The Blindboy Podcast - The medieval origins of 2fm Radio DJ voice

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

A thesis on the human voice Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tickla Vincent, you cowardly Horrigans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. My voice is too busy, see they're all gonna turn that down. What's that about? But that's because yesterday, I did an interview, I did an interview on RTE Radio One, and I did it hear from my studio, but I wanted to out radio, the radio. So I turned the set, the settings on my, my preamble. I turned it all the way up like this when I was talking to him.

Very high base. You see, any time I agreed to go on the radio, especially with RTE, they're like, we'd like to have you on the radio for 15 minutes. Will you come to Dublin? Will you come up to Dublin to go on the radio for 15 minutes? Will I fuck come to Dublin? I can give you a perfectly good broadcast quality audio. Here, from my own studio, we can do it over the internet.

I'm not coming to Dublin. when the people listening aren't going to be able to tell the difference and then they say oh but it's nice to have you in studio with the presenter so they can read your face and then I say I'm going to be wearing a fucking bag in my head anyway so what I've started doing just to show off is when I go on the radio and I'm here in my studio in Limerick

I turned the bass up right up like this so that I sound better than the DJ that I'm speaking to just to prove a pint my voice is still a little listen to that I sounded like a Mongolian throat singer there I'm not sick anymore My voice is back But it's a little bit husky

But I quite like the huskiness in it this week It's revealing some hidden octaves That I didn't know about I should just do that I should just do that the next time Next time I'm on the fucking radio At RTE And they're like

We've got Blind Boy on the line Hello Blind Boy Hello this is Blind Boy How is everything going up there In Donnybrook Dublin 4 Is the traffic crazy on the M50 You never hear that. You never hear two people doing radio voice at each other, do you?

It's usually the main presenter has got broadcast radio voice and then the co-presenter is like a normal human being. You couldn't have two people but broadcast radio voice together. It'd be like a game of soccer with two balls on the pitch. Now in fairness, I was talking to Brendan O'Connor and he's got a, he doesn't have broadcast voice, he's got a cork accent, so he's one of the few people on the radio that doesn't have unnecessarily Dublin broadcast voice.

How do you describe it? How do you fucking describe Irish DJ radio voice? I mean, itinerant lozenges of Werther's original slashing around the underpants of a barrister, the lubricated testicles of a fox rock barrister. I mean, apologies for being so homo erotic with it, but... Radio DJ voice, it's somewhere in the spectrum of caramel and testicles, isn't it?

My voice is sliding around the caramel testicle spectrum. I know, I've promised for a long time that I was going to do a podcast on the history of broadcast voice, radio voice. Why the fuck do they talk that way? Because there has to be a reason. and I've researched into it and I haven't found the definitive little hot take just yet I haven't found that piece of information like I've won basic hunch

and it's a microphone hunch like the evolution of microphones like changed how people sing and people speak if you listen to any recording from the 1920s music recording they all sing pure nasally Hold on, I'll give you an example now, a bit of a fella called Eddie Cantor from the 1920s. All of you may know her too, I'd like to shout right now, say if you knew Susie like I know Susie.

Why the fuck is he singing like that? What a ridiculous way to sing, and that's a song called A Few New Susie from 1925 by a fella called Eddie Cantor. And he's singing out of his nose. And I just played a teeny, teeny, teeny tiny snippet of that because You can't play music on podcasts anymore because they'll get taken down by AI software will spot it, even though I'd probably argue that song there is 1925, so that's 101 years old, if we're being honest, because it's nearly fucking 2026. I'd imagine the copyright is gone on that, but still I don't want to risk it.

But that, songs from the 20s, they sing like an epileptic ferret, is navigating their rectums because the microphones were so weak. They had these weak microphones above their heads and they had to sing in this really tinny way or else the microphones just simply would not catch the audio, wouldn't record it. On top of that, they used to record directly onto wax. The vinyl, it wasn't fucking vinyl, the record was made out of literal wax and the vibrations of noise had to be strong enough that the needle could cut into that wax. So if you had a low voice or if you whispered, it wouldn't work, it just would not record, it wouldn't record.

Same if you listen to speeches from the 1920s. Everyone sounds like they're dipping their toes into freezing cold water, all high-pitched and nasally, because it's what you had to do. Microphone technology was the only way you could be recorded. And then therefore, all of the music and the speeches, that we have from the 20s are only people speaking like that. So the people who were speaking in a low voice or being calm or had deep voices or were even

singing in a whisper. We don't have any recordings of their fucking voices. And then around the 1940s, I think it was, you get this explosion of singers like Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, the crooners who are singing in a. deep bass, low whisper close to the mic, because these things called condenser microphones got invented. We still use them today but they're just a lot more sensitive. They can take in bass frequencies and you can whisper if you like. And spoken word emerges where the microphone is really being used as an instrument in the art of spoken word. A jazz poet by the

name a Ken Nardine jumps out. Would have been around the 1950s. He was definitely an hourl, an hourl touchstone for me. When I was starting this podcast and I was figuring out, you know, how do I want this to feel? I play a little bit of Ken Nardine. This is from 1956. I think this is called Down the Drain. I discovered that taking warm baths made me feel relaxed.

We live in a very neurotic society and they use hydrotherapy and hospitals for those who are neurotic and I have a bathtub That was Ken Nardine You can hear the depth of his voice He's eating the microphone He's really taken advantage of the new technology

of condenser mics to whisper He used to do what he'd call word jazz Which was an extreme of conscious poetic talk over jazz music. Now he didn't invent that, he was a white yank. So in the 1950s he would have had the opportunity to have the platform to popularize it, but free form word jazz would be an African American art form. You'd want to be going back to the Harlem Renaissance there in the 1920s.

