The Blindboy Podcast - Candle Angler

Episode Date: March 7, 2018

An interview with Goldsmiths prize winning author Kevin Barry. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh hello, you wincing princes, you tortured paupers. Are you ready to play Portuguese tennis in the jocular rockery that is the Blind Boy Podcast? How the fuck you getting on? What's the crack? I've had a very, busy week very very very busy I was over in London working too hard last week shooting some stuff for television

but working 16-17 hour days and not giving myself correct amounts of rest and there was some type of flu flying around the gaff and I managed to catch it and I don't know if you can hear it in my voice now it's a very interesting flu actually

it has a lot of character it started off yesterday in my chest then it left my chest and it went to my throat this morning and now it has occupied my ears and nose and I can't really hear anything and my balance is off but I often enjoy

moments of illness because it allows me little brief pockets of pausing in my otherwise turbulent life um thing with London Otherwise turbulent life. Thing with London. Every time I go to London. I'm always being brought over there by somebody.

Whether it's a TV company or a theatre or something. So I get collected from the airport. By taxi drivers. And every time. I always end up in a ridiculous conversation with the taxi drivers it just happens I don't know how it just does I think they look at me and they know this is a man who likes a chat so anyway the two best conversations I've had in taxis in London happen to have been with Muslim taxi drivers, the first conversation

I had, it was last week, and the taxi driver was Kurdish, he was sound as fuck, and I think it was the Irish thing, I think it's because he knew that I was Irish, he was like, oh the Irish, the Irish, you support the Kurds, and we're like, yeah there's a history of that, now what I didn't want to tell him like he was talking about you know old school republicanism where you know the Ra would have solidarity with the Palestinian people and the Kurdish people. I didn't want to tell him that Ireland now is actually quite Islamophobic and very much against refugees whether you're Arab or Kurdish or whatever the fuck. Even even last week i learned not last week this morning the people of listoon varna in clare

93 of the town voted against leaving some syrian refugees to get refuge in their town which was a bit disappointing considering the history of of Ireland and our emigration. And the thing is, you look up the history, lads, of when the Irish were emigrating to England or emigrating to America throughout the years, the same fears and criticisms that are brought against the Islamic refugees today were brought against the Irish.

We were supposedly going to bring disease rape and crime wherever we lay our hats and in america in particular in the 17 18 and 19 centuries it was like we were we were portrayed as uh coming from a culture that was incompatible with American culture, that we came from such war-torn barbarism that we would not be able to adjust to polite American society. And the Yanks used to make cartoons about the Irish that depicted us as apes and monkeys with bombs strapped to ourselves. With bombs strapped to ourselves. And yeah, that sounds an awful lot like what right wing media kind of say about refugees today.

And what Carl Jung would call it is the exposure of our shadow side. That humans have this darkness within them. And when they're confronted with a fear, they will project their darkness onto the source of that fear. And that's our shadow side. It's an archetype. Of course it's an archetype. I mean, if the exact specific fears that the Americans had of the Irish 300-400 years ago, or 200 years ago, are now identical to the fears that the Irish or the British have against Islamic refugees. If those fears manifest themselves in an identical fashion such as the fear of

they will bring rape, they will bring bombs, they will bring violence then it's probably an archetypal fear. It's an eternal boogeyman that exists in human consciousness when we are presented with an influx of people who are different. So therefore you might say, it's quite a natural response. Do you know what probably is a natural response? Racism probably is a natural response to things, but just because something's a natural response doesn't mean it's the right response you can overcome that with compassion and logic and if you're Irish you can overcome it with direct empathy because 30 years ago I had older brothers that were living in London

who were followed around the place because of their accents or, you know, would have been stopped and searched because of their accents. And when you think of it like that, when you think that it was your uncles or your brothers or your aunts who would have been seen as terrorists because of their accents 30 years ago,

that kind of puts the whole into the whole thing into an absurdist perspective, do you know what I mean so it's disappointing to see Irish people ignorant of that element of our history and it's even more disappointing

when I see Irish people virtue signalling about the famine. And then saying refugees are not welcome. It's like, fuck off, will you? Cop on to yourselves. But anyway, I got talking to this lad in the car. This taxi driver, the Kurdish taxi driver. And he just kind of opened up and he started talking to this lad in the car this uh taxi driver the Kurdish taxi driver and he just kind of opened up and he started talking to me and he said some very interesting things and he's the second Muslim

taxi driver I've met who is highly critical of we'll say the wealthier Muslim countries he had no time whatsoever for like the Qataris or Saudi Arabia or United Arab Emirates and he'd said some very fucking interesting things right now he could have been a compulsive liar as well I can't tell but he was telling me that

these pure wealthy Qatari women come over to, Qatarian and Saudi Arabian women. They come and visit London, you know. And they'd have husbands, but they'd be strict Islamic women. And he told me that when they come to London, they have affairs. And that he has affairs with them. And he says that he'd be driving them around in the back of the taxi. And that because in their lives they wouldn't even speak to another man other than their husband, that the very act of talking is considered intimate.

And eye contact, they wouldn't normally make eye contact with men so he says when they sit in the back of his car he looks into the mirror and they look into it too and then they get talking and he told me apparently he's had a few affairs with very wealthy Arab women in London he then went on to tell me that he worked with MI5 in the area in London that he was in, so he could have been a spoofer, he could have been a liar, but you know when you're talking to someone who's a bullshitter and you don't care because the stories they're telling you are so good, you just listen. He was one of these fellas. Could have been telling the truth as well.

But he said one thing that was very interesting. So he was talking about Islam, you know. And the one thing he was saying is that he said Islam is all about peace and it's about sharing and it's about love. He said that's all Islam is. Peace sharing and love. That's the bones of it.

And he said something that took me aback. He said that in his experience as a Kurdish man, as a former refugee, he came to London in the 90s. I'm guessing during Saddam Hussein's time because Saddam wasn't a

big fan of the Kurds in the 90s but he said that he considers Europeans to be the true Muslims I'm like what the fuck are you talking about? what do you mean? and he says I came to England as a Kurdish refugee and I was welcomed with open arms.

And he said that even in his own country where he was born, he was born in northern Iraq where the Kurds are, he's not even considered a citizen. embrace the loving and caring welcoming part of muslim of islam more than islamic countries do he said that in the likes of saudi arabia and qatar and united arab emirates that if you're a muslim from a poor country that you're simply not welcome and if you're a card you're especially you're simply not welcome but in his experience he also lived in i think it was france he said that in his experience european people are very very welcoming and sound and are like have some of what i have if you're in need whereas he didn't have the same thing to say about the wealthier muslim countries which was a bit of an eye-opener for me because i don't know a hell of a say about the wealthier Muslim countries. Which was a bit of an eye opener for me. Because I don't know a hell of a lot about Islam. Or I don't even know that many Islamic people.

So that was the first most interesting conversation with an Islamic taxi driver that I had in London. Now here's the second one. And this is the most interesting. This happened about four or five years ago I was getting collected from the airport and it was a nice long drive and this time my taxi driver was from Afghanistan and he was sound as fuck and he started sparking up a conversation with me and again I think the Irish thing led to some degree of trust or something we had a bit of crack and a bit of banter

and he kind of starts repeating the same kind of stuff like he's a poor Afghani dude he zeroes respect for the richer Arab Islamic countries he's telling me that they were total bullshitters that they don't believe in Islam

that what they believe in is money and power and they use Islam for their advantage so I was leaving him rant away and I was listening with my ears open and then out of nowhere he comes out with this fucking mad hot take and he says

Bin Laden wasn't killed in 2011 so I go fuck ears wide open bin laden wasn't killed in 2011 so i go fuck ears wide open so your man is he's either a lunatic or a spoofer or whatever but i'm listening so he says bin laden wasn't killed in 2011

now if you remember osama bin laden was killed in northern pakistan in 2011 by seal team 6 special forces they flew into his compound In Northern Pakistan. In 2011. By SEAL Team 6. Special Forces. They flew into his compound.

