The Blindboy Podcast - The History of Supernatural Sex wardrobes and Spanking cults in Donegal

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

The History of Supernatural Sex wardobes and Spanking cults in Donegal  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shun the fumble bunting you custard cousins. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first podcast, consider listening to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. It's February now. Spring is slowly creeping in. The little promise of spring. But this is the cuntiest time of year. Because you tell yourself it's not winter. You tell yourself that winter is over. It's approaching spring now. And I find when I do that,

every chilly breeze is a disappointment. I get pissed off with the wind. I react to it. So I won't be doing that this year. I'm going to be acknowledging and accepting that February and March are fucking cold. They're cold months. I know it's technically spring, but they're cold months. I'm off to Oslo next week, above in Norway. It's going to be minus 10 degrees. I've never experienced minus 10 in my life and I'm really looking forward to it to be honest. I'm looking

forward to the excitement and novelty of that. I'm gonna wear 100% outdoor clothes, functional outdoor clothing, outdoor shoes, outdoor pants, outdoor jacket. You can't dress like that in Ireland because you look like you're recently divorced. I've said this before. No disrespect to anyone who's recently divorced. I'd love to dress like that. I would absolutely love. Like, I don't give a shit about what clothes look like. I don't care. I want to dress 100% for functionality.

I want trousers with 60 pockets. I want to wear hiking boots all the time. Waterproof, warm, comfy, stable. I want every item of my clothing to be something that I purchase in an outdoor shop. Function over form, comfort over aesthetics. When I said that last year, that dressing like that 100% in outdoor clothes does make you look like you're recently divorced. A lot of people agreed with me and it made me think about why that is. If you know anyone who's divorced, they've been through an incredible amount of stress. It's very, very stressful and it usually, it's a journey of about minimum three years.

And I think when someone comes out of a divorce, man or woman, they're left feeling quite vulnerable about their sense of self and their sense of identity. They got married. They thought that their life was going to go a certain direction with a certain person. And now that's changed. And they're in a position where they have to And now that's changed. And they're in a position where they have to re-evaluate their sense of self. And ask the big question. You know, who am I?

Married couples can lose their sense of individual identity. And their identity becomes about being married. I think the advertising language of outdoor clothes unconsciously speaks to the emotional needs of a recently divorced person. Like I was picking out clothes for Oslo and as I was looking at jackets and outdoor pants and hiking boots I was reading all the language of the brochures and the tags on each item of clothing. And it uses all this language like resilient, resistant, versatile, against shifting conditions, adaptive snow boots, adventurer, rugged wear

in the face of any challenge. We exist in capitalism. We exist in consumerism. We've been conditioned in this society for advertising to speak to our emotional needs unconsciously. Advertising doesn't sell us what we need. It sells us a better version of ourself. And I think outdoor wear, the advertising language of outdoor wear, The advertising language of outdoor wear meets the emotional needs of a person who feels vulnerable, frightened, unsure of where they are in life, what their direction is, where they're going, who they are.

People I know who are divorced, they find themselves kind of out of sync with their peers who are married. They're like, fuck, I'm divorced now. All my friends are in marriages. When I look around, I don't see a lot of people like me. I feel as if I'm out here on my own in the wilderness, having to fend for myself once again. The advertising language of outdoor clothes actually addresses those needs. And it's how you find yourself wearing Gore-Tex hiking boots in a Costa coffee shop at 11am. And again, no disrespect to anyone who's divorced or recently divorced. It's just a thing I've noticed. I have noticed that divorced people people they tend to go for the the head to toe full kit

outdoor gear and I'd love to dress like that I would fucking adore it but I just don't want that much attention I don't want to be in Costa head to toe in Gore-Tex and then someone going I wonder is that fella divorced

I just like the blend in it's fella divorced. I just like to blend in. It's an autism thing. I just want to blend in. No one notices me. But in Oslo next week when it's minus 10 everybody's going to be dressed like that. I can blend in perfectly and I'll go to a Viking museum. Now when I said this last year about outdoor clothes making you look divorced I got a lot of well-meaning messages on Instagram from people who are in their 20s and they're saying, blind boy, don't worry. Outdoor clothes are actually really fashionable right now with brands like Columbia and Patagonia. Like hipsters, young hipsters in their 20s, they wear fucking forest print camouflaged trousers.

