this day

I have a Butterfly knife at home Yeah That was given to me No and that was the kind of thing Secondary school Like everyone Yeah

But very illegal Yeah I was given a butterfly knife I traded it for fucking, I think I actually traded it for a dog pound CD for a butterfly knife, which I still have the butterfly knife.

I just had it because I wanted to flick it in my bedroom, do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But mad fucking illegal and there was no knives in Limerick. There was kitchen knives, but you couldn't get a fucking flick knife.

You couldn't get that. No, and I don't, I dare say, I don't know that necessarily I mean Limerick was geographically challenged because it was a large

working class city in an era of 30% unemployment where there was a lot of like you know generation upon generation of people that never

had a job that were living in you know I mean for the most part fucking squalor you know all the fucking usual tropes about Irish fucking poverty and unemployment and everything.

Yes, we had lots of it, OK, but the fucking issue was on a Saturday night, after a fucking feed of fucking drinks, everyone poured out onto the same street. Yeah. O'Connell Street. And I mean, not even a big street. I mean, ten blocks of O'Connell Street. So I don't know if you, I mean, you probably don't remember, but like in the Pat Grace's

fried chicken era, like when KFC, when this, It's now the Chicken Hut and it was KFC. The Chicken Hut. Yeah. It was KFC before

and then it became Pat Grace for a while and then went back to KFC. It was an actual KFC franchise, wasn't it? It was an actual, no, he had the KFC franchise

in Ireland. But I heard the mythology in Limerick, he fell out with them but he stole their recipe and now in Limerick we have the Chicken him but he stole their recipe and now in Limerick we have the chicken hut which is like a

preserved fucking like this no one fucks with the chicken hut like the chicken hut will not be allowed to leave Limerick and they have the greatest chicken gravy

known to man but they stole they remixed they remixed it they took KFC remixed and said this is Limerick now and we have a new thing

and it's Limerick chicken and you can fuck off yeah and then the kind of you know entry level Pat Grace's chicken was the fucking snack box it was called

and so yeah people were getting fucking murdered for fucking snack boxes yeah yeah and it was basically like every fucking And yeah, people were getting fucking murdered for fucking snack boxes. Yeah, yeah. And it was basically like every fucking maniac in Limerick was poured onto the same street. And then there was people up there, innocent people basically buying fucking snack boxes. And if you didn't want to give your snack box after your feed of points to some dude with a bicycle chain,

you were liable to get a fucking slap of a bicycle chain across the fucking forehead and you get your fucking snack box taken. Yeah. That level of stuff was happening, but somehow the Libyan thing made like a... See, it's called headlines. It's headlines, yeah. It's like I said, if the story came to me as these international top fucking Marines,

or as I was told, they were like the elite of the fucking it was the PLO I heard. I heard it was the PLO but they were some elite and it's like these are lads who are crack fucking military lads

around the world and they couldn't do one night in Limerick and they got killed and that's how we got stuck with this name Stab City. Yeah, no. That's not the way I remember it

but I mean it's not that there wasn't I mean you know the 80s is interesting for this as well. The Ra were training people up in the hills. The Ra was fucking ISIS in that era, man. I mean, we were the fucking scourge of the planet. Like, you couldn't fucking say the name.

I mean, when I first came here, I would say I'm Irish, and people... You know what people would do? What? They'd go... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like, what am I supposed to do with that? The Irish carabiner cocktails. Yeah.

Come on. I remember going to anti-Iraq war demonstrations and there was a woman in front of me that had a banner that said, the only car bombs I want are Irish ones.

And I was like... You don't know what that means. I was just like... No, but it's like people here drink black and tans. You know, where they mix what's called smithics or whatever. I say to Yanks, how would you feel if I was drinking an SS?, but it's like people here drink black and tans. You know, where they mix, we'll say Smittix or whatever. I say De Janssens.

How would you feel if I was drinking an SS? You know what I mean? It's the same shit, mate. So the initial question. We're still there. We still haven't answered it. So the question was, did growing up in Limerick make it okay for you to be going to places like Compton and Watts? Did it, did it, because you said to me the other night

the fact that you were Irish meant that you got a level of curiosity and acceptance whereas if you were from Beverly Hills, if you were a white person from California, you wouldn't have gotten

the welcome. I mean, it wasn't, it was more difficult to place me. I had a really weird accent which was, to them was like,

what? And then there's some notion somehow that like there's a kind of glam you know the deal it's a kind of glamour for somebody that come from really far away that's yeah that actually knew something about rap could have a intelligent conversation about it because this is also a time when rap is not accepted no dude you there was no rap on the radio. You couldn't even have a club. Rap was considered novelty music. It wasn't taken seriously. On one level, it wasn't taken seriously.

It was considered novelty. And on another level, it was considered, oh, here's just another expression of black and brown youth, you know, malaise and violence. Do you know what I mean? And it's either we're terrified of it or it's a joke. Yeah. But there was no such thing as, like, actually, no, you know,

this is the most serious thing that's happening in the culture for the last 50 years. And we can see it now and we can clearly now contextualize it as very, very important protest music. So, like, you know, when I met Ice Cube and I, you know, I remember the first time I interviewed him. I'd say he was all right. Ice Cube comes across as a... He didn't need to study architecture in college. He studied draftsmanship in University of Arizona. Because before this, before we started talking, I was pitching to you.

Lads who I reckon are completely sound. And I reckon Ice Cube is a gent. I reckon Ice-T is an absolute gent. And I reckon DJ Quick and Warren G are also lovely, lovely lads. Yeah. Easy, lovely guy. Was he? Yes.

The thing I would say about Cube that made me kind of bummed out... You know I gave Ice Cube a Harley? Oh, did you? So, I have a song called Pure Awkward from 2008. Okay. And the lyric in the song is...

It's a song about a lad from Limerick who goes to Compton and finally gets to meet his heroes but what happens is Ice Cube tries to shift him and the lyric is it's a Monday I got up pure early I showed Ice Cube the proper way to swing a Harley

and then a year later I don't know how it happened we ended up supporting this is before Horse Outside or anything we ended up supporting Ice Cube in Tripod in Dublin. Oh, wow. So we were like, we've got to fucking meet Ice Cube. So we met Ice Cube, and I got to chat with him, and I gave him a hurley that had his name and a hash leaf on it.

And he thought it was a shillelagh. But fuck it, that was my one Ice Cube meeting, yeah. That was my one Ice Cube meeting, yeah. No, I remember, you know, like, the thing with Ice Cube that sort of bums me out when I think about him now is, like, I was really unhappy with the straight-out-of-Compton film. I just thought that was fucking low-blow, unfair. Low-blow on who?

Easy. Yeah? They clowned the guy, and they made him into, like, a kind of caricature of himself that he wasn't and I he came across as unbalanced

and aggressive aggressive unbalanced kind of fidgety like something who smoked crack kind of and he wasn't any of that

actually he was a very very very smooth interesting curious working class fella that was clearly a hustler they played him as

as an Uncle Tom to Jerry Heller yes again I don't buy that shit. Jerry Heller, problematic figure, clearly. But his relationship with E... I mean, I'm the only one who has photographs of the two of them together, weirdly enough.

I don't know how... Like, I have a lot of photographs of Eazy-E that I made. He was the first person to give me a proper break where I actually... You know, the first album to give me a proper break where I actually you know the first album cover that I photographed I mean I had photographed both House of Pain and Freestyle Fellowship

for album artwork prior but the first album cover to actually come out was did House of Pain because I don't I don't know how Irish they really are

well no did they did they latch on to you because you were a paddy no Muggs said because Muggs isn't Irish he's Lithuanian no no actually Muggs said... Because Muggs isn't Irish, he's Lithuanian.

No, actually Muggs is Italian. Italian. Muggerud. Muggerud, okay. And fucking Everlast, what's his real name? Schroeder. Schroeder.

Schroeder, yeah. Schroeder, which doesn't sound very Irish. He has Irish, definitely, but the most Irish... The Irishness of House of Pain, they very much... It was Danny Boy.

Danny Boy O'Connor. Danny Boy. But do you think they latched on to Irishness because that was the only way to be white but also have a little bit of an edge in the early 90s? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, you know, if you want, like, ethnic whiteness,

I mean, it's, well, it's what? It's, like, Italian or Irish, you know? Yeah. That's kind of... You know, that's how it works in this country. Which is a shitty thing because the thing is... It is. It is. I spoke to Spike Lee about this

like the history of Irish America and black America is fucking terrible we came from a country of oppressed people the penal laws where we had the opportunity

to empathise with slavery and the Irish Americans became the vicious attack dog of essentially the American Brits it's the and we are

in that whiteness true brutality we bought our whiteness through brutality against black people absolutely the American Brits. It's the no-likeness. And we are no-likeness. True brutality. We bought our whiteness. True brutality against black people. Absolutely, yeah. In the sense that, I mean, we're in this sort of weird situation where if you can imagine,

if you look at things like how they built the railroads or the freeways through the swamps around Louisiana, it was more efficient to use Irish people because if you lost a black slave, you lost property. If you lost an Irish person, well, it was always another Irish person. So it was kind of weird. But then the flip of it being that, yeah, we absolutely didn't,

as we organized from a labor perspective, we didn't want an end to slavery. It was very gay-kicked. Because it would be a competitive, yeah. Yeah. How do you feel about Irish-Americans today who use this full... I hate that shit. I know where you're going.

We were oppressed. We were slaves. No, that's... And it's alt-right and it's fake news and it's like... And it ignores whiteness. It's absolutely... As a way to climb the ladder. Absolutely.

No, I mean, it's the most, you know, that book about Barbados is really the most and I'm very proud of the fact that fucking Liam Hogan Liam Hogan is doing

the work that he's doing Liam Hogan is a Limerick academic who is doing amazing work at actually exposing the myth of the Irish slavery absolutely

and he's someone I'd love to have Liam on the podcast at some point yeah you should I mean and I've heard this I love to have Liam on the podcast at some point yeah you should I mean and I've heard this I've heard about Liam Hogan

from African American activists here yeah he's got a lot of respect singing his praise because of the work that he's doing around this notion

that somehow there's a parity between Irish American chattel slavery and the slavery indentured servitude indentured servitude there were Irish people that were sent to Barbados

but they could earn their freedom after 10 years of work and then they became slave owners they had kids, the kids were free whereas with chattel slavery, generational property, so there's no comparison not to speak of the levels of violence and everything else that was exerted on Africans but yeah I mean not to speak of the levels of violence and everything else that was exerted on Africans but

yeah I mean it's a in those days it was a sort of weird fucking like a novelty kind of somehow around so you were seen as a novelty of here's this kind of leprechaun character here's this well it wasn't even that sophisticated really

actually you know funny enough there's a serial here called Lucky Charms. Yeah. And I'd never even heard of it. But I bet you they asked you to say, talk about the Lucky Charms. So I went,

I remember going to see... In Britain it's said 30p. Right. But here it's Lucky Charms. Lucky Charms. I remember going to see Public Enemy at the... What was the name of the place

that they played in fucking 87 in Dublin and I remember Sinead O'Connor was there. They played at Trinity College. They played the Trinity Ball but they

also did a gig on the Thursday night in a small spot off of Grafton Street that I'm spacing on the name of right now. Did Scary Era support them at that point no?

No they supported House of Pain. No it was House of Pain yeah. House of Pain I remember. Well I was in the studio when they recorded Jump Around. I mean, I...

Fuck off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What was that like? I mean, like, in that era, like, Cypress Hill wasn't that big yet. Like, it was fools chipping in money to buy 40s that we would share. Like, I mean, it was people at the edge of doing something being really broke and you know what i'm talking about like

you know like a bunch of lads that are in solidarity because they're trying to make something work and no one could imagine that it was gonna turn any good art i always think it's it's it's a a shared kind of joke or something amongst good friends and you get that energy and then when it goes out there properly that becomes popular yeah like the earliest shit

with me and Mr. Crone with the bandits it was me and him trying to make each other laugh in a small group of friends yeah and never expecting anyone else would like it

but the thing is if it doesn't work there first it's not it's not ever you might as well forget it it has to work there first and that's the thing with when he's needed so you were in the forget it you have to work there first and that's the thing

so you were in a studio with a bunch of friends there were a bunch of lads this is banging we don't expect anything fellas who thought Everlast was great but that whole

pop thing that Ice-T did with him was bullshit yeah because Everlast before House of Pain Ice-T brought him on as what was Ice-T's crew

the rhyme syndicate rhyme syndicate and his earliest stuff is kind of cringy because GZA got stuck into that as well House of Pain, Ice-T brought him on as, what was Ice-T's crew? The Rhyme Syndicate. Rhyme Syndicate. And his earliest stuff is kind of cringy. Yeah. Because GZA got stuck into that as well. Yeah. GZA was Rhyme Syndicate too. No, GZA wasn't Rhyme Syndicate.

