The Blindboy Podcast - Speaking to a professional storyteller about Shakespeare

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Debs Newbold is an award winning theatre maker who reinterprets the works of Shakespeare through storytelling Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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If this is your first podcast, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. There's a phrase called Luce del Sud. It means southern light. It refers to a very specific

peachy, bluish haze that's present. in Renaissance landscapes of the late 1400s and early 1500s. Landscape paintings that'd be rich in ochres and terracotta hues. Paintings like The Agony in the Garden by Giovanni Bellini or Madonna della La Gia by Sandra Botticelli. A very specifically beautiful fucking Italian type of sunlight, right? Looks like a peach smoke and a fag.

Looks like if a peach could smoke a fag and blow the smoke in your face and then sunlight went through it. Well, this is what I was thinking. I was thinking this exact thing the other day on my bicycle as I was cycling at a very moderate pace

through Limerick City and I went down towards the Bardshit District and as I marvelled at the the wonderful peachy sunlight on the buildings and thought to myself this is like fucking Loche del Sud is what this is like fuck me

and just as I thought that my fucking my bicycle wheel started to slip on bird shit I aquaplained and I'd say a six meter layer of bird shit sliding along waiting for the bike to go sideways tensing up my muscles

expecting to crack my head off the ground and then finally I slide to the perimeter of the barred shit in the barred shit district the perimeter of the bird shit

I slide to the end of it and then my tires gain traction again and thank fuck I did not fall on the ground I think I made a seagull like screeching noise as I did it

but like as I was sliding along the barred shit on my bicycle. A man in front of me then turned around to witness me aquaplaining on

barred shit on a bicycle. He turns around and as he turns his fucking head, he then slips on barred shit and lands on his back and gets bird shit all up and down his back. And I deserved it.

I deserved it. It was as if the barred shit said calm the fuck down, you languor. Don't be comparing limericks. city to the Mediterranean sunlight of a Renaissance painting. Look at that. Look at that in front you. That's a man called Noel. And he's wiping starling shit off his shoulders. Look at that. While your heart is racing because you nearly cracked your skull open. This is Limerick City.

And the bard shit was right. Bardshit taught me a lesson. I'd gotten carried away with myself. but it was very annoyed I was pissed off if you're a regular listener to this podcast you'd be familiar with the deep bird shit lord of this podcast

you'll know about the bird shit district which is a street in Limerick City cut Bedford Raw where about three months a year in the summer

the starlings roast in the trees and then they shit so much that the whole city smells like bird shit and you can literally slip when you walk because there's a one inch layer of bird shit at all times and I was really

annoyed I was annoyed because because I nearly come off my fucking bike I nearly come off my bicycle because of bird shit so I I tagged the Limerick City Council on Instagram and said look I nearly come off my bike because of barred shit and when a man turned around to watch me coming off my bike because of barred shit he then slipped in barred shit it was a little bit of barred shit It was about 9.30 a.m. Lots of people were out walking. The council do, they bring out the washers and they wash down the bird shit

every day, every second day. But to be honest, they don't start to like maybe half ten, eleven. Sometimes I see them there at lunchtime. It's not working. You need to do it like they do in Spain. Get out at three or four in the morning. We all know when the starlings shit.

Not surprised. and everybody, they've got a strict routine. Strict routine, it's a marmoration. Consult with an ornithologist. I can tell you. Just as the sun goes down, you can listen. They do so much bird shit that you can hear the slaps of a thousand shits from two streets over.

Wait until the luce del sud. Wait until the evening sunlight takes on the peachy appearance of a Renaissance painting. When that happens, the starlings will shit. And then when it gets dark, they stop shitting, okay? They stop shitting. So wash the street at maybe three in the morning, four in the morning. Six in the morning would do it.

Six in the morning would do it too. So anyway, the local newspaper got on to me wanting to me to write an article about the bird shit situation in Limerick. And you know my rule with local newspapers. If I get nominated for an award or something, or if my books are selling well this is the type of information I want in the local newspaper because then my ma can show it to our neighbours okay and that's why I like being in the local newspaper

but now I think I'm going to write an article about the bird shit problem in the local newspaper I think that's where I'm at they're giving me space to write out my entire bardship manifesto my entire bard shit thesis I'm not going to get into the Seagull thesis but you know about my

my bard shit thesis where I can trace barred shit to the reason that there's 8 billion people in the world today and I'm being given a platform in the local newspaper to do that and I might just have to lean into it I might just have to lean into

I'm the middle-aged man who's complaining about hazardous barred shit in a pedestrianised street I'm not going to give him a photograph of me sternly pointing at the bird shit. But if they're willing to platform my bird shit thesis then I'm going to take that

opportunity and then unfortunately my ma's going to have to deal with that because the neighbours then will be calling to my ma's house and it's not oh I saw your son's getting an award it's oh your son's a lunatic ah I know your son

yeah he's the fellow who wears a plastic bag in his head and has very strong opinions about the Limerick City Council's attitude towards bird shit cleaning. So fuck it, I'm just going to get balls deep into that. It's quite alarming news coming in now from Limerick City about the bird shit situation. We have, on the

air, we've got Blind Boy Boat Club here to talk to us about the bird shit situation. Blind boy, are you okay? Yeah, I nearly came off my bicycle. I nearly come off my bicycle. It was very difficult. Blind boy, I have with us on the

air, Limerick City Councilor Ignatius Funukin. Ignatius. Are Limerick City Council taking this seriously enough? Appropriate response, appropriate response to the situation with the bird dropping. We have steam cleaners, power washing, 100 degree water, but morning, noon and night. We are washing and addressing the bird. Just getting back to Blindby now. Blindby, do you agree with the councillor's position?

Are the bird droppings being cleaned appropriately as the councillor has suggested? They're not cleaning the bird shit. The machines are merely... They're distributing the bird ship more evenly across the pavement. And it doesn't solve the problem. I've... I've seen... I've seen...

I've been in Spain. I've watched how they power wash streets in Spain. In Spain, you're talking about what's going on in Spain. I'm speaking. Excuse me. There is a phenomenon known as Luce. Adele Sudd, excuse me, in the southern Mediterranean, you can see it represented in Renaissance paintings, in particular, in particular, the work of... Giovanni Bellini, that there, that's like a nightmare, that's like a fucking nightmare that I would have, that, that particular discourse on the radio, that's the type of shit that,

I have dreams about things like that happening not getting dragged into that shit ending up on the radio arguing with a fucking counsellor about bird shit and I need to make sure I don't get dragged into that but I couldn't resist doing a little bit of a fantasy role play a fantasy role play now that I have my beautiful PA here and that at any moment I can give you a sound as buttery as buttery as 2 FM

you fucking cunt It's my new studio lads Beautiful gorgeous new studio No echo post man Absolutely amazing studio And my new PA That I'm very grateful to have I love this sound

Like this week I've got a fucking live podcast for you A couple of months back I gigged in York Absolutely wonderful York Unfortunately I didn't get to visit the Viking Museum there because I just didn't have enough time in York but I can't wait to come back to York

to spend a bit of time how do I describe York it's like Cambridge if they sold it in TK Max and I mean that as a compliment but I spoke to a magnificent guest in York called Deb's Newbold

and Debs is She's a storyteller So she's a traditional storyteller A theatre maker, a director Multi-Award winning And she spent years Working with Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Reinterpreting the work

Of Shakespeare through storytelling So we had a chat about storytelling About art We had a chat about fucking everything because I learned loads about Shakespeare, lots about Shakespeare, in particular that Shakespeare was influenced by oral storytelling, I did not know that. What I'm looking for for guests on this podcast, I want to speak to anybody who is legitimately and genuinely passionate about what they do.

If they're passionate about what they do and they can communicate that passion to a person who's un-initiated, then that's who I want to speak to. And Debs Newbold was amazing. She was recommended to me by Claire Murphy, another astounding storyteller. And I'll definitely be having Debs back on the podcast. But here we go. Here's the chat that we had in York. Also, her website is Debs Newbold plays.com.

And also she is Debs Newbold plays on Instagram. and hopefully when I post this podcast on my Instagram Blind by Bow Club hopefully I'll fucking remember to tag her and you can give her a follow

You were recommended to me by Claire Murphy, the storyteller Oh good old Claire who I had on this podcast in Bristol the last time and we had a wonderful time and I said to Claire if you can recommend any fucking storytellers

please do and you were first on the list What is it that you do? I often ask myself that same question actually What do I do? I communicate with people basically I communicate stories to people And I do it sometimes just with me

And my body and some words on a stage No set, no props, no costume Sometimes I do it with groups of actors If there's money and musicians Sometimes I might do it with one or two actors But essentially I quite like stories that are all about trying to create a sense of compassion and understanding

and what I mean by that is I'm drawn to stories where characters in them are quite hard to understand and their motives and their actions are sometimes reprehensible. Challenge people and in order to be present here you have to have a bit of empathy for this despicable person? Kind of, yeah. I guess what I think probably is that I'm trying to find

in myself empathy for them And then when I perform, it's something to do with. Because I don't know how much we want to get into the different types of performance that you can do. But I'm quite interested in performance that doesn't cost loads of you emotionally because I feel like that sometimes gets in the way of everybody else investing emotionally.

So I'll find the empathy that I have for that character. That will drive my interest in trying to form a story around them. But then when I perform, I try and perform with sympathy. rather than empathy, a little bit of a remove, which is why storytelling is ace. Because, you know, you've got direct address that you can go to. You know, you can step out of a character.