And they took him out. They killed him. And Obama announced it. 2011. And this was huge news. It was massive news all over the world. And they made that film Zero Dark Thirty about it and everything. Using the most highly trained specialised US special forces lads

in the world so when this Afghani taxi driver says Bin Laden wasn't killed in 2011 at all I'm all fucking ears so I'm like what do you mean please tell so he says Bin Laden was killed in about 2005 in Pakistan

and they covered it up they hid it because they wanted to keep the war going so I'm still listening going alright let's hear him justify himself then he says did you know that most of the members of team SEAL team 6 who killed Bin Laden do you know that most of the members of Sealed Team 6 who killed Bin Laden,

do you know that most of those lads died a year later? And I'm like, no, I never heard of that. And he goes, yeah, they played it down in the media. So I take out my phone and I look at it. And yes, the majority of the team who killed Bin Laden died died a year later in afghanistan their helicopter was shot down so immediately i'm like holy fuck why wasn't this all over the news this is pretty big why wasn't it on the news because i didn't hear it at the time and the thing is too is that the war in afghanistan has been going on for 15 years. And for a war of its length, there's really not that many American casualties.

So this particular helicopter that was shot down in Afghanistan, it had 30 US soldiers on it. Most of whom were these special forces elite, SEAL Team 6. So you'd expect this to be all over the fucking news. But it happens. That's massive loss to US soldiers. So I'm all ears at this stage for this taxi driver. So I'm like looking at my phone going fuck me. Yes. They were killed a year later.

Why didn't we find out? And he says it was covered up. And then I said to him how do you know all this shit? And he says the area where SEAL Team 6's helicopter was shot down he said I come from near that area in Afghanistan and apparently the Taliban shot down the SEAL Team 6 helicopter but he said I have an idea who the Taliban are in that area. They're just a load of lads with sheep and the odd machine gun.

They're owl lads. They don't have the type of fucking rockets to be shooting down US special forces helicopters. It's not in their ability to do it. They're just lads with sheep in the Taliban with AK-47s. So he claims. The CIA. Shot down their own lads. Over.

In Afghanistan. As a cover up. Because they knew. That Bin Laden wasn't actually killed in 2011. That Bin Laden was actually killed in 2005. So. Apparently. Bin Laden was killed in May of 2011 and then three months later the lads who

supposedly killed him all ended up dead in afghanistan and also the if you know anything about the the raid that killed bin laden one of the helicopters they had crashed on the night in bin laden's compound and the taxi driver said they just simply did this to leave evidence for when the world media came upon the compound that there was the remnants of this crashed helicopter to show that the team had actually been in this northern pakistani compound because no body was ever produced for bin laden apparently they just came killed him took his body fucked off onto an aircraft carrier and threw it into the sea and that's what this taxi driver was

maintaining to me and i don't know he could be nuts but all i'm saying is that some of his story checked out when i was googling it i thought. But. You know. It's a pure conspiracy theory. That's the. You know. That's the second taxi driver. I've met. First one said. That he.

Has sex with. Rich Qatari brides. And works for MI5. And the other guy's. Got a conspiracy theory. About the death of Bin Laden. So. Either.

I meet the most. Interesting cunts. Imaginable. When I'm in London. Or. Islamic London taxi drivers. very very bored people who like to rip the absolute piss out of fellas like me who are gullible and just want a good story. But after he told me the Bin Laden story anyway. He took me to where I was staying. And he turned off the meter,

and he drove me around, he deliberately drove me around Knightsbridge, which is the area in London where, the Qatari royal family own harids and shit, and there's a lot of rich young Arabs, hanging around there, and he pulled outside a bar, and there was lots of young people in there,

drinking and having crack, and he just pointed out, he was pointing at all the people there, and he says outside a bar and there was lots of young people in there drinking and having crack and he just pointed out he's pointing at all the people there and he says you see that fella he's a prince you see her she's a princess and he was just making the point that these were kind of hardcore islamic people from rich countries who give the impression of adhering to their religious beliefs but here they are in London drinking alcohol and wearing short skirts and living a free life but contradicting what they so vehemently defend in their own religion which I found quite interesting again he could have been spoofing I don't know if these people were princes

or princesses at all he could have been talking out of his hoop and getting a rise out of me so I hope my fucking stupid voice hasn't been pissing you off so what I'm going to do with this podcast is

a couple of weekends ago in Limerick I spoke to the writer Kevin Barry and Kevin is I've mentioned him before Kevin's quite possibly the greatest living writer in the world and a lot of literary cunts would agree with me.

Go and pick up some of Kevin's books if you haven't already. Maybe start off with one of his short story collections like Dark Lies the Island. And then move on to the more advanced stuff. Such as City of Bohan and his most recent book Beetlebone which is an utter masterpiece but Kevin is someone who I look up to because he's a limerick writer and I wrote my book of short stories last year and

to be honest it was Kevin's writing that inspired me to start writing it was Kevin's writing that made me believe that Jesus I could have a crack at this myself because of how he uses dialogue

Kevin writes with a limerick brain do you know Kevin does for kind of he does for limerick the limerick accent what Joyce did for the Dublin accent he brings the lyricism of that accent to the page

and his stories are class so I had a really really enjoying one hour interview with Kevin which I'm going to play you shortly and before I do please continue to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes please continue to

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free all i'm doing is appealing to your soundness a suggested donation so anyway this recording of my interview with kevin barry happened a couple of weeks ago in dolan's warehouse in limerick at um the limerick spring festival which is a celebration of literature and arts in limerick but interestingly um me and kev are both from limerick and what we'd done before we recorded the podcast interview is we had each read one of our short stories to a live limerick audience and bizarrely we both chose stories that were about Cork. I have a story called Reha Corkie. About skinning Rory Gallagher in the 70s. And Kevin had a story. Set in Cork about a man who builds a nest for himself.

Up above in an attic. So bizarrely. We two Limerick writers had come to Limerick. And read a couple of stories about Cork, which had a wonderful irony to it and reverberated Limerick's low sense of self-esteem to the audience, which had a quite dark humour to it. So without further ado, here is Kevin Barry reading a little bit of his short story and then an interview. Yart.

This is no kind of peace for a young man. What I would like very much is a small house of my own. Ideally it would have an aspect such as this one. I realise I could hardly hope for these high windows again but a place where I could close the door on the world and deadbolt it and go each evening but a place where I could close the door on the world and deadbolt it, and go each evening into a place silent as a lung, that I might sit among my own thoughts, in a place of no distraction, and I wanted to be above the city, so that

I can see the palm of the city fill up with its lights, because after all the winter will soon come, and the days as often would be gray and dark and it's inhospitable here sometimes unless we make our pods in which we can travel above us and ride through the skies of the winter until the year again turns on its slow wheel and brings us back to the springtime again and then once more the city will be made out of birds and light applause applause

applause applause applause applause applause thanks very much. Cork has gone down well, hasn't it? What the fuck?

What did we ask? I don't know, man. Jesus Christ, how did this happen? We didn't talk about... The one word we had is, before we went on stage, he was inside taking a slash, and I roared across at him and I said, Kev, I'm going out doing a very weird story about skinning Rory Gallagher.

Are you, is that too weird for you to follow? And he goes, no, I've got something that's weird as well. It's grand. What the fuck?

Two Limerick lads at the Limerick fucking festival and now we're after both of us come up with cork stories. What's going on? It's strange. And both cork stories

have an element of taxidermy. Yeah. Jesus, man. Fucking fist bump on that, I think, yeah. But, um, do you know, actually a good thing to talk about is accents,y. Yeah. Jesus, man. Fucking fist bump on that, I think. But, um... Do you know, actually, a good thing

to talk about is accents, right? Yeah. Because, like... You have a lovely Cork accent, man. I can do... I was there long enough

to do one, yeah, but it was... I always think, like, Cork and Limerick accents are kind... In a funny way, they're close enough. They're kind of

cousinly, right? Cork sounds like, um... a Limerick person who's after receiving a bit of good news. Yeah. There is... There is that... There is the small bit of fucking...