GZA was on Tommy Boy. Yes, yes, yes. Who else was in Rhyme Syndicate? Prince. Tari B. A bunch of dudes from the Bronx that had moved out here. You know, if you listen to the first Freestyle Fellowship record, there's a song called Sunshine Men

where they talk about how all these sort of second-rate dudes from New York, and they're talking about Def Jeff, they're talking about Ice-T, they're talking about, you know, like... So are they kind of trying to say that, like, okay, so New York is the home of hip-hop, so if you're shit, you go to L.A.

where it's not respected? Yes. Okay, yeah. They're just dissing fools that like oh you come out here you think this is you know this is empty territory there's nobody out here

that can rhyme we can do something out here we got some cachet because we from New York it's kind of like the big in Japan of the time exactly and then

and you know Melly Mel all them dudes lived out here at that time yeah and you know you go to any hip hop club at that time

they were the dudes that were getting shouted out on the mic none of the local you know Snoop don't exist yet you know nwa is considered kind of like a aberration or something you know i mean they're like well they don't really rap i mean they're getting over on this novelty thing that they're like gangsters or something and as well uh a huge critique that was put against the west coast is the way they use samples was not considered creative

because the West Coast would take entire loops rather than chopping it up like fucking the Bomb Squad was, or not the Bomb Squad, fucking Public Enemies fella. It was West Coast. Hank Shockley. Yeah, but there was West Coast, like, you know, LL Cool, like a lot of the early LL Cool J shit after Rick Rubin is done by DJ Pooh. You know what I mean?

Yeah, a legend. Yeah, like done by DJ Pooh you know what I mean yeah like that's not you know in that era I mean you know the roots of what become then

the East West Coast beef comes out of the kind of animosity that cats out here felt for not getting the kind of respect you know they used to say like all that L.A. shit

sounds country they rap too slow they don't really ride the pocket properly you know there's all this like all that LA shit sounds country they rap too slow they don't really ride the pocket properly you know there's all this kind of tropes which sounds country oh yeah

but I mean the same shit that's been said now about Mumba rap yeah same shit that was said about rap from the south yeah

you know what I mean and this is just you know the kind of insecurity of New York cats realizing that they losing their their shine

you know that their shit is now starting to be practiced in other places and and I do see that the Tim Dogg song Fuck Compton yeah

I view that as a huge act of insecurity oh totally it's Tim Dogg because he even raps in an old school kind of Eric B and Rakim style

it's kind of like trying to force it's a conservative song we are conserving and preserving how hip hop is in New York and fuck any of you out west of like trying to force this it's a it's a conservative song we are conserving and preserving how hip-hop is in new york and fuck any out west who are trying to do it differently this is supposed to be yeah yeah fuck that um so what was it like first meeting easy e how did it happen how did you first meet easy i think i so like you have to imagine i'm at

i'm at Cal Arts I'm trying to make this documentary project which becomes it's not about a salary because you wrote a book called it's not

because this is how if I want to tell you how I first heard about Brian Cross so I was in my bedroom 2005 2006

and I first started to make hip hop beats in my room and I my older brother who was big into music and taught me everything I know about production he stuck his head in the door of my bedroom and said what are you doing

and I said well here's what I'm doing I'm trying to make beats that sound like half public enemy with a bit of west coast but I'm rapping limerick stuff over it but I want to make it really mad Flann O'Brien limerick shit. And then my brother goes,

that sounds great. There was a limerick fella who wrote a book about the West Coast fucking scene there in 1991. It was really revolutionary. I'm like, what? There was a limerick lad

who wrote about rap in the fucking early 90s. He's like, what was his name? Brian Cross, yeah. He used to hang around with Barry Warner. So that was when I first heard about you I was like

I need to know about this limerick fucking man who wrote about hip hop in 1991 in Los Angeles I couldn't believe it then I went on to Amazon couldn't find your fucking book

and ten years later I finally have a copy of the book because you just gave it to me tonight it's not about a Saturday basically so I was at Cal arts and this guy

mike davis is writing this book about la and basically said to me you know there there's a really there is a really there is a growing interest and lack of understanding around the city and there's a lot of interest in my book and you know you always talk to me about this rap shit why the fuck are you not photographing it? And I was just like, you know the kind of thing where it's like, you know, probably because there's somebody from rap that's already doing it, and, like, you know what I mean? And what I came to realize, of course, is that, like, you know,

as with a lot of things in this country, it looks very different from far away. I remember Olin from All City in Dublin coming here to go to Low End Theory, which at that moment was the most important thing in terms of beat related music in the world. And you go there and it's like an 18 and over club. What's Low End Theory? I know Low End Theory as the album. There's the album but then it becomes a movement where all these cats

like after the death of Dilla. Was that Native Tongues? Oh no, this is way beyond. This is way beyond this. Like that's the second record by Tribe.

That's like from 91 and basically it was the name of a club that used to happen every, I believe, Wednesday night. I'm open to correction

on that one but every Wednesday night in LA and it was really about the notion that like after the death of Dilla that you know instrumental beat driven music

so it's like basically it's where Thundercat gets gets to do his thing it's where it's really Flying Lotus becomes the kind of figurehead of it but Flying Lotus come out of that scene and you know it's this and I remember Olin coming out here and being like and going there Flying Lotus becomes the kind of figurehead of it but Flying Lotus come out of that scene and

you know it's this I remember Olin coming out here and being like and going there and being like it's just a bunch of kids in a

you know a room with the carpet sticks to your feet like Costolo Costolo yeah that's fucking great I said the carpet

sticks to your feet and you said Costolo because that's exactly what I was thinking. Yeah, yeah. But Costolo's is a wonderful dive bar in Limerick. And apparently, Flan Costolo, who runs Costolo's, his brother has a Costolo's in San Francisco, apparently. I'll go way out of it. That's what I heard.

Oh, that's classic. So, like, imagine a Costolo's, basically. It's called the Airliner. And every Wednesday, then kids would go there and you know we used to say uh the theory is daddy kev which is a which is a who's their engineer like i was a kind of a sort of scientist of sound and then the uh he was the theory but the low end was this dude called sam and sam was like a dude from from england that had come out here as a basketball player huge guy like six nine uh and had got injured or whatever, didn't want to play basketball,

was recruited out here, but had some knowledge of sound systems from living in England as a young fella. So he's taken it from the Jamaican culture. He's a white guy from England, but do you know the way in England, they take sound seriously. Yes.

Here, they don't. Weirdly enough, even in the disco era, you never got to the level at the Jamaicans. The Jamaicans and sound as a whole, that's the whole thing right there.

I mean, I spent... Well, we can take it to fucking Kool Hark. Kool Hark brought that love of the sound system, took it to the Bronx. Come on. And everyone's like,

why is Kool Hark's party the best and that's the bark of hip hop because it sounds better than everybody else's party and he's taken that directly from Jamaica sound system culture and he's taken it directly

from Jamaica sound system culture that exists since World War II but that it exists actually throughout the Caribbean all the way to Brazil you know what I mean like after World War II there's this growth

in sound system culture the Jamaicans just do it better than anybody because the Jamaicans are all like you know fellas that work fixing televisions and shit so they're like eh I think The Jamaicans just do it better than anybody because the Jamaicans are all like, you know, fellas that work fixing televisions and shit. So they're like, eh, I think we can do it better.

Yeah. But it's all the way to Brazil. You have sound system culture in Brazil. You know what I mean? Where cats are like interested in music from elsewhere. Barranquilla in Colombia, man. You can't imagine. I mean, they call them pickups,

but it's sound systems, and's it's all west african music and i i say like you know you know you know music in the americas is like a is like a is like a long distance telephone conversation with africa fucking they had skype in fucking colombia since like yeah since the 50s you know they were they were they were they were bootlegging Ethiopian music. The first covers of Fela Kuti in the Americas is in Colombia. It's not in fucking North America. It's in Colombia. But sound system culture is obviously,

this is the kind of, that's the center of it. So you can imagine a bunch of fellas over here in fucking the equivalent of Costolo's every Wednesday go there and play instrumental music, and it becomes a fucking worldwide phenomenon. And then it allows people to listen to music in a different way, which allows for this resurgence of, let's say, jazz, where you have Comercy Washington and Thundercat and all these dudes.

And it's a fucking Costolo's, dude. I mean, you know, Olin come out and he was like, I'm kind of underwhelmed. And I'm like but it's you know what it is it's what you were saying actually which is the idea that it's a

you know like if you're thinking about the rubber bandits as like a bunch of friends yeah you know let's

the world of therapy in a safe space yes you know where it's like you can say whatever you like and it is a safe space no one else is going to hear this only the boys

only you only the boys the boys will Only you. Only the boys. The boys will tell you after you've said something fucking stupid that you shouldn't have said. Yeah. But it's basically an autonomous space. And an autonomous space for Africans in America. Like people of African descent. Pretty much you can...

I mean, that's American culture, man. That's the fucking blues. That's fucking jazz. That's funk fucking blues. That's fucking jazz. That's funk. That's fucking hip-hop. And it's something special happens. It's something special happens when a community that otherwise is denied access has an opportunity to speak amongst themselves.

So if you look at places like The Good Life or The Low End Theory or the Park Jams or you can look at any city in the fucking, you know, the Go-Go scene. Go-Go is Washington, or you can look at any city in the fucking, you know, the go-go scene. Go-go is Washington, D.C.? D.C., yeah. Which is a fucking bizarre type of music. Yeah, amazing, amazing. It's phenomenal, but for me as a musician,

sometimes it sounds out of time, and I realize I don't even understand that piece. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the only go-go song that really ever made it, One Thing by Amory. Oh, man man that shit is fucking savage that's an amazing song

savage that's the that and Chuck Brown Chuck Brown but there's a BDP it's a classic first album BDP

song I'm spacing on it now that's a go-go sample that to me is like like bananas yeah but you know this is regional I mean it's not that different

than you know ghetto tech in Baltimore footwork in Chicago you know this is regional I mean it's not that different than you know ghetto tech in Baltimore footwork in Chicago you know the techno thing in Detroit you know

these are all kind of regional scenes Baltimore house Baltimore house they call it ghetto tech oh do they yeah yeah it's like that like

obscene lyrics like and some of that to me I'm just like I don't I listen to a lot of Fucking To the Baltimore

Ghetto Tech And I'm like Jesus How are you even Listening to this I don't I don't understand That rhythm

Because you're not Dancing to it Yeah Like me listening to Footwork I was just like What the fuck Is this shit

Yeah And then I was I DJ'd at I DJ'd at this thing At the college And This girl came in And I hadn't seen her before

and she said do you have any footwork? I actually had this, one of them Damon Auburn Africa projects had been remixed by some footwork dudes and I was like oh yeah I played it and then I seen her dance and I was like Jesus Christ. But there's a thing about sound system culture actually is that it defies

genre in terms of, you know when you think of genre you think of like particular sets like particular palettes yeah i mean like we think of country and there's a certain set of instruments you think of there's a certain kind of rhythm that you think of in fact sound system culture defies genre in the traditional sense like for example like you have in brazil you have this music called Swingy, which is, like, it's, like, their version. Is it anything to Pasino de Romano? No.

Have you heard of that? No, what is that? All right, it's me pronouncing a Brazilian word really wrong to the point that you don't know what I'm talking about. But, Balé Funk. Balé Funk. There we go. So, Balé Funk is, like, that's the post-electro. That's their ghetto tech

yeah but I'm talking about the stuff that goes back to like the 60s where they'll have like the most advanced really swingy

kind of bossa nova played next to like rock around the clock by Lee Haley and the Comets next to

Check My Machine by Paul McCartney and you're like how the fuck? That's not a genre. What kind of music is that? Like Northern Soul. What kind of music is that?

It's music that works specifically for that sound system and those dancers. Yeah. And it's very fucking interesting because in a weird way for me, and that's what Ghost Notes is about somehow. Ghost Notes is your retrospective of your career. It's like a mid-career kind of thing.