The likes of poets like Langton Hughes are fucking, or fucking County Cullen. And you can go even farther than that back to the Gryots, the Gryot poets of West Africa. And when I'm writing this podcast, they always wanted to have the hypnotic condenser hum of Ken Nardine mixed in with the irrational madness

of a fella from the 1930s called Tom Linnan who really embraced the confusion and anxiety. of Hiberno English as a literary farm. Just listen to the state of this. Listen to this. He's just trying to describe how to go to the mart and sell a pig. In the old days,

you're going down to the fair at an early hour in the morning. The fair at that time you started from 4 o'clock in the morning, 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock, whatever, but the early hour, it didn't like the time of snow that you can go in it to mart at 10 o'clock. but the people

learned that time that time they'd have to get up at 4 o'clock head up for Milton might be fair in at 5 o'clock while you'd stand there

hours before a man had come and ask you how much did you want for the beast you was going to sell What an absolute lunatic You could be waiting

hours before a man had come and ask you about the beast that you're going to sell and he's talking about? He's talking about the last art of doing fuck all. He's nostalgic for a time when in order to sell a pig you had to wait around for six hours doing nothing. Not unlike them the markets today as he says where you can wander in at 10 o'clock in the morning whenever the

fuck you like and sell your pig or sell your beast as he calls it. Back in my day he says the people earned their time. They got up at four in the morning and and waited all day to sell the pig. The lost art of doing fuck all. And what have we got today? It's me saying, oh well in my day, you'd know social media. You had no social media.

So if you were listening to Slipknot and you wanted other people to know that you liked Slipknot, you had to wear a Slipknot hoodie and you had to walk all around town in a Slipknot hoodie and hope that you meet another person who's wearing a Slipknot hoodie and you might meet each other and have a chat about Slipknot.

And then that person might tell you about 9 inch nails and before you know it, you're in buying a 9 inch nails CD. But anyway, that's Tom Linnan. A folk singer, a folk singer from Milltown, Malbein, Claire, who'd also be, I don't know what you call him a sheniki, but he does a bit of spoken word on his albums. That type of mad shit.

But I strongly recommend listening to his stuff if you want to hear some Irish grandfather ASMR. He's got a great album online. called the folk songs of Westclair. What was I talking about? Trying to get to the bottom of radio DJ voice. You know, I'm coming up with nothing. I've spoken to people who've studied

broadcasting in college and they've all said to me, look, we've been told to speak this way but I can't figure out the reason. I mean, so condenser mics start becoming a thing in the 50s, then I think the 1970s you start to get F. M broadcast. This widened the frequencies that people could hear on their radios, but regarding

the style of radio DJ voice, I reckon it has something to do with a live setting. So your radio DJs in the 70s and 80s most likely started off as like DJ DJs in clubs. Now when you're in a crowded room, you've got a large speed. speaker system, there's music, people are drunk, people are dancing. Now you literally have to speak in a strange way in order to be hard and in order to have a symbiotic relationship with the music that's playing. So then you get your coming up now up on the dance floor. Everyone up dance, dance on the dance floor. Now that makes sense. That's that's performance. That's site specific. It's performance. It's performance. performance, it has a relationship with music, it's appropriate to the space. That's not weird. There's musicality in that. That's not strange. But I'm guessing, and this wasn't just fucking Ireland, this was England, America, the whole shebang. These personalities who were able to get people dancing on the floor,

they then logically progressed to the radio, where they just still kept talking that way. And then the context is removed. They're fading the music in and out. They're speaking over the music. It's new tune from Abba coming up, guys. And it reminds you of maybe being in the club. But then the music starts to disappear and now you just have a person talking like this

in the mornings to keep people awake. Like I've been in these studios. I've been in 2 FM studio in the morning or fucking Today FM or BBC radio in the morning. for morning radio a lot of the presenters aren't allowed to sit down they have to stand up because their job there

is to bring a club energy to people's fucking mornings so it's been so far removed from its original context that it's now just incredibly strange and now that we have podcasts now that we have podcasts you go from this one broadcast voice

to a suppose fucking narrow cast a narrow cast voice we have like I wouldn't be allowed on the radio I would not be allowed to speak the way that I speak

not even fucking radio the documentary that I made recently the one that won the fucking award for best presenter right my biggest fight

was I refuse to do TV presenter voice it's not happening I understand that there's a tone and an intonation that TV presenters have when they deliver information,

I'm not fucking doing it. I'm going to narrate this documentary the way that I speak on my podcast. I'm going to slow down and push and pull the words and extract the prose in my fucking words. And I'm going to say fucking on the document. I'm going to say fucking if that's what feels right

during the narration of this documentary and that's non-negotiable and that's what I did. There's one piece of the voice over. I call the Seagull, a cunt. and that that made it all the way to the top of RT

and they were like you can't do that and I let him have it because I'm like okay fair enough fair enough and I changed it to a cunt of a seagull

to a cot of a seagull and it still worked the prose still worked I let him have that because I refuse to abide by a vestigial farm I can't I fail to see the reason

I don't see the reason this is a documentary about Christianity So much has been said about the Irish monks, but who were they? We only do that because it's agreed upon and it feels familiar, but it might not be relevant to the specific context of the documentary. So challenge the fucking thing. I'm not sucking my own dick here.