But it's exactly right, because there is that sort of... When I moved to Cork in the 90s, what amazed me about the place was they all liked it. And in Limerick at the time, we were very cynical about Limerick. Oh, fucking awful place this is, you know? Well, we've just, you know, like I said,

we're both after writing stories about a fucking car like why didn't we write limerick stories yeah but the mad thing with accents in Ireland is you know it's a small country geographically if you have a car it's like

five hours long and three hours wide but the accents change so dramatically so quickly and when the accent changes everything else changes as well like the soul changes you

know and the humour really importantly changes so like the limerick accent and the humor really importantly changes so like the limerick accent is gonna give a humor that's kind of really antic and madcap and serene and twisted like you couldn't come from anywhere else no but then you go out the road a bit and it might be half an hour out in Clare and there's a different accent and there's a different it's just completely unpredictable where it works but like you just came back from Austin.

Yeah. Is it like that with the Yanks? Is it like, all right, so fucking Texas is bigger than Cork? Yeah. Like, Texas is massive. Like, do they have this... That's what I always wondered about fucking Ireland. Like, Ireland is the size of a pizza.

And, like, we have all these different accents within this small... Like, is that... America doesn't seem to have that, or can we just not hear it? Yeah. Are there any Yanks? Woo!

Woo! Or can you tell the difference of an accent in America if it's only, like, half an hour down the road? No. Yeah, see, there you go now. And it's mad, actually. Someone, I was talking to someone out there from Armagh, and their friend was from Cork,

and they said people they talked to couldn't tell the difference between their accent. Well, I know that Dublin people can't tell the difference between Cork, Kerry, and Limerick. I mean, come on. Imagine saying that to us. You can smell a Kerry man's accent. I read an interesting thing recently

about apparently the Australian accent, right, developed, it's a mixture of the Irish and English accent when they're too drunk. Wow. The Australian accent comes from drunk Irish and English people. Yeah. There's the mad one as well in Newfoundland, which is like, it's a Waterford accent from the 1890s.

Yeah. Which has been just islanded off. And it like, you wouldn't hear it now in Waterford, but you go out there and it's this kind of antique, kind of really lovely. It's like an antique language.

There's one thing I was learning, not a language thing, but there's, there was a dialect spoken in Wexford called Yola. Yeah. Right?

And it was basically, like Wexford, it's on the right hand side of, I don't know fucking, it's on the right hand side of Ireland. But,

when the Normans, when the Normans invaded Ireland, first, strong bow on the right-hand side of, I don't know fucking East, it's on the right-hand side of Ireland. But when the Normans invaded Ireland first, strong bow on the lads, right? They first landed in Wexford. So there was pockets of, this was fucking the 1100s. There was pockets of Normans who essentially spoke French. They would have spoken an early French at the time.

They didn't speak English because that was a language beneath them. But it was. They were posh French boys. They didn't speak English because that was a language beneath them. But it was. They were posh French boys, the head and the braids. But the Normans, when they came to Wexford, they spoke a little bit of French. And then this small community preserved itself

up until about 200 years ago called the Yola community, where it was half French and half Gaelic. And there's only one word we have left from that language, and it's called Cuaire. The word Cuaire is Yola. That's it. That's the one word we have left from that language, and it's called quare. Wow. The word quare is... It came from there.

Yola. That's it. That's the only word left. Yeah. Sean Lynch, the artist, has done something about that. Is he? He's telling me about it, I think. Yeah, he was mentioning it.

Sean's a gas cunt. He's brilliant. He is. I was over at the Venice Biennale with him. Right. Yeah. He's a mad bastard. I was only looking at...

What I did for questions... We have officially started the podcast, by the way. Did you get a sponsor yet? Did I get a sponsor for the podcast? Not yet, no. What's wrong with him, man? It's just Ireland. Ireland's behind the times.

The other thing as well, what I heard is that I speak about mental health a lot on my podcast and that can frighten off sponsors. Well, they're very conservative. See, what it is as well is they think, oh, he's going to say something mad. He's going to say something mad. And you are, right?

Well, he said most of it. But it's going to... Well, we'll be associated then, but I don't know. Someone will do it. Brennan's bread. Try Brennan's bread or something. Brennan's bread or just...

Today's takes today, you know? But... I was asking the internet for some questions for you. And then as I pulled out of my book, it's the sheet of questions from my last live podcast guest, who was a Protestant walking tour man up in the troubled areas of Belfast. So I was thinking,

I might ask Kevin Barry some of the questions. So anyway, Kevin Barry, what are the feelings around punishment beatings and shootings that were dished out, especially to minors? And if anyone has apologised or been paid compensation, a subject that is glassed over, in my humble opinion. Well, John, I did a reading a few years ago in Belfast,

in a pub on the Falls Road. And it was their annual kind of, it was the annual kind of Shinners kind of Republican Arts Festival. And I had City of Bohan with me, and I thought, they're going to love this. It's very funny. And I read a really funny bit,

and I didn't click at all about people from the north having a fight with people from the south of the city. Stone cold fucking faces. Looking at me for 20 minutes, didn't click at all about people from the north having a fight with people from the south of the city. Stone cold fucking faces. Looking at me for 20 minutes didn't go at it at all. Were they offended or were they connected with the violence? You could see him thinking this is all fucking metaphorical now about the north. Never occurred to me. And nothing to do with it. Now here's a fucking question I want to know. Is City of Bohan

about Limerick or Cork? It's a weird kind of hybrid of the two. It's somewhere around Charleville, I think. It's kind of in between. Like, I see it more like limerick, kind of late 80s, early 90s, around the docks and stuff. But I hear the Bohan accent as a more corky,

kind of slightly floatier kind of thing. I try and read Bohan in a limerick accent and it often doesn't work. I think it goes floatier and corky kind of in the accent. Yeah, Charleville's a fucking weird place, isn't it? Deeply strange.

They can't park a car in Charleville. They can't and they have... Out in the middle of the road just abandoned all the time. And you're going to... It's like...

They have a population of... There's an animal called a polecat. Yeah. Have they them in Charleville? Only Charleville. It's like... It's not quite a pine marten

and it's not quite a weasel and it's just polecats and they climb up trees and that's all I know about Charleville. It's not quite a pine marten and it's not quite a weasel. And it's just pole cats and they climb up trees and that's all I know about Charleville. I've heard there's something going on with cheese, but for me it's the land of the pole cat. I had a mink in our field alongside the house because I live now in a swamp up in

County Sligo. Do you know they're only mink in the winter? And what are they in the summer? Ferrets. No, no, sorry. Sorry, hold on. I'm going they in the summer? Ferrets. No, no, sorry, sorry. I'm going to have to question the science now. No, I tell you. No, no, no, no, no. No, this is...

It's the same animal and it has two different names depending on the time of year, which I fucking love about it. So in summer, it's brown and it's known as a mink. And then in winter, it's called an ermine. But it's the same animal with two fucking names. They're American. They came in for the fur farms in the 70s.

They did, yeah. And vulture funds. And they're vicious little fuckers. Yeah, oh, they're very vicious. So I asked the farmer next door, I said, Jesus, Pap, what'll I do about this mink in the garden? You know, what'll I do? Play cards with him.

No, right? But he said, well, Kevin, the best thing you could do now, he said, is get a cage in the co-op and get a gun and once he's in the cage, shoot him. Right?

And I was fucking delighted and I went into the house to Olivia and I said, he thinks I'm capable of trapping and shooting a mink. Right.