But you can get away with that shit in your 20s. Then it's ironic. I'm nearly 40. If I do it, I just look divorced. It's very hard for me to say this without sounding like I'm shitting on people who are divorced. I'm neurodivergent. I really, I dislike having to pick out clothes.

I really, really dislike it. I just want to wear the exact same clothes all the time because of how they feel. That's it. Like I've thought about dressing like a metaller. Now I love heavy metal. I adore heavy metal. But I've considered, maybe I should just become a metaller. Black everything.

T-shirts of heavy metal bands, leather jackets. You can literally settle on one pair of jeans. One pair of jeans that's the right fit, the right color, feels perfect and just keep buying those same jeans for the rest of your life. Fashion never really changes with metlers. You're just a metaller. A metaller in the 1980s and a metaller now looks the exact same. Age doesn't matter. You can dress like a metaller well into your 70s if you want. You don't have to think about trends. You don't have to be worried about fashion.

You can buy several pairs of the same trousers, the same shoes. The anxiety of having to choose fucking clothes, that's gone if you're a meddler. I love heavy metal, but I don't want to commit myself to being a meddler in public. Nothing against meddlers, I just don't want that much attention. A lot of my friends are meddlers. If I'm in Costa Coffee, just trying to blend in and have a quiet day, and I'm wearing a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt, and then someone else walks in with a wearing a cannibal corpse t-shirt and then someone else walks in

with a napalm death fucking t-shirt we have to have a conversation those are the rules I've seen it happen if you walk if you're wearing a heavy metal t-shirt in a coffee shop and someone else is also wearing a heavy metal t-shirt and you don't acknowledge that person that's rude so that's why I don't dress like a meddler. I've always been this way about clothes, but it's one of those things that you get diagnosed with autism, and then you find out, oh, this is quite autistic behaviour. This is quite common amongst autistic people. I'm very stressed out by having to keep up with trends and fashion,

and knowing what's in fashion and picking the right clothes and picking something that's not so shit that I stand out and not so fashionable that I stand out. Something perfectly in the middle so that I blend in, I'm comfortable and I can just get on with my day. Like for years how I used to dress myself was. I'd play the video game Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and in this video game your character can go to a multitude of clothes shops, different styles, different fashions. So my character in this video game, I'd take him to a clothes shop. I'd spend about an hour picking the right shoes, the right pants,

the right shirt. And when I finally settle on a look that I enjoy on my character, then I'd go and buy clothes that look like that. And that's how I was dressing myself for years. Of course, I'd never tell anyone that because it's mad. But then, you know, I kind of realized, oh, this is quite a, this is a neurodivergent response to a social language because that's what fashion is fashion is a highly social language of visual communication the choices that you make and the clothes that you wear you're communicating things about yourself to other people in an unspoken language that's agreed upon in a system. And I personally find that social language a bit confusing, mainly because I fuck up so frequently and do ridiculous

things with my clothes. Like this morning, I was jogging into the office this morning, and I jogged past a fella. He was about 29. He looked pretty fashionable. His clothes looked loose-fitting and comfortable. He had an Auburn fleeced lined lumberjack shirt. Kind of skateboard shoes but not skateboard shoes. And these loose fitting trousers that were curled up at the bottom. And then I realised I was following

him. I was following this young fella. And then I stopped and said you can't be fucking turning around mid-jog to study what a man is wearing and memorise it like this is how bad I am with clothes what I was doing

I made a documentary for the BBC around 2018 Blind by Undestroyed and I made them put into the budget that I'd have a consultation with a stylist because you're allowed to do that for TV you know someone has to style you for the camera and I made them put into the budget that I'd have a consultation with a stylist. Because you're allowed to do that for TV, you know, someone has to style you for the camera. Lots of different reasons.

Like when you're on television, you can't wear clothes that have very intricate patterns because it can interfere with the lens. It can create an effect known as strobing, which looks strange on a screen. Also, if you're on camera and you're doing any work with a green screen, you can't wear clothes that have green or blue in them. But I made BBC hire a stylist just to fucking teach me how to dress in real life. Fucking British taxpayer paying for me to blend into the wall in Costa. It's just after the fucking pandemic. Skinny jeans are gone. Skinny jeans are done. you can't wear skinny jeans anymore I've been trying cargo pants

retail is disappearing so you can't walk up to a window of a shop and look at the mannequins anymore you can't wear a suit I can't wear suits anyway anytime I wear a suit I look like a hotel manager I have a feeling I'm just gonna I'm to use Oslo as an opportunity to road test head-to-toe outdoor gear.

