Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast I thought I heard the Banshee but it was a Fox with a cough About this episode The historical relationship between Banshees and the tradition of Keening Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:02 Blindboy Boatclub? Expound your truncheon in the custard dungeon, you dusty, sultry Altons. Welcome to the Blind Eye Podcast. It's raining ferociously here in Limerick. After three weeks. Three weeks of solid fucking sunshine and incredible weather. The likes we haven't seen in years. But finally, the rain is back.
1:28 Blindboy Boatclub? And I'm happy with that. I prefer the rain. You can trust the rain. When the sun is out in Ireland, you can't really enjoy it. Because it's so rare. So when the sun does come out, it puts you under pressure.
1:43 Blindboy Boatclub? It's like, am I enjoying this properly? Should I go to the beach? Should I be at a barbecue? Should I dry all my clothes? You feel guilty about being indoors. Whereas... When the rain is there, you know where you stand with the rain. The rain asks nothing of you. And the summer rain is beautiful because...
2:06 Blindboy Boatclub? You have these thick clouds and everything is overcast. But there's a wonderful brightness and a freshness in the air. So bring on the fucking rain.
2:19 Blindboy Boatclub? But last night, last night I was aware that the rain was gonna come today.
2:25 Blindboy Boatclub? So last night I went out for, for a walk, a walk in the last.
2:32 Blindboy Boatclub? It's gonna rain now for a long time. We're not gonna see sunlight, say, for another, maybe five weeks. I've got no meteorological basis for that claim, I'm just, it's just the mood, the mood of what Ireland is. And we, we get punished, we get punished for sunshine, so it's gonna be raining for a long time. So last night, I got a nice walk in, and I got a lovely evening walk at sunset. Cause I knew that tonight the rain was gonna start. So I began the walk mindfully.
3:10 Blindboy Boatclub? Didn't, my voice is still fucked, lads, as you know, I've had pneumonia last week. I'm not on the antibiotics anymore, but I do have a hoarse voice. My lungs and larynx have been ravaged. So I had a mindful walk. And a mindful walk means I don't listen to music, I don't check my phone. I actively avoid daydreaming or worrying about shit, you know? Worrying about the future or being regretful about the past, trying to keep it to the present moment.
3:47 Blindboy Boatclub? By gently drawing my attention to, to all of my senses. The feeling on my feet and the concrete as I walk, the quality of light.
3:59 Blindboy Boatclub? The peachy orange evening sun, the slanty stuff.
4:05 Blindboy Boatclub? And how it makes plants and leaves and trees look so wonderfully golden and green. And then I take in the smells.
4:16 Blindboy Boatclub? The smell of flowers. That bang of chlorophyll. The smell of green. Even the smell of petrol as a car goes past. I notice it all and I take it all in. And then finally I notice.
4:32 Blindboy Boatclub? The sounds. The sounds of bards chirping and chatting in the evening time. The optimism. Fuck me. The optimism of summer bards. I don't know what the fuck they're talking about, but. When I listen to. A cacophony. Of summer bards in the evening. I just get the impression that they're really excited about tomorrow. That's what I reckon they're talking about. I can't wait to get up tomorrow when the sun comes up and start roaring and shouting. So I was doing this, I was doing this walk. And the rule I'd set for myself was, I'm gonna walk until the sun sets. And when it's actually dark, then I'm gonna go home.
5:14 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm gonna walk back when I feel that it's dark, when the sun has actually fucked off. Then I'm walking back. And what I was waiting for was that lovely moment, the lovely moment when, when the sun does fuck off. And then the bards all go quiet.
5:30 Blindboy Boatclub? So I did. And I walked home. And there was that wonderful stillness in the night.
5:38 Blindboy Boatclub? And then I heard a weird sound.
5:43 Blindboy Boatclub? Like wailing. Not, not a woman wailing, but it sounded like, um. Like a girl, like a child. Wailing and screaming. And it was difficult to tell the direction of it.
5:58 Blindboy Boatclub? And I stopped in my tracks to listen. What the fuck is this? Is, is this a person in trouble? Is there, is there a child somewhere? Trapped or in pain or something? This is a really, a weird. Anxious. Kind of scream. And I couldn't hear the direction. But one thing I could notice about the sound of it is that. It sounded metallic. It sounded like. Galvanised steel, almost. So I knew wherever this sound is coming from, it's kinda indoorsy, indoorsy with something metal. And I was up on top of, like, a hilly area.
6:42 Blindboy Boatclub? And it was near a road and everything, like, it was civilisation. And then I looked down to the left, and there's a, an abandoned Celtic Tiger petrol station. A petrol station that would have closed down, probably 2007, and it's just abandoned. And I think to myself, that's the only place it could be coming from, if it is indoors. But I'm not fucking going down there, not at night time, I'm not. I'd have to hop a fence, I'd have to walk through briars. It's really dark, I'm gonna have to use the light on my phone. I'm kinda freaked out, I don't want to. I wanna go home, to be honest.
7:27 Blindboy Boatclub? I wanna go home, cause I've been out walking for about, about an hour and five minutes. I wanna go home. And then I hear the noise again. I hear the noise, and it's like a wailing, like a child wailing, or crying. But like, not a child. It's strange. And I walk on and I go, fuck it, bollocks. What if, what if that is actually a child in trouble? What, what if? And then I walk home. And I'm thinking, I can't even be sure if it's a person, like, it, it could be some weird bard or something, or, or a,
8:11 Blindboy Boatclub? a noise that a, a heron makes at night time or something. And then my mind went to a fairly dark place. I thought about horrendous videos I've seen online over the years where, if a person falls from a great height, or if they're shot and their lungs are damaged, or even severely winded, the human voice sounds really fucking weird. And I start thinking, what if that's what I heard? What if it's someone who's had their, their lung punctured and they're seriously injured? What, what if it's a child? And then I hear it again. And I go, I can't be sure what that is, fuck. I can't take that risk, so.
