The Blindboy Podcast
Hosted by Blindboy Boatclub
Original podcast
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9,959 words · 8 speakers
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Brandish the candle towards the mutilated genitals of a gilded earthworm, you war-torn Ursulas. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I hope you had a wonderful week, you glorious cunts.
I had quite an eventful week. I was profoundly busy. On Sunday, I was at a festival. I was at All Together Now Festival where
I deliberately chose an early slot. I deliberately went out at 12pm in the day, which is a real, nobody wants that slot. I'd been asked to take a later slot in the day and I'm like, no, give me the 12pm fucking noon. And the festival were like, are you sure you want that early slot? Cause it's, it's very difficult to get people to show up at a festival at 12 noon. So nobody wants that slot, but the thing is, I prefer that slot. I'd rather, I'd rather do a good gig than have the tent fucking packed. A good gig is always better than a full gig that's shit.
And the thing is with later gigs at a festival when you're doing spoken word. I've, I've gigged a festival every year since 2006. I've been gigging festivals for 19, I fucking hate festivals. I hate them. I, I really dislike festivals. I've gigged at a festival every year for 19 years. I have never once gone to a festival as a patron. Festivals are just big loud fields where crowds behave unpredictably, where the flow of people has no rules and it's very overwhelming. If you're fond of a bit of social anxiety. So I've never gone to a festival as a patron, but I've gigged at a festival every single year for 19 years.
So I'm a festival expert. That's 19, 19 years of gigging festivals. That puts me in a small little category of performers. Um, I'm very lucky and very grateful to have been able to remain in the fucking professional entertainment industry for 19 years. But I know a thing or two about gigging at festivals at this point, even though I fucking hate them. For once you get beyond 3pm in the day. That's when people at festivals start drinking. So, once people are a little bit drunk, then you have people coming in and out of the tent who don't wanna see ya, and they just start roaring and shouting, and you're doing spoken word. So, I mean, like what I'm doing.
A live podcast, or reading poetry, or a talk, or even stand-up comedy. It's just you and your voice. The other thing is, after 3pm in festivals, that's when festivals get loud. So, you could have a tent, and there's a music act fucking playing. And if the wind blows towards your tent, it will take all the noise from that fucking music gig. And now you're trying to speak over beats, and that's impossible. So, I took the early 12 o'clock slot, and fucking 6,000 people showed up. It was so strange that it made it into the newspaper. The Irish Times wrote an article about it.
A tent should not be packed at a festival at 12 o'clock in the day, but it was. And it's, it was probably the best festival gig I've ever fucking done. So, the whole tent was packed, but I have to assume, fully packed with 10-foot decklins, because everybody sat down and enjoyed it. And there was no roaring or shouting or bullshit that you'd, you'd expect at a festival. So, it was a marvelous, wonderful gig. I wasn't really looking forward to the gig, because I was quite nervous. I've gigged at that festival altogether now, in Waterford, three times. That was my third time. But for the first two times, on both occasions,
my guests couldn't make it to the gig at the very last minute. And I was like, literally about to walk on stage, and I have no guest. Which is a harrowing situation, because it's so unplanned. So, I was paranoid about going out here the third time, and it's happened twice. And also, what made me paranoid, like, I'm not superstitious. I am not a superstitious person. So, I kind of worked myself up a bit over the week, thinking to myself, shit, what if something goes wrong again? You've done this gig twice. Both times, something's gone wrong. What if it happens again? And then I'm rationally thinking about it, going, no, the first time, someone missed an airplane, and then the second time, a car broke down.
Perfectly normal things that can happen, and I was fine with it. And then I ended up Googling the festival and the grounds that the festival is on. And it turns out that the grounds that altogether now festival is on is actually cursed. And then that freaked me out. So in Ireland, we have these, what you'd call big country houses. They're old gigantic mansions, colonial houses out in the countryside in Ireland. And they were plantation houses like you'd have in Mississippi or in North Carolina or South Carolina or Louisiana.
These were colonial houses where very, very, very wealthy British people lived. Landlords, huge, huge landlords, lived in these gorgeous stately home mansions. And these are from the sixteen hundreds, up until the eighteen hundreds. Most of them were destroyed, but a few of them are left. Absolutely stunning gorgeous buildings, but quite a lot of misery within their stories. Because while the country was dying in the eighteen hundreds from a famine, you had all these wealthy English families living in these giant estates.
And often on these estates, you know, there was the river with all the fish inside there and the locals couldn't fish from this river. These were the people whose land food was grown on. You know, wheat, barley, carrots, vegetables. Food was being grown on their land while a famine was happening all around them and this food was being exported. These big houses were sites of colonial power. It's where the soldiers would feel comfortable on these lands. These people were the rent collectors, were part of the Protestant aristocracy. They were colonizers. So anyway, most of these big colonial houses in Ireland were destroyed.