And that just becomes my thing. That just becomes my thing. And if people think I'm divorced, grand. Just don't talk to me about it. Apparently what's stylish now actually is everything the character George Costanza in Seinfeld is wearing. There's an Instagram account called Every George Costanza Outfit. And apparently how George Costanza dressed. That's the fashionable way for a man to dress right now.

Which is quite ironic. Because Seinfeld is set in the early 90s. ironic because Seinfeld is set in the early 90s and the character of George Costanza was specifically styled to look like a pathetic middle-aged man. George Costanza's character is portrayed as pathetic. He lives with his mother, he's portrayed as being unemployed and now his clothing is being studied as stylish and George Costanza was wearing brands like Patagonia, which are now stylish again. And the character of Kramer in Seinfeld is considered to be stylish now. So much so that in California,

people working in costume for television, they can't get their hands on vintage shirts anymore because everyone's buying them in the second-hand stores to dress like Kramer. So this week's podcast is not about fashion. I wouldn't call this a hot take episode because I don't have a full hot take but I do have a thread of curiosity.

How I write this podcast is I do loads and loads of research about whatever I'm legitimately curious about and then I kind of wait for patterns to emerge and I follow them. In the early 20th century there was a psychologist called Wilhelm Reich. He was a psychoanalyst of the school of Sigmund Freud. Psychodynamic psychologist And the bones of psychodynamic theory, which comes from Sigmund Freud, the basic bones of it is, we have an unconscious mind, that there's a deep part of the human mind that's unconscious outside of our awareness.

And within this unconscious mind, we can have a lot of pain and anger and frustration and hurt that will bubble up into our conscious mind and drive our behavior in destructive ways. Well Wilhelm Reich was Austrian and he witnessed the rise of the Nazis in Germany. He witnessed this. He wrote an incredibly popular and influential book in 1933 called The Mass Psychology of Fascism. He blended Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious with Marxist analysis and tried to explain how fascism came about in Nazi Germany.

How did fascism sweep the entire population? And Reich claimed in this book that it all came down to sexual repression. Reich argued that the German people and German society heavily repressed and shamed all sexual desire. That sex in German society was dirty, unclean, something to be kept in secret, something to be done with the lights off, purely functional, just to procreate,

and that sex for pleasure was wrong. He argued that in a society where sexual desire is repressed deep down into the population. This creates an anxiety, an unconscious anxiety. And from this, fascism and authoritarianism will rise as a way to control that anxiety. Because fascism is all about social cleansing, creating purity, creating perfection, labelling a group of people as degenerate. Basically saying that the Nazis and all the German people who supported the Nazis just needed a good ride. So Wilhelm Reich's ideas in the book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, they became very, very popular after World War II. And Wilhelm Reich coined the phrase sexual revolution.

Now, of course, Reich, he was ran out of Germany by the Nazis. And he found himself in America with his ideas about sex as a form of Marxist political revolution. And when he found himself in America, Reich's ideas became incredibly popular and became the ideological framework of the sexual revolution. From the beatniks in the 1950s to the hippies of the 1960s, free love, sex outside marriage, sex for the pleasure of having sex, simply even talking publicly about having sex or having sex in public, this became revolutionary. This became a revolutionary act. You are now fighting fascism. You're preventing fascism by having sex. But the

thing is with a lot of early psychologists, and particularly anyone associated with Sigmund Freud, you tend to find that some of their work was very, very important to psychology. And then a lot of it was absolutely batshit mad. And Wilhelm Reich believed in a type of cosmic energy known as argon, which fuelled the entire universe, which was released every time a person had an orgasm. And while in America, he began to invent these strange boxes called argon boxes. These boxes were basically a wooden wardrobe that was lined with metal on the inside and had a chair. And what it was, was he believed that this cosmic substance, argon, was the cause of most mental illness and physical diseases.

So basically, it was a wanking box. Basically, it was a wanking box. It was a strange metal-lined wardrobe, looked a bit like a confession box, that people would go into and wank. And while they were inside there masturbating, the metal lining of the box would collect all the cosmic energy and then heal cancer in your body. So there were wardrobes that you wank in and can cure cancer. And these became really popular in America. This was a serious device that was being used by famous people.