In fact, most of the time, if I'm storytelling, I'll be me more than I'll be the character. I'll only step in for a few seconds, right? But what I want to do is try and leave a space for the audience to have the empathy. So I'm not trying to have an emotional effect on you as an audience member. I'm trying to let the story do its job do you know what I mean

I don't want to transfer my emotion into you does that make sense and you've been working with Shakespeare's Globe for a good while and you're this is the bit I'm trying to understand right and what I like about is I haven't a fucking clue

what this looks like because I haven't seen it you're using storytelling to interpret the works of Shakespeare yeah like what's that yeah well so I worked with the globe for about 17 years on and off and I did loads of work in the education department and in that time I got to know the stage really well

I've performed a couple of, you know, I performed on it a few times as well got to know the stage, got to know this bizarre theatre space that we don't use anymore but that used to exist 400 years ago. An outdoor round building have you been there? I actually gigged I gigged there in about 24th thing. Go away. Um, just some, whoever was theatre director, his name was Dominic. Dominic Drumgoor was, yeah.

Yeah, so we were doing rubber bandit stuff, which was, I suppose, a bit like kneecap, but 10 years ago. Oh, yeah, remember you. And we were in Soho theatre and the director of the globe came along and said, that's mad, let's put it in the globe. So they put us in the Sam Wanamaker. It was great because I was, I brought out like six of my friends and we were all, they were all dressed as the IRA and we had fucking AK-40. Sevens and everything. It's like Shakespeare's Globe. But you know what the biggest problem was? There's candles.

There's no lights. Yeah. So I'm there trying to sing up the ra with giant candelabras above my head and all the beeswax was melting and actually melt in my bag and threatened to reveal my face on stage. So I hadn't planned for that.

So I do know the space. But a lot of it was just the people who have seasoned tickets for Shakespeare's Globe. Yeah. And they were like, oh, people were ready to... Because they were like, what the fuck is this? Because it was full tricolor AK-47 and up there are. Like, they didn't know what to do, you know.

But some of them loved it. Shakespeare, I love that, the subversion of it. That's the thing. That's why Dominic book does. Because he said, what you're doing reminds me of what Shakespeare initially tried to do. And that's the thing. That's what I want to speak to you about. I always thought that Shakespeare was mad, posh, inaccessible.

And then after that gig, I went doing my research. And it was like, no, when Shakespeare first came out, it was like NWA. Yeah. I mean, can you tell us a bit about that? Well, he was, I mean, he wasn't like from a working class background. He was middle class, I suppose. But his dad, I think, lost a lot of money, lost his fortune, fell on hard times and lost a lot of his reputation. but Shakespeare did get an education

which is one of the... I mean, the thing is Blind Boy, this is if Shakespeare wrote the Blumming Plays, do you know what I mean? I like the idea that he did because he's from Stratford, up the road from me, do you know what I'm invested in it

but if it was him he came out, you know, he got a family to support back in Stratford. He was an actor first but he decided to come together with 11 other fellas put their own money together

to open their own playhouse. You know, theatre was only just starting to become a big thing again in London at that time. You had the city fathers censoring what you were doing. So you had to try and be dead canny if there was stuff you wanted to say about the way the world was. You had to get past the censor, you know.

But the original globe, it's got no roofs of the daylight, lights it so you play at 2pm. You can't afford to light it at night. So when do you rehearse? You rehearse in the morning. You're rehearsing a play in probably about four or five hours. You know, that's mad. Because you're not doing the same

play the next night. You're doing it. Afternoon, you're doing another play that afternoon. So they're working like you wouldn't believe and the conditions that they were working in were they were just incredible in terms of making you alive, ready you know, ready to go.

I want to ask some questions which may be complete myths about Shakespeare and see what you think of them, right? So one thing I heard was what made Shakespeare so revolutionary was to simply use the English

language that posh people back then mostly spoke French because the the Norman thing a few hundred years ago and that even using the English language would have been considered the language of the poor, the language of criminals, the language of the underclass. So that by itself was revolutionary. Is there truth in that? I suspect there's a bit of truth in it because I think the court language was French at the time, wasn't it? That was the courtly language and most people of higher classes had several languages and they could kind of

pick and choose. The other thing as well is if you think of food right and when it comes to England and class and food in the Normans

and the Anglo-Saxons it's Norman on the plate and Anglo-Saxon in the field so poultry is Poulet that's French because you eat it

but then it's a chicken in the field and that's Anglo-Saxon that's who's raising it and then beef buff that's French but then cow in the field

so that's Anglo-Saxon So there's the class division between English and French So Shakespeare was what Like late 1500s? Yeah, start in 1590s Right up to 161616

So 1066 They're Normans, they're French So French was the language of the court For a couple of hundred years And English would have been really Looked down upon Yeah There were no English dictionaries

When he was writing And he also had the audacity To just make up words Fair fucking play at him for that. Good in it? Yeah, I know. He was the first person to make use friend as a verb, and unfriend actually. So very modern. Yeah, he would turn nouns into verbs. When we say made up, right, did he make them up or

was this the lang? Were these words just hopping around people's mouths on the streets and no one was writing them down? Was he the first to write these words down? Yeah, that could be. That's a bloody good question. And I don't know the answer if I'm honest. But the estimate is that he introduced 1,700 roughly English words into the language at least into the written language

and you're right because we only have these plays because well in the first instance some of them were sold as quarters at the time of... What's that? It's like a large bit of paper that you have to fold in quarters in order to make a little booklet. So when they were down on the coffers you know

maybe when they hadn't had enough people coming in they needed to make a bit of money they'd sell copies of the play in a quarter which meant that other rival companies could do the plays because you kept your plays. Do you know what I mean? You didn't want other people to do them. There were your calling card.

But if you needed the brass, you'd flog them. So about 19 of them were released during Shakespeare's lifetime. I think I've got that number right in quarto form. But then things like Macbeth and Twelf's Night, they didn't release those in Shakespeare's life and they only got written down in 1623 after Shakespeare was dead. So so much of what we know about the, well, so much of what Shakespeare gave.

wouldn't have existed without the Cortos first and then without these two guys John Heminges, Henry Condell they sat down and they dictated what they remembered. So yeah so I mean we don't know exactly which bits he totally made up which bits he was just getting from the street

but he had a huge effect on spoken early modern English massive this was a time when the great vowel shift was going on as well the great what the great vowel shift fuck is this oh no you're going to ask me that I can't really Look I'm going to tell it

I can't really explain what it is I just know it's a really massive fucking thing that happened to the way that English was pronounced and spoken back in the day you'll have to get someone on for that and I'll listen to the podcast Another thing I heard about Shakespeare

is so the theatre was outside the city walls It was Eventually Shakespeare started becoming hip with rich people

like I don't know like fucking hipsters listening to Grime do you know what I mean and they started going oh did you hear

about this theatre that's outside the city walls and he's doing he's doing plays in English this is real cool stuff and then rich people all of a sudden start going out

going to his theatre and this is where we get the phrase slumming it from is it? I don't know this is what I heard go on that's what I heard

and now I'm going to going to, this is the other thing I heard, right? Now, this could be fucking harsh shit, but it's entertaining harsh shit. So, if you look at the Sopranos, the wire, the writing and

drama that we consider to be fucking amazing, right? Apparently, you can trace the way that's written to how Shakespeare's theatre was physically built. Now, what I mean by that is, if you look at the, we all know the Sopranos, yeah?

So in the Sopranos, if you have a bit that's a little bit boring, what I mean is just straight dialogue, a bit of politics that needs to get done. Yeah, a bit of exposition. Exposition. Yeah. It tends to happen in the strict club. Or if they have another bit that's a bit boring, just dialogue, straight after someone is shot.

So you have this sense of sex or violence immediately follows something that's a little bit high bro. and you see this in the wire you see it in the Sopranos well I heard you can trace that to how Shakespeare's theatre was built

and again this could be fucking harsh shit you've got the pit which is the people who are poor yeah they pay a penny the penny stinkers as they were called and then you have

around here the people who can afford a seat and I heard that this created issues with the plays because you have the people in the pit who aren't as well-read and don't receive an education

compared to the people over here who do have an education. So whenever Shakespeare would show a bit with a lot of exposition, it was immediately followed by romance or a sword fight to keep the people in the pit happy. To keep these ones happy.

And it was that continual tension of, oh, this theatre here, for the first time, we've a class thing going on here. People lucky enough to get an education, people who don't. And that was the shape of the theatre it then influenced how people write in the 20th and 21st century.

That's mad, in it. I mean, it's a lovely story, isn't it? It's, I mean, it sounds pretty plausible to me. You think, well, you worked in the Shakespeare theatre for 20 years, so if you're agreeing with it. I'm still no, I'm still a student of it, really. But it does make sense. And also, to do with, like, the fact that they had to keep it moving dead fast as well.

Love Shakespeare is really long, in it. What do you mean by that, they had to keep it? You know, you read the prologue of Romeo and Juliet, right? It says the two hours traffic of our stage. How many people have been to Romeo and Juliet these days that last two hours? Normally it's a bit longer. Back in the day, they used to just make it really snappy. People would be entering on one side of the stage as they'd be exiting on the other.