But some of the few that remain and their grounds are often used for music festivals. And altogether now it's on Corrach Moor Estate in Waterford. This beautiful big colonial house with the most magnificent manicured lands around it. You know, it's like walking around a Constable painting. So while I'm getting paranoid about doing this gig, because it went wrong twice. I start doing my research and then for the crack, because I know, because I know, this is an old colonial house, couple of hundred years old. For the crack, let's type it into the National Folklore Collection, into Ducas,
to see if there is any local folklore written down about this big colonial house. So there's loads, there's loads of folklore stories about this specific colonial house where this festival is. So, now altogether now is probably, probably the most beautiful festival in Ireland because it's on the magnificent gorgeous grounds of this old colonial house. And this place has been, it's been colonial grounds since the Norman invasion. So that's after 1177. And I can look up history books and I can find out all about the very wealthy people who lived in this colonial house, the Beresford family.
I can find out about where these very wealthy people made their money. So like I said, they were granted this land during the colonial conquest of Ireland and then it remained a colonial family, colonizing Ireland for hundreds of years. But I can look up the British slavery database, the Slavery Compensation Act, which is 1837. You know the way the Brits like to say, "Oh, we ended slavery." But when the Brits stopped doing slavery, they had this thing called the Slavery Compensation Act, which sounds nice, doesn't it? "Oh, you, you paid enslaved people loads of money." Did they, fuck? No. When the Brits got out of the transatlantic slave trade,
they compensated everyone who owned slaves with loads and loads of money. And the British taxpayer didn't stop paying this until 2015, right? So when I looked up the records around this big colonial house in Waterford, these, these colonizers, I found one of them. George de la Puer Beresford in the 1830s.
He lived in this big house in Waterford, but then he went to Saint Vincent, which is in the West Indies. He was a colonial secretary there, so he was a colonizer in the West Indies too. And he was compensated a hundred and forty-eight pounds because he owned six enslaved people. So this is the caliber of people that you're dealing with. Incredibly wealthy, colonizing Ireland, eighteen thirty-seven, which is a couple of years before the famine, and then also owning a bunch of slaves in the Caribbean and making money from that. And it's often easy to find out the histories of very wealthy people, because these things are written down in the, in the historical records, such as there, the Slavery Compensation Act. He was paid this much money, I can see it.
But the stories of either enslaved people or back in Ireland, the stories of the fucking peasants that were dying, the ordinary people of Ireland, we don't have historical record for their stories, but what we do have is oral folklore. There's so many spooky scary stories about this Beresford family in Waterford, there's so many of them, that it tells us that they were probably absolute bastards, and they were so scary and so mean that the stories about them were supernatural. But the big one is that the grounds itself, the house itself, were altogether now festival of cars, that that's cursed.
And the curse originates when... So there's a story in Ducas, in the National Folklore Collection, about a woman, she was a widow. This woman was a widow, and she only had one son. Also, by the details, I'm going to assume this story is from the early eighteen hundreds. So this woman is a widow, but her one son was misbehaving. He was very unruly, she was worried about him. Now, he's a child, maybe eight or nine years of age, but he's fighting, or he's stealing, he's going off the rails. And she's a widow, so his dad isn't around, her hands are fucking full, and she doesn't
know what to do, and she wants to put the frighteners up him. She wants to scare him straight, because he's only a child. So she thinks, okay, his dad's not around... Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go up to the big house, to the colonial house, Caromore House, and I'm gonna go to the marquis, the marquis Beresford. Marquis is like an earl, but it's the colonial person who owns this house. And her plan is, I'm gonna take my little boy up there, and I'm gonna say to the marquis, "This young fella is misbehavin'. Can you give him a stern talking to and frighten him, please? Maybe show him something scary, show him what happens to criminals."
Because the local marquis, the local person who lives in the big fucking house, the colonizer, they have absolute power. They're judge, jury, executioner. But they're also human beings. So maybe sometimes something like this would work, and that's what she's thinking. "I'm gonna bring my little child up and meet the marquis, and he'll play along. He'll have that little bit of compassion where he understands, ah, this child is misbehavin', I'll scare him straight." So that's what she does, she walks up to Caromore House, up the long driveway with her little son, knocks on the door and looks for the marquis and says, "This is my son, and he won't behave himself. And I'm a widow, it's just me as his parent, and I'd like you to discipline him."
So the marquis Beresford comes to her and says, "I see, I see what you're doing here, don't worry about it, I'll discipline him." And then at that moment, the marquis and his strong men, they get the little child and they hang him. They hang him, they kill him there at the door in front of his mother as a joke. And his mother drops to her knees, bawling, crying at the cruelty, the cruelty of this. Beresford, the marquis Beresford of Waterford, can't believe it. And through her tears, she pints at him. And she puts a widow's curse on the marquee, puts a widow's curse on him and his family
to the seventh generation and a curse on the house. And in Irish folklore, a widow's curse is one of the most powerful curses because widows occupied kind of a liminal space. The system would have been so harsh at the time that the bottom of society would have been a widow. Widows were often the first to be evicted during famines when they lost their husbands. And that a widow's position was so disenfranchised within society that her pain and suffering almost grants her a type of symbolic purity and supernatural power. And also what you have with widows is the pre-Christian Irish thing around the Kailuk,
the goddess of winter, the goddess of the land, the hag of winter. And you get the sense that these cruel British landlords in the land of Ireland, that the goddess of the land, the pre-Christian goddess, will have her revenge on these colonizers for their extreme cruelty to the children of Ireland. So that's a folk story. That's not historical record. The record is, I have records of the local people of Waterford told this story about the widow and the widow's curse and how she lost her son and how she cursed this posh family, the Beresfords, for seven generations. And then there's other folklore stories about the house and the lands in it.