Willem Rijck, he managed to convince Albert Einstein to climb into this box and have a wank. He was hoping that Einstein could use the theory of relativity or something to do with subatomic particles to confirm and prove his theory. So Einstein went in and had a fantastic wank in a metal lined box but was like, that was a great wank but I'm afraid there's no science here, Wilhelm. There's no science about your theory about the wanking energy in the universe. But Wilhelm didn't listen. And famous people kept buying these wanking wardrobes that he was selling to try and cure their ills.

J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs all purchased a cancer-curing cosmic wanking wardrobe. But the thing is, Wilhelm Reich was already under surveillance by the FBI in America because he was a Marxist and they were terrified of communism. So he was being watched very carefully and very closely.

And then the FDA got involved, the Federal Drug Administration. And they said to Wilhelm Reich, you can't be selling wardrobes that you wank in and tell people that they cure cancer. You can't do that with no proof. But he kept doing it. And then they arrested him. And he got sent to jail.

And a lot of his books were burned. But that didn't stop him. Because when Wilhelm Reich got out of jail he invented a machine called a cloud buster which was a type of strange large gun that was powered by argon argon is this cosmic energy how do I describe this

so basically Wilhelm Reich believed that argon, this orgasmic energy, was present everywhere. And he didn't like storms. He didn't like rain. So he invented a cloud buster, a machine that was pointed at rain clouds, right? But what fueled this machine was the energy of wank. So he'd get people to wank inside in his wanking wardrobe and then the energy of that wank would go into this gun and he would shoot that up at the clouds so that rain would go away. In the 80s Kate Bush wrote a song about it called Cloud Busting and there's a replica Cloud Buster in the video. The The cloudbuster obviously didn't work because Argonne isn't real. But after the 1960s, after the sexual revolution, after free love as a radical political tool

amongst the hippies, Wilhelm Reich's ideas went on to inspire a new approach called primal therapy. There was a psychologist called Arthur Janov. And Janov started to think, all right, maybe this repressed sexual stuff, maybe that's a bit mad, maybe that's a bit too much. But Wilhelm Reich was definitely correct with repressed energy of some description causing people anxiety and depression and mental ills so jan i've developed a theory that poor mental health or mental illness comes from repressed emotion specifically emotions that we were unable to express as tiny babies. Anger and anxiety and humiliation that a tiny baby might feel but doesn't have the words to express this. That a baby can only express its emotions by screaming

and crying. So Janav developed primal screaming therapy. A form of group therapy where adults would literally scream like babies. Like imagine going to a group therapy session and you're encouraged to throw a gigantic, huge screaming tantrum. Janov believed that to scream and cry at the top of your lungs would release deeply unconscious pain and trauma that you're holding in your body since you were an infant he wrote a book about it in 1970 called the primal scream and this became a hugely popular pop psychology book. Like it was massive. One of the earliest proponents of primal screaming was John Lennon. John Lennon from the Beatles. And just after John Lennon left the Beatles in 1970 he started to get involved in primal scream therapy. You can hear it in his work. Listen to a John Lennon song called Mother from 1970. It's a song where John Lennon is speaking about

being abandoned as a child by his mother. Wonderful lyrics. Mother, you had me, but I never had you. And at the end of the song, the lyrics are Mama don't go, Daddy come home. And Lennon keeps repeating them until eventually at the very end of the song, he's not even singing anymore. He's literally screaming, screaming at the top of his lungs. He's screaming

like a little baby in a way that isn't musical at all. And arguably, arguably inventing the type of screaming that you now hear in heavy metal music. That was probably the first example of it in music. 1970, John Lennon's song Mother. But what Lennon was doing there was expressing things that he'd uncovered in primal scream therapy. Loads of adults in a group, screaming at the top of their lungs like babies to release repressed pain, guilt, humiliation, anxiety from when you were an infant. But there wasn't any evidence for primal scream therapy. But it was very popular. And it took from the ideas of Wilhelm Reich. So in the 60s, your repression was sexual energy. You must get that sexual energy out there. By the 60s your repression was sexual energy

you must get that sexual energy out there by the 70s things had changed it's not sex anymore it's repressed emotion let's all scream let's scream together in a group and throw tantrums because the hippies were entering the 30s then

and lots of hippie groups formed communes around this primal screaming therapy. And none of them were psychologists, they were just groups of people who liked to scream. And one of these groups found themselves in a tiny village in Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland. In the 1970s, lots of hippies, from England in particular, but also from places like Germany, other places in Europe, lots of hippies moved to the west of Ireland to start communes. A commune is a little, a closed off kind of little society, a little community based around an ideological belief.