I'm not sucking my own float. But I have been, I've been reflecting on that award and just wondering, Jesus, thousands of documentaries entered that competition. Why did my strange documentary, in Ireland about Irish Christianity, such an underdog topic. How did that possibly, how did that win? How did it even get fucking nominated? And I think, I think one thing I did, which might have made it stick out from the crowd, is instead of following the established language of television, I followed the language of podcasting, whether that be the style of narration that I was doing

are the fucking interviews that I was doing. There's a way that you're supposed to interview people on television and radio. There's a format, and the format is you have a list of questions and you don't allow the person that you're interviewing to veer away from the topic of the question. Keep bringing them back, keep bringing them back

and never ever allow the conversation to wonder, keep bringing it back to the sheet of questions in front you. Now, I reject that. I reject it and I tell you why. That exists from a time when radio interviews and television interviews were recorded onto tape, literal physical tape. So if you went off topic, it meant that you had to edit that tape. But in the 60s, 70s, even the fucking 80s and very early 90s, editing that tape meant an editor had to sit down for hours with a razor blade, a fucking razor blade, and had to cut pieces of tape,

which is unbelievably expensive and expensive to the point that it's unthinkable. So if you're doing an interview back then where it's going down on tape, do not deviate. Stay on topic, bring the person that you're chatting to, bring them back on topic all the time, never wander, never converse because it'd be so expensive to edit it but what you lose there is relaxation. We don't exist in that universe anymore. You make a piece of television now or a piece of radio

you edit digitally, it takes two seconds but yet radio and television still operates under conventions as if someone has to physically edit that tape with a razor blade. So when I was doing that documentary and I'm sitting down with academics. I'd another fucking rule. I said, we're going to record this interview. Like I'm doing my podcast.

Put on three cameras, roll them. I might have one or two questions, but if I'm sitting down across from an academic and their area of expertise is in 12th century chalises, if the conversation drifts towards corn flakes, don't intervene, let it happen. Let's talk about fucking corn flakes. Don't bring the conversation back on topic.

Allow it to wonder. Edit the corn flakes out afterwards. It'll take two seconds and let the conversation naturally come back to 12th century chalises. And you see, what happens then is the conversation becomes very fluid and natural and relaxed. And now the person that you're speaking to, they're not paranoid about being on camera. They're not thinking, they're not, they're not thinking about how to talk, they're simply talking. And now a very relaxed expert is engaging authentically with the subject that they're so passionate about that they've dedicated their lives to becoming an expert in it.

And then from that you get a piece of television that feels different and you don't know why. And if TV commissioners come to me and they go, we don't like the way you're doing interviews, I give them that full thesis the full thesis on razor blades and tape editing and they go that's you're dead right I don't have an argument against that

but back to the radio DJ voice I mean I don't think I can just do one podcast on this this is going to be a subject that I'm just going to have to dip in and out of once every six months

because it's my white whale it escapes me I mean what the fuck is this? Who talks like this in real life, guys? Who actually talks like this in real life? Nobody. It's utterly mad. It's fucking

nuts. Why isn't that in the DSM as some type of noradvergence? And that's just the Irish one. Every single country and region has decided and agreed upon its own utterly bizarre

radio DJ voice and technology can't fully something I have thought of is I think it's possible I think I'm onto something with the this tradition started in nightclubs needing to speak over a crowd

needing to be hard I think a good cultural analogue here might be the town crier in cities throughout history wasn't just the European thing you had a person called the town crier

and it was an incredibly important job it was a person they were an officer an officer of the monarchy or of the court and their job was to announce things publicly

to large crowds a really important fucking job and they had a way of speaking you still have town criers today but they're ceremonial they're engaging in a heritage art farm they're no longer

relevant town criers survived for thousands of years and then they stopped. Let's just take England as the example. They stopped in the 1920s. Radio. Radio. Town criers stopped being functionally relevant when radio became a thing

and radio announcers became a thing in the 1920s. But I'm going to play you a clip now of like an actual town crier from this recording is from 1939 in Cornwall. Now this is from a town. Cryer competition. So what you have here is this. You're hearing, the town crier that you're hearing is where the radio DJ is now, right now in this moment. So these are town criers and it's their actual job, but this job is disappearing. So now they're at a town crier contest. It's going from something that was once relevant into now not being relevant and becoming performative. And I'm

going to play you a little bit of the radio announcer too, just so you can hear the tinny voice, the tinny nasal voice that they had in the 1930s before condenser voices and then you'll hear the recording of the actual town crier. Yet, but here is the winner, Mr. V.T. Johnson of Foy Cornwall.

So let her go, maestro. Oh, yes! Oh yes! It's known to all present that the decision of the judges rest upon the clarity, volume, method of interpretation and quality of tone displayed by us, the four finalists in this national contest. So that's 1939, and what's beautiful about that particular clip, because it's a town crier contest, your man is listing out the criteria for what makes a good town crier, and he mentions, like,

tone and clarity. And his way of speaking is as strange as a radio DJ. It's as removed from everyday speech because it's functional. It's functional. He needs to speak in those tone, clarity, elongated, loud words so that a massive crowd can hear what he's saying. It's a functional type of speech. And what's even more fascinating still is when he announces him, himself. He says, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Now that's amazing because, so that's 1939. Oye is spelled O Y-E-Z. What the fuck is that? What type of word is that? Because that's not English. Oh yeah, it's Norman. It's old Norman French. It's not even French. It's Norman. and oh ye means hear ye but Norman French

that comes to England in 1066 with the Norman invasion because you have to remember in England, in England, Scotland and Wales Posh people spoke a version of French well up to like the 1600s because this was the language of the court the fucking ruling class were effectively French they were fucking Normans and English was gutter speech this was the language of the common people. But what does that tell you about the power and importance of a town crier

where the word, oh yeah, that doesn't even fucking mean anything anymore? That that survives a thousand years from 1066 up until 1939. Oh yeah. And even the phrase, don't shoot the messenger. That was a real thing that had to be said. I mean, Jesus Christ. I mean, what really killed the town crier? Okay, radio was that ended them.

But literacy, literacy. When people, at the Industrial Revolution, the common person starts to learn how to read. So now you're able to get your nose from notices or from newspapers. But before that, the average person couldn't read. So you relied upon this person who was a messenger of the court, who would come to your village and deliver incredibly important. important news, news about a war, news about a famine, news about disease.