The best part is shooting I never felt so fucking male in my life. I was thinking right I'm going to sort out this mink but he just went off after a while

but the great thing was there wasn't a rat for miles around the rats just leg it straight away they're phenomenal like my dad used to my dad used to do this thing

he was from West Cork and he used to do this thing which he would call Lamping Rabbits oh yeah so he'd be talking when I was growing up oh we used to go

Lamping Rabbits and I'm like what the fuck you talking about Lamping Rabbits but what, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he'd be talking when I was growing up, oh, we used to go Lamping Rabbits. And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about Lamping Rabbits? But what it used to be is they'd get like a motorcycle bike floodlights

and a battery on the back and they'd point it at rabbits and the rabbits would startle and then they'd have Jack Russell's after the rabbits. But what they used to do as well is they would have ferrets, right? And so they'd put nets

all over the holes in the warrens and they'd send one ferret down after the rabbits but then they have to send the jack russell after the ferret because if the ferret got stuck down the warren they would kill every rabbit and suck all the blood out of them and then you can't sell a rabbit with no blood inside yeah yeah you know not in cor. You know, not in Cork anyway. Yeah. They used to go lamping in the Glen in Cork City up to the 90s. They're still saying lamping in the 90s? Up in the 90s. And some of them would be on scooter things,

but the classiest guy had like, he had a customised Volkswagen Beetle, because the engine is in the back, right? So he had someone driving it, and he had the front, he had an armchair kind of glued on to the front. And he had a shotgun, and he'd be going around and be like lights lights come on he'd shoot a rabbit and it's really weird we bring it up because he was the fella i heard was building a nest in his apartment with furs

i knew someone who lived i knew of someone who lived in a house with him and he said we figured it out about every october november he starts coming in with a load of fucking furs and kind of bits of twigs and bits of straw. We go, Jesus Christ, he's building a fucking nest up there. It was on Ballyhooly Road in Cork in the late 90s. I hope he's still up there. All I can think about is him fucking laying eggs then now. Just take it from there.

Fucking hell. Have you heard of Lamping? Dazzling. Dazzling. Oh, that's a nice way of doing it. East Cork, it's dazzling. In West Cork, it's Lamping? Dazzling. Dazzling. Oh, that's a nice way of doing it. East Cork, it's Dazzling and West Cork, it's Lamping. And then they have

the Dazzling and Lamping Festival in between in Charleville. That's spot of it this year, I think it's going to be. But yeah, my dad fucking, he burnt the shirt off his back with a dazzling battery. He did, yeah.

He had a big battery in his back for the dazzling, and the acid leaked out. And only for the cheap polyester shirt, it saved his back from getting burnt with acid. So he came back home from lamping, and he had no shirt on his back because the acid blew it off.

What have we got now, Facebook? That was his Facebook burning his back with a battery acid hold on now a second alright and this is another question what's the crack with Protestants

okay I can actually I have to wait to open my phone for the Kevin Barry question so I'm just gonna actually I was I was I was out on my bike up in Sligo. I was in Leitrim, right?

And I was just going around on the bike, and I again started talking to this guy, sort of a farmer in the field. And we were talking all about, because it was very near Fermanagh. Yeah. And we started talking all about Catholics and Protestants, right? And he said,

do you know that even the dry stone walls have religion? Go away. Because he said, and he showed me, and he said, I'll that even the dry stone walls have religion right because he said and he showed me and he said i'll show you a catholic wall right and he's he brought me to the field and he showed me and there was this wall and it like it started off really well you know it was kind of really neat and well arranged and it was going very well and about 25 yards into the field you could tell your man just would i fuck it you know he said now i'm'm going to show you a Protestant wall and we went down the road and he showed me this wall and it went on for fucking miles over fucking days and up hills and

everything and he said do you want to see a Presbyterian wall I said no way I'm going home you know but it's even in the building. And was the Protestant wall neat? It was perfect. They wanted to stone stoned out of place, you know? Because they were all about taking the decor out of the churches and making it very functional and straightforward. Or steer Protestant chapels. A Calvinist chapel. A Calvinist chapel is just like a box.

Do you know what I mean? Not a stained glass window in sight. No. That was almost like the, what do you call that, golden cow carry-on, you know? Not the buffer. The Catholics were all the sexy, bleeding Jesus, you know? That was the like the, what do you call that, golden cow carry-on, you know? Not the buffer. The Catholics were all the sexy, bleeding Jesus, you know? That was the kind of thing. Sexy, bleeding Jesus, yeah.

What's the deal with the fucking flaming heart? And the loincloth and all that stuff going on, yeah. It's very strange. What you'd be grown up with. So now we're going to get on to the Kevin Barry questions because I have my phone open. Okay. So these are questions from the internet directed towards phone open. Okay. So, these are questions

from the internet directed towards your ears. Okay. And you're going to answer them out of your mouth. Right. What inspired you to write? I think most people

who write, do it, are kind of, I actually have a theory that most writers are either really bad singers or failed musicians. I think writing fiction, writing stories is a kind of a displacement activity when you can't sing songs I actually have a theory that most writers are either really bad singers or failed musicians.

I think writing fiction, writing stories is a kind of a displacement activity when you can't sing songs or play the piano, you know? My musical career has gone tits up and I just released a book. There you are. I'm convinced of it, you know, because it's, I do think writing stories is a kind of musical form in a weird way. That's how you do it. You follow, you're looking for the tune of it

or the melody of it line by line. You're trying to hear it. But Joyce, Joyce was obsessed with fucking opera singers. She used to be obsessed with, did you ever hear John McCormack?

Yeah. Did you ever listen to John McCormack? Oh, what a gas cunt. Yeah. I love listening to John McCormack. He's a great YouTube hole. He's a wonderful, at four in the morning.

And what I love too is, like John McCormack, he would have been knocking around, what, 1920s, 1930s? Yeah, yeah. But if you listen to, like John McCormack was ridiculously popular, right, in the States as well as in Ireland, right? But if you listen to American popular music from like 1916, early 1920s, you'll hear singers with Jewish names and they sing in an Irish accent. So in the way now that if you listen to popular music,

all singers will sound like black Americans. They'll take on an R&B twang. The Irish twang was the thing to do in pop music in 1916, 1917 because of John McCormack. Yeah, he was amazing. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre

in Hamilton at 7.30 p.m. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. 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, don't. The first omen, omen i believe girl is to be the mother mother of what is the most terrifying 666 is the mark of the devil movie of the year it's not real it's not real who said that the first o, only in theaters April 5th. It's less complicated, do you know what I mean? What I find with music is you have a set of lyrics and then you have actual music and the music itself can dictate the emotion

of what the listener hears. But when you've got just writing on a piece of paper, on a page, the emotive tone of it is down to the reader. And I like participatory art. I like art whereby the meaning of it is down to the reader. And I like participatory art. I like art whereby the meaning of it is not just created by the author, but created by the space in between the reader

and the fucking writer. Do you know what I mean? But with music, you're kind of... I just feel you're controlling the emotions of the listener too much. A song like ours, like fucking... I don't know, Dad's Best Friend, the song we have, right?

It's a very aggressive song and the lyrics are very aggressive and the music is very aggressive. But I often wonder what would that be like just as a poem?

Yeah. Do you know? Yeah, I think what I see reading your stories I think is that you do it and approach it and definitely

in the same kind of way I do which is realising that fiction or drama or whatever you're writing it doesn't come from the front part of your brain it comes from the weird kind of subconscious places at the back it's a waking dream yeah and you're just trying to channel into that in some kind of way without being distracted by other things and I think that's why a lot of writers find after a

while that they kind of they like to write first thing in the morning because you're still in that kind of melty dreamy kind of state and also I find you're not afraid to when you're still in that kind of melty, dreamy kind of state. And also I find you're not afraid to, when you're still half asleep or half awake, you're kind of not afraid to embarrass yourself, you know, and you'll put anything down on the page. And it's weird when you look back over a story. You also haven't interacted with other people. When you get straight up in the morning, right,

as soon as you leave your door and say hello to Mrs O'Reilly, you're immediately into your state of I'm around people now and I must have a guard up and I must be normal. But when you get straight out of bed... And just start doing it. Yeah, and you could have just had a dream about riding dinosaurs through Star Wars, you know what I mean? And it's just trying to keep it unguarded. And I think sometimes when people start writing first, they look back over it and they come across all these bits that embarrass them,

and go, oh, Jesus, I didn't say that, and start cutting them out, you know? How are you with that now? Well, I think what I've come to realise is that the bits that really embarrass you and make you recoil in horror from the page, those are the good bits, you know? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's when you're getting at the real stuff that kind of went, oh, Jesus, can I put that down? And you have to, you know? So it's just, yeah, it's... I don't know, mean i i like i was writing in my in my 20s and stuff but in a fairly kind of undisciplined way how are you now looking back because you were a journalist in your 20s i was yeah i used to do like i started in limerick i used to do limerick district court and all that um which i tell you put fucking hairs on your chest

in 1989 um but it was uh the greatest day of the year, actually, at Limerick District Court in the late 80s. It was Thursday morning it would sit and it would be the week after the 2FM beating the street was on in town, you know? Because the evidence table would be just fucking groaning with all the weaponry that had been confiscated at the beating the street. But it was great.