To be honest with you, man, I'd done a bunch of work and I'd never digitized anything. It was just all analog. And then I had a sort of stroke of luck and I had a, well, I had a stroke of luck and then I ended up with this painting

that was worth the fucking obscene amount of money in this house, which as you can see, like a fucking seven-year-old could break in. Yeah. And my father was like, will you fucking get rid of that fucking painting, please? That's a bad impersonation. My father doesn't tell him that at all,

but get rid of the fucking painting because someone is going to see it and they're going to steal it. It was a Banksy painting, basically. Yeah, yeah. I've done a lot of work with Banksy over the years and and so I flagged it and then the deal was I'm going to buy myself a couple of really nice photographs that I like and then I'm going to buy myself a really good scanner and then I was like you know what I need to make

and you know I've been doing this work for like 25 years and I need to kind of make something that makes sense as an essay the way that I, you know, like the way that I think about photographs and the way I think about music and try to put it together like that. And that's the kind of thing, those kinds of connections, you know, like why is it that Colombians figured out Fela before North Americans? Like that stuff for me is fascinating, you know. You talking about, you know, coal being brought from the north of England and shale or vinyl being brought back in the hull of the boat and as a possible story for Northern Soul.

I don't know whether I found that out. I don't know. It sounds lovely. The Colombian one is that there was a German ship went by that was full of Hohner accordions on its way to fucking Argentina and it shipwrecked and all these accordions washed ashore because Colombians play German, there's no really Germans in Colombia, some but there's

not really and they in the coastal region in the north what would be the northeast of Colombia they play accordions like really crazy, like the accordions like really crazy. Like the accordion to me is the first synthesizer. You know, it's like they took the church organ

and they made it portable, you know. It's like they detuned the shit out of them and they fucking play like at a speed that when, you know, there's a famous story that they, in the late 60s, early 70s, Colombian accordion players recorded themselves and sent tapes to the honer factory uh to like see if they could get honer to send them accordions and the dudes in germany were like uh i don't know how you change the speed of the tape but like you know clearly the shipwrecked ship

from Germany is not the real story but somehow it's an origin story of sorts it's an origin story and it's nice and usually with these things

it's the most interesting version that we want to believe yeah I'm going to pause the podcast now so I can take a small piss is that alright Brian? as long as I can do the what's the instrument called?

as long as I can do the nose flute version of the what's the instrument called as long as I can do the nose flute version of the what's the instrument you call it my ocarina yeah you can do the

ocarina pause I'll tell you we'll give Brian the opportunity now all we've got is a tin of fucking young cider no no no

I'm gonna go hold on I was thinking about this yesterday coming up from the car I have a fucking nose flute from Brazil alright so

I'm gonna go for a slash and we'll be back on with the nose instead of the ocarina pause we've got the brazilian nose flute pause There you go So that was a man playing a flute with his nose And that is

On April 5th You must be very careful Margaret It's a girl Witness the birth Bad things will start to happen Evil things of evil It's all for you. No, no, don't.

The first O-Men. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year.

It's not real. It's not real. What's not real? Who said that? The first O-Men. Only in theaters April 5th. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishikesh Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Gimeno in conversation.

Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder, April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit TSO.ca. That was a Dilla song. Was it? Yep. Rico Suave, Bossa Nova.

Which is, yeah, it's a favorite Dilla joint. So if you heard that, that means that there was probably a little bit of an advert in there to sell you some shit you don't need. As always, you know the story. Look, this podcast is supported by you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast. If you can afford it, do. Give me the price of a pint once a month.

If you can't, you can listen for free york alright so this podcast so far has been a series of incredible tangents every time I've only managed to ask one question which was how did you meet Eazy-E and I've managed to not answer it successfully

we've ended up talking about fucking Costolo's the limerick soviet and sound system Colombian accordions We've ended up talking about fucking Costolo's, the limerick Soviet, and... Sound system culture. Colombian accordions. Colombian accordions. So what was it like meeting Eazy-E for the first time? How did it happen? Obviously, you know, look,

I'd seen him on fucking television. I remember one of those music programs on Channel 4 had NWA on, and... That was probably like what? Your man Marc Lamar. What was... The Word. The Word. The Word used to... They used to have a bit of West Coast stuff in the early 90s.

I remember seeing the videos on YouTube. They treated it in a novelty way. They did. There was an interview with Snoop and I felt they didn't. No. He was very much, it was Mark Lamar interviewing Snoop because I used a sample of that in the song Pure Awkward. I took a sample of Snoop's interview and put it into the song Pure Awkward. But Mark Lamar is kind of asking him, he's kind of saying to him,

oh, you advocate selling drugs and things like that. And it was very much a privileged position, not understanding where Snoop was coming from, not understanding the resistance of Snoop's voice, not understanding the authority that Snoop is talking against. And he was treated like a novelty. In the same way, he brought on MC Hammer and Mark Lamar came out in the silly MC Hammer

pants without realising MC Hammer is a man with serious respect in Auckland MC Hammer is a fucking legend he's the real deal but we just saw him as parachute pants No I remember the first time I seen NWA on TV at home

they had your man that was asking the questions which I presume is the smart Lamar dude they beeped him when he cursed but then they let NWA curse there you go which is like what the fuck is that exactly

buffoonery and coonery it's like fucking when Johnny Rotten went on that show and they cursed and the presenter was just like come on do more curses yeah so it's

it's novelty eyes in them it's not taking them seriously yeah look at these black lads from America doing curses aren't they so bold yeah

this will frighten your children yeah and not respecting the art no and then it kind of infant infantilizing yeah um

so then uh I come here. I'm at CalArts. I'm doing my thing. And then I start to pick up a little bit of side gigs. Of course, I have this narrative now. Mike Davis, his book comes out and it's a success. And then he says, you know, you should fucking, you should do a book about L.A. hip-hop, and I'm like, okay,

and then, so I, I, in earnest, I, I kind of started, like, he, he said, you know, I, there's this French journal, wants me to edit an issue about LA, I want you to do a photo essay for it, and, you know, it's like, you know the deal, I ended, you know, I'm in the middle of grad school, nobody's really taking that seriously, so here's this guy that wants me to do his photo. I say, okay, I'll fucking do it. And in the first month, I met both the Freestyle Fellowship and the Watts Prophets,

which really changed my vision. Who are the Watts Prophets? So the Watts Prophets are like, you know, the easiest way to describe them would be that they're like the West Coast version of the Last Poets. Yeah. Although they're different

in sort of interesting ways. And the Last Poets were kind of Black Panther era. It was spoken word. Spoken word, proto-hip hop, sampled by a lot of cats.

They were using bongos. Gil Scott Heron is from that too, yeah. And the Watts Prophets were the version out here. It was quite theatrical. They were activists

they're based out of watts um it's led by this cat that i'm still friends with father amdi an amazing figure spoke at the funeral of bob marley um you know just a really important figure out of watts and somebody who really you know i start to meet elders who, as opposed to being infuriated by hip-hop, are actually really feeling enthused and inspired by it. So I come back to Mike, I show him as far as I got the first month, and he was like, Jesus Christ, there's a book. And is Mike your tutor at this point or something? He's a temporary lecturer at the school,

because he has this Irish wife, and i'm hanging out with him and he's and then i don't know anything about la and his version of la a kind of blue collar uh marxist ground up kind of version of la is like way more interesting than anything from tv or you know and it does kind of align in some weird way with like, you know, that was the thing for me. It was like, like, okay, hip hop in Ireland as something that you listen to that gives you a good vibe and you get hyped up about it is one thing. But then when you come here and you realize that everything you've ever seen in films or contemporary art or literature or the news or whatever

hasn't really prepared you for what the reality of the united living in urban united states is like yeah more than hip-hop then you're like wait a minute this thing that i was just thinking of as this art form actually is the most useful fucking thing i suddenly know all these all this slang all this stuff about the street you know all these things all this useful stuff stuff for me is coming from this music. I start to think about it and, you know, it becomes a much more important part. But that was from 88, you know, like when I come back, I was already like, I knew what was up. And so then Mike was like, well, you know, like your, your perspective on this is really fucking interesting

and you should, you know, let's try to do something with it. and so you know now I'm starting to get a little bit of traction I'm starting to and I started you know I started to get uh the odd gig where they would ask me to to uh you know do stills on music videos or you know go out to clubs that there's you know there's this new club and then just do this you know whatever can you go and so I started to like write a little bit of social stuff taking social photos and do whatever, can you go? So I started to write a little bit of social stuff, taking social photos and do stills on music videos. Just basically making myself available to the community that I'm making my work in, honestly. It wasn't like some fucking grand scheme to have a career or something. I wasn't even, you know what I mean? That didn't exist

yet, let's say. And yeah, Eazy was the only member of NWA you would see at the club. Yeah. Dre was kind of scandalized. Dre is at the studio anyway, man. Dre is not that social. Yeah. Cube is a nerd. Cube is at the office.

Yeah. Cube ain't at the club. Yeah. But Eazy is, it's Eazy, dude. Yeah. He's at the club. Bit of a Eazy-E is, it's Eazy-E, dude. Yeah. He's at the club. Bit of a mad bastard. He's a bit of a mad bastard.

Very sweet guy, actually. Yeah. Like a very generous, kind of sweet dude. Funny as shit. Yeah. And tiny. Yeah. What Father Amdi calls the South Central Pygmies.

You know, Kendrick and all these dudes. There's a lot of dudes that are very little guys. And he's always like, yeah, it's because we got the South Central Pygmies. Which is funny. And AZ is just kind of this larger-than-life character. And at that time, his big hot shit thing was he was basically signing the Black Eyed Peas. Okay, wow. But they weren't called the Black Eyed Peas yet.

They were called the At Band Clan. Okay? And I knew them dudes because I knew Will and them. Like, Will and them, they were all out of the projects. And you would see them. There was this place called the Hip Hop Shop

and you would see them. And so, you know, I started to see them. And then, you know, like within a year, there's an opportunity for an album cover to be done. He has a really specific idea. The lady at Relativity, which was the label that distributed Priority at that time, asked me, would I be interested in, uh, would I be interested in

shooting it? And I was like, fuck yeah. So he said, drop off your portfolio. And there was another photographer. I, it was the beginning of when I was starting to work for, I don't know if I actually started to work for Rap Ages yet, but it was like close to the beginning. And yeah, there was this other photographer from the Bay Area that he was the only other photographer that had rap shit in their portfolio. And Eazy knew me from the club and was like,

nah, let's use him. And I was green. I mean, I didn't know what I was doing, man. I mean, I had a master's in photography, but in this realm, that wasn't worth the shit, you know? Um,

and so, yeah, he, I went and met him, and like, of course, he knew me, like,

I knew him from the club or whatever, but, super nice guy, had this idea, where he was gonna, you know, Dre is dead to me. Okay.

And I'm gonna pour out this 40, and that's, that's what I want on the cover, is me pouring out this 40. Like, you know Dre is dead to me okay and I'm gonna pour out this 40 and that's that's what I want on the cover just me pouring out this 40 like you know what they do

so this is post MWA post MWA is just just broken and him and Dre are not friends anymore him and Dre are not friends

and has Dre found death row at this point not yet okay and the thing at the time was like

if you popped up if you opened a beer I mean still the same you pour out some for the homies that aren't here is what they would say. And this was like

Dre is dead I'm pouring out the drink. No the record was called 187um like he murdered Dre. Okay yeah. So I was like ooh you know

wow that's that's pretty intense. But how literal was that? Not literal. Not literal, yeah. Because that's what people on our side over in Ireland and the UK were like, all right, it's literally about killing Dre. This is murder music.

As opposed to looking at the metaphor. Yeah, but even going back to Jamaica the soundboy killing you know this is just part of the culture I mean just cause you say it's like that song do you ever hear the song by

Cody Ranks yeah what's the song six million ways to die choose one that one yeah and I love

what I love about that song is that he sounds like he's from Ennis or Tipperary and it's you get that Irishness coming out into Jamaica and talking about, I'm going to take a hacksaw and cut off their tongues.

And to me, that's the most fucking Irish song ever. Dup-a-dil-dil-dil-dun-a-sign-on-the-wheel. He sounds like he's from fucking Tip. So, no, I mean, the whole thing is that it's like, I mean, I think this is part of the problem somehow around the understanding of the music. There's a level of... I mean, it's fucking literature. There's levels here.

Yes, yes. And if you're not actually paying attention to the levels... And you look at it literally. You're looking at this stuff literally, you're thinking like, Jesus Christ. This guy's murdering all kinds of fucking people here. But it's not. It's not, yeah. It's not that.