A commune is a form of social escapism where a group of people get together and decide let's create a new world, a little new world that's away from the one outside there. Some communes were a bit like a cult but in the west of Ireland it was mainly hippies. Anyone down in West Cork will tell you about all the English hippies that are there now. Now one theory as to why so many hippies ended up in the west of Ireland was the

70s was the height of the Cold War. People were really really afraid of nuclear war breaking out at any point and some people believed that the west coast of Ireland was the safest place to be if nuclear war broke out in Europe. Now personally I think, especially with the English hippies, quite a lot of English hippies in the 70s, they were posh. They were rich kids. They might have had dreadlocks and appeared poor, but they came from wealthy families. They came from posh, wealthy families. And when the English colonised us, the west of Ireland was always a holiday destination. The west of Ireland was where the rich colonisers over in England had their land as a holiday home.

So I think a lot of these English hippies that came here in the 70s, they were following in the footsteps of their great-grandparents, the Grand Viscount of Shrewsbury or something. They were fetishising the west of Ireland as a wild, primitive, uncontacted land where they viewed the people as animals. In the 1970s, this commune of English hippies bought a big house in the town of Bartonport, this tiny little fishing village in Donegal where everyone spoke Irish.

And this group of hippies called themselves the Atlantis Commune. And they literally all lived together in this house. And they screamed. They were proponents of primal screaming therapy. They screamed at the top of their lungs all day long, screaming and crying like a group of 30 adults

and it drove the locals fucking mad. The group became known as the Screamers. They drove everyone in the village insane. They're like who the fuck? Who are all these mad English cunts who have to rent in a house and all they do is scream inside there all day. People couldn't handle it. The IRA sent them a bomb threat. It was so disturbing that it was being discussed in the Dáil in Ireland, the Irish Parliament in the 1970s. What the fuck are we going to do with these lunatics up in Donegal?

There's a lot of English people living in a house and they scream all day long. But this commune of people, these hippies, this was their way of life. They genuinely believed. If they scream and scream and throw tantrums, that they're being emotionally authentic. scream and throw tantrums, that they're being emotionally authentic, that all the pain and anxiety within them from childhood, they're getting it out in a really healthy way through primal scream therapy. But it was no crack for their neighbours. They were eventually ran out of town and they moved to the tiny island of Inish Free off the coast of Donegal where they could have their commune and scream to their

heart's content. They eventually moved to Columbia and they started a screaming commune in Columbia until two of the members were murdered by FARC who were like these revolutionary guerrillas in Columbia. Kevin Barry, the wonderful writer who I've had in this podcast, he fictionalised some of this. He wrote a book called Beetlebone in 2015, a fantastic novel, which is half fact and half fiction. It's about John Lennon going to a small little island off the west coast of Ireland and encountering the Screamers. But the other thing I find fascinating is when the screamers, the screaming hippies, left their house in Burtonport in Donegal, when they left that, another much stranger group of English, I don't know what I call them, hippies,

another English commune moved into the same house. And these were called the Silver Sisterhood. And I'm going to speak about them now after the ocarina pause. I don't have my ocarina, so what I'm going to do is... I don't think I'm going to hit myself into the head with this book because it is quite a hefty book. But I might tap it for you. I have a book here. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

This is a book that's written in the 1300s. The reason I have it is that The Canterbury Tales is one of the first books to be written down in what we call the English language, as mad as that sounds. It's written in Middle English. English in the 1300s would have been considered a peasant's language, the language of the people. And this is one of the ardiest examples that we have of Middle English written down. You can read it comfortably and kind of understand it. Before Middle English, you've got Old English. A good example of some Old English, if you want to read it, is Beowulf, which is an epic Anglo-Saxon tale, which that's nearly impossible to read. Old English does not sound like the English we speak today.

So I'm going to gently tap the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer with my fingers, because I'm not hitting myself into the head with it, it's too big. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone.

Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's the girl. Witness the birth.

Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what?