Like, there's one story I found where a local woman snuck into the grounds of the estate and there was a well. And she went to the well, thinking, great, I'll get some fresh water from this well. So she did, but when she took the well water home and tried to boil it in her pot, the well water wouldn't boil, no matter how much she left it over the flame. And then she said, fuck it, this is strange, but it's clean water and I have a pot of clean water, even though it won't boil, I'm gonna chance it. And then she gave the water to her family and it was cold because it wouldn't boil no matter how much flame. But when she gave it to her family, they placed the water up to their lips,
cold, but the second it went into their mouths, then it started to boil and it burnt all the mouths of her family really, really bad. And a story like that, what that tells you is that the people believed that there was probably once sacred wells on this land, pre-Christian sacred wells, or maybe a well belonging to a saint, that the people would visit because they venerated this well. Then all of a sudden, they couldn't because a landlord builds walls around it. So because the well, the well is a conduit to the other world, the pre-Christian other world. So because the well had been mistreated, colonized, then the fairies were
angry and now the well is dangerous. And then I found another story and the story is a long time ago, there lived a marquis of Waterford who was very hard-hearted. The tenants had to pay him very high rent. So this is another marquis of this house in Waterford, a descendant to the fellow who had the curse put on him. But the story is, he was an absolute bollocks. He was charging very high rent during the famine, a cruel person. So his rents are so high that the local parish priest, the Catholic priest decides, I'm gonna go up to the marquis's house. I'm gonna go up to that house and I'm gonna knock on the door and I'm gonna say to him, I'm a priest, all right, I'm a man of God. I'm asking you, please, to reduce the
rent on your tenants because they're dying. The priest's name was Father Sprat. That was his second name, Sprat. So when Father Sprat went to the marquis's door, the marquis laughed at him and said, Father Sprat, it's out in the sea with the sprats where you should be. A sprat is like a small fish. And he kicked the priest off his land, basically, and didn't reduce the rent. But soon after that, that particular marquis started to become obsessed with the sea. He started to get like anxiety and he couldn't live on dry land anymore. So he had to go onto a boat and the only way he could know peace was that if that if he was on a boat
in the sea and he was driven tormented on this boat because fish used to jump from the water and then arrive into his boat and he'd have to throw all the fish out until eventually he shot himself into the head. So that's folklore, that's not historical record. These are the stories of the local people, hundreds of years old, that we're very fortunate to have and to be able to read and to look at. We don't know how much of it is true, they're very entertaining and they spread orally. But what we do know is it paints a picture of whatever fucking family lived here, the colonizers for hundreds of years in that colonial house in Waterford. They were bad, they were really, really bad and they were cruel.
And that's why there are stories about haunted very wells on their land. And you tell that to kids so that the kids never go in. And that's why there are stories about the woman who went there with her child and her child was hung. In each story, you have members of this family, this very wealthy family, and they're victimizing the most vulnerable people, a widow, a child, a priest. I'm no fan of Catholic priests, but Catholic priests during the Irish famine, and in particular in, in the Irish penal laws, when being a priest was illegal, they were probably a better caliber of person than the priest that we grew up with. And, and then you have a story where a sacred well is victimized too.
So that folklore gives me a hum, it gives me a hum and a taste and an idea. But if these stories exist amongst the people about this house and about this family, then they were evil, they were bad. And then I can go to the historical record and see, ah yeah, one of them owned a lot of slaves there in the Caribbean. But then I started thinking, fuck it, that widow's curse, that widow's curse.
That she put on seven generations of this posh colonial family. The widow's curse and also that story of your, the marquis shooting himself on a boat. These are wealthy historical people. These are the type of people who had their portraits painted. If I just look, I guarantee you I can find out about the members of this family. And lo and behold, it would absolutely appear. They all ended up dying horrifically in terrible accidents. So the first fellow I found out about was a fellow called Henry Beresford, the third marquis of Waterford, right? So he's this colonist living in this, this fucking house where I was gigging at the weekend on the lands. And this cunt.
So he sounds like a right prick. So in eighteen thirty seven, incredibly wealthy. He was over in, in Leicester, in a place called Melton Mowbray in Leicester. And him and his buddies went to the races and they were drinking. So wealthy colonists drinking. And when they were on their way home, they came to a toll, a toll bridge or whatever, somewhere where they would have had to pay money to get home. And the toll keeper was like, that'll be ten quid. And then the marquis is like, do you know who I am? I'm not paying a toll, let me through. Now, the toll keeper, who's just a working class person, he's not going to argue with a fucking marquis.