And so it was that, you know. But it was serious too. I mean, they were definitely having a it was that you know but it was serious too I mean they were definitely having a falling out you know yeah but I don't think EZ had been

threatened by Suge yet you know it wasn't like there yet like it was in the kind of like before that moment and what happened with that shit

so when Suge Knight gets involved I'm robbing the fags off your brain I'm sorry no no rob him rob him I wish this fucker

would drive down and get us more fucking cigarettes we've got Dan here from Dublin. Give us a shout out there, Dan. Sorry, buddy. And he says it in a fucking limerick accent. What kind of limerick accent is that?

But, uh... What was it like when Suge Knight got involved? Was that real shit? Did you ever meet Suge Knight? Yes. Was he as scary as people say he was? Yeah. I mean, he's a pretty formidable person.

Okay, look. At that time, this is the moment where the whole thing starts to look like, actually, this could be a million-dollar industry. So now a whole other level of people start getting involved. Now it's not just the homies, you know what I mean? It's not like the heads that are in it for the love and all the dysfunctional fucking figures

you could expect involved in any scene, especially a hip-hop scene which is already like built, a technology built to help people that don't have voices. Because the way I always look at it

with early gangster rap is like, yes, there were lads from fucking Compton and they grew up hard, but ultimately at the end of the day they're fucking artists. And they're... You know, Dre was a really good fucking DJpton and they grew up hard, but ultimately at the end of the day they're fucking artists. And they're...

You know, Dre was a really good fucking DJ. I mean, he could mix records out here better than anybody. But that was his fucking thing. People who are passionate about their fucking art are avoiding the violence, are avoiding that shit when they can because they care about their artists, they care about the art. None of those

those are up to I mean minor shit you know like selling weed or you know stuff that you get released from prison

for now you know what I mean stuff that you know hood economics shit not like out murdering motherfucking people

and shit like nah there was people doing that sort of stuff for sure but not them they wouldn't have ever made it

no no no no there was I mean they're in the period after that do you look at it now do you know the way now people doing that sort of stuff for sure but not they wouldn't have ever made it no no no no no there was i mean they're in the period after you look at it now do you know the way now uh a lot of rappers we're definitely seeing now with contemporary rappers a lot of fellas who are genuinely going down for murder fellas now who are full-on gang heads but the thing is is that for them to release music just means making a track in your fucking friend's house and putting it straight onto SoundCloud. And as a result of that, you're seeing people with less effort

and then they're going away to jail. Whereas back then, maybe... To actually make the music took up way more of your time and effort and discipline. You were talking about the streets, but you weren't living it as such. But now, the ones that are living it, they're releasing one song and they're straight away to jail. But even in that era, there were... Tekashi 6ix9ine, Bobby Shmurda, people like that.

They're gone. Right. But in that era, there were cats. There were groups that were just crip or blood groups. If you think of... Battle Cat did a record around that period called Crips and Bloods Banging on Wax. So there was groups like Tweety Bird and Loke and all those... When the Crips and Bloods Banging on Wax So there was groups like You know Tweety Bird and Loke

And all those When the Crips and Bloods Tried to get together Well that did happen You know But even like The likes of fucking Like DJ Quick

He didn't have a C in his Quick Because he was a Blood So he wouldn't put a C in there Yeah MC8 Yeah You know what I mean There was that thing

Where you could not have a C or a K Depending on your alliance Yeah That was the real deal I'm guessing Yeah That was the real deal I assume out guessing. Yeah, that was the real deal. I assume out of all of them,

DJ Quick seems to me like the most genuine gangster, as in with connections. There's a lot of fucking, there's a lot of cats that have genuine connections. But the thing to understand, look,

the thing to understand about gangs or gang culture in general in this city is gang culture here was a defensive action by fucking young African-American kids against fucking white racist fucking groups general in this city is this gang culture here was a defensive action by fucking young african

american kids against fucking white white racist fucking groups that would come into their neighborhoods and would stop them from getting on the bus and would beat the fuck out of them yeah so it was this it was this in in a in a in a kind of in a similar kind of way bastards of the party is a great documentary but it talks about this where, like, if you think of the Panthers as one kind of social formation, then gangs in Southern California are another. And I mean, it's not just in California. California is the one that got the hype, and obviously

the branding out here is pretty fucking good. Obviously, Bloods and Crips are everywhere now. But, you know, like, Chicago has a very strong gang tradition amongst black fucking kids. Detroit has a gang tradition.. Detroit has a gang tradition. New York has a gang tradition. But really what it is, what are gangs?

Gangs really are fucking neighborhood groups. Yeah. But when it's a neighborhood group and the action is defensive, it's different. But it's not just, I mean, these people didn't just produce violence. These people also produced amazing things. You know, breakdancing as we know it, at least 50% of it comes from this city. This isn't really, you know, written into the tablets of hip-hop history.

But, you know, crip-walking, popping, locking are L.A. things done by neighborhood gangs as a way to express their identity. I think Quick would say that crip walking came from the Mexican hat dance, that the African-Americans took that from seeing Mexican-Americans doing a dance around a hat. And that then developed into the blood walk and the crip walk followed the blood walk. the blood walk and the crip walk followed the blood walk i am not so sure that it's that simple but uh i i probably would have to differ with quick on that one but we could get into it but what would you uh reckon the influence of chicano uh dress sense and style and culture and how that influence african-american very strong very very strong Yeah, I mean, you know, sagging, pressed jeans, certain kinds of cuts, certain kinds of, you know, in the details.

Obviously, you know, car culture, you know what I'm saying? Like, there's a lot of crossover, but it's very strange. I mean, it's strange in a sense that there is, especially in the jail system here, which is very, very important, there is a, you know, there's a traditional kind of animus that exists between brown and black kids. However, there is this extraordinary conversation that exists between brown and black kids where brown kids listen to old soul oldies

sung by black men, even though they would never be in a room with a black... You know, like you flip the record over and it's a funk record, they would never, never play that. They'll play the oldie, the slow one, the sad one, and then flip it the other way, you have all kinds of the way, the sag, you know, like...

The thing that I think people doesn't understand really about West Coast hip-hop is the... Is there no more cider left? No, it's all gone. What kind-hop is that the prison system is where it all starts to... You know, you look at Cube in the kind of post, what we would call out here, the sort of post-Dass FX Cube, like where Mac-10 starts. Well, Mac-10 just got out of jail. Yeah.

And so suddenly there's a whole new kind of lexicon in Cube's music because he's writing with so when I listen to Ice Cube's early stuff

no no no his first album is like America's Most Wanted and Kill It Will and I hear him working with East Coast producers

like fucking Hank Shockley Hank Shockley do you think that was a fuck you to Dre it's like Dre you might be the best on the West Coast but I'm going to go to the East Coast producers like fucking Hank Shockley Hank Shockley do you think that was a fuck you to Dre it's like Dre you might be the best

on the West Coast but I'm gonna go to the East Coast and find Hank Shockley in Public Enemy's producer and bring this because I Cube's earliest

solo records it's East Coast beats for West Coast raps political raps yeah I don't know that necessarily it was a fuck you but I think

you know the notion was if you wanted to make a serious statement that the Shockleys provided like what they call, like it was the hip hop equivalent of Phil Spector. It was like the wall of sound. Do you think because Ice Cube's, so Ice Cube's solo records for me, they're very political in a way that I don't associate with early West Coast. Early West Coast is smoking weed and partying, but then Cube comes out with the solo records that are, this is political, this is about the LA riots. Do you feel that maybe he was like, I want public enemy beats to make this political message sound more authentic,

because over West Coast beats, you don't associate political lyrics with this sound. Fuck the police Is pretty political Let's just Of course Deflate this Let's just like

Turn that one on its head Really quick I think Cube has an agenda there I think Cube Has recently converted To the nation Yeah

Which is much more An East Coast thing Than out here Was much stronger In the East And I think you know In terms of framing A certain kind of Speech a certain kind of speech,

a certain kind of black utterance at that time, the Shockleys were doing, you know, with Public Enemy, were doing something that was, like, really fucking advanced. And it was a very particular thing. You know, it was like Pooh or Dre or, you know, Slip or any of the early West Coast producers, the sound, you know, Shockley's had a very, it was a very specific thing.

It wasn't like it was contingent on the sample or whatever. It was like they built up this kind of multilayered kind of sound. And I think he wanted, yeah, I think he wanted that. I think he had a I mean I think if you could say anything about Cube from that moment it's Cube takes Cube very seriously yeah which he should because those first three

I don't see those the guy can write that's the disappointing thing to me when you see straight out of Compton is that I'm like dude were you fucking phoning it in or like how did you let this happen? Like, that's not the nuance of Cube. Like, Cube as like a really sophisticated person,

as somebody who's really able to kind of gather up thoughts, like what, you know, Kevin Barry would call like, you know, finding rap, finding fiction, finding language. He didn't do a good job. When it came down to it, they were settling scores with Straight Outta Compton, which I thought was really

Do you see a parallel between the limerick writer Kevin Barry and Ice Cube? Sure. In the way of finding... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Because Kevin, as you know, I had him on this podcast kevin is someone i really fucking look up to as a limerick writer for me kevin gives me he gave me the when i first started writing short stories kevin gave me the confidence reading i've never read anybody where i felt like he's writing us yes yeah and and to meet him of course then and realize like you know, well, he is one of us, obviously, but, like, just the, there's a difference between being of it and being able to, and that's Cube.

That's Cube. You know, Cube, maybe not the most gangbanger, weed-slanging dude of his crew, but somehow he was able to voice it. Yeah. And this is the tricky thing about uh and it's something i wanted to talk to you about actually which is about authenticity is that cube may not be the most authentic uh cat in that group like he's the nerd yeah you know he's the guy who i'm gonna take a break from the group yeah i'm gonna take a break from the group

for a while and go study in Arizona Because my parents want me to Yeah I'm getting bussed to the valley You know I'm not going to school in Compton I'm not going to school in South Central I'm going to the valley Yeah

Far Valley I'm going to the same school As House of Payne Yeah I'm going to Taft High School Far Valley But somehow I'm able to voice it

And And he could And he really Because he sounds really Fucking hardcore Man Death certificate Death certificate Death certificate Jesus Christ Come on it and and he could because he really sounds really fucking hardcore and death certificate ah death certificate jesus christ come on i mean that's he really really you know uh robert so he had an ear he has an ear and then i don't know like because it's an ear is like well that

recorder has an ear yeah no he has a brain attached to an ear that's able to take. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, that's Kevin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, there's a thousand conversations at the Supermax. He just happens to fucking find the one. Kevin is able to find the absolute fucking best ones. Yeah, like the one that you're like, oh shit, that's Supermax.

You read five lines of Kevin Barry and you fucking prick. Yeah. How did you get that? Yeah. No, it's ridiculous. I mean, it's fucking amazing, you know. And Cube, you know's ridiculous i mean it's fucking amazing you know so and cube you know that i mean that's that's cube you know i mean that that and it doesn't that thing it you know a lot of times doesn't come with a it's not so easy in the end you know to

come with a big responsibility sometimes i feel like yeah and he you know he was that like he was the most serious cat out here for a long minute you know people really regarded him and I think then he backed himself out of it you know

like he cause like fuck shit I could just go do films movies you know

cause I mean no disrespect to Ice Cube but I mean like post 1993 I'm not listening to a lot of... When it's like, if you can do it, put your back into it. Right.

I'm not really listening to that, but... No. Kill It Will, America's Most Wanted, and Death Certificate. The Holy Trinity of those three albums. Fucking hell. That's rap at its peak. Yeah. Do you know?

And for me, like like I fucking love Public Enemy I love Public Enemy but Cube did the Public Enemy political shit and it sounded scary and dangerous in a way that

with Public Enemy like again it's no disrespect to them with Cube sounded like I'm actually gonna do this stuff he's younger and he's a different

kind of storyteller than Chuck man I mean Chuck is like the village like Chuck is somewhere between the last poets and Cube do, man. I mean, Chuck is like the village... Chuck is somewhere between the last poets and Cube. Do you know what I mean? Generationally, literally he is, but also

in terms of the concept of what he's trying to do. Because Chuck D was older. Chuck D was like 28 when they started with Public Enemy. Cube's like 20. Yeah. Cube's coming out like... Yeah. I mean, I remember meeting him and, you know, like, I mean, it was intimidating, dude. Like Cube was when I met him in that era, you know, like, you know, F. Gary Gray is doing the is doing all the videos.

And, you know, you know, you meet Cube and Cube is, you know, super the nation. All the dudes from the nation are with him it was intimidating I was like whoa but then after It's Not About A Salary came out I met him and he said yeah man you know I really like the book I really feel like you

told a lot of shit the way it was supposed to be told and I was like wow I'll take that that's fucking praise from Caesar. That's cool. Yeah. That's cool. What was it like first meeting Tupac for the first time?