And if the town crier delivered bad news, people would kill him. People would kill the messenger. I mean, it's the 14th century equivalent of arguing with someone in the Facebook comments, I suppose. You had Facebook daz and irrationality and mass panic back then, but it was just that man there is telling us bad news, let's kill him. It was so widespread that to kill a town crier was, it was considered treason. It was considered treason, which was the highest fucking punishment hung drawn and quartered shit. But I do see a relationship and a parallel between the town crier and the radio DJ. Based upon my theory that radio DJs once served the purpose. When the radio wasn't there, the purpose that they

served was to speak in a performative, musical way in a nightclub between tracks to get people's attention. Then they're removed from that site-specific context and thrown onto the radio and now it just sounds weird. It sounds

a person who's having a chat like this on the radio. A person who's speaking like this all day long. It sounds as absurd as that town crier sounds. It's that absurd. It got me thinking about other forms of speech, other forms of speech that are site-specific, serve a very specific

function, are utterly bizarre and only work within a specific context. And what came to mind was the way that people speak at cattle auctions. Like, listen to this. Now that's a recent clip. That's only from a couple of years ago. It's from the north of Ireland. And that's someone selling a cow. Or that's someone auctioning a cow at a cattle auction. And that's that's someone auctioning a cow at a cattle auction. And that's it's the anxious poetry of capitalism. As strange as that speech is. which I would argue it's just as ridiculous as a 2 FM DJ, but as strange as that speech is it serves a very specific purpose. And it's been studied in anthropology. It's the music of capitalism.

It's the rapid speech, that rapid rhythmic speech, and the context, the context is everyone's bidding. Everyone is bidding for a cow. It creates a sense of urgency and inevitability and anxiety. and this pushes the bids up. The urgency makes you want to bid higher. The inevitability makes you think it must go higher and it creates anxiety in the consumer and the person's spending.

Interestingly, where you also hear this combination of urgency and inevitability, you hear it in the right-wing grifter. Listen to how Ben Shapiro speaks. Listen to how Charlie Kirk used to speak. Especially when Charlie Kirk used to do Bible shit when he'd talk Bible verses. A good right-wing grifter. They're smart.

They're able to use their words. They're able to recount information. But they do it really, really, really quickly. Ben Shapiro, listen to him. Really, really quick facts with a tone of inevitability. So it's manipulative. It prevents you from critically engaging with the fact that they're talking out of their hopes. Also what the auction, the cattle auction chanting,

What that does is you don't get to stop and think. You don't get to pause and think and wonder. Do I want that fucking cow? Not a hope you're being machine-gunned, machine-gunned constantly with speed. It puts the buyer under pressure. And then what it does quite interestingly is it reduces certain words to just noises to fillers, to fillers. There is yabidabadoo in the middle of it.

There's non-words. There's just things that sound like words, and then what's enunciated are the figures. Do I hear 30? Do I hear 40? Do I hear 50? Yab-dab-dab-doo da, do I hear 60. Bizarre speech,

bizarre speech, which is perfectly acceptable in that, in those circumstances and that context, but also perfect for that context. And the only time I've seen it, something similar out of that context is, like I said, the right-wing grifter, the fast-talk and right-wing grifter. And it's not intentional, but it does, it harks back to the little speech from Tom Lennan that I played earlier because Tom Lennon in Ireland in the 30s, he's from Milltown Malbey.

He's talking about the Milltown Malbe Fair, in Clare, which was a cattle auction. And he's saying, in my day, you would go to the catal auction, you'd bring your beast to sell, and you'd wait around all day. You'd earn your time. You'd wait around to sell your beast. And what he's complaining about is how nowadays the waiting is gone. You just show up and you sell the pig. And his little speech there,

it's a Marxist critique. He's critiquing what he doesn't like about capitalism. He's basically saying, I remember when this mart and cat auction in Midtown Malbey, yeah, you're setting a pig, but it wasn't about that. It was about the culture. It was about the experience. It was about the in-between, the waiting around, who you might meet, what you might do, what chats you might have, just waiting to sell your pig.

Now that's been stripped away and financialised and now you're just selling pigs. And Tom Lennan would probably die a shock now if you'd have heard a modern catalogue cheneer. Another thing I wonder about when it comes to understanding the roots of radio DJ voice and situating it within the nightclub space. is there's a very unique noise that bouncers make when they're clearing the club I have a very detailed thesis

about bouncer noise so before I get into that let's have the ocarina pause okay I don't have my ocarina let's not let's not worry about that I'm not feeling very ocarina-ish

the past few months I do have a storm lighter because there's a storm outside storm bram country bram I'm going to click this storm lighter and you're going to hear some adverts for bullshit okay, here we go

Oh yeah sure not to burn myself I use this for smoke and cannabis I actually don't do that that much anymore very very rarely very rarely do I do that and nothing against it

it's just it's only enjoyable when it's rare and occasional for me anyway some people like it all the time are just like an occasional little treat every couple of months

probably have to do a legal disclaimer there that was a piece of fiction in a fit I'm talking about a fictional universe there support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page

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Keeping this podcast listener funded means that I'm not beholden to advertisers. No advertising. can tell me what to speak about or adjust the tone in any way, they can truly fuck off. And if they want to advertise, they do so on my terms, because this is listener funded. Also, social media is collapsing. It's collapsing. The algorithm is now an AI algorithm on Instagram, Twitter's fucking gone, Facebook is gone. So, if you like this podcast, recommend it to a friend, recommend it to a friend in real life. That genuinely helps. Upcoming gigs.