So the marquis and his friends tie up this toll keeper. And in the toll keeper's hut, there happened to be pots of red paint. So they painted the toll keeper red and painted everything around him red while they were shitfaced. And then they had so much crack doing that, that they went back into town. And decided, let's just start painting everything fucking red. So they kicked down people's doors, they threw red paint on people, they, they vandalized everything with red paint in this little village in, in Leicester in eighteen thirty seven. A policeman tried to get involved. What do you think they did? I'm the fucking marquis of Waterford, I am, I can do what I want. So they kicked the shit out of the policeman and painted him red.
Then more police arrived and managed to arrest one of the lads.
And then the marquis got his friends to come back. They broke into the police station, beat up the police and then painted the inside of the police station red. Now, what are they, like, ultra-strong? They're so strong they can kick the shit out of policemen? No, they're ultra-posh. They're so posh that they can beat up a policeman. A policeman isn't gonna defend themselves with a fucking marquis, even if he's in Waterford. So, anyway, the marquis heads back home, to his house in Waterford. And back over in Leicester, they're like, "I know this fella is posh, right? And I know he lives in a big giant house, but there has to be some type of justice. He kicked the shit out of policemen."
So the marquis, a year later, eventually, 1838, he goes back to Leicester for his day in court. He arrives wearing bear furs, okay? So that's how, that's fucking Andrew Tate shit. Real contempt, doesn't give a fuck about what he did. He knows he's not gonna face justice. Gets brought to court, gets a fine. But, the reason I have this, the reason I have so many details about this one fella from this house in Waterford is because the phrase "to paint the town red" was coined by the judge who fined him. And the other thing, this fella, Henry Beresford, he sounded like a prick. Really rich prick.
If you're from Leicester, you'll know of a legend called Spring Hill Jack. So, if you were walking around the dark alleyways at the time, there was a fella called Spring Hill Jack who used to jump out and frighten people and then jump onto the roofs of buildings. Again, we know about Spring Hill Jack from the folklore of working-class people from Leicester, the poor people of Leicester who were working in factories and coming home. This man would jump out and frighten 'em and scare 'em and sometimes beat people up. Well, this fella, Henry Beresford, he's the main suspect for that Spring Heel Jack business. So anyway, he, he went back home to Waterford, to this giant house.
And he was trampled by a horse in eighteen fifty nine. And then another relative, the fifth marquis of Waterford, right, came out of this same house, born in eighteen forty four. He died by suicide in, on the grounds. He shot himself and he might be the one that was referred to in that folklore story about the priest and going out into the ocean and the fish attacking him. Then the sixth marquis of Beresford, right, the sixth marquis. Born in eighteen seventy five, he fucks off down to South Africa, Rhodesia, or whatever the fuck the Brits called it. He goes down to South Africa to do some colonial shit down there, to fight the boers, I believe.
He gets attacked by a lion and then manages to survive the lion attack. Comes back home to Waterford and, and drowns in the river. And I was looking at the river the other day and I, I marvelled and said, that, that's the most shallow river I've ever seen. It must be like an inch, an inch of water. Well, this fella drowned in it after because he was attacked by a lion. The lion attack had mauled him and then he drowned, drowned in an inch of water in Waterford. And then I'm like, fuck me, because this is historical record. Like I said, these are all posh people. I'm like, shit, maybe this widow's curse is fucking real. Because then the seventh marquis, right, born in nineteen oh one.
He accidentally shoots himself in nineteen thirty four in the house in Waterford, right? So that's another person. They all die young. Th- this fella died at thirty three. They all die young and tragically and out of nowhere. So I just, I find that fucking fascinating. Here I have this, this folklore story about the widow cursing the, the marquis for seven generations, right? And then I'm looking at the historical record and there's all these marquises dying of bizarre deaths. And then the strangest thing of all about Corthamore House, where All Together Festival now is.
I'm left thinking, why is it still standing? Because we had a lot of these houses in Ireland, we had a lot of colonial houses. And they're not here because the IRA burnt them. The IRA burnt them down. And generally, if a colonial house was left unharmed and the IRA didn't burn it down, it meant that that particular family, that they were kind, or that they were interested in Irish independence, and that they weren't necessarily part of the British colonial administration, even though they had money. Because that's the case, there was a lot of posh families, a lot of Protestant families, who fought against British occupation and fought against colonization and funded the IRA,
or would help the IRA in their war against the British. So I couldn't understand, I'm like, why is Coramore House in Waterford? Why was that never burnt down by the IRA? And then, of course, I go looking into it. And even the local IRA lads were a bit freaked out by this, by the lands around this house, and they were freaked out by the stories. This didn't feel like a safe space, it felt supernatural, it felt cursed. But in the 1920s, the IRA were given the order, go and burn down that fucking house, burn it down. I don't give a shit about the local legends or whether it's cursed.