I really, I would say, I was in the room with Tupac probably two or three times. The only time I really, really met him, I was the stills photographer on Dear Mama. Yeah. And, you know, i had this kind of i mean i have a kind of ambiguous relationship to tupac in some respects in the sense that like whenever he was out here like he was one of those dudes that was like nobody like okay we knew you know like you knew

that dudes were like doing, doing crazy shit. Okay. Yeah. But, like, hip-hop in those days, like, you couldn't wear a baseball cap to the club. You know, because it was gang-related. You couldn't wear a bandana. You couldn't wear... A lot of clubs, a lot of times, you couldn't even wear sneakers, dude.

I know. Because I'm thinking WC and the Mad Circle dress code. Yeah. That song. No, dude dude that's it like you know which is an amazing song you should listen to

it was Coolio yeah we know Coolio from Gangsters Paradise but Coolio was an incredible fucking rapper he was in a band called WC and the Mad Circle

they have a couple of albums fucking unbelievable DJ Aladdin was the DJ DJ fucking Aladdin he was also the DJ for Ice T's low profile

best shit DJ Aladdin yeah yeah Home Invasion Home Invasion yeah and he was in the DJ for Ice T's low profile best shit DJ Aladdin home invasion home invasion yeah and he was in a group with low profile with WC before that

but anyways you know Tupac was the type of dude that would show up to the fucking I remember going to see Gran Puba playing in Pasadena

yeah come on man it's Gran Puba dude it's like the 5 percenters in New York the conscious stuff like Puba you know the dude's like the Five Percenters and New York, the conscious stuff. Like, Puba, you know, the dude that brought you

Tommy Hilfiger. Why are you there rocking a fucking bandana, like, cripped out? Like, nobody can even wear a baseball cap in a damn club. And then you've got to show up, like, extra.

But he was allowed to do it because he was Tupac. He was a movie star. Yeah. He was a movie star. And he was a movie star. I mean, he was really... Do you feel that Tupac. He was a movie star. He was a movie star. And he was a movie star. Do you feel that Tupac maybe appropriated the gang culture of the streets

that he wasn't associated with? I think, you know... Tupac did not grow up in gangs. He grew up in the projects in Marin, and then I guess he grew up in New Jersey. He was a panther baby, but he didn't come out of that kind of culture. No, not really. You know what I mean? I think, you know, it's one of those things where this is a cat that deeply understood that

uh in order for him to make you know for his life to have any meaning he needed to make sense for his people like he felt he like he that that was in his body like he he understood that but that in that moment uh you know the the the the way like you know it's it's just it's just one of those things like where it's like you you should if you have to wear it on your sleeve yeah it's probably not real and then like why are you at the grand poobah concert wearing yeah you know and then the next minute I turn around and your shirt's off entirely, like when nobody was doing, you know what I mean? But is it like, to take it back to Limerick, if you get hassled in Limerick,

the lad who's doing the most talking is the one who probably isn't, who you shouldn't be looking out for. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And Tupac had a vibe of that about him. He was just, it was extra, you know? Like, it was kind of lippy, and he was kind of loud, and he was kind of, you know.

But, look, Tupac's also a Gemini. His birthday is very close to mine. And Tupac wore, you know, you know Werner Herzog? I do, of course, know Werner Herzog. So Werner Herzog has this... A man who made a documentary about eating his own shoe. Do you know what I'm saying? I fucking know about a Herzog

Dieter loves to fly but he Herzog has this idea of like the performed self yeah like not some stable notion

of who you are that's like this mustard seed your soul inside you but that's something that you're

creating and recreating like memory or anything else you know all the time a living sculpture yes and Tupac is that like who are the two boys who are the fucking two English lads Gilbert and George the living sculpture ah here now

would you see a Gilbert and George living sculpture type of thing with Tupac taking it back to Herzog ah I wouldn't see it in Gilbert and George per se, but I think there are plenty of examples of folks that, you know, had complex

lives where they veered from being... Look, the real thing to understand with Cube is this. Look, it's the Eric Hobsbawm thing, man. Banditry. Yeah. Tupac is a bandit. Yeah.

But it's a bandit that could be a tender dear mama, could be a fucking prick at the club, could be the ladies' man and date and fucking Quincy Jones' daughter, and could show up in the fucking projects and everyone would fucking love him. You know, I mean love him that's the thing as well, Tupac brought if you think of songs like Dear Mama

he brought a type of sensitivity that was only permissible in R&B, I'm going to go one step further, you're going to go LL Cool J I Need Love, no, which was written by Christy Moore's fucking brother, I know did you know this, LL Cool J had a song called I Need Love from the late 80's and it was written By Christy Moore's Fucking brother I know Did you know this LL Cool J had a song Called I Need Love

From the late 80s And it was written By Christy Moore's Brother Luca Bloom Luca Bloom No one knows that But did Luca Bloom Do a cover of it

Or he actually wrote it Oh shit no No I'm sorry You're dead right LL Cool J wrote I Need Love And Luca Bloom Did a cover of

I Need Love Which was a hit as well It was a huge hit yeah But Shout out to Christy Moore LL Cool J Indeed LL Cool J wrote I Need Love and Luca Bloom did a cover of I Need Love. Which was a hit as well. It was a huge hit, yeah. But LL Cool J, indeed. LL Cool J had this thing where he was able to talk about that he needed love or round the way girl. But LL Cool J was never, he was bad. He wasn't, I'm a killer. Bad in the Michael Jackson way warrior bad in the Michael Jackson way

bad in the Michael Jackson way he wasn't like I'm out here fucking repping our people and I'm going to lead the fucking revolution and he was very honest about that

LL Cool J was Will Smith before Will Smith he's like Will Smith it's a very that's the and he wore it on his sleeve and you have to respect

it says LL Cool J wasn't like I'm a gangster it's like no no no this is my thing no whereas Pac actually

there's a vulnerability in Pac that's the thing weirdly enough there's a vulnerability in Biggie I personally there's a big vulnerability

in Biggie for me I prefer Biggie to Tupac if you ask me to bust out what record am I busting out I'm busting out a Biggie record

Me too You know Ready to die to me It's like Dude like Wow That shit really You know

Which I mean Now you're allowed to say it I mean Growing up You were You had to be Biggie or Tupac Not for me But you know

Well in Limerick Oh in Limerick Sorry In Limerick Fucking I had to be Tupac In public And Biggie in private

you couldn't say in Limerick Tupac just attained a strange folk status in Limerick Tupac is a whole other thing there was murals of Tupac in Limerick Tupac is a deity in the way there's

murals of Che and Kilkey well now Che Guevara has got the Kilke connection he does he's the lynches the lynches of Galway yeah but

the thing is is that on some fundamental level he stops being he transcends from being a you know

a political leader a revolutionary and he becomes a deity like it becomes like no matter what part of the world you go to you're going to find some fucker selling

a bootleg t-shirt that has fucking Che on it. Yeah. I don't give a fuck where you go. You can go fucking anywhere. Which you can take right back in Jim Fitzpatrick.

Of course. To this day, Jim Fitzpatrick. Jim Fitzpatrick. The reason that there's Che Guevara posters everywhere is Jim Fitzpatrick, an Irishman,

made the iconic image of Che, and he decided, I'm not putting a copyright on this. This is an open source image and as a result now you can buy it anywhere.

And in the way that people like Lampiao in Brazil or Pancho Villa in Mexico or these bandit figures that are like people that don't aspire to power. I don't want to be the president. I'm not interested in being the president or the king.

But I am interested in being this kind of dissident figure that's a glitch, like, you know, that's like a fucking, a rip in the fucking time-space continuum and a fucking thorn in the side of anybody who's asserting privilege, asserting fucking power, asserting fucking repressing people. I'm this kind of dissident, unpredictable figure. And Pac is that.

A trickster. A trickster. Yeah. And, you know, Big never, dude, he died when he was 26. I know. It's, I mean, you know, like this is. That's the freakiest shit. I'll tell you something.

I'm looking at photographs of either of them and going, they were fucking 22, 23. It's fucked, you know. I'm looking at photographs of either of them and going they were fucking 22, 23 it's it's fucked do you know like I mean even Kurt Cobain as well like I mean Jedward are older

than Kurt Cobain yeah do you know what I mean it's nuts what do you think of I heard something recently Kurt Cobain is more relevant

to the rappers of today than Tupac if you listen to yeah yeah no I mean I understand Trippie Redd

XXXTentacion Lil Peep you hear Kurt Cobain in there and they almost reject Tupac possibly I mean

you know I mean you can Kurt Cobain you know I mean there's a DJ Quick song that's a total fucking, there's a Tony, Tony, Tony song, Raphael Sadiq song, that's a total Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain did something very interesting, which is Kurt Cobain. He's very much embraced by the rap community.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think figures like Kurt Cobain work for the kind of rap that's being produced now. Very much so, yeah. In terms of a kind of... What's the influence of fucking drugs, man? Drugs, but as well, something... There's many critiques I have of the hip-hop I had growing up. The one thing that always...

The misogyny I always had to look over the misogyny and ignore it in order to enjoy the beat complicated difficult yes as I get older

it's like I'm listening to fucking like bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks and as an adult now I'm going Jesus lads

I'm just listening to the beat and I'm not with the lyrics but something happened I think the turning point for me was Tyler the Creator Tyler the Creator

it introduced a vulnerability Tyler the Creator circa 2011 introduced the capacity within rap music to speak about things like depression, anxiety, mental health and you can trace from Tyler the Creator now to the

acceptance of Kurt Cobain grunge and emo music that's now very prevalent in today's rap if you look at Trippie Redd or Little Peep or people like that I mean there's others involved, I mean I think De La to me for example as a group

that like, you know, always had this you know, the first song, you know, the first song about child abuse, the first hip-hop song about, you know, Millie pulled a pistol on Santa. You know, you think back to those songs. Ice-T has a song called The House. There's a house down the street where

the kids are. It's only a minute. It's on Original Gangster. And it's just a little quick, one minute song, and he's going there's a house down the streets where the kids are and every day

they seem to have a new scar and it's him listening to Domestic Abuse next door and he goes why won't anybody do something

call a cop then there's a pause at two bars the other night I heard gunshots oh wow and that's 1991 and it's Ice-T

just saying, kids next door, their parents are doing nothing, they're kicking the fuck out of them. I'm an adult, why don't I do something? I ring the police, everyone in the house is shot.

Yeah. I heard that when I was 11 and started crying. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, is it a thing where, like,

the way I always explain it is that there's a, there's like a kind of internal pendulum in the music. And on one side, it's like, it's like body, what we call body music. And on the other side, there's like the heady side. And what's interesting about what's happening in the music now is that they're, well, I mean, like social, I mean, look, you know, the era we're talking about is, you know, Walkmans, you know what I mean? Yeah.

It's like, whoa, fucking portable, fucking headphones. Now what are we dealing with? You know what I mean? It's like. Speakerphone. Yeah. And like in a, in a, in a, like where your entire world comes through the walk, man.

You know what I mean? Like the entire everything. Everything. And, you know, there's a whole different set of social, social issues, even the way we talk about certain kinds of social issues.

Good and bad. Different kinds of relationships to, to, to, you know, the kinds of drugs, the kinds of way people deal with... What do you think about when hip-hop started taking ecstasy around 2012? Well... Like Chief Keef out of Chicago starts talking about Molly Water, which is ecstasy crumbled into a fucking bottle of water.

Yeah. You know, when I first came to the States in 88 90 it was still legal here like fucking MDMA it was something

you could like it was legal in Texas there was I remember in Berkeley there was still there was a lab

that was doing experiments with it you could get it like it wasn't illegal you could get it but were yokes big in the 90s

yokes was a different thing it was rave culture and there was no bridge between here's one thing I'd love to fucking ask you about now

and I know very little about it and it's taken it away from hip hop but the early 90s East LA Latino scene

with backyard parties yeah and listening to kind of house music and doing yolks and it was the Latino community

have you any experience of that in the early 90s? Yeah, of course. What was that about? There's a whole kind of resurgence and re-historicization of that scene now.

And it was basically kids would like bunk off from school, go to a house party in East LA, start at 11 o'clock in the day and listen to fucking rave

and do yokes. That's their kind of proto-house or electro is this music called Freestyle. Let the Music Play by Shannon, for example, would be like a classic. But then it very quickly, you know, the Summer of Love flips it into like, it become like an acid house thing. It's huge. I mean, and it was a huge scene. But it was very Latino.