I was really struck by by shane who goes as dark as it a while ago yeah his last piece especially about the river you know um and sometimes thinking about limerick and thinking about places like city of bohan um came to me because i remembered a conversation i had with with the late jim kemmy was he kind of before your time a bit no but like my dad, but my dad was a communist as such, so he was a friend and a good fan of Jim Kemmy, yeah. He was a brilliant guy, you know, and I remember meeting him one day

down around Poor Man's Kilkee, and it was at the end of a really fairly troubled time in the city. There'd been lots of trouble and feuds and all that sort of stuff going on, and I remember saying to him, Jim, what the fuck is wrong with the place? What could be wrong with us, you know?

He said, I don't know, he said, but I think it's coming in off the river. Yeah. And I took that line as the first line for City of Bohan, whatever's wrong with us, it's coming in off the river. But often I think it's the places have these kind of trapped auras or energies

or reverberations that come from history and that come from human feelings settling down into our places and kind of permeating all that's gone on in what we kind of perceive as the present moment, you know? You have that exact theory in Beetlebone. Yeah, yeah. Which I fucking love.

Thanks, man. There was a bang of Flannery Brine off it, which I love, but not in a derivative way. It was like a little nod to Flann, where you had the character talking about you walk across certain patches and this patch in the art contains all its previous misery. Right, yeah. Which I fucking love that.

But, yeah, there's this weird thing with Limerick, and it goes back to Shane's piece, blaming the river, you know? Yeah. But the theory that I have, I would say, with the river and Limerick is there's two things that can cause the human brain to go into a very contemplative space right and that's fire and water right even if we look back at human evolution um they study human tools right we've been behaviorally no we've yeah we've been behaviorally modern for about 50 000 years so 50 000 years ago there was people walking around the exact same as

us no different exact same as us. No different. Exact same. Same brain, same bodies. And they looked at the tools that humans were making. And for about 30,000 years, the tools were the exact same. 30,000 fucking years now.

Remember, Christ is only 2,000 years ago. So 30,000, that's insane. But same simple tools over and over. Then something happened about 15, 20 20 thousand years ago where there was an absolute massive explosion in creativity and anthropologists and paleontologists going what fucking happened that caused human technology to explode and they reckon it was the invention of fire now

there's two theories number one is that with the invention of fire humans had more proteins to release when they started to eat cooked meat. But the other theory is that all of a sudden with controlled fire, humans had the space to gather around and fire... You know when you have a fire in front of you, you will stare into it. You don't even ask. It will draw you in and all of a sudden you're in a waking dream state so they some people are claiming that the discovery of fire triggered the a contemplative creative thing in the human brain that's exploded technology yeah the other thing that will do that is water so if you are down by the shannon or whatever and staring into the fucking river it depended on where your state is at the time

like i go down to the river a lot but i my mental health is in check so i go to the river and i think happy thoughts yeah but other people you can stare into that fucking river or a body of water and it would cause that same contemplation and it will draw you inwards and if the feelings inside yourself are negative it can draw you towards it yeah it amplifies it amplifies. And you always hear people, you know, they went towards the water or the water dragged them in. Yeah, a drag off it. Yeah, it's like

what's really interesting as well. Taking a drag off the Shannon, that's really interesting now. Yeah. You want to watch yourself. But it's really interesting the way we're all inclined to interact with water

in what becomes a kind of a ritual way. You know, I do the same walk every day in sligo where i go to this lake and kind of space out and kind of look out of for a while and go yeah grand and i go back home again but it's just you stare into a lake i do yeah lakes are all right lakes lakes are like we don't have many lakes in limerick do we i mean i'm i'm all about rivers because they flow but like yeah yeah lakes are interesting lakes are kind of spooky and kind

of haunted feeling as well you know because with a river there's a sense of urgency because it's always you know you look at that piece of river and before you know it

it's gone yeah you know and I like the sense with a river where it's I love just looking at a river and going I'm looking at you now

little flap in the water and you're going to be down you're going to be out in the ocean you know what you should do you should do a travelling podcast down to Linty the Shannon

I would fucking love to wouldn't that be a great idea I'll come on the two of us dissecting different ripples we have to watch out for the minks watch out for the

Shannon minks watch out for the minks yeah that kind of stuff can I have a tap up of my pint barkeep is Neil Doran around the place

can I have a new pint please do you want a new pint Willie do you want a new pint Kevin no I'm alright I'm grand thanks? Can I have a new pint, please? Do you want a new pint, Willie? Do you want a new pint, Kevin? No, I'm all right. I'm grand, thanks. Can Willie have a new one of them? God bless. You touched there, right, when you were talking about writing in the mornings, right? I have a big thing with writing creative flow.

When I sit down to a page to write, what I am chasing is the feeling of flow which is basically I leave my conscious perception and I enter into a waking dream state

where the story reveals itself to me and that's the only way I know how to write if I try and write in a cognitive fashion if I try and plan it out beforehand

it'll be contrived but if I just let it come out I'll end up with a story and go fuck me how did that come out of it are you the same? I have near fucking mystical notions about flow and how to kind of engender it

and how to make it start happening are you into Carl Jung? no the thing is when you start writing stories and when you start making fiction the first thing it is it's a declaration of enormous ego you're saying world shut up and listen i have something to fucking say right um and the deal you have to make this

kind of it sounds a little odd and esoteric but you have to make a kind of a pact with your own subconscious and what you're saying to it is gimme stuff you know gimme material um and my part of the deal as an actual person is i'm going to be available to it and I'm going to treat it like a real fucking job and I'm going going to go into this shed in a swamp in Sligo seven days a week and I'm going to sit there for five hours until something fucking comes and like most days it doesn't go great you know but it's a weird like Norman Mailer called writing fiction the spooky art because there's something odd going on and it seems to give you just enough just often enough to keep you going back and doing more and what it often happens is you have four or five really slow sludgy days where your brain feels like fucking porridge

and then all of a sudden you get a day in the hand is kind of guided across the page and the flow comes but that's not the day you're writing the day you're writing are the slow days where you're just sitting there staring out at the rain where it's all kind of composting, you know, in the subconscious. And it's kind of, yeah, it's all about really, I think you have to take it really seriously. Like, my thing is,

it's like I don't take myself seriously at all. I'm an idiot, you know, but I try to take the work very seriously and do it. Yeah, and you can separate yourself from the work. I think it's very wise for anyone doing any work in particular to separate your own personality take the work very seriously and do it. Yeah, and you can separate yourself from the work. I think it's very wise for anyone doing any work in particular, separate your own personality from the work because that allows you then to fail. Yeah.

Like, how are you with, like you spoke there about, you know, you'll sit down and write and you might do five days of stuff you're not happy with and then it'll hit you at the end. Yeah. How are you with the anxiety of failure? How are you with sitting down and going, I wrote a piece of gaga today? Yeah, it's like,

I think what's very important actually is to get past that anxiety about something not working out for you on the page. Because the worst thing that can happen really is that you become kind of skilled and adept. And like I know there's a certain type of short story I can write now, you know? There's a short story

probably set in a pub with loads of funny dialogue and something fucking strange and surreal happening about two thirds of the way through. And I could turn it out and it'd be grand.

You know? But it'd be too easy for me. That comfort is terrifying. There would be discomfort there about it. And I prefer to do something that causes difficulty for me all the time.

So it was really hard to put a fucking one of the Beatles into a book and try and make it convincing. So you have to give yourself... Challenge yourself, yeah. Yeah, completely, and push yourself.