It's the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. What's not real? Who said that? The First Omen. Only in theaters April 5th. I'm like one of those ASMR pricks. Alright, you would have heard an advertisement there, for something.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash TheBlindWayPodcast. This podcast is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living, it's how I rent my office, it's how I pay my bills. So if you enjoy listening to this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction whatever the fuck please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing all I'm looking for is a price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it

if you can't afford it don't worry about it you can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free so everybody gets a podcast and I get to earn a living patreon.com forward slash

the blind boy podcast. And if you are going to Patreon, make sure you become a paid member and not a free member. I think that's just a way for Patreon to get your email address, but I don't see any benefit if people become free members. So if you are becoming a Patreon subscriber, become a paid member. If you enjoy this podcast also, just tell a friend. Next time your friend is saying what podcast do you listen to, say I listen to the Blind Boy podcast, give it a crack. Word of mouth is still the most powerful way to spread any piece of work that you're doing, especially as social media sites are collapsing all around us. We're seeing the end of social media right now. I'll just plug a few gigs. Next week, my two gigs in Berlin are sold out. I'm in Oslo, right? I'm in Oslo in Norway on the 6th

of February. So if you're around for that, come along. 20th of February, I'm above in Derry. so if you're around for that come along 20th of February I'm above in Derry March 7th and 8th I'm doing these tiny little gigs in Ballycotton in church at the Sea Church Podcast Festival they might even be sold out those are tiny little gigs that I'm doing

and then April my huge big UK tour that I'm doing right because the podcast is after getting really fucking big in England, Scotland and Wales the past six months, I don't know why, but it's gone really, really big over there, much, much bigger than it is in Ireland, I can't understand it, but you keep wanting me to come over to do gigs, so I'm doing a huge big tour in April At Newcastle. Glasgow sold out already.

At Nottingham. Wales. Cardiff. Brighton. Cambridge. Bristol. Bristol's completely sold out. And then my biggest ever fucking show.

In the Hammersmith Apollo in London. It's my biggest show I've ever done. I can't believe I'm gigging in the Hammersmith Apollo in London. It's my biggest show I've ever done. I can't believe I'm gigging in the Hammersmith Apollo. I just can't believe that. It's one of those things where David Bowie's last gig as Ziggy Stardust in 1974, I believe, was in the Hammersmith Apollo. I used to watch that gig on TV since I was a child.

One of my brothers had that on VHS and when I was a child, like a small child, we used to watch David Bowie's last gig as fucking Ziggy Stardust in the Hammersmith Apollo. I remember watching it and being so young, probably six years of age, because it's one of these core fucking memories that I just have. I remember watching David Bowie and the Hammersmith Apollo on that grainy footage as a child with my brothers and saying to myself, I could never be a rock star because what if I needed to do a shit in the middle of the gig? You couldn't get off stage. You'd be stuck up on stage needing to do a shit. And then I asked my brothers, what happens if David Bowie needs to do a shit in the middle of the gig? And

then they said, he'd have to hold it in. And I made a decision that I said, I can never ever, I could never ever go up on stage and be a performer in case I need to do a shit. I can't believe I'm gigging that fucking venue. I can't believe I'm gigging the venue where I first had a thought about what it would mean to perform live in front of an audience and for me to have made the decision at six years of age that, no, not happening. What if I need to shit in front of 4,000 people? That is not a career option for me. Can't happen. I just can't believe I'm gigging that venue. I'd love a time machine to go back to six-year-old me and tell him. No, actually, I wouldn't. I'd scare the fuck out of

myself. But please come along to that gig on the 1st of May in the Hammersmith Apollo. My biggest ever live podcast. It's half sold out already. What I'm really... I don't say I'm proud of myself very often, but one thing I am... I do get asked, is there any one thing that you're proud of in your career? And I think I'm not proud of any one thing, but something I'm very, very happy about. I suppose I could say I'm proud. I like the fact that it's the longevity.

I like that I'm still doing this after about, after 20 years. I'm doing this 20 years. I'm glad that I'm still doing it 20 years. And I suppose I am proud that I thought my, like, my biggest ever London gig was in the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. In like 2014, I I think with the Rubber Bandits I can't believe that more than that's 10 years ago I can't believe that 10 years on I'm gigging Hammersmith Apollo I could not have guessed that 10 years ago So I'm very proud that I actually have a career. I still have a career and I'm only doing the biggest venue now. Usually with entertainment,

the big stuff happens in your 20s and then it gets quieter after that. So I am proud of that longevity. I never feel it. You have to realize it's a strange thing. I don't live my life as blind boy. I don't wear a plastic bag in my head when I go about my daily life. I'm nobody. I go into shops, into cafes, like nobody knows who I am. I'm just a man who's trying to blend into the wall and cost a coffee. That's it. And that's how I like it. And I love that. But then I do a gig and I've got the bag in my head and then I'm like reminded that all right when I put a bag in my head a lot of people know who I am it's very strange like I did a Vicar Street gig last week and my guest

had brought like 12 people backstage and I went to say hello to all these people but I had my plastic bag on and everyone looks at me differently and talks to me differently. They have that weird star-struck look in their eyes and I'm the centre of attention in a fucking room with every single person looking at me and when I speak everyone goes quiet.