You'd have this sort of almost overlap of two scenes, which could sometimes be really good, like drama-wise, when people are not supposed to overhear stuff, you know what I mean? But it was also just to keep it fast because you had 3,000 people to keep happy, a thousand or more of them were the penny stinkers down in the yard and even in the writing of the soliloquies and things this is the thing right so soliloquies which are the speeches that are done when a character's on their own on the stage they're not talking to themselves and I think a lot of the

who are you talking to they're talking to this lot so breaking the fourth wall there's no frigging fourth wall there's no pardon my french there's no fourth wall Blind boy, there's no fourth wall There isn't because if you're in a theatre that has no roof right It's got pigeons, you know, crapping on the thatch at the top The daylight is flooding the place

You've got over a thousand people in the yard There had to have been heckling There would definitely have been heckling Of course they would Because you need to learn how to go to the theatre Exactly But maybe you're in the theatre Was about heckling

Maybe if we can all see each other We can't pretend we're in Elsinor Or Verona we have to know that we're here we have to look at each other and go we are here this story is happening right here right now so if I'm

trying to think about whether I should kill myself or not I hesitate to say that because it's quite a heavy thing to say but if I'm Hamlet and I'm saying to be or not to be that is the question I'm not saying it to myself in a late 20th century psychological realism kind of way

I'm saying, right, to be or not to be. That's the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them to die, to sleep. You know what I mean? I'm asking them, what should I do? What am I supposed to do? You know, this supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good, says Macbeth.

Do I believe these witches or not? Come on, what do you think? I mean, that's, for me, that's what really got me, Blind Boy, with the daylight playing conditions, the fact that you could talk to, you could decide whether to ask the people in the yard or the people up in the gods, or there were people in the Lord's rooms above the stage

because he paid more money to be seen. So you'd actually pay the most money to sit up there. Oh, wow, like the box. Yeah, but the box would be behind us at the top there. And it's even in... Are you fucking serious? they'd be, oh, the bloody pricks. Dude, they'd be out there and there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they'd put their best clothes on, you know. That is just ridiculous. I didn't know that. Let people enjoy the show. They don't be looking at the king's shirt. I know. But what's great is you've then got this,

like you said this hierarchy that's visible and you can choose who to talk to. And so if you have a little aside that is maybe underhand, maybe Richard III, sent some of his asides to just two or three people down there. Between you and me. I'm going to do this thing. Watch this. It's going to be brilliant. And then, you know,

you know, the King Edward comes on and he does the thing. It sounds, that sounds very stand-upy. Like that's, when you spoke about that there where you might have had a few people there, that's Stuart Lee. Yeah, yeah. Like Stuart Lee, when he does crowd work, he will, it's a very interesting thing and he does it specifically. He divides the audience. Stuart Lee will go, but ye up there know that, but he don't know that. And what it does is it creates attention there and then stops hector not here I just realised too so you know I opened the show

with like talking about condoms and stuff yeah I just I've been doing that for a long time but I do start the show quite coarse and like that was a pretty coarse story there about the arseholes and stuff there is actually

a method behind it but I haven't I've only realised that now having this conversation with you is so my biggest fear is that rubber bandits fans show up to my podcasts. Seriously. Now, it's been happening less and less, thank fuck. They just want to check you got a horse outside.

That. There's no one here because if you just, but if you'd have said that and there was, you'd have gotten out, and then it's like, oh, we're in trouble, we're in trouble. But I'm dead fucking serious. The audience that I had 10 years ago was so wildly different.

and they would get fucking drunk and throw things like it was a whole and that was fine then because that energy was matched on stage but when I started doing this podcast it was really difficult because you had 80% of the people like

I'm here for the podcast hug and then this 20% going when's he going to sing about the horse and it's like that's not happening so sometimes I start off a little bit vulgar to find out if any of them are out there.

It's a diagnostic, yeah. It is. And if I, if I, like, you were given a nice kind of, a polite chuckle, you know? Oh, he's talking about condoms, yeah, yeah. Whereas if it was a horse outside person, they'd be like, fucking condoms, yeah!

And then I'd know, and then I'd go, oh, shit, okay. So I'd be then thinking about how to moderate the gig from then on, because those people can ruin a podcast very quickly. But that's actually not. far off the Shakespeare thing. It's that sense of it's not necessary. It's this is what you have to do sometimes with a crowd. Yeah. It's like the comedian who

like you know Joanne McNally yeah. My therapist ghosted me. You know that podcast? Yeah. So Joanne like she has been doing stand-up for fucking years and she's a brilliant stand-up and she's very well crafted at it. And she was doing it with moderate success. And then All of a sudden she has this podcast that goes huge, massive, massive, too big. And then she has this crowd showing up.

And she can't really do her stand-up anymore because people are literally pissed in the audience. But she then, because she has years of experience, then changes the show to accommodate that. And everyone has to do that to an extent. Yeah. When I do, when I storytell Shakespeare, so I'm doing it on my own. Yeah, that's the, you're playing like 20 characters? Yeah, but I'm mainly playing me though. I come on as me.

It's kind of like theatrical stand-up in a way. Are you going like, and then King Lear said this and then... Well, sort of. I mean, what I'll do first is I'll get them to speak Shakespeare. So there'll be a bit of chat and I'll ask them to create the storm with me. Because there's some great text. The great thing about Shakespeare is that the text is like, do you ever get, like, you're a writer and you're an artist. So do you ever get like a cynicismic response to words?

Yeah, yeah. A lot of honourable player in there, isn't there? Absolutely. So I'll get them to. to speak some of the storm text with me and we'll mess about with it and we'll have a laugh with it. So that's diagnostic

and that's also going, look, I'm going to be with you mostly. I'm not going to disappear into character because I think if I do that, it's a bit eggy and people, there's no space for people. So mainly I'll be talking, yeah, I'll be talking about, well what I'll do is either I'll do one of three things.

I'll either report what happens. So I'll say something like, I don't know, Leah walked up the three stone steps onto the wooden podium and he surveyed the audience right or I'll I'll embody him so I will be I will look

you know so I might say I don't know Leah had his arms open had thrown up to the storm as though he were commanding it and then I'll go blow winds and crack your cheeks rage blow but only for a short while because it will really

frighten them if I stay in character for too long or I'll do a thing that I call advocating, which is where you stay in your own, you stay in the character's body, but you kind of lean out and talk to them. So you might have Leah standing, looking, you know, furious. Because he hadn't had much sleep, actually. And also, he was a bit old, so he was losing his hearing. And so it's really frustrating because he couldn't really hear what his daughters are saying, and you kind of go back. So you've got all, you've got those three things to play with. And then you've got just chatting to the audience as well. It sounds a bit like, like if

someone forced you to do Shakespeare at a house party. Is that the vibe where it's like, fuck it, I've got nothing but a fireplace and some people staring at me. What can I do here? Pretty much, yeah. That is pretty much is. That sounds incredible. I mean, I've had some amazing experiences doing it and it's and it's informed my other storytelling practice where I make up my own stories or I use folklore. It's informed my work as an actor, as a director, as a maker. Everything about that breaking down of the fourth war, declaring that we're together it opens up so many possibilities

and that thing of being present blind boy that thing of like I am talking to you actually I'm going to be here and it means also because there's no script I don't write it out and learn it it means that if I've got an audience

that you can feel a really up for the really dramatic stuff you can stay in character a bit longer and if it's not that kind of audience or if you're in a festival where there's a lot of stuff going on you can be sit back on it a bit more so you can

you have to let the space play you because you can rehearse a show but really two things are missing one is the audience and the other is the space and the space and the audience play you I think that's what I try to get at

so that it isn't never feels imposed on anybody it's an offer really that sounds unreal I'm going to let these lovely people of York have a pint and a piss and then we're going to come back out

in about 10 minutes to continue to chat Dog bless I do enjoy it when we get a bit of a natural a natural break there in the podcast Let's have an ocarina pause before I go back to my chat with

with Debs Debs Newbold You don't want to miss the second half Because Debs tells some Very riveting stories Wonderful storyteller Let's do an ocarina pause I don't have a fucking ocarina

Because I'm in my brand new studio I didn't bring any ocarinas in We'll get around to the ocarina eventually for this week for a pause I don't have anything really anything loud of nothing to bang off my head this is quite a bare studio other than for recording equipment

it's certainly very hot my body is being accosted by humidity here so let's have I've got a window open there now to let some cool air in let's have a pause whereby a 2 FM DJ enjoys a cooling breeze Oh yes

Cooling cooling breeze 57763 The traffic is crazy on the M50 The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode Hulu original limited series That blends gripping pacing

With emotional complexity offering a dramatized look as it revisits the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox for the tragic murder of Meredith Kircher and the relentless media storm that followed. The twisted tale of Amanda Knox start streaming August 20th only on Disney Plus. As the breeze comes in and cools my chest, cooling breeze in Donnybrook, Dublin 4, cooling breezes Gardee

Gardee are looking for a cooling breeze RTEE broadcaster Marty Whelan has been arrested for the assault of a cooling breeze The incident took place at 3.20 a.m. It is understood that Mr. Whelan assaulted the breeze with a blunt instrument Gardi who were called to the scene

described the incident as horrific In his closing remarks, Judge Finty in Kinsula told Marty Wheelan that the violence of his actions undermined our shared meteorological experience. A sentence is expected to be handed down to Mr. Wheelan later this week.