The only way you'll keep making anything that's worthwhile. That's what David Bowie used to say. David Bowie used to say that if in a new project you're not stepping out of a comfort zone, then forget about the fucking project. Do you know what I mean? And I would completely subscribe to that because it's in that fear and that potential for failure and that learning new shit that's what

triggers the good shit inside you when you start going into comfort zones yeah i think writing stories or writing songs or drawing pictures or anything any sort of creative pursuit is always kind of laced with anxiety but what you realise after a while is that if you're worried you're working. If you're worried and freaked out about it, that means that you're actually fucking doing it. The worst thing that can be is thinking, oh this is going great.

I like to look at this. That's death. That's a disaster. If you're kind of going, oh Jesus, this is more fucking bollocks again. It's probably going alright and you'll probably get there four years a day is like that and you'll have another book

you know what I mean yeah yeah yeah but it's strange it is I don't know if you've found this but I find it and like even though you're

you know you're sat in your hole writing it's kind of hard physical work in a funny way because you're kind of tense and kind of bunched up a bit do you write with a pen

or with a laptop I do first drafts with a kind of a pen longhand, because I think it slows down the process just a little bit to get a bit more care into it. I find if I'm typing on a computer screen, there's just something about the little happy tappity tap that gives the sensation of thought without actually thinking, if that makes any sense.

I don't. I'm terrified of my hand just getting sore and then having an idea in my head and not being able to write it, so I have to type. You type it. Dylan Morne, do you know the comic? Dylan has a novel

that's about 800 pages long, and he wrote it longhand, and I was talking to him about it. He said, it's an absolute fucking masterpiece, but I can't read it. I can't. I can't make it out so you know it's good

it's good um you touched on something there about beetle bone and it correlates to a question that i was asked online about it some fella says i didn't take anyone's name so some fella says uh what amazes me about beetle bone is the amount of research that you had to do but how did you find working with it with so little archive available well presented that like a quiz question yeah but you know i i actually did fuck all research for it because i thought i think research when you're writing is a way not to write it's a way of procrastinating yeah it is and i thought if i if i opened the cupboard marked John Lennon, Beatles, the fucking world of material would fall out. What I did do is

I watched for about six months, I watched YouTube clips of TV interviews with him in the 70s. And I transcribed them literally line by line, his speech just to try and get the intonations. Did you do that as research? Kind of, yeah. Just to try and get... I knew it was a novel

at this stage. It's weird the way it started that book I was going out on my bike a lot around Clou Bay in Mayo and I should have been happy on a lovely day in County Mayo but any time I got around Clou Bay I got this really kind of melancholy feeling and I'd start to think about

what Saul Bellow used to call my significant dead, you know, friends who had died and family members who had lost and stuff like that and it was this kind of death haunted feeling and I thought, what the fuck is causing this out here, but I knew it was the atmosphere of a novel, right, I was going to use it for a novel and the only thing I knew

about Clube A was that John Lennon used to own a little island down there, so somehow or other the two started coming together and I made it about him going out trying to find his island I did find out one great thing about this actual island he owned out there that towards the very end of his life he had a plan to renew

the planning permission with Mayo County Council to build a house out there and the fact that John Lennon and Mayo County Council having dealings with each other I couldn't leave it alone then you know and just a question there about we said the death anxiety

that you experienced in that area, what the fuck is that? God knows. Do you reckon it was the isolation, the loneliness? God knows. Something about, I don't know, being beside the sea. Does anyone ever get this

when they go to the seaside? It can make you feel insignificant. And like there's a thing within dreams. Often if we dream that the sea is in front of us. Right. we're confronted with our own insignificance, you know? It's actually,

it's like going back to what we were talking about with the river in Limerick. Sometimes really obvious, huge kind of physical entities are so big that we can't quite see them. And if you think about

the whole western seaboard of Ireland, you know, I think it's hugely affected by the fact that it's on the edge of this great fucking malevolent throbbing ocean all the time and it affects the psychology of the people like i would say if you were just to describe west of ireland people in a single word it would be rattled yeah yeah yeah yeah it's just like yeah fuck is going on because they are like

yeah and it's because of that ocean but it's something that's so huge and so very obvious that we'd never kind of think about it really you know i'm guessing you're not a social media user i'm not um i just find it like you know i love it and i'm always on the internet like everyone else but you don't do social because i was just thinking there don't when you were talking there about like being out in the in the world wide open and you were confronted with these, it brought up these inner feelings of death anxiety. Yeah, yeah. What people would usually do in that situation

is that when the death anxiety comes on, they take out the phone and they take a photograph of it and put it on Instagram. Right, yeah. And that relieves the death anxiety. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it does, you know what I mean? So you're at an advantage there.

If you were on Instagram, you probably would have gotten a little pang of death yeah and said oh there's a lovely sheep i'll take a photograph of that and then you didn't go to the depths you're unconscious with that darkness i have like i've i've i have very mixed feelings about being online i think you know the internet is an is an infinitude so it contains everything good and everything bad it's all things. I do find where it's troublesome for writing for me is that there's also like a thing I've convinced myself of two things actually.

I've convinced myself that one, there's a God and two, he is a big lever and that at 12 noon every day, he turns the internet on, right? So I don't have to look at it before then. Because I find if I go online first thing in the morning, if I pick up the iPhone and start looking at stuff I kind of go into a kind of an impatient kind of flitty yes mode where I'm reading really quick and I'm going from site to site and I for

me that's not a good place to be and I imagine it'd be difficult to sit down and have a bit of writing after that yeah it's hard to go into it because it's a really concentrated space you're going into so I find I'd rather stay in that dream melty spacey mode for a few hours at least and then do whatever you want with the thing for the rest of the day but it's um how would you think it's one thing i always wonder about is we say great art great artists that i'd be looking up to throughout the years how would they have gotten out of the internet was there like someone all right joyce yeah joyce was obsessed with detail obsessed with research right if he had Wikipedia yeah would he have bothered us all this is the thing yeah seriously like and someone like I mean

the very fact that you can look everything up makes people not look anything up it's a kind of a curious way you know so it's um I don't know I mean like I I don't have any worries about sort of fiction really or storytelling because it's a fundamental human need because life is fucking meaningless and weird and shapeless you know and we tell stories to give shape and meaning to it to help us get through so that's not going to go that's as fundamental a need as food and drink and sealants over our heads you know but i think the forms of storytelling are going to change and i think this is it actually goes into podcasts a lot i think one of the

reasons why you have this real explosion in podcasting now is one of the last things that can still slow down or kind of flitty impatient brain is the voice is you you call it the hulk the podcast yeah it's we still we're children we want to be told stories and we want to just go Impatient Brent is the voice. You call it the hug, don't you? The podcast hug, yeah. We're children. We want to be told stories. We want to just go into that space. As well, I think that one of the reasons podcasts explode now as well too is the average Facebook feed that you flick through,

it's very chaotic and it's unorganized and it's not curated. So you can flick through the feed and you've got an ISIS beheading video followed immediately by a cute kitten. Yeah. And this is too chaotic. And what a podcast does, it allows people a kind of a one-hour meditative space to be alone with something in our lives that are completely saturated by media and eyes.

It's like a medieval cloister, you know, in a church or something like that. It's like a medieval cloister, you know, in a church or something like that. It's like a medieval cloister. A cloister. Like a cloister. The cloister cat. Cloister is the word of the night, ladies and gentlemen. Someone has just won 500 euros.

Someone says, I read on Wikipedia that you have a big ego. How does this help your success? I saw that on your Wikipedia page as well. I don't do... You go into shops and if you see that your book isn't at the front,

you go and change it yourself. Fucking blind boy's book again. Jesus, get that out of the way. No, it's kind of, like I was saying a while ago, to write anything, to say you're going to write anything is an immediate expression

of fucking ego. Of course, yeah. But it's, yeah, I think... Why do you call think like the ego and that confidence yeah i think it's actually ambition and and like you have to have ambition for your work if you didn't have any ambition for you just write the pages ball them off ball them up and fuck them into the river and a lot of people do that you know yeah i know a lot of people great great writers, who just fuck it away, or they hate it, or they will never show it to anybody. Because it's too self-revealing often.

