The medieval origins of 2fm Radio DJ voice

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Tickle a Vincent, you cowardly hawregans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. My voice is too bassy, they're all on the turn that down.

• 1:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's that about?

• 1:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, that's because... Yesterday, I did an interview. I did an interview on RTE Radio 1, and I did it here from my studio. But I wanted to out radio the radio. So I turned the settings on my preamp. I turned it all the way up like this when I was talking to him. Very high bass. You see, anytime 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 perfectly good broadcast quality audio here from my own studio. We can do it over the internet.

• 2:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 gonna 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 point. My voice is still a li- 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.

• 3:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  I should just do that the next time. Next time I'm on the fucking radio with 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 with broadcast radio voice together. It'd be like, 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.

• 3:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 4:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 homoerotic with it, but

• 4:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 gonna 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 one basic hunch, and it's a microphone hunch.

• 5:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 5:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Why the fuck is he singing like that? What a ridiculous way to sing. And that's, 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 has gone on that, but still, I don't want to risk it. But that. Songs from the twenties, they sing like an epileptic ferret is navigating their

• 6:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  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

• 7:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 twenties 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,

• 7:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 of Ken Nardine jumps out, would have been around the 1950s. He was definitely an aural, an aural touchstone for me when I was starting this podcast and I was figuring out, you know, how do I want this to feel? I'll play

• 8:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  a little bit of Ken Nardine, this is from 1956, I think this is called Down the Drain.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  I discovered.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  That taking warm baths made me feel relaxed. We live in a very neurotic society and they use hydrotherapy in hospitals for those who are neurotic. And I have a bathtub.

• 9:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was Ken Nardine.

• 9:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 consciousness, poetic talk over jazz music. Now, he didn't invent that. He was, he was a white yank. So in the 1950s, he would have had the opportunity to have the platform to popularise 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

• 9:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  of poets like Langton Hughes or fucking Count D. Cullen. And you can go even farther than that, back to the Griots, the Griot poets of West Africa. And when I'm writing this podcast, I always wanted to have the hypnotic condenser hum of Ken Nardine, mixed in with the irrational madness of a fellow from the 1930s called Tom Linehan, who really embraced the confusion and anxiety of hyper no English as a literary form. Just listen to the state of this. Listen to this. He's just trying to, he's just trying to describe how to go to the mart and sell a pig.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  In the old days, you'd go into the fair at an early hour in the morning. The fair at that time, you started from four o'clock in the morning, five o'clock, six o'clock, whatever, but the early hour, it didn't like the time to snow that you can go in at the mart at 10 o'clock. But the people earned that time, that time, they'd have to get up at four o'clock, head up for Milton Maldbeef Fair, in at five o'clock. Well, you'd stand there hours before a man had come and asked you, how much did you want for the beast you was going to sell?

• 11:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  What an absolute lunatic. You could be waiting hours before a man had come and asked you about the beast. That you're going to sell.

• 11:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And he's talking about, he's talking about the la- 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 the, 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 waited all day to sell the pig. The last art of doing fuck all. And what have we got today? It's me saying, all in my day, you'd no social media. You had no social media. So

• 12:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 Nine Inch Nails and before you know it, you're in buying a Nine Inch Nails CD. But anyway, that's Tom Lennon. A folk singer, a folk singer from Miltown, Malbay in Clare, who'd also be, I don't know what you call him, a Shannick Key, but he does a bit of spoken word on his albums, that type of mad shit. But I, I strongly recommend listening to his stuff if you want

• 12:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  to hear some, some Irish grandfather ASMR. He's got a great album online called The Folk Songs of West Clare. But what was I talking about? Trying to get to the bottom of Radio DJ Vice. You know, I'm coming up with nothing. I've, I've spoken to people who 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 FM broadcast. This widened the, the, the frequencies that people could hear on their radios. But regarding the, the style of Radio DJ Vice.

• 13:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  I reckon it has something to do with a live setting. So your radio DJs in the seventies and eighties most likely started off as like DJ DJs in clubs. Now, when you're in a crowded room, you've got a large 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 heard 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.