It's a colonial fucking house, burn it down. So when the IRA went there, when you see this house, and you might have seen it if you were at the festival at the weekend, above the door up high is the most beautiful, gorgeous, stone sculpture of a deer, a stag. Like, this is just beautiful. So at the top of the house is this stone stag. And the story goes is that the IRA went to the house one night to burn it down. And the night that they went there, there was a full moon. And as they looked up at the house to burn it down, the full moon was just absolutely
perfectly illuminating the antlers of the stag. And it was such a visually strange coincidence and so striking to have this moon, full moon, perfectly behind the statue of the stag and the antlers on this colonial house, that the IRA just ignored their orders and they said, no fucking way, I am not gonna, this fucking house that has the curse, where everyone who owned it had terrible fucking lives, I'm not gonna be the person to burn it down. I'm fucking with shit that I don't understand, some fairy shit. Fuck this, I'm not burning it down. And that's why it still stands. So I'd done all this research last week, just for my own crack, just for my own enjoyment.
And I start to think, fuck it, man, I've gigged this place twice. I've done two gigs at this festival and in both cases, the worst possible thing has happened. My guest hasn't been able to make it to the gig, literally as I'm walking on stage. Maybe this is the curse, maybe this is the fucking curse of that house. And then I started to think of, I'm like, well, the first gig that I tried to do there, my guests for the podcast were supposed to be, it was supposed to be the Whalers, the remaining members of Bob Marley's band, Jamaican fellas, and their car broke down. And I would have been talking to them about the connection between Jamaican people and Irish people.
And then I started thinking about, oh, yeah, sure, one of the fellas who owned this fucking, one of the fellas who owned this house, wasn't he a slave owner in the fucking Caribbean? Maybe that caused the Whalers' car to break down. Now, I'm getting a little bit of anxiety, you see, and when you get anxiety, you lose critical thinking faculties. No, a fucking 300-year-old curse didn't cause Bob Marley's keyboard player to fucking break down in his car on the way to my gig. That shit just happens. But, having said that, I was very paranoid about my gig at the weekend. I didn't think anyone was gonna show up and I had this terrible feeling that something was gonna go wrong, to the point that-
I was offered Bob Geldof as a guest for my podcast and I said, no fucking way. Not Geldof. There's something about Bob Geldof. I think it's because, because he's Irish. And, and during the, the Scottish Independent referendum of 2014, when Scotland was trying to get independence from the United Kingdom, Geldof comes out of nowhere and is like, calls himself British first off. It's like, you're born in fucking Dublin, buddy. Calls himself British and then asks the Scottish people to stay within the union. Come out of it. Well, stay out of it, Geldof, will you? So I said no to Bob Geldof as a potential guest for my podcast, cause I'm like, there's,
that's dark energy. I'm fucking with some dark, there, there could be fairy shit going on here. There's dark energy, not Geldof. Fucking banshee bones, Geldof. Come out of it. So I went with a comedian from Cork called Chris Kent as my guest instead because he's got a good aura about him. There was something, if I got lost in a fairy fort and became disoriented, I'd be comfortable taking directions out of it with Chris Kent. So that's why I went with Chris. I didn't say that to Chris on the day, I didn't want to freak him out. That's why I went with Chris Kent, because I needed, I needed Chris Kent to act as some type of protective knock-nahini amulet. So anyway, it turned out to be grand, turned
out to be fine. Wonderful, wonderful gig. 6,000 people showed up. There's no such thing as the curse. It's just a series of coincidences that happened. And I managed to not mention any of this on stage or, or to freak out the people who attended this festival, this altogether no festival. Can't believe I'm after talking about that for 30 fucking minutes. And I could have told you this last week as well. I made a choice not to speak about this last week because, and I was right not to speak about this last week because. Twenty five thousand people at the festival. Obviously, if around six thousand people show up to my gig, I have to assume those people listen to the podcast. Otherwise, what are they doing listening to me? People take drugs at festivals.
And I think me going, did you know the grounds of these festivals are actually cursed? And I'm gonna speak about this for twenty five minutes in great detail, specifically about why they are cursed. That's gonna cause a couple of whiteners. That will cause whiteners, deeply unpleasant K-halls, and bad mushroom trips. You'll get the heebie-jeebies and the mushrooms and start seeing the fairies. So I waited a week to reveal that about the location of that festival. None of it's real, it's horseshit. I don't believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in people believing in the supernatural and freaking themselves out. I believe in anxiety and irrational thinking as a result of anxiety
and the ambient impact of negative vibes on people's drug experiences. Like, any time I've smoked cannabis in a legal country, I've had a wonderful experience. And I wonder how much of that is because I don't have to feel like a criminal. No matter what age you are, you can't, you can't fully one hundred percent enjoy cannabis, we'll say, in Ireland, because it's illegal and you're looking over your shoulder. And that little, that little hum of uncertainty can be enough to tip you over into, into whitener land or whity land. I don't wanna describe what a whity or a whitener is. We're odd adults here.