It feels like being a dog that everybody wants to rub. That's not my life, that's not my everyday lived experience and I'm glad because I'll be honest, it'd be very hard not to turn into an absolute prick. When people notice you from TV or the internet or whatever, the look on their face, how they treat you is, imagine you walked into a room, right? And you just pulled out a hundred euros and gave it to a person, just handed them a hundred euros. Imagine the look and the smile and the excitement on their face. and the excitement on their face. That's how people look at you if they recognize you from somewhere. And the reason I'm able to identify that is because I can take the bag off and just

be nobody again. And I tell you, if I was walking into a coffee shop every day and there was people there who recognized me and looked at me like that, I'd start to get used to it and I'd start to feel entitled to it. And it would probably make me feel as if I'm special or important or better than other people in some way, because that's the way that people treat you. And I'm just really glad that I don't have that because I'd lose my sense of humility. I'd lose humility and start to feel a bit entitled maybe or not view myself as equal to other humans. So when I get a tiny, when I get a tiny taste of it, it's strange and I'm like, thank fuck this isn't my real life

because this would freak the fuck out of me. There's 365 days in a year and I'd say out of those 365 days, only 48 hours in total are spent with a plastic bag in my head in front of people and only in those 48 hours out of the year am I like somebody who's recognizable. Rest of that time I could be absolutely anybody. It's very very strange but it's also sometimes where it feels weird for me to say that I'm proud of something I've done because it doesn't feel like me, if you get me. So before the ocarina pause, we spoke about the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich

and his strange wanking machine and his belief that human discomfort is caused by repressed sexual energy and that fascism is caused by repressed sexual energy and then we moved on to the primal screamers the people who believe that human discomfort is caused by

repressed emotional energy from your early infant years and we found ourselves in the small Donegal village of Bartonport, where a hippie cult of primal screamers moved to in the 1970s. In 1984, the screamers left. They went to Inish Free, a little island. But they left behind them their big house, their three-storey house in this tiny little village in Donegal, a fishing village where everybody

speaks Irish. The English hippies left behind their house and these new English hippies moved in. This English commune moved in. It's hard to describe the Silver Sisterhood. They were a commune moved in. It's hard to describe the Silver Sisterhood. They were a commune of all women

who tried to create a separate reality which was set in Victorian times where only matriarchy existed. So they tried to live in this little house in Donegal, which used to contain people who screamed all day long. The Silver Sisterhood, dressed like it was 1890, refused to use electricity, and they tried to inhabit a reality where men didn't exist.

They lived in a universe where there's only one gender, women, but that one gender was split into two separate genders of blondes and brunettes. It's hard to know if they were a cult, if they had religious beliefs. If they had religious beliefs. They were said to worship like an earth goddess. But really it seemed much more like a type of cosplaying. But a 24-7 cosplay. Where they pretend that it's Victorian times and men don't exist.

They were all English. If you type them into YouTube, the Silver Sisterhood, you'll see that they appeared on the Late Late Show in Ireland in the 1980s, and a couple of the members gave an interview to Gay Barn. They all had fake names. Like one of them was called Priscilla Language. But then it became apparent that the names were permanent, but the people weren't. There could have been multiple Priscilla Languages, and we don't know. that the names were permanent but the people weren't.

There could have been multiple Priscilla languages and we don't know. So they pretended it was Victorian times, dressed like they were in the 1890s, didn't use electricity and recreated a kind of a schoolhouse atmosphere and it was all women. Spanking and discipline was also a huge part of their regime. And some say that it was actually a lesbian spanking cult

full of posh English women who pretended it was the Victorian times, living in a house in a tiny village in Donegal that used to be inhabited by English people who screamed all day. The most bizarre thing about the Silver Sisterhood, and this is the fucking early 80s, they used to program video games. They operated a tiny video game development company called St. Brides, named after the Irish pagan goddess St Saint Bridget or Bridget.