I open my window now to find myself haunted by a cooling breeze. Cooling breeze. There you go. There's your 2 FM DJ experiencing a cooling breeze during a heat wave. Pause. Support for this podcast comes from you

the listener via the Patreon page. patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast. This podcast is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. This podcast is how I was able to build this studio, how I was able to purchase this wonderful new PA that makes me sound like a 2FM DJ. And it doesn't really, because I don't, I don't want to do that to my fucking voice. It's stupid, but it just, it's nice to know that I can. So anyway look This is a fully independent podcast It's my full-time job

This is how I earn a living Please support the podcast directly If it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, entertainment If you're listening every week And you're enjoying the work that I do Please consider paying me for that work All I'm looking for is the price of a pint Or a cup of coffee

Once a month, that's it And if you can't afford it If you don't have the money don't worry about it listen for free you can listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free everybody gets a podcast

I get to earn a living Patreon.com forward slash the blindby podcast and also advertisers can fuck off no advertiser gets to tell me what to speak about or change my content in any way that's what ruins

art that's what ruins the thing that you love the thing that you enjoy that you love whatever the fuck it is as soon as advertising comes in it destroys it because the art stops being about

passion and creativity and playfulness and it becomes being about it has to be popular it has to hit targets it has to do well it has to go viral fuck that that's how you end up with consistent mediocrity upcoming gigs

that gig I mentioned last week on Garnish Island and Cork that sold out in five minutes now it was less than 100 tickets but it sold out in five minutes so thank you to everyone who's coming along to that gig then I'm at electric picnic whenever

electric picnic's on August something the end of the month I'm at electric picnic the Saturday I think I'm doing a live podcast with Dara O'Brien about science all right so

come to that if you don't want to be in a loud field full of people come watch a wasp attack the cider on my lip on the lip of my bag which is something that's happened every single year

that I've been gigging electric picnic and I've been gig in electric picnic for 19 years so there you go get attacked by a wasp every year Tuesday the 23rd of September Vicker Street Dublin there's very few tickets left for that gig wonderful relax

This is a Tuesday night gig. If you're thinking, I'm not going to a gig on a Tuesday night, this isn't like that. This is like going to the theatre. This is like going to the cinema. You can go to one of my Tuesday night gigs in Vickers Street. You don't even have to drink.

And then you're going to be, you can go to that gig, you can be home and bed on time and you'll be up for work fresh as a fucking daisy. All right? Don't think of it as a gig. Pretend it's the cinema or the theatre. It's a live podcast.

Derry Wonderful Derry I cannot wait to come to ye Derry on the 27th Saturday the 27th in the Millennium Theatre Right Come along to that Very few tickets left for that now

I'm trying to do a couple of smaller More intimate gigs That being said I had a smallie there up in fucking Sligo That's now sold out All right dog bless thank you The people of Sligo Now back to my chat with the wonderful Debs Newbold

I know this week's podcast is very long but it's a podcast You don't have to listen to it all in one go What I do I love long podcasts I love a nice long podcast Because what I do is I I listen to it in bits throughout the week

Rather than go the whole shebang Alright Here's the second half of my chat with Deb's Newbold In York What's the crack did you all have a wonderful pint and a piss what is the what is the local piss in York what's the local point of piss

Sam Smith you don't have one lagger you can all agree upon no that is astounding lads that's amazing I'm very it's I always ask that wherever I go like I mean it's a strange thing some places you go somewhere

and it's agreed upon this is the one local like if you go to Ireland it's just Guinness as simple as that you know what I mean that's mad and do you have

those Sam Smith's pubs around here yeah those are the really really strange ones where they bring the drink on horses and you can get kicked out if you speak about a television um does anyone go there for fun no

really have you ever been in one oh yeah I've been in one or two tell me about that What the fuck is this? I only learned about it a month ago. I was like, well, what the... They usually buy a nice building, don't they? And then they make it look not that nice inside.

They don't want... They don't want customers, is it? They don't want... How are they open? There's no jute box. There's no dartboard. Have you seen a dartboard in a... Oh, have you seen a dark?

Oh, okay. No technology. No. And is the horses thing through? Do they bring the kegs and dray horses? only in tadcaster okay I mean is it religious

is it Calvinist it sounds a little bit like yeah it's a little cultish in it I mean fair play to him as well because yeah no offence

Sam Smith's obviously but what I was no fuck I'm I don't give a shit I'm going back in an airplane a few days but like but the other thing

is because this is what I was reading because they stuck to that so much there'd be no craft beer without them. Because when the American craft beer movement started in the 70s, they were able to go through the beers that Sam Smith was making

and going, oh, we'll just do this. And Sam Smiths were just like, no, we're just sticking with this thing and we've got horses, fuck off. Something I was thinking about backstage, before we took a break, right, and you were explaining the process of how you're taking Shakespeare. And I don't want to say

breaking the rules a bit, but the fluidity of what you're doing. Change it the whole time responding to the crowd it's very Irish it is that's how you tell a story in Ireland like when I had Claire on and we were speaking about

storytelling with Irish oral storytelling there's no rules as soon as you decide this is the story and this is how it should be told then stop it's you tell the story how you want to tell it

change it, it can be different every time two people will tell the same story different there is complete and utter fluidity and it's all about the moment and what feels right it's like jazz music it's like jazz music as opposed to classical it's this is about a vibe this is about improvisation don't be bringing rules in here

is there like you're Irish in a bit aren't you? Yeah half of me do you think some of it comes from that like what type of Irish and did you grow up with Did you go up on any stories or anything like that? Yeah, no traditional stories though, just really, really bloody good storytellers. But that's the thing, it's not, it's not a traditional thing.

It can literally just be a drunk uncle who's going to be it. But it's not even, when we say Irish storytelling, the example I have us give, there's a beautiful video online, and the video, it's on YouTube, and it's called English people giving directions versus Irish people giving directions. You know it. I've experienced it as well. Yeah. It's true, isn't it?

So that's, like, that's the storytelling you grew up with in Ireland. You don't have an uncle who's handy at telling stories. You have an uncle who you ask him how to get to the shop and you've just found out about his nephew. You know what I mean? Or he'll tell you, you know, a really elaborate and interesting sounding way. It takes about five minutes. And then he'll say, but I wouldn't go that way.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the fact that the video is, it's English people on the street. How do I get to the bank? straight that way then take a left there's the bank and then they just meet this Irish farmer

and it's like how do I get to the market and your man goes well Timie Riley's house is up there but if you go there you've gone too far do you know what I mean and it's amazing this is that how she talks yeah she did

if you go there you've gone too far in a car she'd go instead of left or right she'd go Valerie that leg that leg and she'd hit my mum's leg she wouldn't be able to say left her right I remember telling me one, like, a story about walking home from the poolway shopping centre and a heartbreaking because she saw a one-legged pigeon hopping. And so she spent a lot of time looking for a lolly stick to make a little crutch for it.

The thing is, I don't think she was making it up to amuse me. I think that my nan did look for a lolly stick to help this little pigeon. Where was your man from in Ireland? Cassaray, Ross Common. Fuck off! We got one person. Got one person. That's where...

That's interesting. That's the home of Ireland. Polish poultry. Yeah. So she's, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then Grandad was from Wexford. Well, Ballind Dinus just outside Wexford town.

Oh, another one. Are they both here? Nan and Grandad? Blimey. How'd you manage that? And there's the Brummy in you as well. What was it like grown up in Birmingham? Oh, well, we're talking backstage about canals.

You couldn't go on it. It was different when I grew up. It's a lot nicer now. Although it's got its troubles, hasn't it? Its councillor has gone bankrupt and there's been the bin strike and everything. Have you heard about that? There's been a strike among the refuse collectors just because of overpaid a pay dispute. And so, yeah, it's been quite tough in Brum lately.

But when I was growing up, I lived in a place called Stetchford near an Alcan aluminium factory. And you'd sometimes get told you had to close your doors and your windows and stuff because, you know, there was a spillage from the factory or whatever. And so I do remember this smell, but I also grew up, it's East Birmingham. And so you're right on the edge of what used to be the old forest of Arden. So I was in the suburbs and in a council house. And so the back garden was massive. It had loads of trees.

There was a wrecked ground nearby. There was an old disused bit of railway behind the Iron Horse pub where we go Blackberry in. And so it was a real mix of kind of that suburban edgeland wildness that I didn't know was a wild at the time. It was just where you could go and play. And then this kind of like suburban street. And I think Brummies are quite, you know, obviously there's a lot of huge Irish population in Birmingham. But Brummies are quite voluble as well. And we love a chat and we love to tell stories.

And the accent sort of trips along. I love the accent. Oh, I love you for saying that. Not everybody says that. Really? Yeah. Oh, Jesus. It's wonderful.

You sound like bubble gum. What I adore. What I adore about Barmanham and what fascinates me about Barmanham, the heavy metal. I, like, I fucking love Black Sabbath. Yes! And I love Judas Priest.

I knew you may get on. This is what I love. This is what fascinates me about Black Sabbath in particular because if you credit anyone would inventing heavy metal, you'd go with Black Sabbath, right? Yeah. The thing with Black Sabbath is, so when they started off,

they were just they were like a shit Led Zeppelin they weren't they weren't as technically good as Led Zeppelin you know and they were doing this thing

and I met a fella a meta fella who'd been to early Black Sabbath gigs like you're talking 150 people and the question I asked him was what did you call it because heavy metal didn't exist I said what did you call it

and he just said it was shit prog rock it was shit prog rock that was it but what fascinates me about Black Sabbath is they grew up Ozzie and Tony Iommi grew up

after Birmingham had been bombed right so it's post-World War II and they literally grew up with there are bombs somewhere and we don't know where they are and they might go off at any point so their childhood was disused like fucking places blown to bits

growing up in rubble sirens going off because they've just found a Nazi bomb from 10 years ago here and the terror of that, right? And then they developed this sound. Now, the other thing I love about Black Sabbath sound, Tony Iommi, the guitar player, he was working in a sheet metal plant.

Yeah. And he chopped off the top of his fingers. And obviously, that's not great if you're a guitar player to lose the top of your fingers. Quite tricky. But they didn't want to get rid of him. So he replaced the top of his fingers with a bit of a washing up liquid bottle.