• 14:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's site-specific, it's 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, they're fading the music in and out, they're speaking over the music. It's "New tune from ABBA, coming up guys."

• 14:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 2FM 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, 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

• 15:41Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 15:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 gonna narrate this documentary the way that I speak on my podcast. I'm gonna slow down and push and pull the words and extract the prose in my fucking words. And I'm gonna say fucking on the document, I'm gonna 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 was one piece of the voiceover, I called

• 16:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  a 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. Cause 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 form. I can't, I fail to see the reason. I don't see the reason.

• 17:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, 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, made 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

• 17:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  have made it stick out from the crowd, is

• 18:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, or 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 wander. Keep bringing it back to the sheet of questions in front of you. Now, I reject that. I reject it, and I tell you why.

• 18:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 19:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 had another fucking rule. I said, "We're gonna record this interview."

• 20:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 chalices. If the conversation drifts towards cornflakes, don't intervene. Let it happen. Let's talk about fucking cornflakes. Don't bring the conversation back on topic. Allow it to wander. Edit the cornflakes out afterwards. It'll take two seconds and let the conversation naturally come back to 12th century chalices.

• 20:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, 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.

• 21:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  I give them that full thesis, the full thesis on razor blades and tape editing. And they go, that's, that's, you're dead right. I don't have an argument against that. But back to the, the radio DJ voice.

• 21:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, I, 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, it's, it's my white whale. It escapes me.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  I mean, what the fuck is this? Who talks like this in real life, guys? Who actually talks like this in real life?

• 22:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Nobody. It's utterly mad. It's fucking nuts. Why isn't that in the DSM as, as some type of neurodivergence? 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 heard. I think a good cultural analogue here might be the town crier.

• 22:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  In cities throughout history, it wasn't just a 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, and their job was to announce things publicly to large crowds. Really important fucking job and they had a way of speaking. You still have town criers today, but they're, they're ceremonial. It's, it's, they're engaging in a heritage art form. They're, they're no longer relevant.

• 23:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Town criers survived for thousands of years and, 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 crier 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.

• 24:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  So these are town criers and it's their actual job, but this job is disappearing. So now they're, 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 gonna 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.

• 24:41Speaker 06

  Yet, but here is the winner, Mr. BT Johnson of Foye Cornwall. So let her go, maestro.

• 24:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Be it known to all present that the decision of the judges rests 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.

• 25:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 himself, he says, "Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah." Now, that's amazing because, so that's 1939. "Oh, yeah" is spelt O-Y-E-Z. What the fuck is that? What type of word is that? Because that's not English.

• 26:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  "Oh, yeah." It's Norman. It's old Norman French. It's not even French, it's Norman. And "oh, yeah" 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 speak, this was the language of the common people.

• 26:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  But what does that tell you about the, 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, that was a real thing that had to be said. I mean, Jesus Christ. I mean, what, what really killed the town crier? Okay, radio was, that ended them, but literacy, literacy. When people, at the industrial revolution, the, the, the common person starts to learn how to read.

• 27:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  So now you're able to get your news 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 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, 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

• 28:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, 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 a purpose.

• 28:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  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,

• 29:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 29:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now, that's, 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, 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 2FMDJ, but as strange as that speech is, it serves a very specific purpose. And it's been, it's been studied in anthropology. It's the music of capitalism. It's the, the rapid speech, that rapid rhythmic speech. And the context, the context is everyone's bidding.

• 30:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, in 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 talked Bible verses.

• 31:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, 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.

• 32:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then what it does quite interestingly is it reduces certain words to just noises, to fillers, to fillers. There is yabba dabba doo in the middle of it, there's, they're non-words, there's just things that sound like words and then what's enunciated are the figures. Do I hear thirty? Do I hear forty? Do I hear fifty? Yabba dabba doo, do I hear sixty? 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 talking right wing grifter.

• 32:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's, it's not intentional, but it does, it harks back to the little speech from Tom Lenihan that I played earlier, because Tom Lenihan in Ireland in the 30s, he's from Milltown, Malby, he's talking about the Milltown, Malby Fair in Clare, which was a cattle auction. And he's saying, in my day, you would go to the cattle 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.