It was almost entirely Latino. Yeah. There was certain clubs, you know, on the east side of Hollywood that that's all they would play. I actually photographed a lot of those dudes

because I used to do a lot of work for this magazine called Herb. And Herb was, you know, this kind of brainchild of this young

African-American cat called Raymond Roker that was a place for all that stuff to exist together. So, you know, in the pages of that magazine you'd have... Is that the last fucking... There's a lot of fags over there. Not one that I can roll a spliff with. Dan's got fags.

I'm going to roll a spliff with this stuff. I will not wonder if I can roll a spliff. Ben's got fags. I'm going to roll a spliff with this stuff. But, you know, in the pages of Herb, those things live together. In the streets, not so much. But there's an Instagram account called Veteranas and Rukas. I follow that, yeah. Yeah.

And my friend designed, they just did a book of flyers and photographs and memorabilia from that period and my friend designed it and, you know, I mean, it's, you know, I remember it very well.

It's fucking mad. But LA is, you know, now it's challenging. And that's the, because some of the stuff, it goes back to the 70s. It's like the,

following the Pachuco's and how that goes into the Cholo scene and just this whole East LA Latino thing that was separate to hip hop but at the same time... Pachucos is rock and roll. What are Pachucos?

And is that the Zoot Suit riots? Yeah. So, damn, okay. I know I'm taking it back now. No, no, it's cool. I mean, this is all LA shit. I'm happy'm taking it back now. No, no, it's cool. I mean, this is all L.A. shit. I'm happy to talk about it. I mean, basically, you have, you know, this was Mexico.

Yeah. Up until the 1850s. It was, of course, yeah. This was Mexico. L.A. is fucking, yeah. It's Mexico. Mexico, yeah. And you know about the Brigada San Patricios, right?

Were the Irish lads involved with that? Yes. Is that where the term gringos comes from? No. Do you know what I heard about the term gringo? Yeah. So a lot of Irish lads came over to fight with the Mexicans against the Americans. Right.

And they used to sing a song, which is an Irish song called Green Grows the Grass at Home. Yeah, I know this. And the Mexicans started to refer to the Irish fighters as gringos. Green Grows the Grass at Home. Gringos, the grass at home. Gringos. That's a fucking new one. I never heard that. So, okay.

1850s, Alamo, all that shit. You have the Mexican-American Wars. The expansion of the United States westward, in this case into the southwest, which is, at that moment, Mexico. So they begin to fight the Mexican army. A load of fucking Irish fellas from, I mean, you know, the economic draft end up in the fucking army from Philly and fucking Boston and Chicago end up in the American army and go down to fight against these bad

Mexicans and realize, well, hold on a minute now. This is a fucking smaller country that's Catholic. Jesus, I don't think we're on the right side here, lads. Yeah. Switch fucking sides, lose, and all get executed en masse. And every year on St. Patrick's Day in Mexico City, they put a wreath on this fucking big monument. They were called the San Patricios, the St. Patrick's, for all these Irish fellas that did it.

I mean, really one of the fucking you know one of the most wonderful kind of gestures of solidarity that has existed on this continent yeah that's fucking phenomenal

fair play to the boys fair play to the lads like fucking yeah Jesus the corona test better than the Budweiser lads I was thinking but anyway

they all lost their lives In all seriousness Roy Cooter Made a record With the Chieftains About it actually Yeah There's never been a film

About it I didn't know that Roy I love that Roy Cooter Made a record With the Chieftains About it Yeah

So There was no rapping But anyways Fucking You know As part of that War And as part of that war and as part of that expansion of the United States,

basically the Southwest becomes part of the U.S. And then, you know, a massive Mexican population suddenly becomes nationalized. They become Americans. And there's all kinds of treaties that were made in that period where those people were supposed to be protected and it was supposed to be all good for them and they were supposed to have access to go back and forth.

And are these people indigenous Californians? Some of them are indigenous Californians. I mean, this is a complicated issue for Chicanos. Some of them are obviously Mexican, which is some mestizo Spanish indigenous mix. And some of them are just, you know, folks from, you know, like Mexicans. Very interesting, very progressive, very radical. They also believe that their, like, Tirnanog or, like, fucking mythical place is this place called Aslan.

And Aslan is here in California yeah and so is that like their Israel? sort of or yeah like there's a kind of Israel Tir na Nog you know it's this kind of utopian a chosen people who are supposed to find their way to this place

yeah and you know for the most part people that you know, for the most part, people that, you know, aren't part of the American project writ large for racial reasons, for class reasons, for cultural reasons that they're not, you know, they're not, you know, the white American thing is a very specific thing. It's not for everybody. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. specific thing it's not for everybody you know what i'm saying yeah yeah yeah and um they're these are deeply cultural folks man i mean you know like if you want to understand how to live

in this part of the world don't look at what the white people are doing or the black people are doing look what the mexicans are doing yeah you know that they figured out a way to eat the cactus they figured out a way to make stuff out of corn, like stuff that really grows here, not stuff that is imported or is some kind of... And as part of that is this very rich, very sophisticated iconography, sort of sets of cultural histories and trajectories and tropes, of which a lot of it is what we think of as, you know,

mainstream popular culture. And, you know, a lot of the flavor that people think about when they think of here, whether they think of lowriders or ponchos or fucking amazing fucking blankets or pottery or whatever it is, rock and roll is part of this discourse or discussion that exists between... Because the mad thing is, Brian, so I was... Yesterday I was doing my little Blade Runner tour.

Right. And I was up by the Bradbury building and I was in Grand Central Market, which features in Blade Runner. And like I said, the thing for Blade Runner for me is it's Los Angeles, November 2019. And in 1982, when they made Blade Runner Ridley Scott and Sid Mead predicted

that Los Angeles 2019 would be overcome by Asian culture Chinese and Korean and when I was in Grand Central Market I was like no it's South American it's Salvadorian it's Mexican that's what they got wrong well I mean there's you could I mean I could take you to

Monterey Park right now and we could you'd feel like oh shit the Koreans and the Chinese are actually here Los Angeles is a fucking extraordinary spread out very multicultural in a fairly interesting way in a way that's not

like London or New York or Paris where people actually get to have, you know, little Mexicos, little Chinas, little Koreas, little Chokyos, little whatever. Little Armenia. Little Armenia. Which is where we are right now. Little Armenia, little Filipino,

historic Filipino town. I went past the first Sikh temple in the United States just there to get in here like yeah and you know that's the you know that's the part of this mad

megalopolis that people really generally to be honest you know like you ask people people say come to LA and then they complain usually some bad stereotype about

how spread out it is or you know the difficulty of it is. Like, I'm going off to San Francisco next week and I can't fucking wait because I can just walk around the place. I can't walk around L.A. Well, if you're staying at the fucking standard in West Hollywood, you can't. Do you know what L.A. is like? Do you know the Dock Road in Limerick? Yeah. L.A. is the Dock Road on a horn.

It's just one big long dock road do you know what the dock road used to be? what? that used to be the red light district oh it fucking did indeed yeah it did and there's still one place beside Dolan's Warehouse

called Ma Rhynes and apparently that's still the same vibe it's still there but there's no one in there I mean that's the old school that was the

that was the brothel of Limerick it's still open I don't know if there's anyone practicing in there as a brothel but like there was a great are you familiar

with the Limerick artist Jack Donovan I do I am of course Jack Donovan a fucking legend and he used to go down around the dock road and he used to paint

what he would see in the brothels of Limerick which again it's because it was just beside the docks and you'd have a lot of soldiers coming in or Navy of of course.

Do you know about Jack Monday? No, tell me. Jack Monday is... Have you ever heard our song, Black Man? Yes. So we have a song called Black Man. Shot in the docks. Shot in the docks for one very specific reason.

Because there's a story in Limerick. In 1918... no, sorry, about 1920, would have been the height of the War of Independence, a ship came into the docks in Limerick. And it was a ship full of African carpenters. And this ship moored there, and these African carpenters stayed in Limerick for the week. And while they were there,

they noticed this tension that's happening in the country. They noticed the War of Independence. They were looking at the black and tans kicking the shit out of the people in Limerick. And one fella on the boat who was an African carpenter, his name was something Jacomundi or some African name, but the Limerick people heard it as Jackmundi. He got it into his head.

He's like, look at what's happening to the fucking Irish people. At that time, it was illegal to fly any... If you were coming out of Limerick docks, which in 1920 was British property, it was Britain, you had to fly a Union Jack. So Jack Monday, who was docking out, getting ready to go back to Africa with his carpenter, said, fuck this, I'm flying a tricolour.

So he raised the tricolour up on this ship in Limerick in 1920. Black and Tans went onto the ship, started baiting the shit out of the African carpenters. And this fella, Jack Monday, stabbed the Black and Tan, ended up in Limerick prison and then joined the RA. And this is the legend in Limerick that this fella, Jack Monday, who was an African carpenter, was imprisoned in Limerick prison and then joined the legend in Limerick that this fella Jack Monday who was an African carpenter was imprisoned in Limerick prison and then joined the IRA and he was the black man in the IRA in Limerick, Jack Monday, there's a coffee shop called Jack Monday's in Limerick now and that's where

I want a black man in my gang comes from and that's where we shot it on Limerick Docs because we shot that with Channel 4 and they were like look we want to shoot this in London, it'll be cheaper and I'm like no, we're shooting this in Limerick fucking docks because of Jack Monday. And there's a very specific subtext to this. And I don't give a fuck who fucking knows it or not. But this is why we're doing it.

It's this act of solidarity, dude. It's an act of solidarity. Yeah. I mean, that's a fucking beautiful story, man. When did you first work with Outkast? And when did you start going like Outkast being like okay I'm very familiar

with southern hip hop but the first time I really heard southern hip hop for me is when it trickled over

from Outkast I didn't know about Scarface I didn't know about UKG nothing like that you didn't know about Ghetto Boys

no really it didn't make it as far as Golden Disc because Ghetto Boys in some fucking weird way

was like my mind's playing tricks on me it was like such a but Southern Hip Hop at that point it was trying to sound like West Coast

there's a song about fucking mental illness there you go Scarface is a fucking legend I'll tell you a fucking crazy story about Scarface when I first started working for Rap Age

1994 working for Rap Ages first cover I shoot for them is a dude called Magic Mike DJ from Orlando selling records out of the trunk

making a fucking grip of money big deal okay didn't do a great job kind of didn't I I don't know it was

whatever reason I you know in those days I mean you know I never trained as a commercial photographer I didn't ever assist at anybody

so I was kind of making it up as I went along. So there were certain things that were working, certain things that weren't. Second job I got from him was go shoot Scarface. Go to Houston. But this is the days like, dude, there's no publicist.

There's nobody to meet us at the airport. And Southern rap was spat upon in the early 90s. Southern rap was seen as fuck off. We've already accepted that the west coast are going to do it. There's no fucking way the south are going to do it. Come on. So I go there. He's after moving into a house, like, on one of these, like, private lake.

And you have to buy the house. But he bought a house, and there's no fucking furniture. There's a pool table. There's a pool table. There's a bed in his room. Yeah. And then there's a bunch of relatives but there's no other furniture. There's couches

but there's no other furniture. And we're supposed to stay there for the weekend. And there's a guy who's like second only to Louis Farrakhan is staying there as well to meet with Brad Scarface.

Anyway, long story short, did the photos. We got shot at one night. I remember at the club. We went to this club and these dudes chased us and we got guns fired. What's that like,

getting shot at? It's really surreal. Because you were definitely not getting shot at in Limerick in the 80s. No, no, you weren't. I mean, in Limerick in the 80s you were liable to catch

a fucking dig or a hatchet or a headbutt. But the guns hadn't come to Limerick yet. But the guns weren't there yet, no, you weren't. I mean, in Limerick in the 80s, you were liable to catch a fucking dig or a hatchet or a headbutt. But the guns hadn't come to Limerick yet. The guns weren't there yet, no. It's fucking surreal, because generally getting shot at is something that happens in the past tense. You're like, when it happens, you're like, what was that? Was that a fucking gun?

And then everyone is like, Jesus, did you just say you remember the gun? It's like that. It's done. It's done already. It's already over. The funny thing, like, Jesus, did you say you remember the gun? You know, it's like that. It's done. It's done already. It's already over. The funny thing anyway was I remember meeting Bushwick and the Farsight actually played in Houston. They all came over.

Big Boy was with them. Big Boy, not Big Boy from Outkast, but Big Boy was the road manager of the Farsight, who's now like a huge radio personality here. And anyway, whatever. Did personality here. And. Anyway. Whatever. Did the photos. Came out good. Went back to LA.