But what that did was, the only way for Tony Iommi to play the guitar, he had to tune everything down so the strings became soft and wobbly and then he could only play bar cards and basically invented that doomy dark sound of heavy metal guitar because he chopped his fingers off in a factory. But then

when Sabbath with this strange new dark sound that no one knows what to call it when they started to go to America their first audience and they could never explain it were traumatised Vietnam veterans As you

yeah they'd be playing they're like from fucking Birmingham all of a sudden they're in America and they're in these clubs

and the audience are they said it was Vietnam Vets and then their friend is in front in a wheelchair something about the trauma of war

something about the trauma of growing up in Birmingham with unexploded bombs found its way into the sound of their music and worked

as an auditory healing for lads who just had their legs blown off in Vietnam. The power of that. Oh my God. That's real fucking art. And it might sound fucking silly, but

the space that you're in can shape sound and the impact that it has. Like one of my favourite examples is, is if you think of Gregorian chant, right? So monks used to sing in monasteries and the monastery

is just at one large chamber, a like this. And when they'd sing, it would all kind of be around the same level. And they'd go up and down, but they're all singing kind of the same thing. Then when Notre Dame Cathedral is built, the same monks are brought in and they're singing in Notre Dame. And what starts to happen over about 50 years, they begin to harmonise in accordance with the mathematics of how Notre Dame Cathedral is built. Because sound is symmetrical vibrations of air. So just the way the air is bouncing around the building,

they start harmonising in accordance with those mathematics. And then you end up with a totally new style of singing. As mad as it sounds. And another example then is there's this band called Caius. You don't know Caius, no? Late 80s, Josh Hamm was in him. He was in Queens of the Stone Age. But Caius invented a type of heavy metal called Stoner Metal.

So it's a slower, sludgyer type of metal, almost nirvana-ish, but it's slower. But how they ended up with this music was they grew up in the Palm Springs Desert of California. And Palm Springs is nothing. It's just flat rock and then mountains in the distance. And when Josh Ham and his mates were born and they were like 16 and they wanted to start a band, it was so hot they would practice outside the garage and they wanted to play

Black Sabbath and they wanted to play Zeppelin but they couldn't because the land was so hard and flat that if you made a loud noise with an amplifier or a drum kit the fucking echo from the mountains was so loud that it would put you out of time so they slowed down Zeppelin and Sabbath

to match the echo of the mountain and then came up with this stone or sludge metal, which I love because that's like 1989, but that sounds like a story from Paleolithic times, you know what I mean?

That's far out, that is. But it makes music theatre in a way. It does, doesn't it? Because the space, the space is playing the... The space is what's dictating the performance, you know?

And in that story about the veterans watching Black Sabbath, there's fucking Greek epic happening there. There's catharsis happening there, isn't it? Yeah, big time. You know? And that's profound theatre.

That's one of the first reasons that theatre was invented, that live performance was invented. How'd you mean as a type of therapy? Well, they used to go and see all these huge, you know, they go to the amphitheaters in Greece and they go to see these incredibly extreme, almost biblically, not biblica, that's the wrong word, but removed.

The battles and the, even the story, you know, stories like Medea and Agamemnon, you know, with infanticide and matricide and just awful. And really they went in order to feel, well, you use the phrase in your story. I think pity and terror. That's what catharsis is. It's an almost simultaneous feeling of pity and terror that's then released. They went for a release.

Because, yeah, catharsis for me is, it's a safe way to explore very, very difficult, frightening emotions. Like, when I write, I get a catharsis. I can write When you go to a therapist If you have a good fucking therapist And you're in that Like that rapport And you're telling the therapist

About things that you wouldn't tell anyone else Things that are You don't even want to hear yourself say out loud But the therapist that created such a safe space That it's okay That's catharsis The release I mean I get it through

I get it through writing It's interesting that you say that So there was an element of catharsis. with the Greeks. Yeah. And they play those shows, those plays in these huge stone amphitheaters that were outdoors. Right. So we've got daylight.

So we know we're together. We can't protect. Just like the globe, we can't pretend we're anywhere else. So we are together, thousands of us. And the stage would usually back onto some amazing natural beauty, natural wonder. Like the sea or massive cliff tops or whatever. And they perform in these huge masks that kind of gave the air. Actors are removed from the story they were telling.

And so all of those elements, they work together to allow us to enter into stories and situations that are so dark, so extreme that we can go there together in a safe way and almost see them unwound for us, unspooled for us. And I mean, Shakespeare works with the epic, you know, even though we're watching a play about a king who's going insane. or losing his mind because of age or illness or however you want to interpret it it doesn't matter that he's a king he's a man who's afraid of getting old he's realising his mortality can't communicate with the people who love him anymore

and lashes out at the people who are closest to him but in the Greek theatre there's even more removed going on so you can go to these places and I was going to ask you about your mask yes ask me go on I'd really like to so I mean there's a huge variety of different mass traditions

in performance, ritual performance, and also just masks that are used to provoke performance and ideas. But it seems to me that the mask, and I've done a lot of mask work myself, that the mask has an effect both on the audience and the wearer, and there's an interesting synergy that happens. And I wanted to ask you, when you put that mask on and you are with people, what do you see and how do you feel inside the mask? How different is it to if you were just speaking to people face-to-face for you?

So I've been wearing the mask for near 20 years. I've been doing it because it just felt comfortable from the start. Like the thing with the mask for me is, so it is, the meaning is drastically changed over the years. The most important change that's happened for me is when I got diagnosed with autism. a couple years ago. And this mask was a huge part of my diagnosis

because when I said to the psychologist he's like, what do you do for a living? And I'm like, well, you know, I write books and I'm on TV and stuff. And I wear a plastic bag in my head and he's like, oh, why'd you do that? Is that? And I'm like, when I wear the plastic bag so that I can be on TV

and the next day when I'm in Argos, no one knows who the fuck I am. And he's like, why don't you want people to know who you are? And like, so I don't have to do small talk with strangers. Then he goes, that's autism, sir. Do you know what I mean?

It was a big tick on the box. But what it allows me is like I'm comfortable coming up and having a conversation with you up here in front of a lot of people. But I'd be quite nervous meeting someone in public

with the mask off. That's difficult because the thing is with being autistic is I don't want to make eye contact with people. I would prefer if for conversation my eyes or whatever the fuck it feels like I'm reading the inside of my thoughts

that's what it feels like. I can't think is something that I have to do because it's appropriate, it's socially appropriate. The other thing when I speak to people is I'm consistently monitoring my body language and my fucking facial expressions.

I don't have to monitor my facial expressions anymore. I just have my eyes and it means all I got to focus on is the tone of my voice. So it actually this physical mask makes the act of conversation less emotionally draining for me as an autistic person because now all I'm worried about is my body language I could be making any type of the fucking face under the ear

it doesn't matter I can focus the mask allows me to focus on talking and thinking and if I didn't have it I think I'd be a bit more awkward you know what I mean that's fascinating so my sister is diagnosed late late in her I don't know she's 40 something when she was diagnosed

and she talks about masking as something that she does to get through the day sometimes so it's interesting pretending to be normal pretending to be not autistic that's what autistic people have to do it's we watch and learn

what normal is and then deploy it in social situations but I'm sure as your sister says it's fucking tough work and you do enough of it and so it takes a lot of processing power

you know and I'm I was interested in what you said She talks very eloquently about that but I'm thinking about her and I'm thinking about what you said when it takes the pressure off you and I'm just trying to translate that

to more classical or European mask work in theatre because the minute you place a mask onto an actor suddenly the experience that you find you have is that you're slightly let off the hook because your face is covered you're not really as responsible

for what your body's doing. So you become less self-conscious. And then do you find that you're reading people differently through those eye holes than if you didn't have the mask? Can you... There would be a bit, right? Because the thing is... So, like, emotions are reflected.

And you're reading my face differently because you can't see a lot of it. So naturally, anyone I speak, speak to with the bag on, they can't get a full read of my, there's no mirroring happening. Like, I'll tell you a fascinating fucking study.

They did a study on people in California who were getting Botox, right? So Botox, it relaxes the muscles in your face. That's how it works. It relaxes muscles and then that gives the appearance of someone being a bit younger.

And they did a study that over time, people who were getting Botox consistently were reporting certain mental health problems and psychologists were finding that they were finding it difficult to empathise. And one of the theories was, if a person smiles at you, if a person is, if someone says to you, my cat died yesterday, without even thinking of it, you will mirror their facial expression. We mirror all the time. The people who were getting loads of Botox, the muscles weren't there. and they'd stopped mirroring other people's emotions and then after a couple of years because they weren't mirroring it's like they weren't lifting the weights

that practice emotions and they were starting to lose empathy because they weren't mirroring yeah that's mad but it totally makes sense doesn't it it completely makes sense because it's a it's like a feedback loop between us isn't it? Yeah and that's another reason

why life performance is incredible especially if the audience can see each other and you can see them because that feedback loop it's visual it's energetic there's something that we make in the space between us in the whatever field that is that we can that we can enter together and in terms of mask you find if you if you put a mask on an actor and it's an archetypal mask right so it's like a hero mask or a crone mask or a full mask but you don't tell them what it is oh wow I swear to I swear they will start to play that mask because I think they're looking at looking through the eye holes and the audience. No fucking way. I've been in situations where this happens.

The audience start to slightly, very, very subtly, subtly, just adjust themselves to their interpretation of the mask. And these are these classic theatre masks that we think of the big smile, the frown. Yeah, well, there's the big smile and the frown, that's comedy and tragedy. That's more of a kind of a symbol, symbol kind of. Okay, okay. I'm talking about masks that are very, very archetypal.