So I've got the month of December off. I take December off because I don't want Christmas parties showing up to my live podcasts. They're a bit disruptive to spoken word gigs. So my next gigs aren't until January. A lot of these gigs are setting out quickly because people are purchasing them as Christmas presents. Thank you so much to everybody who's buying tickets as Christmas presents. That's very kind. thank you. So the first gig that I have in 2026 is on the 23rd of January in Waterford in the

Theatre Royal. Then I'm up in Nace at the Spiris of Kildare Festival. Vicker Street then in February which is a Wednesday night gig I believe that's very nearly sold out all right last tickets for that same with Belfast Waterfront very few tickets going for that that's on the 12th of February Galway Leisureland few tickets left for that on the 15th I'm just going to cover the ones that I'm contractually obligated for right now fucking cork opera house there and

is that March and then University of Limerick Concert Hall in my home city there in April then a lot of gigs in the middle of that right but I'm not contractually obligated right now at the UK tour on October 26 long way

away but still the fuck's sake I'm coughing like a cunt sorry UK tour October 26 right these are actually selling quite quickly even though it's a year away

Brighton Cardiff I hate calling it the fucking UK England, Scotland and Wales there's nothing united about it my apologies Brighton Cardiff

Coventry Bristol sorry Guildford London Glasgow Gateshead Nottingham And I'm sorry to say

I'm not gigging in Leeds I announced an imaginary gig in Leeds there A couple of weeks back What's up at my throat Fucking ghost of Princess Diana Trying to silence me in my gutlet I'll drink some sparkling water there And exercise my throat

Of the ghost of Princess Diana Who is the sight What's around my problem? Princess Diana. Who'd be haunting my throat if the fucking Mountbatten. Mountbatten the bousy bastard would give me a good haunting, I'd say. The prick. Any more gigs? Asher that's it. Look. Let's move on to my thesis. My bouncer thesis. So there's a noise that fascinates me. A noise that we'd all be quite familiar with if you've ever been in a club or a late bar. It's the end of the night, the lights go up and then you hear,

lads, can we get out to, up, do not, dafto, d'aps! Lads can we get off to lapped doze? And I'm enamoured by that noise. Now that's the noise of the Irish bouncer. It's not a limerick thing. I spent three years gig in the nightclubs of Ireland. I'm talking 2010, 2011, fucking recession. Dark shit.

Some of the most miserable days of my life, if I'm being honest. Ireland built all these huge Celtic Tiger nightclubs into 2000s and then the recession hits into 2008

and they all start collapsing. And I was gigging them all up and down the country from fucking Longford to Carlo. I gigged. them all. And what made the gig so depressing was, so the nightclubs, this is, let's

say 2011, nightclubs are collapsing, right, ready to close down. The recession is hitting hard. You go to somewhere like Carlo or Litrum, and they have this big fancy nightclub. But half the young people have emigrated, and the ones that are left,

they don't have any fucking money. So people are showing up to the nightclub very, very late at like 11. So I'm booked to do the gig at 8pm but then the owner is like there's nobody here there's no one here you have to push it push it push it and then i'm not on stage until maybe one one a m because then the nightclub fills up and it fills up with very drunk angry people like there's even music from that period the genre is now called recession pop and i'm talking riana lmf ao pit bull

I know these songs inside out, and if they ever come on my earpads and I hear them on like on headphones, the songs sound different. I'm like, why does this sound different? It's because I'm used to hearing it 15 years ago in a completely empty nightclub. Like there's a song called Starships by Nikki Minaj, since chills up my spine. I only know that song with the loud reverberated echo of an empty nightclub. But anyway, for fucking three years. For three years I'm there

When the nightclub ends Packing up my stuff Ready to get into a very depressing car Back to Limerick At 2, 3 in the morning And I would listen The lights go up The music stops

The first thing you hear Is that the smash of glasses Being put away And then a gaggle Lads Can we get up to that after after that days Can we get up to that after after after days?

the universal noise of bouncer and first off it sobers you up because it does more than sober you up it opens up other senses when you hear that chant your other senses suddenly you become aware of smells in the nightclub that you didn't smell you become aware of the smell of cigarettes

the smell of drink the smell of the carpet the smell of sweat the lights are extra bright I could never understand I'm like did all the bouncers go to bouncer college and agree upon this fucking noise how in every single club

in all of Ireland it transcends accents they just have this one noise lads can we get upda da da da da da da da days the town crier is present in the lineage of that chant the club

DJ is present because it's in the club and they're trying to cut through the gaggle, that noise, the crowd. But also it's the threat of violence. It's not particularly threatening. It's not aggressive. The bouncers aren't aggressive when they're doing it. They're not even angry. It's much more of a sigh.

It's a sigh. It's like, I'm at work. I am at work. And the people behind the bar are at work. And I know you're having fun, but for us, this is work. and now our work is ended and we all want to go to bed and when you hear it

it carries authority because it's like the only people who are shouting that are the people who have the authority to physically remove you if you don't listen to it and let's dissect the phrase lads can we get

a da da da da da da da day I think what's being said is lads can we get up tonight can we get out tonight please like the way the catalogue auctioneer uses gibberish or the way the town crier is saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, lads, can we get a-da-da-da-da-days, is stripped of all words and language and now it's purely tonal.

And we don't have a lot of that type of tonal communication in the English language. What it reminds me of is so something I would love to understand, but I don't understand because I don't speak the languages, but in West Africa, there's several tonal languages where meaning is communicated not necessarily by the words that are being used, but the specific tones. And because of that, in some West African cultures where languages are tonal, where meaning is communicated through tone, they were able to use drums to actually to communicate information across large distances. Now I'm going to play with a little bit of a clip of a West African drummer explaining this and showing you an example because I think

the bouncer noise is a tonal, a tonal form of communication that doesn't use words. Drums are not only musical instruments. They are also a means of communication. People talk to each other by using drums. Many African languages are based on high and low sounds. For example, when the Ashanti's say, good morning, it sounds very. like this. Mahi, machi, machi.