It's like a cross between a panic attack and hitting your funny bone. It's ninety minutes of viscerally feeling your heartbeat in your arsehole while being mentally trapped inside what a triangle smells like. The anti-crack, minus-crack. Let's have a little Ocarina pause now. I don't have an Ocarina. I've been in a bit of a transitionary phase recently where I'm, I'm between studios, I'm between studios. So a lot of my Ocarinas and instruments have been packed away. But what I do have this week is a little set of Allen keys. Little set of Allen keys.
I love Allen keys.
Because as a child, again, this is, this is quite autistic behaviour. But as a child, I genuinely believed, I thought that Allen Keys were keys that you use to open men called Allen. I'm sure someone set me straight when I was about five years of age, but there was a few years there where I, I thought that every man whose name was Allen must have had lots of little compartments and drawers and scrows. Actually, I was very young. So there was a cartoon when I was a child. I'd say maybe, I'd say 10 people listening to the podcast are gonna remember this.
When I was a fucking tiny child, there was a cartoon and it was for adults, because my older brothers used to watch it. And I used to beg them, can I stay up late, please, just to see this cartoon? It was called Dick Spanner. It used to scare the living fuck out of me. It was, it was like stop motion, it was stop motion animation about a detective who's a robot. And it was for adults. It wasn't like, it wasn't inappropriate. It was just, the tone was quite dark. And I used to stay up late to frighten the shit out of myself and look at Dick Spanner, the robot detective.
And I just got it into my head that one of my brothers had a set of Allen Keys. And I just assumed, oh, keys for Allen. Allen is a robot like Dick Spanner, and he has bits that open. And all Allens are like this, and this is why you have Allen Keys to open Allens. That's not what Allen Keys are at all, but they certainly have a lovely, healthy jingle, kind of a dry thud. So I'm gonna jingle these Allen Keys, and you're gonna hear some adverts for some bullshit.
Oh, wow.
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Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.
Love the crown molding.
Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.
Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?
No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.
No FiOS? Yeah, no thank you.
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They don't even want to jingle, they're so dry.
Very silent metal, almost leadish.
That was the Alan Key pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. This podcast is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. Each week, I research, I write, I deliver a new podcast about whatever I'm genuinely passionate about. Because this is listener-funded, I have the freedom, the freedom to fail each week. This podcast is how I, it's how I pay all my bills. It's how I buy the equipment to make the podcasts. Everything, it is everything. So if you listen to this podcast, if you enjoy it, if you're a regular listener, if it brings you martyr, merriment, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast,
please consider funding it directly and becoming a patron. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. How much does it cost? Ideally, the price of a pint or a cup of coffee, once a month. That's all I'm looking for. But if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. You're grand. Listen for free. Listen to the podcast for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Upcoming gigs. Electric picnic, lads. You know I'm doing a live, like I said, I've been doing Electric Picnic every year since 2006. There's gonna be people at Electric Picnic who were, who were born when I did my first gig, alright?
So we know I'm gonna do it. I was only allowed to announce it now. I don't know what I'm doing at Electric Picnic. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Sometime, it'll be a live podcast. It'll be grand. Come along. It'll be crack. I might smoke cigarettes on stage to keep wasps, to keep the, that's the thing. Electric Picnic, it's at the end of August, when you have aggressive wasps who fly into my bag on stage. You think I'm being paranoid. I mention it every year. I am not. I get foddered around by wasps who want to go inside my plastic bag. Smoking cigarettes on stage keeps the wasps away. So I'll do something at Electric Picnic, another festival that's built on
an old colonial house, Stradbilly Hall, which was, the grounds of which were established in the 1500s, fucking Queen Elizabeth, the 1500s, during the plantation of leishon, awfully. So that's another colonial house with a fucking festival on it. Right, surprise announcement, these tickets only went on sale this morning.
I booked this gig, I'm doing a tiny, tiny fucking gig. I mean, less than 100 tickets, fucking tiny. I'm doing a gig on Saturday the 6th of September, right? As part of this, it's a literary festival, I think it's part of the West Cork Literary Festival. The festival's called This Island Drift, and it's on Garnish Island in West Cork. I booked this at the last minute, and I'll tell you why. If you're talking about fucking British colonial houses, we'll say, in Ireland, right? A lot of the British colonists wouldn't have even lived in their estates, but they would have treated Ireland like a a beautiful holiday destination in the 1700s and the 1800s.
And there's a little island in West Cork called Garnish Island, that's, that's where this festival is. It used to be one of these colonial gardens. There is nowhere else in Ireland like Garnish Island. It's just beside the village of, of Clenngariff, right? And it's not an island out in the sea, it's a tiny island in, in an estuary. It's uniquely sheltered by these mountains, and these mountains protected from the harshness of the Atlantic. So they don't get any frost on Little Garnish Island, it's subtropical. Nowhere else like it, there's plants that grow on this island that only grow in tropical climates.