I mean, if I showed them to you, you'd be able to go, yeah, that looks like a bit like an old, kind of an old wizened, wise person. Okay. Or that looks like a very innocent child or whatever. So you've got like the crone, the devil, the hero, the woman about to be a hero. My favourite mask. I love that. Woman who thinks she's attractive.

Loads of different archetypes, right? But you can put it on an actor. Then having not seen what that is, they'll start to play that mask. Because they're reading how the odd that is. Is that a training thing? it's used as a training thing it's used as a way of waking up ideas as well so you can actually put

two masks together you could get a scene from your book, you could find a little nugget from your book and put two performers and give them some text and get them to play it with the masks on especially if it's half masks so they can speak and you can just, there's something about putting two masks together and just seeing how they interact

because the thing is what we're tapping into all the time is every human's inherent genius for interpretation we're desperate to do it, aren't we? We want to communicate. Even if we, we might not want to make small talk, we might not be good at that. We might not want to stand up on a stage, but in

some way we want to at least allow a little bit of ourselves into the world and share that in some way. Absolutely, yeah. So we're always trying to find ways to do that. So when you put two masks on a stage, you don't even have to have words passing between them. The audience will create a story. They'll invent a story because you've got a crone

and you've got, you know, a hero. and I've seen archetypal masks right and someone's done something and I swear that the mask has smiled I'm projecting so much that I think the bloody mask has smiled and it hasn't of course it's a rigid mask but then what you can do

is you can remove the mask and you can play a trigger line so you can learn what the trigger line is for the mask and you can play a scene that way so you could play if we were in a scene now and we had a script and we learned it and we were doing our lines and that

we could say okay blind boy I'd like you to play this like the huntress and the huntress trigger line is what are you looking at so you play the scene and it might be that you're proposing marriage to me in the scene but you play it with the spirit of what are you looking at totally changes the scene

you know what I mean and if I play the crone trigger line is is it mine you know yeah it's fascinating but and what is the crown is the crown like an evil bad it doesn't it doesn't really It depends on the context.

The crone is, is it mine? The crone is, I'm doing it physically and nobody will be able to hear if they're listening to this, but it's, it's, it's, it's hard to explain. Is it Gallum? Gellum, is it Gallum? It's more, it's more Mrs. Overall,

if Mrs. Overall was kleptomaniac. You know what I mean? Okay, okay, okay. It's more, it's more, um... Is it chaos? Is it, is it's someone who is trying to, trying to gather as much as she can because she's in extremists she doesn't necessarily show it

but she needs to gather as much as she can to herself and she might do that in a desperate way in an angry way, in a playful way could do it in all sorts of ways but it's this kind of winding something into yourself is the crone but that's just my interpretation

that's just my interpretation are you into English myth the English folklore or any of that stuff. Oh yeah. Tell us some of that because what I wanted with this tour

was to try and speak about English to learn about English folk, English myth because it's hard to find out about this stuff. It's not written down

as well as it was in Ireland. And I've been trying to figure out why that is. In Ireland someone tried to take it away from us and because of that we went right,

okay, whereas here you had people living in the country and all of a sudden they, the industrial revolution I think that's got a lot to do that. You're able to buy bread and eggs

and you just subtly forget the belief you had about the nettle. Yeah, and I think also you know, having it written down by people, by collectors, I think can kill it as well. I mean, it preserved it for us. Because it makes it one story. Yeah. And I feel like,

yeah, telling English folk tale and English myth is an act of restoring it. Like, you know, if King Lear is based on an old folk tale. Go away. Yeah. There was a king. and he had three daughters and he wanted to know how much they loved him but he wanted everybody else to know how much they loved him too

because he was a man nearing the end of his life and he wasn't sure if he'd done right by himself. So he held a great feast and he asked each of his daughters to explain how much they loved him and the first daughter got up and explained in great melifluous tones just how much she adored her father and she'd performed very well and she sat down to applause. Second daughter got up, outdid her first sister if anything,

was even more beautiful in her text. Pleased her father, no end, sat down. The third daughter stood up and she said, Father, and looked down at her food, because this was a great feast that he laid, I love you, like meat loves salt. Dad didn't like this. He didn't understand it.

It didn't have enough beauty in the text. It didn't have enough symbolism. She wasn't drawing on poetic, language and he was angry and let down and embarrassed in front of all these people that she'd not risen to the heights of obsequiousness that the other two daughters had so he banished her sent her out from the kingdom and she was the youngest and she hadn't been raised to look after herself so there she was completely at the mercy of an empty sky you know nothing over her head to take care of her she goes into the forest and she weeps and she finds an elm tree to

to huddle herself in and thinks what will become of me now a huntsman comes along and he spots her and he sees that she needs some help and her dress is all ragged now so he doesn't recognise her as the royal person that she really is and she doesn't tell him he says come with me I'll take you to my mother's house and he walks her to the other side of the forest and sure enough there's his mother's house which is actually a palace this dude is not just a huntsman he's a prince

his mother's the queen she walks in this young girl and the mother the queen is canny as anything and she can see by the look on the young girl's face and her sons that something is brewing between them their eyes are full of each other but she says nothing, she sits back. She also notices that the young girl has got a little bit of gentility to how she eats her dinner, but she says nothing, she just sits back.

And she lets her son take that young girl for walks day after day, and day is turning to weeks, and the two of them fall in love. And the young girl, she doesn't reveal who she is. She's too full of sorrow and shame from being banished. But the wedding day is set, and the queen invites nobles from far and wide to the wedding. of her son and the young girl she notices on the table in the buttery the list of the guests and she notices a name on it and so she goes to the kitchen and she asks the cook when you make the

meat when you serve the meat medieval banquet about 20 courses course 23 is the meat when you serve the meat you can do all the food however you like when you serve the meat can you make it with no salt and the cook he's not particularly happy about this because he's quite proud of his cooking but she's a good egg he likes her there's something about the way

she's asking him he knows it's important so sure enough they make this huge banquet and she's veiled when she gets married and all of the guests sit themselves at the table and you can guess what happens the first second third 19th 20th course comes out the food is exquisite and then the meat comes out and everyone starts to eat And first there's a little muttering, tastes a bit nothingy, you know, around the table.

But at the very far end of this table, there's a man, and he has his head in his hands, and he's a weeping. And the queen, who's can he? He says, tell me, sire, because he's a king of a neighbouring kingdom. Why do you weep? And he says, I had a daughter, and I asked her how she loved me, and she said she loved me as meat loves salt. and I didn't understand. But now I do, and if I could see her, I would ask her forgiveness on my bended knee.

Of course, the young woman, the bride, she takes her veil off, she goes to her father, and she embraces him, folds him into her forgiveness and says, you don't have to kneel father, I forgive you. And that's a really, really old, old story from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and it's probably older than that, ancient.

And that's one of the sources for the story of King Lear. This stuff is out there and it's folded into our so-called literature. That's amazing. The thing is, though, right, Blind Boy, the other thing about Shakespeare is it's not literature. I mean, I know there'll be a lot of professors

clasping their, you know, clasping their tie-pins. And I don't mean that in a sort of incendiary way. What I mean was these words were written to be spoken out loud. just like our oral culture. They were written to be heard in a room called an auditorium, auditory. The Elizabethans used to say, we're going to go and hear a play.

It's like a live podcast, blind words. You know what I mean? And in the prologue of Henry V, he says, let us upon your imaginary forces work. Peace out our imperfections with your thoughts, I think. Peace out our imperfections,

with your thoughts when we think when we mention horses I can't remember the quote now think when we mention horses that you see them printing their proud feet into the yielding earth

I think that's the quote but he's basically saying look we haven't got much set we ain't got no props but we've got your imaginations and we can make something together so it's an oral thing it was written down out of

first necessity flogged the quarters but then maybe to make some money, maybe to commemorate after you died, we've only got this stuff written down by chance. It went into ears straight into your heart, straight into your body. And that means when you, if you want to,

if you want to get into Shakespeare, if you feel like you can't get your ear in, speak it aloud. You might feel like a wally, but just do it in a room by yourself. You can give, and I've done this, a group of six, seven years, year olds a speech and you can take a word from it like vexation they wouldn't know what vexation

but you can get them to explore okay what's the shape of vexation vexation you you kind of trying to wake up their synesthesia show me the shape of vexation and they might contort their bodies or they might stamp or they might make an x with their hands and if you say vexation what sounds in that word okay can you sculpt your partner to look like a statue called vexation shit. By the time you've done all that, they can tell you what the word means. You don't have to go to a dictionary. It's part of our bodies. Language comes from the body. I'll, you know, I could talk for about two hours on this stuff. That's fucking amazing. You're big into the folklore of hairs. I love a hair, yeah. Tell me about that. Well, I don't know what it is. I really

don't know what it is. Hair's are shapeshifters. We have them in Irish mythology. We have them in English mythology? In Irish mythology, hairs, what it was Gerald of Wales who said this, so we can't trust it, but he said that hairs would run after, hairs would run after pregnant women and steal the milk out of their boobs. Oh, no, no, women, no, witches, like women would shape-shift into hairs and that's what they would do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a story about a woman who shapeshifts into a hair and turns all the milk of the cows, black. That's it. There's one of them. Yeah. I kind of feel like the hair is a bit of a friend of the crown really. The hair, the hair lives on its own in a form, right? It doesn't, it's not a

community-spirited creature necessarily, or at least it's archetype, isn't that? And I know that a lot of folklore and mythology aims to bring us together. I love the fact that there is also space for a, for an archetype that is running on its own, having to find its way, because we're all, we're all fundamentally both together and alone at the same time. And we're both together and alone around a fire listening to a story we're both together and alone here every one of you has got a different image of a hair now in their heads but it's all a hair it's not the same hair and so I love the fact that there is a space for this creature and it's often a woman that shapeshifts into it women who you know controversial statement but have been slightly sidelined in the last few