It can also be said by a drum that can be both high and low sounds. The pitch of the drum is changed by pressing on it. The saita is signaling, a lion is near the village. The sound saying, run, run! I mean, I find that fascinating. And that's in the areas that we now call like Cameroon parts of Nigeria. You've got these tonal languages and the literal capacity to communicate through drums because the drums can replicate those tones.

And just as an aside that, that's one of those things that has me fascinated. I adore rap music. And rap music is, it's folk music. It's folk music of African-Americans. But African American people had their history stolen from it, wasn't written down. So a lot of African foundational black American people, they, they don't know where their enslaved ancestors came from. And Africa is huge.

So they have this vague, they just kind of know probably somewhere in West Africa. And that's as far as they can trace it. And you're going back 400 years. But what I find so beautiful about rap as post-colonial resistance, your ancestors 400 years ago had a culture and practice where they turned drums into words and the ghost of that practice manages to survive through the generations until you get rap, which is where you turn words into drums and the power of that. as artistic expression would knock a horse. But what I wonder about, what I would wonder about when I'd hear that universal bouncer eyes, lads, can we get up-da-da-da-da-down?

The words have been removed. You can't decipher it, you can't write it down, you can't turn it into a sentence. It's pure tone, it's percussive, it's almost drumming, but it carries massive meaning, huge meaning, It's very powerful. We all know that sound.

We know it. Even when I'm doing it here on the podcast, I promise you, especially if you had a few drinks last night, someone got the fear. It's very powerful. I've tried to ask bouncers about it. I've never gotten a great answer off. It's felt...

I've gone to bouncers and said, that noise, that noise there. Can you tell me about that? And I can tell it. It felt intrusive. Like, they've never thought about it. And no one has shown it to them. It's just this thing that's been agreed upon.

And another thing, too. I know that every fucking country that has bars has that noise. Every, I've heard it in England, I've heard it in America, I've heard it in fucking Australia. Now, not that exact one. Different countries and different cultures, they have their own sounds, but it's the same shit. it's a wordless noise that does that exact job and the thing is it's disappearing and what I would say to anyone out there

if you're a folklorist if you're a practicing folklorist or if you're studying folklore in college and you want a fucking a good master's project nightclub spaces are disappearing because of neoliberalism all right property has become increasing and he financialised.

Like, I watched it happen. I was there. I was there at the recession. I was lucky enough to grow up in the Celtic Tiger. When I was in my fucking 20s, post-agrophobia and I was able to go out and go for a pint and go to nightclubs, I swear to fuck.

When we were 22, 23, you went out at 7 o'clock and you drank pints that you purchased in the nightclub. a pub for a good three hours and then you went to the nightclub at half nine and that was normal and it was affordable. Two euro pints, two euro pints of Bavaria and free shots, free fucking shots because the nightclub wanted you to come in. All right? I saw that dismantle. In 2010 I watched that dismantle and what happened was young people, that's when the house party became a thing.

That's when pre-drinking became a thing. Pre-drinking was not a thing when I was in my 20s. Why would you bother? Pre-drinking was what you did in the pub at 7 o'clock because it was affordable. Pre-drinking started in the early 2010s, where people would get shit-faced at home, drink all the drink at someone's gaff, and then leave and go to the nightclub at 11 just to meet someone from the opposite sex or the same sex. To fuck someone. You went to the nightclub to have sex with people at 11 o'clock. Then 2015, come into it, fucking Tinder or what have you. Now the nightclub is no longer an essential space

to meet someone to have sex with. So from there you get nightclubs closing all around you. Now those are just the cultural reasons. Then there's the economic reasons of people just simply not having the fucking money. Pines, taxis, rent being 40% of your wages. Going out just isn't affordable anymore. Okay, it just isn't affordable.

Then the pandemic hits and now you've a generation of people in their early 20s who had three years of a pandemic who just went to house parties and now they don't have a cultural context of even going to late bars or going to fucking clubs.

So this culture is disappearing and you're getting less and less bouncers and this is what I'm saying. That noise Lance can we do it up to depth it up there's it's universal It's a song, it's important, it communicates meaning. The fact that you can't go on to YouTube and listen to it,

I'm not sure anyone's really written about it. When I'm talking about it here in this podcast, I'd say there's a lot of people going, oh yeah, oh, that thing. It's across cultures, a serious folklorist should be visiting all every fucking nightclub that you can go to. and have a microphone and record all the bouncer noises. Record them and keep them because they'll disappear.

And they serve a very important... It's the last vestiges of the town crier. Like I mentioned, the town crier, thousands of years going back to the point that they're talking norman fucking French and then it becomes completely irrelevant. But you see, nothing replaced the bouncer noise. So it was still humans walking around making this tone that communicated a very powerful meaning that we all understand and it's across cultures. And if you record all that and go to every different country, a different nightclub, you have all these noises that actually tell a story of economic collapse.

And also I think that within lads can we get a da-da-da-da-de-day. The DNA of the radio DJ voice is in there somewhere It's in there somewhere The radio DJ existed in that space Shouting over that same crowd I'm but the bouncer was the one to end the night With that noise Lads can we get it de det de det de det dee

And it got me thinking about monoculture too I've been faring off my bicycle quite a bit recently It always happens at this time a year in the past two weeks I've fallen off my bicycle three times now the reason is and I welcome it it's the leaves the exact point of decomposition

that all the leaves are at right now so the temperatures that you get in December are low enough that it slows down the decomposition of the leaves the leaves they break down slowly then what happens is the surface waxes of the leaf, the autumn leaves that are decomposing

and are going to return to the earth. At this point right now in December, it's the waxes and the leaf that are left and I believe as well as a biofilm is formed during decomposition. Long story short, the leaves right now are particularly slippy, very, very slippy. And if you cycle a lot like I do and you're going through paths that have leaves,

you're going to slip. So it's happened three times to me in the past two weeks. Now I have a helmet, I have gloves, I wear a lot of layers of Gartex, so when I do slip off my bike, I haven't had an injury, just a little bruise on my knee or whatever.