• 33:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  He's basically saying, I remember when this mart and cattle auction in Miltown, Malbay. Yeah, you're selling 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 Lenihan would probably die of shock now if he'd have heard a modern cattle auctioneer. Another thing I wonder about when it comes to understanding the roots of Radio DJ Voice and situating it within the nightclub space is

• 34:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, County Bram. I'm going to click this storm lighter and you're going to hear some adverts for bullshit. Okay, here we go.

• 34:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah. Sure not to burn myself.

• 34:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  I use this for smoke and cannabis.

• 35:01Speaker 01

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• 35:59Speaker 00

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• 37:02Speaker 00

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• 38:14Speaker 01

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• 38:28Speaker 07

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• 39:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  I actually don't do that that much anymore.

• 39:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Very, very rarely, very rarely do I do that. And nothing against it, it's just...

• 39:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's only enjoyable when it's rare and occasional, for me anyway. Some people like it all the time. I just like an occasional little treat every couple of months. Probably have to do a legal disclaimer there. That was a piece of fiction. And I'm talking about a fictional universe there. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I put into it each week. Because this is my full-time job. It's how I pay my bills, it's how I rent out my office.

• 40:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is my job. And having it as my full-time job, it means that I have the time and space to fail, but also to write this podcast, to research it, and to make sure that each week I'm putting out something that I can really stand over and that I'd listen to if I wasn't me. Because that's all I want to do. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast.

• 40:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee. Once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, if you don't have that money, don't worry about it. No problem at all. Listen for free. You listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a lovely model based on kindness and soundness. If you're a new patron, don't sign up on the Apple Patreon app because Apple are greedy bollocks and they'll take 30%. So try to do it on a browser, if that's okay. Keeping this podcast listener funded means that I'm not beholden to advertisers. No advertiser can tell me what to speak about or adjust the tone in any way. They can truly fuck off.

• 41:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 41:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  A lot of these gigs are setting up 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 Nays at the Spirit 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 Leisure Land, few tickets left for that on the 15th. I'm just going to cover the ones that I'm contractually obligated for right now.

• 42:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking Cork Opera House there in, is that March? And then University of Limerick Concert Hall, 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. Uh, the UK tour on October twenty six. Long way away, but still. For fuck's sake, I'm coughing like a cunt. Sorry. Um, UK tour, October twenty twenty six, right? These are actually selling quite quickly, even though it's a year away. Brighton, uh, Cardiff. I hate calling it the fucking UK. England, Scotland and Wales, there's nothing united about it. My apologies.

• 43:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Brighton, Cardiff, Coventry.

• 43:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Bristol.

• 43:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sorry. Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead, Nottingham. And I'm sorry to say I'm not gigging in Leeds. I, I, I announced an imaginary gig in Leeds there a couple of weeks back. What's up with my throat? Fucking ghost of Princess Diana trying to silence me in my gullet.

• 43:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'll drink some sparkling water there. And exorcise my throat of the ghost of Princess Diana, who is the, what's wrong with 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.

• 44:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  I need more gigs. Asher, that's it. Look, let's move on to my thesis.

• 44:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  My bouncer thesis. So there's a noise that fascinates me. A noise that we, we'd all be quite familiar with if you've ever been in a nightclub or a late bar.

• 44:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's the end of the night, the lights go up and then you hear.

• 44:44Speaker 06

  Lads, can we get up, up, up, up, dais?

• 44:48Speaker 06

  Let's come and get up the left the left the left there's.

• 44:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 gigging 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 in the 2000s. And then the recession hits in 2008 and they all start collapsing. And I was gigging them all, up and down the country from fucking Longford to Carlo.

• 45:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  I gigged them all. And what made the gig so depressing was, so the nightclubs, this is, let's just say 2011, nightclubs are collapsing, like ready to close down. The recession is hitting hard. You go to somewhere like Carlo or Leitrim. 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.

• 46:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then I'm not on stage until maybe 1am, 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 Rihanna, LMFAO, Pitbull. I know these songs inside out. And if they ever come on my, my AirPods and I hear them 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 Nicki Minaj, since chills up my spine.