They were making text-based video games in the 1980s and utilising the early internet. A text-based video game is like, it's like an interactive novel, it's hard to even describe. But they made one video game in 1987 called Jack the Ripper and this is the first ever video game to receive an A18 certificate. So the first ever video game to receive an A18 certificate was made in a tiny Irish speaking village in Donegal in a weird commune of lesbian spanking Victorian cosplayers. It's hard to describe this without me sounding mad. Here's where it gets weirder. First off one of them, the leader, was arrested. Arrested for spanking a woman so hard that it constituted assault and then I found an article in the Sunday Telegraph from 1993 and it appears that their premises was raided by members of the Screamers in 1992.

So the Screamers had been renting this place to the Silver Sisters and the Silver Sisters weren't paying rent so the Screamers raided it. But when the Screamers raided it but when the screamers raided their victorian commune they found a lot of neo-nazi literature and anti-semitic literature and sadomasochistic journals and they uncovered evidence according to the screamers they uncovered evidence that the silver sisters were in contact with far-right organizations over in England, the BNP and the National Front, so we appear to have gone strainedly full circle. We started off with Wilhelm Reich believing that free love and sexuality is the cure for fascism and how his psychology inspired primal screaming therapy. The primal

screamers moved to Donegal to scream and shout. Then the sadomasochistic, spanking Victorian women turn out to be mad fascists in contact with the British far right. And they're

and they made the first ever video game that had an 18 certificate. It's fucking nuts. It's mad. all in a tiny village in Donegal where everyone speaks Irish all of this stuff happened I came across all of this stuff in my research you can check it all out it's a very difficult episode to do because it's so bizarre it's so bizarre. It's so strange. My gut feeling, based on no evidence whatsoever, just a gut feeling. There's a bang of MI5 off the whole thing. There's a bang of British intelligence off the entire thing. This is the 1970s. This is the 1980s. Donegal is in the north of Ireland it's just at the border of the six counties the troubles is happening the IRA

MI5 and British intelligence have been known to infiltrate hippie communes, cults, all this type of stuff I just find it really weird it seems like a front for British military intelligence I have no evidence, just a feeling in my gut. First off, you've got the Screamers. Then they end up in Colombia, living with FARC.

FARC are a Colombian Marxist organisation with strong ties to the IRA. The IRA used to go to Colombia and train FARC. and train fark then in the same house you've got a matriarchal lesbian commune of people who want to pretend that it's the Victorian times and men don't exist and they spank

each other and they refuse to use electricity but they're programming video games they're programming video games in a tiny house in Donegal in 1983 they're using the internet in a tiny house in Donegal in 1983. They're using the internet in 1983.

It just feels like British military intelligence. It just has that vibe. All military intelligence is about smokescreens and confusion. I have zero evidence. But a great way to plant a lot of posh British MI5 agents on the fucking border is to pretend that they're a cult that screams all day long or to say that they're a a Victorian spanking commune and why are the far right involved?

why are the National Front involved? why are the British National Party involved? it's all really fucking strange. And what it reminds me of is what the CIA used to do in San Francisco in the 1960s. In San Francisco in the 1960s, the CIA, they used to infiltrate the hippies. They'd infiltrate the hippie movement as a way to find communists and they would set up free clinics free clinics in the middle of Haight Ashbury in San Francisco at the summer of love and they would offer people free contraceptives treatment for venereal diseases but really it was a CIA front it was a CIA front

organization and the workers would dress up as hippies and some of them were psychologists like that definitely happened because it was proof if you want to read about that there's a magnificent book called Chaos by Tom O'Neill but that shit in Donegal in a tiny village with weird English cults

there's just a smell of intelligence there's a smell of military intelligence and I have zero proof. I just have a gut feeling and that's it. And it doesn't mean that all the members in it were like MI5. They mightn't even know, but it does seem like perfect subterfuge

to infiltrate. British military intelligence infiltrated fuckloads of hippies and environmental groups throughout the 80s and the 90s. Right that was an absolutely mad episode. That's all we have time for. I'll catch you next week. I'll catch you next week.

I'm going to be over in continental Europe. I'm going to be in Berlin. I'm going to be in Oslo. Can't wait. I'll catch you next week. Meantime. Rub a dog and kiss a swan. I'll catch you next week. Meantime, rub a dog and kiss a swan.

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