hundred years um this you know there's a there's a there's an archetype which allows us to to have agency and to not be good always to not be good and my favourite story about hair comes from ESOP there's about three or four but my favourite one is the hare who lives

who lived in the form by herself and got tired living on her own and she came down to this farm yard where lots of other animals lived and she tried to live among them she wanted to be part of a community and she did her best she was an outsider

but she was no trouble so they accepted her and then one day that hair woke up and she heard a sound and it was far off no one else would have heard it but her sleek ears

they took it in they could they could hear that the hands were coming and she knew from instinct that they were coming for her and she always knew that they would come for her but she hoped that they'd live it a little longer before they did but here they were

so she knew she had to do something she wanted to hide so she went and asked one of her friends for help and she went to the goat and she said to the goat the hounds are coming they're coming for me they're not coming for you please can you take me up on your back because you can move faster than I

well you know this far me are better than I and you can move over the obstacles a lot more easily than me could you find me somewhere quickly to hide take me hide me there and the goat said I'd love to help you I'd love to help you but you know my back is not strong it would probably you'd probably injure me there's plenty of other people here

plenty of other friends that you could ask for help. And she says, yeah, yeah, there's plenty of other friends. No problem. So she goes and she goes to the ram. And she says to the ram, the dogs are coming, the hounds are coming, they're coming for me. But you, you're huge. You could stand between me and the hounds and you could butt them out of the way. And the ram said, I'd love to help you.

I would, but you have to know that hounds are much more likely to go for a sheep than they are a hare. You can't ask me to put myself in harm's way. But there's plenty of other friends here you can ask, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No problem. So then she goes to the ox. She says to the ox, please, the hounds are coming. Now she can hear them. They're a little closer. And the ox, his ears prick, he knows that they're there too. They're coming for me though. Please, you're so ferocious with your horns. You could just put your horns down and you could frighten them off. You could scare them. He says, I would love to help you. Honestly, I would. But there's a whole load of female ox over there that need my hair. attention. But I'm sure there's people here. You can ask as friends, you can... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem.

Finally, she goes to the shy horse. She thinks, oh, the shy horse, of course, why didn't I think? She goes into the stable, and there's the shy horse looking like a king. And she looks up at the shy horse. And now she can hear the hounds, and they're just in the trees near the farm yard

any time soon. She'll be able to see this now. It's coming through the trees. So she holds herself as steady as she can, and she says, please, the hounds are coming. They're coming for me. but you are so majestic they would never dare they would never dare attack you look at all look at all the space you take up i could hide myself in the folds of your tail i could hide myself there please will you will you let me and the shy horse said i have a master too don't think i don't and he's waiting for me now who's expecting me i'm sorry but i have to serve him

and so this regal shy horse turns to do the bidding of his master leaving the hair standing there hearing the hounds now and they're through the trees and she can hear them and she can smell them and she knows that they can smell her and she looks down in desperation at the calf and the calf is there a day old and the calf looks at the hair and the hair looks at the calf and the calf shakes its head because the calf thinks if bigger and older and more regal animals than me are not going to help this hair, then I can't. And the hair looks around her at this farm, this place she's been living, at these creatures who she thought were her friends. And she feels something rising her. It's this feeling that comes up through her solar plexus rise. in her chest and at first it feels like it's a sob but it's not a sob it's a voice and the voice

says you have legs girl run and she runs and she's still running it's my favorite hair story Fuck me, that's great. That comes from Aesop. Yeah. Wow. I mean, what a do-day. Whoever he, she was, whoever they were. Whoever they were.

I mean, they say that A-Sup was one slave who had just left all these stories, but I wonder, it does sound like a lot of people. Yeah, and if it's an oral tradition and it's a way of communicating how to comport yourself in danger you know how to you know how to be friends someone who might not be your friend

you know all this all this stuff gets I can imagine that this sort of advice for life in those awful situations that slaves found themselves in you know I can imagine that it's a collective thing I like the idea it's a collective thing well what I enjoy about the fables is so my love of mythology is

a lot of it is about biodiversity like huge amounts of Irish mythology is about don't fuck with pollinators like bees were very important they were associated with Bridgett butterflies it's very good information about it'll tell you about the time of year what to expect and the regenerative properties of the environment around you and why certain things shouldn't be exploited and I love that about mythology but the fables they feel like psychological psychology. They feed, because that's what it is. You learn, there's so much wisdom about the human condition. It, it tells you things about, about resilience, about understanding emotion, about pain. Like, the lion with the thorn in his paw, that's, is that a fable? I think that's a fable. That is a fable, yeah. Like, that's just anger. That's just, if you've got a thorn in your fucking paw, and it doesn't have to be a thorn in your paw, it can be insecurity, it can be

you're not going to be you won't be happy and you won't be kind to people it's you can't become an effective human being unless you try to accept the parts of yourself

that you don't like and going to therapy I was speaking about this when I was I did it I don't like the phrase toxic masculinity because it pisses off

the type of men that need to hear about it did you get what I mean so I use the term an unhelpful view of masculinity and like the word vulnerability

like you have to be and this isn't first off I never heard any useful information never came to me in terms of gender what I mean is anything I learned from society such as be a man

none of it is ever useful what's useful to me is being an adult what is an adult an adult an adult to me is someone who has emotional literacy. To be an adult is I fully understand what I'm feeling and I can observe my emotions and respond to him rather than react to him, you know?

So if I feel anger, I'm going to challenge the anger and go, I'm feeling anger here, but really I'm angry because something is threatening. Something is frightening. So where's the fright coming from? And you go there and that to me is, that's the toolbox of an adult. whereas when I was a teenager

I'm not going there I'm going straight for the anger and throwing a bit of a tantrum you know and if you look at who we call toxic masculinity fucking Trump Andrew Tate

Connor McGregor whoever you want they're effectively they're not behaving like adults none of the this is not adult behavior this is tantrum throwing emotional reactivity

throwing your toys out of the pram they're not being adults but they're marketing their behaviour as no this is how you be a man you know what I mean and vulnerability the lion

with that thorn in his paw and I'm trying to remember the fucking story there's a lion with a thorn in his paw and he's stuck in a cage and no one wants to come near the lion because he's being such a prick and eventually

one person says have you asked the lion about why he's a prick if he tried to investigate it and it turns out the lion's actually pretty sound just he has a thorn in his fucking paw

and the pain of this is causing him to lash out the lion needed to be vulnerable in order to find that the first act of vulnerability was allowing a person to help to listen

the fella came in and said what's on what's going on Mr Lion well I'm going to fuck you you bastard

and then eventually eventually eventually I said would you know what this is sore I'm glad you came here and listened and then the line takes it out himself

having identified it takes but that's vulnerability and these proponents of masculinity the Jordan Peterson Connor McGregor all of this they shit upon masculinity by saying that masculinity

is men who cry and most people think or sorry not masculinity vulnerability if you say vulnerability in the media in a male context it's oh men who are were able to cry. That's just one facet of it. Vulnerability

is the ability to confront the thorns. One huge mass of thorn that no one likes I'm insecure. I'm an insecure person. Sometimes I get jealous of other people. Sometimes I see someone who

has more than what I have and I feel like the anger comes in. If I see someone and I don't know they've got a better job than me, they have better possessions. They have their career

is in a better place than mine. My initial reaction is look at them I bet they think they're great

the fucking prick. But that's what it is. Do you ever see someone like an or maybe

they're dressed immaculately or whatever? Look at them. They think they're fucking great. What a

fucking arsehold. Get a load of them. Based on no evidence that's the lion's roar. But the

thorn there is I've no evidence that this person's a fucking prick thinks they're great. They've made me feel insecure. That's my shit. But that's vulnerability. The vulnerability is, oh, I'm not angry at all. I'm insecure. I need to work on me. I need to actually work on me and that person over there actually had the exact same worth simply because

we're human beings and no aspect of our behaviour defines our worth. But that's what vulnerability is to me. Vulnerability is, it's actually really fucking strong. And I don't even, it's, it's, it's Fuck gender. Gender's not involved in it. Adults are vulnerable. Adults have the emotional toolbox and the emotional maturity to safely investigate really threatening parts of ourselves.

And it's not just crying. Crying is one facet of it. It's what makes you feel insecure? What makes you jealous of other people? What are you threatened by? What are you so threatened by that anger needs to step as a secondary emotion to protect you from that.

Because when you see Andrew Tate behaving the way he does or you see Trump behaving the way he does, you're afraid of something. You're afraid of something and instead of dealing with it, now we're all dealing with a tantrum. That's not masculinity. That's someone

behaving. I don't want to talk shit about children. It's someone who's behaving in a way which is emotionally. No, no, actually I'm not talking shit about children. It's completely appropriate for a child to a tantrum. For a child to throw a tantrum, for a teenager to sulk, this is normal, healthy behaviour for them and it's not dysfunctional whatsoever. It's a part of growing up. But if we still

hang on to this shit in adulthood, now it doesn't serve us anymore and it's dysfunctional. And dysfunctional, immature behaviour is framed as fucking masculinity. Fuck that. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely. So, but I just spoke about that there for about six minutes. I could have told you the story of the line with Thorn in its paw for one minute and it does the job. Yeah.

Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, it has to be a lion. The favours, they're about their psychology, they're about the human condition. We're just close to the curfew, right? I'm going to pull up the house lights and 2000s, Arlen B singer, Oshar, has kindly come along tonight

to hand out the microphone and answer, for answering of questions. Hello? Oh, we've got, Oshers, the job already, okay, what's the crack? What's the question? For me, R. Debs, whatever you want. So I find it really interesting that you said

about people finding catharsis in heavy metal music. And you've gone through an autism diagnosis later in life. And I wondered if there were any kind of characters in Shakespeare

that you thought might have had neurodivergency and if people had um if people count the farces in those plays juicy you asking me that or blind boy both of you debbs you're fantastic by the way you both are yeah you're amazing thanks thank you fucking fantastic oh the top of me head it's hard it's really hard

I mean you can think of so many of them could be I guess I mean Leah definitely there's something going on with Leah there's something happening to him and whether it's neurodiver or the onset of dementia or it's just some kind of breakdown but you know like when he's out on the heath it feels like a meltdown when you are so overloaded so overstimulated he's just at a scene just before where he says is there no one here who can tell me who I am I don't know who I am if I'm not the king if you're not treating me the way I expect to be treated

all the rules all the rules are gone so who who am I? And then he has this enormous meltdown. That's a huge thing happening. It's a storm that's happening in his mind. But it's difficult for me as far as I know, a neurotypical person I don't actually know, but I don't know how comfortable I feel trying to make those generalizations. I'd love to respond to it and see what you think, right? So I can't comment on Shakespeare because I don't know enough about Shakespeare. But in sitcoms, and I'm guessing you could probably respond to this with Shakespeare stuff because it probably goes back further, right?

If you look at Seinfeld, Friends, in Friends, you've got, in Friends, you've got Phoebe, in Seinfeld, you've got Kramer, in the Big Bang Theory, you've got Sheldon, every single sitcom that you look at, there's one character. who is deeply eccentric, the fool. Yeah. And as an autistic person, I think that represents, if each person in a sitcom is kind of an archetype,

you've got Ross and Manica are kind of straight, you know, same with Marge Simpson. Marge Simpson is the audience almost. Then you've got kind of the comic relief that coming from Joey and. Chandler, like Chandler is a little bit eccentric, but then you've got Phoebe and

Phoebe is just cookey, just on a different planet. Same thing with Kramer and Seinfeld on a different planet. That's wonderful and they're great characters but the problem is they're never taken seriously

as human beings whatsoever. They're never, never, we love them when they come on screen. We fucking love it. We know fun is going to happen. but they're never offered any full humanity. They never have relationships, complex emotions. They never get sad.

When they do get sad, it's followed by a joke. The sadness is reserved for Monica. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that's how it is to be a nora divergent person. That's what I... So in my friend's group, when I was growing up,

people love you because you're nuts. People love you because you're eccentric. You're there as comic relief. When you go to a wedding, where are you sitting? And this is something that... I'm serious. This is something that used to break my heart. And what I mean by this is...

I'm invited to a wedding. And then it's like, oh, why am I not sitting up there with all my friends? My friend's group is here. This is a friend's group wedding. Why am I not sitting up there near the bride and groom?

why am I back here? Who are these people that I'm sitting with? And then I look around at my table and I'm like, this is really strange. I don't know any of these fucking people at all. I'm supposed to be over there with my friends. And then the person beside me,

oh, this person's a roaring alcoholic. Right, okay. And then I was at, seriously, I was at one fucking wedding. Oh, this person's got a ferret. Right, this person that's brought a ferret with them. That person, they're fucking nuts, they are. And then I go, oh, I'm at the lunatic table.

And your friends don't plan it. What happens is the planning of a wedding is a very frightening thing. And your friends are basically going, right, okay, who sits beside who? Who sits beside who? And then my name pops up and it's like, no, I can't have him that close to Auntie Mora. He's just going to talk about the Norman invasion all night. and they're scanning through who they can't have me near

because of what mad eccentric shit I'm going to do or whose ear I'm going to talk off and they have this group of misfits where they don't know they're terrified of shame I've got relatives here we can't have them there

and then all of a sudden everybody slowly gets put to this one table near the fucking emergency exit and it's the lunatic table and that happened to me enough times that I stopped going to weddings because I know it's hilarious I know it's fucking hilarious

but Christ it hurts Pretty soul crushing It fucking hurts It really hurts Because I thought these people were my friends You know what I mean And all of a sudden

And that's When you look at a fucking sitcom That's what Phoebe is That's what Kramer is Because the thing is You realise They don't actually take you seriously As a human being

You're just a funny friend Who comes in And says crazy mad hilarious facts And those bizarre things you're the eccentric and there's great value in that but you're not allowed to be a full entire human being they're not thinking about your feelings

the thing is there here's the problem they are not considering fully that you experience rejection because you're so insane do you get me so it's okay to throw them at whereas someone else it's like no they have to sit here near all the friends because they'll be offended

I can't get offended because I'm nuts do you get what I'm saying but it's like I do get offended I notice it so I just stopped going to weddings because there was so much hurt I stopped having friends to be honest I don't really have friends it's not that I don't want friends

it's a lot of artistic people as you get older you just start going there's no fucking point I'm better off on my own it's too much fucking hassle coupled with the fact that we're all right with it I don't get lonely you know what I mean but I can't be arced

with forgetting birthdays forgetting people's birthdays not having that understanding I don't understand the concept of hanging out with someone Yeah All those social rules Unwritten

Completely unspoken social rules Not a clue And I'm so I mean Your sister's the same crack as it You could be her talking Yeah Yeah That's so that's

Any artistics in the audience You know the crack don't she? Yeah Yeah Just to just to say I think the foot the fool was a big thing in that, you know, in...

Are they the fools? Is that what, that's what I want to ask you, what archetype is Phoebe? What archetype is Craig? They're the fool, and the fool appears in several Shakespeare plays, and it's also a thing in the culture at the time, the person who would speak truth to power, sometimes through riddles, sometimes through non-secouters,

would say the unsayable to the king, but they were revered and they were given a status at that time, the fool. See, that's interesting. Phoebe doesn't speak truth to power. Well, smelly cats. What are they feeding you?

That's it. She does a bit actually because there's that backstory where she stabbed the policeman and that's fairly fucking cool. But like, it's that thing too with Nora divergence autism.

It's not a fucking disease. It's a type of human being. And I think this is my theory is that there was once a society where we were very useful. and then things changed. And the example I give, dyslexia is a type of noradivergence.

Dislexia is a noradivergence. And if you think of English pubs, right? English fucking pubs, pubs anywhere. Why are they called the horse and hound, the king's head, the spotted duck? They're called this because they came about at a time when most people couldn't fucking read.

Reading is, like all of us can read, 500 years ago all of us couldn't read it was people who had the money to have an education so you had a society where people simply didn't fucking read

so where's the pub it's the one with the painting of the spotted duck thank you very much I'm going to go there you could have had dyslexic working class people going about their entire lives

having no idea whatsoever that they're dyslexic because they live in a world where words don't exist then you get this situation where the capacity to read is equated with intelligence which is fucking bullshit

and dyslexic people are called stupid and institutionalised to be considered and treated stupid if I existed a thousand years ago in Ireland

I'd probably be a druid or a bard or something because of my memory and my ability to tell stories and I wouldn't be called eccentric I'd be considered magical

and the pig or the king would give me a free pig you know what I mean if artistic people would make fun. Like, writing came about, and before writing, mythology

had to be told by reading the landscape. Like, in Irish myth, we have the town. The town is this massive, massive, huge story written down, it's thousands and thousands of pages. And this exists before writing. And I stood on the hill in Rath Krogan, Rath Krogan up in Ross Kramman, where you can stand on this fucking hill

and you can look at the mountains and the trees and tell the entire story of the town by just turning around and it takes a day to tell someone had to be able to remember that and that person was autistic I fucking promise you you know what I'm getting at

we have gone over curfew I'm sorry I can't take any more fucking questions but that was a that was a lovely question and I think that answer was nice out of both of us yeah yeah um Debs Newbold thank you so much for a wonderful

incredible evening that was astounding there you go now there you some clapping ensued after that I don't like playing the end of the podcast because the level goes up but goes a bit loud at the end when everyone starts clapping thank you so much to my guest

Debs Newbolt Debsnewbolt plays.com if you want to check her out or see if she's got any live gigs coming up Debs Newball plays on Instagram give her a follow magnificent, interesting, talented, passionate person I love chatting to Debs

also I want to give a shout out to I'm very very happy with my new studio I really love the sound in here is astounding I've got a little custom built studio you can't hear any of the noise outside nobody can hear me it's acoustic paneled

it really is perfect I'm still going to use my office mainly for writing but never again is a seagull going to interfere with this podcast being recorded I want to give a shout out to the the lads who built this studio for myself and a couple of other artists now before I say this I want to make it clear

this isn't an advertisement I haven't received anything to give this shout out this studio was built by monster garden rooms tiny small independent Irish business that build garden pods garden offices acoustically insulated studios

like fucking this one most importantly they're lovely sound people who love what they do really proud of their work down to the tiniest detail so I want to give them a shout out monster garden rooms

this is not an advertisement I'm not getting anything in return to tell you I'm being sound to a small independent Irish business it's just a pair of lads doing excellent work so I'm trying to be sound to them and if you're considering

getting yourself a little office pod or a garden pod or whatever and you live in the Munster area consider giving them a shout that's all I have time for this week you glorious cunts I'll catch you next week with probably my Old Testament podcast

lads I have a hot take brewing that I've been researching and I'm really looking forward to doing that episode so hopefully that'll be next week. In the meantime, rubber dog, genuflect to a swan, whistle at a ladybird. Dog bless.

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