• 46:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 47:26Speaker 06

  Lads, can we get up da da da da days? Can we get up da da da da da days?

• 47:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  The universal noise of bouncer and first off, it sobers you up. Because it does more than sober sober you up. It 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 them like, did all the bouncers go to bouncer college and agree upon this fucking noise? Why, how in every single club in all of Ireland? It transcends accents.

• 48:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  They just have this one noise. Lads, can we get up 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 it's in the club and they're trying to cut through the 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

• 49:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 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 cattle auctioneer uses gibberish, or the way the town crier is saying, "Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, lads, can we get out today's?" Is stripped of all words and language and now it's purely tonal.

• 49:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 it 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.

• 50:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now, I'm going to play you 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.

• 50:41Speaker 06

  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 say, "Good morning", it sounds like this. Ma chi, ma chi. It can also be said by a drum that can beat both high and low sounds.

• 51:11Speaker 06

  The pitch of the drum is changed by pressing on it.

• 51:18Speaker 06

  The sahita is signalling, "A lion is near the village."

• 51:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, I find that fascinating. And that's in the areas that we now call 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's one of those things that has me fascinated. Like, I adore rap music. And rap music is, it's folk music. It's folk music of African American people. But African American people had their history stolen from them, wasn't written down. So a lot of African foundational black American people, they don't know where their enslaved ancestors came from.

• 52:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 52:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 noise. Lads, can we get up to the up to the door? 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.

• 53:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've tried to ask bouncers about it. I've never gotten a great answer off them. 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 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, 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, it's

• 54:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, if like, 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 increasingly financialized. Like, I watched it happen. I wa, I was there. I was there at the recession. I was lucky enough to grow up in the Celtic Tiger.

• 55:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  When we, when I was in my fucking twenties, post agrophobia, and I was able to go out and, and go for a pint and go to nightclubs. I swear to fuck. When we were twenty-two, twenty-three, you went out at seven o'clock and you drank pints that you purchased in 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 twenty-ten, I watched that dismantle.

• 55:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 twenties. Why would you bother? Pre-drinking was what you did in the pub at seven o'clock because it was affordable. Pre-drinking started in the early 2010s where people would get shitfaced 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, apps come into it, fucking Tinder or what have you.

• 56:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  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. Pints, 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 have a generation of people in their early twenties 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.

• 57:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  So this culture is disappearing and you're getting less and less bouncers. And this is what I'm saying, that noise. Lads, can we do that, do that, do that, do that? It's universal. It's a song. It's important. It communicates meaning. The fact that you can't go onto 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, oh, every fucking nightclub that you can go

• 57:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, it's, it's the last vestiges of the town crier.

• 58:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like I mentioned, the town crier, like 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 it today?" The DNA of the radio DJ voice is in there somewhere.

• 58:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's in there somewhere. The radio DJ existed in that space, shouting over that same crowd, except the bouncer was the one to end the night with that noise. "Lads, can we get it today?" And it got me thinking about monoculture too. I've been falling off my bicycle quite a bit recently.

• 59:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  It always happens at this time of 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 on the leaf that are left.

• 1:00:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I believe as well, 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 gonna 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 Gore-Tex, so when I do slip off my bike, I haven't had an injury, just a little bruise on my knee or whatever.

• 1:00:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 then you get dog shit on your body, on your clothes.

• 1:01:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  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? And 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.

• 1:02:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 a new clothes horse 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, 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 opened the bag and I'm like, this cardboard smells like vomit and shit, what's going on here? So I had to find out. It's recycled cardboard.

• 1:02:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Recycled cardboard, like think of it, it comes from other cardboard. So cardboard that might have had meat in it or fat or, or decomposing foodstuffs.

• 1:03:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 still forms into like buteric acid. Buteric acid, that's what makes vomit smell like vomit. It's rancid butter smell, strong rancid butter smell, that's buteric acid. There's loads of that in recycled cardboard. It's the ghosts of, of, of when that cardboard contained food that went off. Cardboard pulp itself, when it's being pulped, it produces hydrogen sulfide.