But last week I slipped off my bike and I found myself in the middle of the city centre. And sometimes I enjoy slipping off my bike. It's not often you get to lie on the ground in the city centre and get to look up. So when it does happen, when I do fall over, I get a little bit greedy and I take about 60 seconds to enjoy lying flat on the ground and looking up at the city.

Now another slight aside, when I fell over, I got the sudden smell of dog shit and I was like, oh no, I didn't slip on dog, that's my greatest fear. My greatest fear is slipping on leaves because the leaf had dog shit underneath it and and then you get dog shit on your body, on your clothes. I've spoken about this before. Hasn't happened in many a year. But that last week, I fell on my back off my bike and I got this dog shitty smell and I'm like,

what the fuck is that smell? It wasn't dog shit. I checked myself what it was. It was cardboard that I had in my backpack. Now, this is just a separate thing I want to speak about because I can't devote an entire podcast to this. But have you noticed? Like right now at this time of year

We're all buying a lot of packages Okay Post-pandemic Retail is also collapsing Retail is collapsing So we're buying packages online And having them sent to our house Do any of you

Have any cardboard boxes That make your hallway smell Like vomit or shit Have you ever marveled at that Ever stepped back and wondered What the fuck is going on? I've just purchased The new clothes horn

And the cardboard packaging that it comes in smells like shit. And now my whole hallway smells like shit and vomit. What's going on here? Well, last week when I fell off my bike and I was on my back and my bag was close to my head and I got a little subtle smell of shit, I'm like, what the fuck is this? And I open the bag and I'm but this cardboard smells like vomit and shit, what's going on here? So I had to find out.

It's recycled cardboard. cardboard, like think of it, it comes from other cardboard. So, cardboard that might have had meat in it or fat or, are decomposing food stuffs, this stained cardboard gets pulped and made into new recycled cardboard and homogenized. And dairy, dairy is another one. But these decomposed food, effectively, decomposed food, it's still forms into, like, butyric acid. Like, butyric acid, that's what makes vomit smell like vomit. It's rancid butter smell.

Strong rancid butter smell. That's butyric acid. There's loads of that in recycled cardboard. It's the ghosts of when that cardboard contained food that went off. Cardboard pulp itself. When it's being pulped, it produces hydrogen sulfide. That's the smell of rotten eggs. and then another one

which is called Metal Mercaptain which is the smell of shit and all of these compounds are present in recycled cardboard so that's why if you're wondering

why your hallway smells like shit and puke right now because you ordered something online that's why that's just an aside that's one investigation that I made what I was lying on my back

the second investigation that I made what I was lying on my back is So I was in Denmark Street in Limerick And I fell off the bike Because I slipped on some leaves There was no one around And like I said

If I do fall off the bike and I'm fine I'll get a little bit greedy And go Do you know what I'm going to lie here for about a minute For about a minute I get an opportunity to lie On the ground in the city Because you can't just walk down the road

And go do you know what I'm going to lie on the ground You have to have an excuse and slipping off your bicycle is a great excuse to be horizontal in the city so I just had a look around the walls and a vision came back to me I said Jesus Christ these walls are empty

I remember a long time ago when they used to be full of flyers and how this relates to the radio DJ voice thing and how the radio DJ voice becomes more and more pointless and absurd as we move away from radio we're exiting the monoculture and entering a polyculture we're not all looking at the same movies anymore we're not all listening to the same music

reading the same books it's very hard for us all to agree upon one cultural artifact I mean you have transcendent artists like Taylor Swift we all have a cursory awareness of Taylor Swift at all times but it's disappearing billionaires are the new thing

unfortunately like the past since Trump got in power you're seeing more and more billionaires Peter Thiel Zuckerberg I mean these are the new

Tom Crozes but when it comes to art culture like something that's been happening the past couple of years some country artists some American country artists will headline

Croke Park like 15, 16,000 people 30,000 people and collectively people go Who the fuck is that play? Who's this person playing Croke Park? Why is it sold out and why have I never heard of him?

Who's listening? I don't know anyone listening to this person And that's not me being old because it's not like back in 2015 where it's like Garth Brooks Garrette because everyone I don't know any of Garrette Brooks songs I might know one

No, I don't know any Garret Brooks songs friends in low places or something, very, very vague, but I know who the fuck Gart Brooks is. I have a cursory awareness and I can bring an image into my head of Gart Brooks. But that's disappearing now. Like I travel in airports, and I've been doing this as part of my job for a long time. And people don't buy books anymore at airports.

There was once a time when someone went on holidays, people who don't really read would just simply be. buy a book to take to the beach or to go on the plane or you'd buy a magazine for the plane. That's disappearing. And after the pandemic, the first thing I noticed in airports was the magazine and book section was about 75% smaller than it had been in the airport before the pandemic. Books. The space that, like you're always going to have people who read books, but that's a separate type of person. In the same way, you're always going to have people who like, like I'm a music liking person.

I like music, but that's my personality. You're always going to have some people who enjoy reading or enjoy listening the music, but I'm talking about the general population. Paperback books used to be appealing to the general population and you'd see them on people's

laps at airports. That's disappearing. It's being replaced by podcasts or just scrolling on fucking Instagram and TikTok. But because of that, you're getting the polyculture. people's interests are splitting off into very specific things because of the algorithm that exists in our phones.

And when I was lying on the ground there last week, going, Jesus, there used to be a lot of flyers around here, and I just noticed there's no flyers anymore. And then I went back to that street on Google Maps, because on Google Maps you can do this thing where you look back through the years and to test my theory, I walked around Limerick City in 2020, 2010, which is you can do that in Google Maps. And lo and behold, there were flyers for fucking gigs everywhere.