You can't hide in fiction. In a weird way, if you're writing an essay, you can kind of hide, and you can kind of strike attitudes and poses, but in fiction, because it comes from the subconscious, it all fucking comes out. That's an interesting thing you said there about essays, because people that I know, we know will say that identify as writers right people who from an early age they

were like i want to be a writer people who decided i'm going to go to college and study literature and are now still trying to be writers i found a trend with these people and the writing of essays i it's only my only fucking my hot take like You know what I mean? But I notice that certain people will write essays as a way of protecting themselves from writing fiction. And when I read their essays, I can say, that's only fiction on a

floppy. Do you know what I mean? I can see they're trying to be fictitious in this essay, but they're protecting themselves by calling itself an essay. When you write fiction, I think all the kind of the real gooey icky strange bits

they're pinned to the page and fucking wriggling for everyone to see there and there's no getting away from them and if you don't feel a bit frightened of it and a bit freaked out by what you're writing

you're fucking not doing it right. Absolutely man I scare the shit out of myself with some of the stuff I do but I like that I'd write stories. But I like that. I'd write stories about murderers and stuff. Like, sure, that fucking story about the two lads in Cork, skinning Rory Gallagher, you know?

Afterwards, I'd be looking at that going, what's wrong with me, you know? But then I'd find solace in something like the theories of Freud. Freud has a book called Civilization and its Discontents. And in this, he was trying to rationalize the Holocaust and Freud's whole thing is basically humans

are continually want murder non-stop fucking murder all the time but the rules of society keep this from us via defense mechanisms and when I write fiction about a murderer I'm allowing that shadow side of myself through.

And it stops me killing people. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, kind of a release. But it's like the thing John Moriarty has taught us to talk about as well, the philosopher talk about, like, wildness within and wildness without. You know, that you had to tune in

to kind of a wildness on the air and in the atmosphere to nurture the kind of natural wildness that we all have inside us. And if you don't do that, you're kind of fucked at some level as well. Yeah. How do you feel about, we'd say,

how you were on failure? Yeah, it's... What's failure to you? Well, like I write sort of... I'd say I write probably 10 or 12 short stories a year and only one or two of them will ever make it out

of the house because I look at it and I go shit you know do you consult other people and ask them if they think it's shit no I know

fairly well but I do have a weird kind of ethical thing where I go I've got to finish everything I start on the desk because I think you kind of

you only learn how to finish the good ones when they come along by finishing all the bad ones. There's nothing wrong with finishing a piece of shit, yeah. Yeah, just do it and get a made thing on your desk and put it away and after a while look at it and you might find something. I find what's often useful is you can

start to weld two failed stories together and make something that kind of, oh Jesus, hang on, it's kind of starting to stand up on the desk in front of you you know um i have a thing with like the most important lessons i've learned creatively have come from failures and there's a thing i always say that like there's only one failure and it's the failure of uh the failure of not trying because you were scared to fail yeah that there's a great value in making an absolute bollocks of something

because that bollocks that's sitting in front of you will one day inform something that goes right. Yeah. And at some point you have to develop an attitude within yourself

of just going, ah, fuck it. I'll just do it and I'll just put it out. And if people like it, they like it and if they don't, do you know what I mean?

And just go for it. Willie, are you stuck for time because you're supposed to be DJing up in Jerry Flannery's globe aren't you are you okay ten minutes

alright no he's gonna we can still talk just Willie has to go and DJ and then he's doing you're doing a confirmation next week

aren't you you don't get confirmed when you're the baby Willie for fuck you're doing a confirmation and he cradles a child in his arms.

You odd boy. Willow DJs, 21 next week. This is a weird one. A lot of DJs see what they do as storytelling. Do you see parallels with writing and djing

oh jesus yeah that's no that's interesting like it's kind of because you'll be i know from reading a few of your stories now you'll be dropping the odd reference to fucking house music and tunes oh yeah yeah yeah myself and friends of mine started putting on kind of house house nights and stuff here in the in the early 90s and stuff you know so it's kind of what type of shit you'll be into it was kind of i was very of shit did you be into? It was kind of... I was very influenced by going down to Cork to Sir Henry's and kind of to Deep House kind of stuff. Oh, fucking Sir Henry's, of course.

Yeah, Jesus. Were you at any important gigs in Sir Henry's? You didn't get in a band? Oh, loads of them. No, I wasn't at any of that. The Ball and Chain? I had a very snobby period where I wouldn't listen to guitar for about five years.

It was all kind of Sir Henry's house music, 120 beats per minute, nothing more now, you know? Rome Anthony. That was the song. now, you know. Rome Anthony. That was the song. There was a, there was a, remember Rome Anthony? He did something with Daft Punk,

but he had a song, the song was called Make This Love Right, but in Cork, it was known as The Ball and Chain. Right. And it was the most famous song

in Sir Henry's. I was, fuck, I was only a sperm and you were there and you don't know the name of the song. Do you listen to music while you're writing?

Yes, I do. Do you do that? I do. Often stuff without words. Exactly. I have an entire playlist. kind of electronica stuff. I listen to the

Blade Runner soundtrack. Oh, wow, yeah. Vangelis. Yeah, yeah. And it makes a kind of an atmosphere, doesn't it? Yeah. I love how, like,

or a bit of Inyo Maricone. Right, yeah. And to see how that... What were you listening to when you were skinning Rory Gallag love how, or a bit of Inyo Maricone. Right, yeah. And to see how that... What were you listening to when you were skinning Rory Gallagher? Either Evangelist or Inyo Maricone.

But I'm actually, I'm writing my second book at the moment now and what I'm doing is I'm curating my playlist and fucking Ryuichi Sakamoto. Yeah. Did you ever get into him?

I've listened to loads of him but you know what's interesting actually is that you can kind of engineer a mood, can't you, with the music in the room? Yeah, well it's the cinematic. Like what I said to you earlier about,

like, I'm halfway through Beetlebone at the moment, right? Now, I know all your fucking, your other work, but Beetlebone is really, it's knocking me for six, right? I fucking love it. Thanks, man. In particular, when I was sending you my short stories at the start, you were saying to me,

you know, make good use of paragraphs. Yeah. Now, I didn't know what you were talking about I hadn't heard paragraphs since leaving so I was like what does a paragraph matter but reading fucking

Beetlebone yeah made me understand oh shit now I know what he's talking about about paragraphs it's almost a visual thing

you know as you're given I love seeing loads of white space yeah on a page you know it's like

it's a drink of cold water for the reader you go oh right or it's like especially if the prose style is kind of like, it's a drink of cold water for the reader. Especially if the prose style is kind of dense and there's a lot going on with rhythm and stuff like that. It's just given little kind of little valleys in between where the reader kind of goes, okay. It's a ten course meal. It's having different

courses in the meal rather than a big piece of bacon and cabbage, you know. And one thing I noticed about Beetlebone 2 is when I was first, like my background is writing TV, you know and the one thing i noticed about beetleborn too is when i when i was first like my background is writing tv you know before i was writing books writing tv and it looks like a script yeah you know what i mean it's and a script to me is a body of text that describes the scene and then some dialogue yeah and you have that and you also you quite interestingly you drift a little bit

between first and third person. Yeah. It's really interesting, actually, while I've been, while I was writing the book, I was coming and going between writing scripts

for short films and films and stuff and writing prose. And it's, there's something about the script that's really attractive because it's present tense and it's in the moment

and there's a sense of momentum going along. And you find yourself getting, I think a lot of it is because we watch so much really fucking good television drama now. So, you know,

things like the big American shows, The Wire and The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, they're a really good storytelling. Have you seen the new, you're a fan of The Wire, obviously. I am, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Have you seen fucking bollocks, what's it called, the new one? Juice, The Juice. Have you seen The Juice? Oh no, is it good? Oh The new one. Juice. The Juice. Have you seen The Juice? Oh, no, is it good? Oh, fuck. Yeah.