• 1:03:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the smell of rotten eggs. And then another one, which is called metal mercaptan, which is the smell of shit. And all of these compounds are present in, 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 while I was lying on my back. The second investigation that I made while I was lying on my back is.

• 1:04:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 gonna lie here for about a minute. For about a minute, I get an opportunity to lie on the ground in the city. Cause you can't just walk down the road and go, do you know what? I'm gonna 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.

• 1:05:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  And how this relates to the, the radio DJ voice thing. And how the radio DJ voice becomes more and more pointless and absurd as we move away from radio.

• 1:05:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 artefact. 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 Closes.

• 1:06:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  But when it comes to art, culture, like something that's been happening the past couple of years. Some country artist, some American country artist will headline, "Croc Park", like 15,000, 16,000 people, 30,000 people. And collectively, people go, "Who the fuck is that pla—? Who's this person playing "Croc 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. Because everyone— I don't know any of Garth Brooks' songs. I might know one. No, I don't know any Garth Brooks' songs. "Friends in Low Places" or something.

• 1:06:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Very, very vague. But I know who the fuck Garth Brooks is. I have a cursory awareness and I can bring an image into my head of Garth 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 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

• 1:07:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  book section was about 75% smaller than it had been in the airport before the pandemic. Books. The space that, like, you're always gonna have people who read books, but that's a separate type of person. In the same way, you're always gonna have people who like, like, I'm a music liking person. I like music, but that's my personality. You're always gonna have some people who enjoy reading or enjoy listening to 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.

• 1:08:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 you look back through the years. And to test my my my theory, I walked around Limerick City in 2010, which is you can do that in Google Maps. And lo and behold, there were flyers for fucking gigs everywhere.

• 1:08:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, Leitrim, 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 that comedian or the musician or the DJ's poster is everywhere. But what that then means is that every member of the city

• 1:09:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  then has a cursory awareness of that artist. They might not know a thing about the artist. They might know any of the art that they create, their songs, but at least that their name is stuck in their head on the tip of their tongue, and there's a cursory awareness of. A monoculture, where at least everyone knows this thing is happening. And what that does then is that creates communication, arguments, discussion, connection. That's what Roland Barthes would have called it, the, a city's semiotic skin. That's what flyposting does. It brings people together through communication because, I'll give you an example, right?

• 1:10:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Two thousand and fucking six, 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 spelt Deadmau5. So everyone in Limerick was talking about Deadmau5, going, who the fuck is Deadmau5? It's not Deadmau5, 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 flyposting disappeared. For a couple of reasons, laws came in. Spaces disappeared where cultural things were happening, but it retreated to the fucking algorithm.

• 1:11:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 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.

• 1:11:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:12:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've been doing this for twenty five 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, Usher Hall was so big that when I used to gig Edinburgh to one hundred and fifty people, fifteen years ago or thirteen years ago, I would look at Usher 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 thirteen years ago, it's like, oh, Frankie Boyle,

• 1:12:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Jimmy Carr, Peter Kay. You could walk into a pub in Edinburgh and be like, oh, Jimmy Carr has sold out Usher 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 twenty twenty five, I can sell out that same venue, but you could walk into any pub in Edinburgh and say, Blind Boy is playing in Usher 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.

• 1:13:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, fifteen thousand 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 realise, it's polyculture. We've lost monoculture. We no longer have a shared cultural literacy.

• 1:14:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 in messages, people DM me and go, "Oh, my neighbour, I, I never knew my neighbour was a fan of your podcast and had been listening all this time. I met them at your gig." We've retreated into these strange private interests and, 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 can't really, you can't just assume anymore.

• 1:15:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  You can't just say 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 listened to Slipknot, you had to wear a Slipknot hoodie and walk around advertising it. And if you were lucky, you saw another person wearing a Slipknot hoodie. And both of you came together and spoke about Slipknot. 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 thi- I think I'm entering my Finnegan's Way era.

• 1:15:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, some television writing or pitching television documents. My buddy James is coming down for a writing session and sure I might have a pint as well.

• 1:16:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  All right. Rub a swan, fall off your bicycle, wink at a bouncer.

• 1:16:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Far to the carlo. Dog bless.

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