And you see, why that's important is you get a shared cultural literacy. So in 2010, if some comedian, if there's just a comedian or a DJ, is gigging in Limerick City, and this can be for any city, fucking London, Lytrum, whatever the fuck you have, 2010 there is a comedian gigging in the city their poster is pasted everywhere all over the walls I understand this some people might think that this was ugly okay fair enough it was ugly back then

but the comedian or the musician or the DJ's poster is everywhere but what that then means is that every member of the city then has a cursory awareness of that artist they might not know a thing about the artist They might know any of the arts they create, their songs, but at least their name is stuck in their head on the tip of their tongue and there's a cursory awareness, a monoculture, where at least everyone knows this thing is happening. And what that does then is that creates communication, arguments, discussion, connection. That, what Roland Barth would have called it, the, a city's semiotic skin.

that's what fly posting does it brings people together through communication because I'll give you an example right 2006 the artist Dead Mouse played a nightclub in Limerick before he was massive

and his poster was all over the city but if you know Dead Mouse you know that his name is spelled Dead Mow 5 so everyone in Limerick was talking about Dead Mow 5 going who the fuck is Dead Mow 5 it's not Dead Mow 5 it's dead mouse and at least you have connection there.

You have the fabric of community. People are speaking about one thing. It's monoculture. But the flypost and disappeared. For a couple of reasons, laws came in. Space has disappeared where cultural things were happening, but it retreated to the fucking algorithm. You see, around 2010, the nightclubs were like,

I don't need a budget now to print out all these posters and pay someone to put them on the one. wall or even risk the fine for putting them on the wall, because now I can advertise on Facebook. And now we've all retreated into our separate interests through the algorithm and have less in common to communicate with each other about. And I think that's a bad thing, because our society is quite polarised. But the eureka moment that I had when I was lying on the ground, it's something that I've been bringing up a lot on this podcast, especially post-pandemic. And it's something I've, I can't understand about my own career, you see, because this is my job, I do fucking gigs.

Something I haven't been able to understand is how myself and artists like myself can gig and sell out venues and then not be famous at all. It's a very, very strange thing. and it's post-pandemic. I've been doing this for 25 fucking years. I've had dips, I've had highs. I can't understand how... Like, let's just take Edinburgh. I did a gig in Edinburgh about six months ago.

I sold out Usher Hall. That's... I think it's the largest seated venue in Edinburgh. I mentioned at the time. Osher Hall was so big that when I used to gig Edinburgh to 150, 50 people 15 years ago or 13 years ago, I would look at Oshar Hall and just never even consider it as a possibility for somewhere that I would gig.

It was beyond my dreams, didn't entertain it, that would have been silly. But when I used to see venues like that getting sold out 13 years ago, it's like, oh, Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr, Peter K, you could walk into a pub in Edinburgh and be like, Oh, Jimmy Carr has sold out Oshar Hall tonight. And then everyone in the pub would go, oh, yeah, that fella. And some people would be like, oh, I really know his material. And then other people would be like,

I don't know much about him, but I have a cursory awareness of his existence. In 2025, I can sell out that same venue, but you could walk into any pub in Edinburgh and say, Blind Boy is playing in Oshar Hall. He's sold it out, and most people in the pub will go, Who? Who's that? And same with fucking, like I sold out Hammersmith Apollo in London, the Palais Theatre in Melbourne.

And it's not just me, it's loads of other artists doing similar sized venues. And it's like, how can you sell out those venues? But yes, not be famous. No one knows who the fuck you are. And same, like, those country artists in Ireland, American country artists, and they're selling out Croke Park, which is fucking huge, 15,000 people. And then online people are like, who the fuck is that person and who listens to them? I've never heard of them.

How are they able to sell out Croke Park? And the flyers, the flyers is what made me realize. It's polyculture. We've lost monoculture. We no longer have a shared cultural literacy. Like when I go and do a gig in Australia or somewhere like fucking Nottingham, the place fills up with all of these people who are living in the same city and then, because this gets reported to me

and messages, people DM me and go Oh, my neighbor, I never knew my neighbor was a fan of your podcast and had been listening all this time, I met them at your gig. We retreated into these strange private interests and shared, the shared

culture is disappearing. We've gone from broadcast to narrowcast. There's no Game of Thrones anymore. There's no sopranos. There's no breaking bad. There's loads of shows that are as big that exist. But you can't really, you can't just assume anymore.

You can't just say it to somebody. Are you watching that? Highly exceptional rare circumstances. Kneecap, kneecap sticks out over the summer. Fucking everyone knew about kneecap, but kneecap, they transcended art over the summer and became political. And that's why, to take it back to what I said at the start. In my day, if you listen to Slipknot, you had to wear,

a slip-knot hoodie and walk around advertising it and if you were lucky you saw another person wearing a slip-knot hoodie and both ye came together and spoke about slip-knot and if you were lucky you might hear about nine-inch nails. I think that might have been my radio DJ voice podcast. I'm not sure what that episode was about. I think I'm entering my Finnegan's Way, Keera. I'll be back next week. What a hot take of some description. All right. Are we going to be Christmas cunts? No, not next week. There will be a podcast at Christmas time, of course. I never miss a Christmas.

I might do a walking podcast. Might do a little walking podcast for you. I'll be doing some writing over Christmas, some television writing or pitching television documents. My buddy James is coming down for a writing session. I'm sure I might have a pint as well. All right, rubber swan, fall off your bicycle. wink at a bouncer.

Fart of the Carlo, that bless. So, you know, You know, I'm going to be the I'm on

on on We're going to be able to be. And... ...that... ...and... ...and... ...you know...

...and... You know, I'm going to be able to You know, I'm going to be able to