Blah. Blah. Blah. Fast forward now. Fucking. 2012. So like. 20 fucking years.

Like. I don't know. What's that? Like. 28 years. I don't know. How many years later it is. 20 something years later fucking

I'm at a concert Quantic is opening for De La Soul at this concert on the west side of LA and my wife is singing with Quantic and and I'm friends with Paz from De La

and so after the show, I go back looking for Paz, and I seen him, and we were chatting and whatever, and it was normal shit. And whatever way out of the corner of my eye, I see, oh, Jesus fucking Scarface.

There comes Scarface. And I'm thinking, like, do you know that kind of situation where it's like, I'm going to get five seconds with this guy? Yeah. How do I tell him, I was in your house in 1994 and this whole, you know, this whole thing,

how am I going to make him remember that? Yeah, he's seen a lot of people. Dude, come on, he's fucking Scarface. Okay, so as he's walking towards me anyway, and I'm having a kind of fucking social anxiety of like, how do you, you know, fuck. And about 15 feet away, he starts pointing at me. And I'm like, what the fuck is this?

And he's like, you were at my fucking house. You remember? And he remembered the dude I was with. And I didn't even remember the name of the dude that I was with. And he fucking, and I was like wow this fucking guy and so then I said to pass I was like dude fucking Scarface I was at Scarface house in 1994 it's now 2012 and he fucking remembered me how the fuck he was like oh yeah that's totally normal I was like that's how he is that's what he said that's how he is yeah it's just like

that's only ever happened to me it's two other times that's ever happened to me carrie mae williams great african-american photographer remembered me for meeting me at this fucking 1990 2015 i made her and she was like weren't you at that thing with deborah willis at nyu and i was like whoa yeah, fuck. Yeah, I was. And then Gip from the Goody Mob, his wife is Joy, great singer, out of that whole outcast scene. Yeah. And she saw me in a bar in downtown LA and I'd met her once in Atlanta like 20 years

before and she remembered me. But it's like, that's fucking, that's a superpower. Like, I don't, you know what I mean? That's like a part of your brain that the fucking that's a superpower like i don't yeah i mean that's like a part of your brain that the regular all the rest of us don't really have access to or whatever and so the story without cast is this basically in those in that era of rap pages i was asked to go photograph outcast now the simplest version of this story is that i went and photographed him and

this must be like 92, 93 yeah after Southern Playlistic no Southern Playlistic just come out yeah

I went to Westside met him at an office and photographed him but now I'm gonna do a little fucking take a little blind boy liberty here with this story

and jump into a whole other fucking version of it ten years later I'm downstairs here and it's two o'clock in the morning i'm in there fucking printing in the dark room for some fucking deadline on some job whatever and i'm listening to the i'm listening to the radio and it's one of those public radio kind of fun drives you know like we're raising money you know send money whatever whatever we're going to give you know, send money, whatever, whatever.

We're going to give you this gift. And the gift was that there was a recording of a reading of the Terence McKenna book called True Hallucinations, which is really a book about the beginning of the 60s where like these two sort of ethnobotanists, Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, go to the Amazon and discover psychedelic drugs. Yeah. Quote, unquote. Like Columbus discovered America. And the reading of the book is happening over some psychedelic band.

Yeah. The thing that trips me the fuck out is that if you read True Hallucinations, when McKenna and Leary go there in the early 60s, they meet this fucking, I'm so glad I get to tell you this story, they meet this guy,

they're looking for a guide to take him into the Amazon. And they meet this guy from Barbados. And he's like 80 years old. And it turns out, whose fucking guide is he? He was Casement's guide. Roger fucking Casement's guide? Yeah.

Fuck off! Yeah. What?! Yeah. So Casement, let's just be fucking clear here, is the first sort of post-colonial He's the father of human rights. He's the father of human rights.

I mean, he's the first sort of colonial subject to speak back to, like, who's a member of government to speak back and say no. The whole colonial Roger Casement,

if you don't know, he was in 1916 rising, he was a He's the weirdo of the group. He didn't get, he didn't end up in, he ended up getting

caught in Bannistrand. He was Sir Roger Casement. He was a knight of the British Order. He get he didn't end up he ended up getting caught in banister he was Sir Roger Casement he was a knight of the British Order he called the fucking Brits out for him he was in the 1916 rise and he tried

to organise guns they hung him they called him they released his diaries to let people know that he was gay Roger Casement is a fucking legend

in Irish history what the fuck is going on with Terence McKenna and Roger Casement Dan can I get one of those mentals if you wouldn't mind and how does that relate to Outkast so yeah I need a mentol for this I don't know where this came out of but anyways this was one of those moments where you're

just like what the fuck so it's now I'm downstairs two o'clock in the morning listening to this fucking radio station they're broadcasting this thing and they're now it's some psychedelic band from the 60s playing in the background and they're this fucking radio station, they're broadcasting this thing and they're, now it's some psychedelic band from the 60s playing in the background and they're reading from true hallucinations and the joke is then, of course,

is that McKenna and fucking Timothy Leary are both Irish and American and they both know who fucking Roger Casement is. Yeah. Which was like,

whoa, what the fuck? And when you say he was Casement's guide, what do you mean he was Casement's guide? So if you read the Maria Vargas Llosa book or you read any of the biographies, the Angus Mitchell fucking biograph he was Casement's guide, why do you mean he was Casement's guide? So if you read the Maria Vargas Llosa book

or you read any of the biographies, the Angus Mitchell fucking biographies of Casement, Casement's a very interesting figure. Yeah. When he went to the Amazon, the way that they would do it is, the way that the fucking rubber barons would do it is, they would get blacks from the Caribbean,

trick them into fucking coming to work for him and then they would have none of the fucking difficult work of managing relations with indigenous folks would be done directly.

My understanding of Casement is that he exposed the horrible kind of human rights abuses that were happening with rubber in what we would now call the Congo

which was Leopoldville at the time. He was against the Belgians. That's what he did first. He was in South America too. Right. Well, first he goes to the Congo. He goes to the Congo really as like a fellow from Antrim

that would come from a military family. His mother was Catholic though. Yeah. So he was baptized Catholic secretly by his mother and she told him to tell no one. So he already had this weird kind of conflictual kind of secrecy in his thing.

Basically Casement after the Congo well in the Congo for example he fucking meets Joseph Conrad. Yes. And he's the one

that fucking shows Joseph Conrad. You know this whole fucking adventure fucking man you know narrative is bollocks the real fucking deal here

is look come with me into the jungle and I'll show you come with me into the jungle I'll show you where there's fucking

whole fucking villages where their arms have been cut off because they didn't collect enough fucking rubber mind you what are they

collecting rubber for go on what's the fucking technology? Bicycles. Oh, Jesus Christ. The first single person fucking urban transportation in that period is bicycles.

So the rubber in the Congo was called for bicycles in the West. I mean, can you imagine the difference in riding a bicycle without a fucking rubber tire and riding a bicycle without a rubber tire?

And they didn't have inflatable tyres then they had pure rubber on the bicycle yeah so it was like you know the oil

or the you know like valuable like the fucking Congo now now it's for

smartphones yeah Coltan yeah Coltan so so he so he writes this

you know absolute indictment but the thing that's interesting about about Casement is that Casement somehow writes this you know absolute indictment but but the thing that's interesting about about about uh casement is the casement somehow for whatever reason he he doesn't just like say like this fucking rubber thing is a fucking bust he says no imperialism is a fucking bust we're here thinking

we're like you know the narrative is that we go there we save them yeah we're not saving them we're fucking destroying them yeah and he's really the first one to kind of articulate this like if you really speak truth to power

yeah but the Brits led him away with it because he was speaking truth to Belgian power right not British power exactly he was

they were complicit but he wasn't really directly pointing the finger at them yeah and the whole thing with colonialism is like the Brits will go oh look at what they're doing the Spanish are terrible the finger at them and the whole thing with colonialism is like the Brits will go

oh look at what they're doing the Spanish are terrible the Belgians are terrible the Portuguese are terrible we're brilliant we freed this land we're so efficient we're so

look at how better India is now look at how better you know and basically so he'd come back anyway and then

so then he becomes this kind of heroic figure for the what was still called abolitionists you know the abolitionists which would be the kind of human rights people the people that would have fought against slavery and whatever but this is now the 1890s and more or less slavery is gone yeah but they're the same kind of configuration of people that were you know activated around slave ending

slavery or still they still exist and they're like you know what uh we're hearing that it's worse than the fucking amazon and so take them a couple years to convince them and they send them to the amazon and he's basically going to the amazon to do the same thing which is to basically see what's the conditions like on the ground and what the fuck are they doing and how can we fix it so when he goes to the amazon the real issue he has is there's a this rubber baron in Peru that basically puts a target on his back. Then, of course, he gets sick, one thing and another.

But his basic trick with Casement was he was a kind of solo operator. He was a meticulous notekeeper. And he was an adventurer. I mean, I guess he was like... Were the meticulous notes eventually the Black Diaries? Yes. That's what buried him. The thing with Vargas Llosa says, and I don't know.

I mean, maybe this is like my romantic Republican fucking thing. Is that clearly he's queer. Okay. But Vargas Llosa says just because he writes it doesn't necessarily mean that he did it. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Just because he said he went down to the village and he's seen an indigenous young fella

and he fucking paid him a few bucks and got a hand job doesn't necessarily mean that he did it I don't know I reckon Casement was gay

and I think oh no he's gay no that's in the end what got him it was the Norwegian guy that ratted him out that got him found a bad friend

but I think in 2019 we need to be embracing Casement was a queer hero of Ireland 2019 we need to be embracing Casement was a queer hero of Ireland and we need to really be looking at that

I agree this narrative because today one of the issues in Ireland is there's a rising level of fascism in Ireland

and they're latching onto figures from the 1916 rise of Michael Collins and they're changing the narrative and it's like no

hold on a second these were radicals they were artists and Roger Casement was fucking queer and he was a queer voice. He was very close to Pierce and I dare say, I think there's a strong argument to be made.

There's a strong argument, but the thing with Pierce, Pierce is a bit dodgy. I mean, Pierce, I don't think, I don't think Pierce was gay. I think there might have been a paedophile element to Pierce if you read his writings.

I think there's... A little out of the tricks or whatever it was called. I think there might have been a paedophile element to Pierce, if you read his writings. I think there's... A little out of the tricks, or whatever it was called. I think, you know, I mean, there's certainly been, the case has been made for around Casement in the same way. Oh, has there? These were young kids. I mean, these are, you know, I mean, he's boys. Okay, okay.

I mean, he's interested in indigenous boys, you know. In any event, you know, so how he would operate was, he would arrive in a place, in this case, if I remember correctly, I think it's Belang, Belang de Para, which is the last place I photographed for Ghost Notes. And in Belang, he goes looking for a guide who's English-speaking, who knows the territory, and he finds these two Barbadians, which would be normal in that period for rubber barons, would find guys from the fucking Caribbean.

Because they wouldn't want to go do the dirt on the fucking indigenous. They're not trying to dirty their hands with fucking beaten indigenous fellas or whatever. In the same way that the corporations do it today. They keep enough distance so that their blood isn't on their hands, it's on someone else's hands.

Subcontractor's hands. Deniability, yeah. Subcontracting, subcontracting. And plausible deniability, right? Dan, can I get another can, if you wouldn't mind? Is that all right? We're through.

Just a very nice barn here. Your man is a bit unfriendly, but... But in any event, so Casement had two Barbadians that were his guides that were fellas that had like in good conscience

ran away from had been tricked into working there but then had ran away but then never had got enough money to find a way back to Barbados or whatever

thank you very much Dan and whatever you're having yourself obviously and yeah man that fucking same character whose name i forget now but that same character shows up in fucking timothy leary now where does this get into outcast here we go so i'm sitting there listening to that shit and my fucking jaw now has hit the floor i wasn't

fucking expecting casement at all i had no idea actually i actually only knew of casement my version of casement like fucking St. Patrick's, St. Clement's was basically he had tried to convince the Germans to fucking do this thing

and then he got guns and then he ended up in Tralee and then he ended up getting killed in England. That was it, yeah. Do you know what I mean? There was none of the other,

the big solidarity fucking things that he did didn't exist. Yeah. And so, so I'm fucking in shock. And not only that, but like fucking, he's linked to the 60s?