It was the colonial property of Belfast Ionians who...
Used to work for the East India Company, I believe, in the eighteen hundreds. And in fairness to them, they noticed, holy fuck, this tiny little island in Cork is very different, it's strange. So they built these beautiful Greek and Roman looking gardens on the island, and they also surrounded the island with a perimeter of pine trees. And this farther protected the island from frost. So if you look up photographs of Garnish Island, it, it does not look like Ireland. It looks like a posh Victorian person's dream about ancient Greece. And I've never been to Garnish Island. And my dad, who was from West Cork, he used to always promise me when I was a kid, someday
we're gonna go to Garnish Islands, the most beautiful place on earth. Someday we're gonna go there. We'll look at the beautiful flowers and I'll show you where your grand uncle burnt down the big house. So there was a big house on this island, it was called Garanish Lodge. And in nineteen twenty-two, it was burnt down by the IRA. But this was just after the independence of the twenty-six counties. So it was burnt down by the anti-treaty IRA. And my dad told me that I had a grand uncle involved in that burning. But again, the problem is, I can't prove that because it was the anti-treaty IRA, the illegal IRA. It was during the Irish Civil War.
You see, during the Irish War of Independence, those IRA members, they wrote down all of their experiences in order to get pensions. And this was held in the, the National Archives. So if you had, if you had a relative who was in the, the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, you can go and look up their records and read stories about what they were involved in. So then, when the Irish War of Independence ends, I'm explaining this for, for British people who are listening, Irish War of Independence ends nineteen twenty-two, British forces say, right, we're gone, ye won, we're gone out of Ireland, but we're keeping. The six counties. Some people were like, yeah, sounds fair enough, Brits.
And then other people were like, fuck that. That's not an independent Ireland. Give us back all of it. So then the IRA split in two. You had the pro treaty who effectively became the Irish Army. And then you had the anti treaty IRA who were illegal. And they fought each other during the Irish Civil War. So I had an anti treaty IRA grand uncle. And apparently he was part of a unit that burnt down that house on Garenish Island. And I can't confirm that at all. I've just got a story from my dad, who was a bit of a lunatic, in fairness to him. But anyway, yeah, I'm gigging a teeny tiny festival on Garenish Island. Literally less than a hundred tickets.
And I'm doing it. I'm doing it as a piece of performance art, not even just for me. Performance art for me, not even for an audience. I like the idea. I want to go to this little island that my fucking dad promised to take me as a child, but never did. And, and he would describe it to me consistently, describe what the microclimate. He'd describe how the Gulf Stream would hit the island, how the island was protected from the mountains, how it had all these tropical flowers. And then he'd tell me about how my grand uncle burnt down the big posh British house on the island. So I want to go there for me as a little pilgrimage with a plastic bag on my head.
I want to do that as, as what you'd call an autotopographical performance. It's a form of, of specialized autobiography. I want to combine the ritualistic embodied action of a pilgrimage with the conscious framing of performance. And do that autotopographically. That's a lot of words to describe. Going to a fucking island my dad told me to go to. But I'm doing it just for me, for me, for some, for some fucking meaning. And when I got offered this gig at the last minute, I was like, there you go. There's the fucking opportunity. There's the perfect opportunity to do that. So if you want to come to that.
Well, you're not really coming to that part, you're coming to a live podcast. It'll probably, possibly me and Kevin Barry having a chat, because Kevin's at the festival. So if he's available, I'll probably have a chat with Kevin Barry. And I'd probably chat to him about this, because I think that would interest him, because he wrote a book a few years back called Beetlebone, which is like an alternative history about John Lennon returning to an island in the west of Ireland to join a screaming cult. We'll see what happens. So yeah, if you... I know that's, I know it's very short notice, I know that's very short notice, and the tickets only went on sale this morning. It's a bit of a surprise for me, too. I only decided I was gonna do it last week.
But yeah, literally, there is, I think, less than 100 tickets for this thing. So if you wanna come to a live podcast on a strange little island in West Cork that has a microclimate, and you have to get to the gig on a little ferry, it's less than 10 minutes, I think, on the ferry, too, and very gentle waters, and I do believe that some seals, seals reveal themselves and say hello to people who are going to the island. And then the little village beside it, Glen Garif, strange looking place from the photographs I can see. It looks like the type of place that very posh Victorian British people went for holidays
in, in the 1860s. And then even more interesting than that, where this little island is, it's... So it's well inland, in a natural harbour in Cork, right, well inland. But if you were to leave Garnish Island and go out amongst the bare peninsula, about a half an hour on a boat, maybe a little bit longer, and go out towards the Atlantic, then you'll meet a rock, and this huge, huge fucking rock sticking out of the sea. This rock is called Bull Rock. Now, this rock has got a huge natural arch in it, and it's, this rock is hugely significant in Irish mythology, because...