No, it's as good as the wire. It's about the pimps in New York in the 70s. Oh, Times Square in the 70s, yeah. Oh, fuck me, it's good. Maggie Gyllenhaal's in it. She's amazing. There you go, yeah. But it's...

I think that makes us... But in that kind of present tense storytelling makes us very impatient with the traditional novel kind of form. Yeah. Where it's past tense and you have someone coming down the stairs. Yeah. And the fucker is spending three and a half pages describing the staircase.

And you just go, oh, come on. We can cut that past. Yeah. Our brains process story really quick and in a really sophisticated way now. Because we're really well trained from watching this really good television drama. And just try and bring some of that technique in like did you ever read they're brilliant like and i always put off of them for a long while the hillary mantel books wolf hall and bringing out the bodies i was put out because they had these big lists of characters at the front of god fuck i won't be

able to follow all this stuff you know but um she described her it's written in the present tense and she described it as, she said, all right, I'm going to plant a camera right in behind Thomas Cromwell's forehead, and I'm just going to go for 800 pages, right? And that's the technique she used. It's a really televisual technique, and it just works. It's an absolute masterclass

in writing fiction in the present tense, and about cutting out all the stuff you don't need to do anymore, because it'll just annoy readers who are really sophisticated followers of story now as it goes along. I find tenses is one thing that kind of, like I write from a Limerick perspective and my editor's from Dublin

and in Limerick, we don't really obey tenses when we speak. Yeah, that's true. I could be talking about someone over there and I go, sure, there he was over there over in the corner, but I'm talking about now. so i write like that and then the people in dublin read it and go what's wrong with him yeah i'm like i'm just talking fucking limerick

yeah but whatever about tenses right if i said to you now right if i said to you right write a 1000 word story really quickly would you choose like on the spot would you choose first person or third person I'm nearly always inclined to go third person third yeah because I find first person

it's you really have to thrust in the voice right absolutely yeah because you lose reader very quickly

if they don't buy into the voice you lose what the reader very quickly I just find with third person you can kind of go into widescreen and you can kind of play God a bit more with it and you can be flowery with with third person you can kind of go into widescreen and you can kind of play God a bit more with it

and you can be flowery with language you can you can try things with language and you can try and make world build I love writing I love writing first person because

it allows me greater empathy into a character like I do like that thing where I think they call it close third and we're getting very kind of about it now

but where you kind of really do third person but you're really in the character's brain you know and kind of sort of you're kind of feeling everything physically in the sensation with it. That's a big thing for me when I'm writing I try and do a thing called on the body whereby

I don't know if I step in dog shit or if I burn my hand on a stove, the first thing I'll do is I will write about it to exactly what it feels like in that moment and then drag it into a story later on. But what I like about first person is a lot of the stories that I would write are bordering on fantasy.

Like that story that I read out there about skinning Rory Gallagher and fucking, you know, wearing a horse around Patrick Street. Like that's completely absurd. If I was to do that in third person, then it's science fiction. But when you do it in first person and it's the voice of the narrator and they may be lying to you, or not only lying, they may be unwell. It allows you to go into the territory of fantasy

and science fiction. Yeah. And that's what I love about Flannery O'Brien. Yeah. What I like actually about the kind of work you're writing and all that

is that it starts off and it looks like it's kind of realism, right? Yeah. It is real world. But then very quickly you said, okay, we're going to take this out

towards the kind of really towards the edge of believability and that's a really interesting place to go you're walking a very fine line are they still

buying into it and to get away with that you have to be really fucking willful and determined and just go this is going to be manic and mad

and sort of surreal but you have to totally kind of invest in it yourself I think first person is the key to it otherwise it's it's science fiction yeah I mean I'm writing a story at the moment now about em it's about a fella who he his skin sheds right like all our skin sheds but he collects all his skin in bags and he's also obsessed with his computer so he's after figuring out that

he can create system restore points with bags of his own skin so then so then he snorts bags of his own skin to revisit earlier versions of himself so it's a quieter more thoughtful story than the previous one the thing is is like you only get away with that in first person because you have to do it through... At the end of the day, it's just some lunatic sniffing bags of his skin. But because he himself thinks that he's revisiting versions of himself, then you get away with it. If that was in third person, it's ridiculous, it's silly. Do you know?

Because it's not silly already. It's real art. How are you, Willie? How is it? Is it you? Yeah? You good? Will we leave him open the bar? Is that a metaphor for ask the audience questions?

Yeah, we'll give him a few questions. Does anyone want to ask a question? Like, do you want to open the bar and have a pint or ask a question to ourselves? Which one do you want? Both. Both. Both. You can't do fucking both.

All right. Two questions. Two questions. Is that fair enough, Mr. Barman? Yes. All right. One question. Now, the thing is,

in the last podcast that I did, we don't have the audience mic'd. So if you ask a question, we're going to repeat what that question is. So what is the first question sir willie i'm only joking so for the listeners at home the question from the audience was what disappoints you yeah that's a good question sir it's a really good question. And I'd say actually it goes back to something I was saying earlier on.

If I've written a story or a piece or anything where it looks like I've just been kind of jumping through my hoops. If it's something where I've become adept at a particular type of world and I've just done that again. It might be a fine story in its own regard but it's done nothing new for me. I have to answer the exact fucking same because I've only written one book and I'm on my second one now

and what makes it more difficult is this time I'm going, oh shit have I done that already? So that's the shtick. One person with their hand up, a bit of manners. Are you happy? I'm really happy I'm kind of

I find for me actually that happiness tends to be kind of retrospective I'm kind of never really particularly happy in the moment at the time, but as soon as like I'm finished something or I leave someplace, I go, oh geez, that was great. I was really happy back there. On a day-to-day level, I'm kind of moaning a lot and giving

out a bit and fucking grizzling, but then you realize, oh geez, yeah, that was a great period of my life, you know what I mean? I get a bit of that as well. Now, I'm all right with my here and now happiness because I actively try and do it as part of my mental health. I'll try and meditate. Even if I'm having that pint there, I don't just passively drink that pint. I notice the sensations of the bubbles and the tang on my tongue

and I enjoy that pint. I thought that was what you were doing, yeah. But that's part of what I do, to be actively aware of happiness in the moment because I'm happy that I'm drinking this lovely pint. I have mixed feelings about the whole mindfulness thing. Why? I think there's a lot to be said for it,

but there's also a great amount to be said for mindlessness. Right? How about for... But seriously, like, about just going to that place where you just go, oh, fuck it, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm here and I'm just going to deal with things and I'm not going to, oh, look in too much.

I think there's an awful lot to be said for that mindful fucking patterns that people work at but the other side of it is not to be forgotten well I'm a man

who likes to smell his own farts there you go on that note on that nostalgic happiness thing do you find that

I often find that if I'm drinking or smoking a bit of Baldy, that like, it retrospectively takes me back to previous memories. It allows me to time travel empathically. Yeah. Do you find that?

I think actually it's really interesting the way writing fiction or writing stories has an awful lot in common with nostalgia. And if you think about it, like we're not nostalgic for every moment and period in our lives there's just certain times and events and places that we go oh yeah you get really nostalgic about and and storytelling works in a similar way you're drawn to the heat of some time or place or event um there's an awful lot involved i think uh what's your man's name the kind of the Oliver James or something that's like

talks a lot about creativity and nostalgia drawn from the same kind of pool all the time final question from me how

do you drink when you're writing do you do you find substances in any way assist your writing process actually Martin Amos

said the best thing about marijuana and creativity marijuana what are you, a guard? Yeah, that's it. The bargeo. I'm just a slightly

older generation. But he said it's it's brilliant for making notes, but it's not great for the actual sitting down and writing the story yeah I think the pint of beer the glass of wine

is great when you're finished but at the time it can just make you think oh this is going fucking swimmingly on the page you know when it might be

yeah alright we'll wrap it up now because you want to open a bar and DJ has to go and DJ somewhere else so God bless Kevin Barry God bless Kevin Barry. God bless Dolans.

And best of luck to everyone. Cheers. Cheers. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play.

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