Like, what the fuck? Anyways, as I'm listening to the thing anyway, your man comes back, Roy of Hollywood, legendary figure in public radio in Los Angeles, comes back and, yeah, man, we're listening to the Terrence McKenna True Hallucinations, being read with musical accompaniment by some fucking psychedelic band from the 60s that I can't remember the name of,

and we've just gotten a big donation for the 12-cassette set of the reading of True Hallucinations from, you won't believe this, folks, how about this for a name Andre 3000 and I'm just like I'm like what in fuck's name is this flash forward a month later I'm at the Virgin Megastore fucking Crescent Heights and Sunset

I fucking step into the elevator whatever way I look who's fucking standing on the elevator Andre 3000 I said fucking hell man I said And it was just when that song With Rosario Dawson had come out And so they were like

They were about to be like Massive The biggest thing ever And I was just like Dude You fucking bought the fucking cassettes Of the True hallucinations reading

With the Roger Kism Smith and he was like I totally did and I was like fucking hell man and you know I have to be honest man over the years like you know there's a sort of thing that you can get really depressed you can really make yourself fucking depressed if you start thinking about like are these fucking white South Africans are talking to the fucking Yanks and are talking to the Israelis and are talking to every bad bunch of fuckers on the planet are all having this conversation and the joke is on us and they're fucking us up and they're stopping us from getting to where we need to be.

And then you find out that Roger Casement is somehow related to Andre 3000 and for a small minute in your day in between having a smoke or a drink you think like actually dude like there's probably a way somehow we can figure this shit out like we could probably you know what I mean and it's those little but it's the small solidarities like

that's what it is like you know it's like it's the small solidarities yeah how did you end up working with Damien Marley so and you gotta tell us the story about you and Kingston with Damien Marley so and you gotta tell us the story tell us the story about you and Kingston

with Damien Marley and the Limerick City thing oh no that wasn't even that wasn't done but anyways Damien basically the manager of Jurassic 5

was an old friend of mine who's an Irish American cat Dan Dalton reached out to me and said, you know, this Jurassic thing, you know, I need to, you know, I need to, like, manage other acts.

And he, weirdly enough, had been doing reggae shit since he was in college. So he knew he was connected to that community and he said you know damian marley just won an oscar got dropped by his label went back to jamaica and made this fucking song and now all the is this welcome to jam rock yeah and then so all the fucking radio stations on the east coast look at him what are we looking at is that a cat nope what is it a skunk is that a skunk? Yeah. Fucking hell.

Yeah. Would you smell them around the place now? Tell him. Oh, stop. Is it bad? Why do you think it's called weed? Why do you think they call weed skunk? Is that what I've been... So half the time when I'm going around in LA

and I think I smell weed, it might be a skunk. Skunk, yeah. But I tell you, if you run over one... What happens? Your fucking car is fucking destroyed. I mean, it's... You can't... What happens? Your fucking car is fucking destroyed. I mean, you can't believe how bad it smells.

It is fucking unreal. Wow. The only thing that can get rid of it, weirdly enough, is tomato juice. What? Yeah. So you have to rub tomato juice on your car if you roll over a skunk? Yeah. Fucking hell.

Yeah. Well, fair play, Tim. We're learning a few things now Fair play then So Pepe Le Pew over there So basically Fucking I went down to

Went down to To Miami And I met this guy And I have to be honest Like I'm not You know I mean I'm I was never like a super bob head

Like Do you know like i remember i remember when bob played in ireland i remember everyone from buddies going up to fucking day yeah yeah bob marley again like tupac bob marley and tupac like yeah fucking deity man come on it's fucking bob man it's gone it's the fucking man and uh so anyway i went down there anyway and tried fucking you know the deal was anyway Dan said to him look fuck these American labels what you need to do is get a label deal for yourself

just distribute your shit you produce you make it you get the budgets you figure it out and whatever whatever I don't know geez in the end I don't know what the deal was but he said if you come down I'll pay your ticket do this photo shoot as part of me

kind of convincing Damien that he needs me to manage him and if it all works out you'll do the cover of Welcome to Jamrock and I said fine I remember buying one of those

comps of Bob in you know, in the 60s before Island and listening to it in a plane on the way down on CD and getting there and meeting him and, you know, I mean, I think he must have thought like, this is weird. I mean, you know, like he was looking at me like, who the fuck is this guy? And I was looking at him like, I'm not exactly who the fuck is this guy, but like, this is a I mean you know like he was looking at me like who the fuck is this guy and I was looking at him like not exactly who the fuck is this guy

but like this is a very strange figure and really not having that much of a clue about Rasta or like you know like I mean

just to be fair you know like reggae wasn't really my thing you know like I knew a little bit of dancehall shit you know like the Bobby Condors era

like you know Cuddy Ranks like that but I thought it wasn't like a proper roots head yeah but it wasn't a roots head or nothing tall shit yeah yeah bobby condor's era like yeah you know cuddy ranks like that yeah well i thought it wasn't like a proper roots head yeah but it wasn't a roots head or nothing and so then and then we went then you know then it all started to you know all the wheels started falling in place and i ended up going back then actually they flew me from brazil to kingston shot the cover of jam rock flew back to bra Brazil to finish what I was

working on and that's when we started to get to know him a little bit but I have to be honest with you I'm going to be dead ass

and I know Damien probably if he hears this he's going to be laughing I doubt Damien Marley is listening to this podcast you have no idea

the man is you wouldn't be surprised but anyways it was really five or seven years before I really felt like those dudes like you know like i was accepted into the group or whatever yeah it's quite you know i

mean it's it's really serious i mean it you know i've i've a lot of respect for those cats i have a lot of respect a lot of respect for rasta i have a lot of respect for bob the original gong leonard leonard how, the cat that invented Rasta. I mean, you know, they're, for them, the St. Paul for them is Marcus Garvey, and Garvey was in contact with Dev. Garvey, yeah, big connection between Garvey and Sinn Féin and all that shit. Yeah, because he was like, well, how the fuck did you guys get out from under him? You know, like, how did that work?

Yeah. And, you know, this is a really, it's a very, very serious, it's a very serious thing and so now,

you know, like, now I'm. And a guy, what's his name, Cyril, Cyril Bridge, Cyril Briggs.

Yeah, Cyril Briggs. Cyril Briggs as well, yeah. No, well, there's a number of, of,

of sort of great intellectuals. There's a lot of solidarity between Jamaican revolutionaries and Irish revolutionaries around 1920. And Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs, they were really... And he hooks up with the Harold and Relais sense as well. They were writing about what was happening in Ireland at the time and looking, what are the fucking Paddys doing? Can we copy that?

Yeah. Yeah. In the same way as, you fucking gandhi is looking at fucking uh uh what's his name uh turn smacking ernie and fucking starving himself to death and fucking cork and going like huh that worked yeah that's interesting because it's all against the same which is against the brits it's all against the brits martin luther king looking at gandhi thinking about the same thing yeah which turns out turns out that in the North, in the fucking 60s, when they get television, they see Martin Luther King and they go, wait a minute. Sure Jesus, that's the same fucking shit that we don't have.

Yeah. And it's fucking television. Yeah. And it's those weird, like, you know. Huey Newton, man. You read Huey Newton's biography and he mentions, and this is how I took it back. I said this one actually to Paul Tarpey. and he mentions and this is how

I took it back I said this one actually to Paul Tarpey I cracked open a copy of Evil Empire by Rage Against the Machine

and on the inside cover of Rage Against the Machine it's all these books that Zach De La Rocca is listening to

reading so he's got all the fucking black revolutionaries and in the middle of it is Dubliners by James Joyce

and I was looking at this going what the fuck is that and then I read Huey P. Newton's biography Huey P. Newton was of it is Dubliners by James Joyce. And I was looking at this going, what the fuck is that? And then I read Huey P. Newton's biography. Huey P. Newton was reading James Joyce Dubliners and recognising the oppression of the Catholic Church

and relating that to the oppression of the police in America against the black community. Ding. Damn, dude. Did you just see something green come flying out of the sky, landbying that mountain over there? We didn't just see a fucking UFO, did we? I just seen something green come out of the mountain.

Did you see that then? No I missed it. The two limerick lads saw it. That was really weird. Anyways yeah, so you know, I mean that for me, music is just a, like a lot of times is like a vessel to fucking, to find those little fucking weird... Tell us the story about the Jamaican lads and the limerick thing so

fast forward a bunch of years later now I'm part like I'm Damien Marley's photographer or whatever and he's touring Europe I don't know

this is a few years ago four or five years ago and we end up in Dublin and it's the end of the tour and we have a day off before everyone flies back and it's a Sunday and there's a reggae club in Dublin on the end of the tour and we have a day off before everyone flies back and then it's

a Sunday and there's a reggae club in Dublin on the Sunday at the yeah button factory I think yes and so someone anyway from the gig or whatever is like the manager's texting me like we're all going to go down to because everyone was sleeping because you know when you're on tour like it's like there's much sleep and then you get a day off and everyone's just like room service and and so I was like oh shit like 9 or 10 o'clock we're all gonna go over

to the button factory okay cool we'll go over to the button factory go with D you know and it's a you know the deal man you're moving with a dude that's like a

fucking you know sort of religious figure almost you know like he's like a Bob Marley's son it's Bob Marley's son then you know

so we're over there anyway and whatever dude like I'm just a fucking photographer and mostly you know at that

you know when they're having a good time that's generally not when they want to be me have me taking photos so I'm just fucking chilling in the back having a fucking point

and thinking like wow what a trip we're at some fucking reggae club at the button factory okay fair enough with Damien Marley. And so the word comes anyway that the thing is about to end,

but there's a she-bean on Camden Street owned by, I don't know if they're Nigerian fellas or Kenyan fellas. But the funny fucking thing is, anyway, that either way, whether it was Nigerians or Kenyans, it was actually a fucking Chinese restaurant. And under the Chinese restaurant, there was these kind of, they looked like rooms that you could book out for like a birthday party or something. Yeah.

You know. So they brought us down there anyway. So there's two lads from the, from the, like the button, that do the reggae night that are there. And. They're from Kingston. And they're from Kingston. So we're all

you know it's it's Rasta so it's all sullen and fucking Guinness and fucking weed and it's everyone's series

and their reasoning I don't know if you know about this but like Rasta's reason you know it's like for us to be arguing or

kind of what we're doing now where it's like except that it actually can be it can be competitive sometimes generally a lot of biblical shit you know kind of what we're doing now where it's like except that it's actually can be it can be competitive sometimes generally a lot of biblical shit

it's you know it's it's pre-colonial a lot of times you know like what happened with the Queen of Sheba when she

you know this kind of stuff and so they're all reasoning and whatever and then these two lads from the button factory in a way from Kingston fucking kind of

tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to go outside and I'm like okay and then they were saying that you're me to go outside and I'm like okay and then they were saying that you're from Limerick and I was like yeah I'm from Limerick and the one fella says I'd never fucking go there and I was like I was just shaking my head like I was like hold up a minute you're from fucking Kingston like what are you fucking talking about like what do you

think limerick is like yeah yeah you know i mean like i've been to kingston like fuck off dude do you know what i mean like it's like gunman ting come on dude that's not limerick man like like kingston is kingston is fucking rough man i mean kings, Jamaicans in general are pretty surly and it's and Limerick just isn't that but Limerick has this it just has this fucking amazing rep it's helpful sometimes actually

if you say you're from Limerick the people fucking look at you differently or whatever but it's funny to me because I never really I don't know I never really felt like I never really fucking was I don't fucking walk

anywhere in Limerick man I mean and I'm one thing but my old man Limerick is fucking grand it's this mad reputation that came out of

fucking nowhere but what bothers me it's funny but at the same time it's annoying because it's like how the fuck did boys from Kingston

figure out Ireland is grand except from fucking Limerick Kingston you know And I mean In all honesty man Like Do you think

In reality Like if I was anywhere And I seen And then someone told me like Do you see the two lads over there They're from Kingston I'd go over and tap them On the shoulder

And ask them to go outside And ask them like Jesus you're from Kingston I'd never go there so what fucking Dublin prick got into the two boys ears and told him

stay the fuck away from Limerick it was fucking hilarious dude I was like give me a fucking break man we've reached I'd say the two and a half hour mark there now Brian

so I think we'll wrap it up we've done the majority of your career we were supposed to talk about a lot about hip hop and your experiences but it went into various tangents but fuck it

that's a good podcast that's what I'm happy with yeah that seems about right alright yeah okay God bless

God bless you Brian Cross thank you very much Dan where's Dan gone I wanted to give Dan a shout out don't mind him I'm sure he's probably having a slash

is he having a slash Dan we're wrapping up the podcast and I think Dan is the man who provided cans and fags and I want to give a proper Dublin shout out to Dan. You're more than welcome, pal. It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you very much. Yart.

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