It's almost like, it's, it's like the mouth of hell. It's where the, the souls of the dead go to cry. Sometimes it's called the, the hostel of the red god. Choc Dun, the dark one. There's one lighthouse on this rock. It's, it's almost impossible to get onto this rock because the tide around it is so strong, but it can be witnessed by boat. And yeah, it appears to be like the mouth of hell in Irish mythology. The closest thing to hell, cause hell didn't really exist in Irish mythology, but they had this, this house of the dark one where souls would go. And one theory around it is, so it's off the Bair Peninsula, right?
In West Cork, in the Atlantic Ocean. And if you were looking at it from the Bair, from the peninsula and land in Ireland, and you're looking out at this rock with its big, big natural arch. At certain times of the year, the sun would set and then the arch would wink with the sunlight, like, like a mouth. And that's why it's the house of the dead. That it's a beautiful part of the country. All around there, around, around the Bair Peninsula in Cork and going as far down as the Ring of Kerry and Valencia Island, there's fucking nothing like it. Valencia Island is another one that has a, one side of it has a subtropical microclimate
because it's protected from the Atlantic. I didn't even give you the link. Look, if you wanna come to that gig, theislanddrift.com. And there's less than 100 tickets and they only went on sale this morning. And then after that, I've got Vicker Street in September, on the 23rd of September, I believe, lovely Tuesday night, live podcast up in Dublin. The Vicker Street gigs are always fantastic. And then on that Saturday, on the 27th, up in Derry, the Derry millennium. This is a rather unstructured podcast this week. I was actually supposed to be talking about the fucking Old Testament this week. The reason this podcast is so unstructured is you may have noticed how wonderful the
sound is and how nice my voice sounds. Well, that's because I am in my brand new studio and the sound here is absolutely immaculate. Very dead.
Echo. No echo. So I've been tormented by seagulls on my roof, even the sound of rain pattering on my roof, pharmaceutical companies having meetings. My office, it's not really, it's not the best space to record podcasts anymore. I love my office for writing, for research, but when it comes to recording fucking podcasts, I can't have, I can't have seagulls. I can't have some seagulls on the roof getting in the way of me delivering a fucking podcast. That's insane. And the acoustics in my home studio were dogshit. I was never happy recording in that space.
So now I finally have a little, a little custom-built space with wonderful sound and technically no external factor should ever get in the way of me delivering a podcast, which is how it should be. That's how it should be. So I have a little recording studio shed thing. I'm sharing it with some other artists, so we have like a roster and the sound here is perfect. And also I got myself a little, a mic PA, which is in all my years of recording, I've never done this. I've never had a piece of hardware for my audio. It's always been software in a computer, but I've got this fucking PA here. It's gorgeous. I sound like I'm on the radio. Wait till you hear this. It'll turn up the bass.
Irish radio, Irish radio. We're up all night to get lucky and now a new one from Dermot Kennedy. But before that, let's platform a racist.
Gardaí are appealing for information after the singer Dermot Kennedy was seen milking a swan. See, that's the level now. Fans, get it like that. Fans, fans were seen queuing outside Brown Thomas on Grafton Street yesterday to catch a glimpse of the singer Dermot Kennedy, who was dressed as a lactating swan for his new music video. When approached for comment, Mr. Kennedy made that noise that swans make when they whoop their wings. Whoop, whoop, he said, while producing milk from his swan nipples. Nothing against Dermot Kennedy here, lads. Um.
As far as I know, actually, well, he follows me on Instagram. So as far as I know, Dermot Kennedy actually listens to this podcast. Dermot, I'm after getting a P A. You know what that is? You work in studios. I'm after getting a P A for this podcast. All right. And I'm messing around with knobs and it's just that I hear your name a lot on the radio. So when I think of of radio voice, your name sends the, oh, no, I'm just messing with the, the high frequency here. Singer Dermot Kennedy surprised fans today by laying an egg. When approached for questions, representative of the singer told Gardie, told Gardie that
he intends to shed his skin like a reptile. So that's, I'm just messing with these new, these new fucking ties and the beautiful sound I'm getting out of this. So I'm in a new studio this week, lads. Brand new studio. I'm very, very happy with the sound of my voice, but it will take a little bit longer to get it perfect. I don't need as much bass in my voice as that 2 of M shit. I'd planned for this week's podcast to be about the Old Testament. This was gonna be, I'm doing quite a bit of research into the Old Testament and doing, I have some hot takes brewing and I want to do it properly. If I do it, I want to do it properly and give it the passion
and attention that it deserves. And I did get a little bit distracted this week by, I'm in a brand new space. I'm in a brand new space, new studio, new equipment. So I need to settle in here before I do any serious hot takes. I'll catch you next week. In the meantime, rub a dog.
Milk a swan. Milk a swan like Dermot Kennedy. And caress a dandelion. Dog bless.
Someone asked me last week on Instagram to stop doing kisses at the end of the fucking podcast. I can't do that. There's people who get ferociously upset if I don't do kisses at the end of the podcast.
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