8:55 Blindboy Boatclub? I climbed the fucking fence, which I wasn't very good at doing. I climbed the fence and now I'm walking through
9:04 Blindboy Boatclub? old, concrety tarmac. It's, it's a field, but no one's gone near it since two thousand and seven. So it's, it's a field, but the ground is concrete and tarmac that's grown over for ages. Which is, it's a very unnatural feeling when there's not a lot of light. It, it feels a bit like, do you know when you step on an escalator? You step on an escalator and the escalator isn't working and your body expects to move and it doesn't and it, and it feels, you feel off balance. It felt like that because my feet are clearly touching grass. So it feels like a field, but underneath me it's solid, it's fucking tarmac.
9:49 Blindboy Boatclub? So it was a very strange feeling in the, in the dark. And, and then there was other bits where the tarmac had worn away. So I nearly fought on into little tiny fucking holes and not being sure of my feet. And the farther I go, I'm getting away from the streetlights from the road now and it's getting really dark. So I take out my phone and I, I pull out the torch and that makes it a bit better, but makes it freakier. Cause when you shine a torch in a dark field, you start seeing, seeing things in the shadows. So my heart starts racing now and then I hear the noise again, louder. Cause I'm, and I'm like, yeah, it, it sounds like someone hurting a child. That's the noise and it's definitely in that petrol station.
10:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Cause I'm getting close to it. And the farther I go into the field, the more I freak myself out. Cause then I start thinking, that's when you get it. Doesn't matter how old I am, how rational I'm being.
10:50 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm now into the depths of a fucking field in the middle of the night with nothing but the light on my phone and I start freaking myself out thinking it's the banshee. It's the banshee and someone I love is gonna die and I'm hearing the banshee wailing. And I'm reading a lot of folklore recently. I'm reading all about banshees and fairies.
11:16 Blindboy Boatclub? And every single story, every single story is a person walking by themselves at nighttime. Then they see or hear something in a field and they make the crucial mistake of being curious and trying to find that sound and then they get disoriented and are never heard from again. So rationality out the window now and this, these are the thoughts that I'm thinking. And I start to really freak myself out because a couple of weeks ago as well, I watched The Blair Witch Project. I just threw it on. I hadn't seen it in years. I watched The Blair Witch Project and it didn't, it wasn't that scary when I watched it now. But when I was a teenager and I saw that film, fuck me, that frightened me.
12:01 Blindboy Boatclub? So all of that now starts to come back.
12:05 Blindboy Boatclub? And I'm feeling really anxious now and I've got my hand up, like I don't wanna see what's in front of me. I'm freaking myself out, really fucking freaking myself out. But I can't turn back, just in case a person is hurt. I can't turn back. And then I get about, I'd say 25 feet from the petrol station. Now, it was a very clear night as well, very clear night, so the moon was out. So it wasn't pitch dark. But as I walked closer to the, to this abandoned fucking petrol station, abandoned 20 years, so like horror film shit,
12:47 Blindboy Boatclub? as I get closer to the petrol station, it's really dark there because the forecourt is still intact. So that's completely dark. So I just, there's no fucking way, camera phone or not, I'm not walking into the space of the petrol station. So I stop and I hear the noise again and it's like, yeah, that's coming from inside the petrol station. My ears aren't playing tricks on me. There's something inside there wailing. I'm freaking out about the fucking banshee.
13:19 Blindboy Boatclub? And I think, what am I gonna do? So I wanted to shout, I wanted to shout out, hello? I wanted to shout. Because if there was a person or anything inside in the petrol station, I'm like twenty feet away. I'm not going in to where it's dark, I'm twenty feet away. I wanna shout, cause if something's in there, maybe they might shout back. But I got that feeling.
13:46 Blindboy Boatclub? That you get in a dream, you know, when you're in a fucking bad dream? And you can't scream. I kinda got that feeling. Like, I could shout, I could, but it just, something was like, no. I, I, it's like, my body wouldn't let me do it. So I think, what am I gonna do? And I look down on the ground and there's loads of pebbles, there's loads of pebbles and rocks, so I go, okay. So I get a, a decent sized rock. And I think.
14:18 Blindboy Boatclub? What if I throw, if I throw this rock up onto the roof of the petrol station, of the forecourt? Which is made of metal, if I throw this rock up there, then it'll make a loud bang. Let's see what that'll do. So I get a rock and I throw it into the air. And I miss it. And then I get pissed off at myself, cause I used to be brilliant at throwing rocks when I was younger. Then I get a second rock and I don't throw it this time, I lob it, I lob it into the air and it comes down. And then thuds onto the roof of the forecourt. And makes this giant fucking metallic thunderous thud. Rock was about the size of a tennis ball, just goes boom, like that.
15:02 Blindboy Boatclub? And then I hear a, a sudden noise, like a scarper. And just in the corner of my eye, running out, out of the area of the petrol station and into the taller grass. I see the, the brush of a fox's tail, the fox's tail. And I just get this lovely sense of relief, I'm like, thank fuck. It was a screaming fox, that's what it was.
15:28 Blindboy Boatclub? Just a fox, thank fuck. It wasn't a little, a little child in pain. It wasn't a banshee, it wasn't a ghost. It was just a fox. Everything's okay. And then I turn around to go back to the road, back to civilization, because I've walked a good bit into this field where the old petrol station was. And I turn my back to the petrol station and start walking away from it towards the road. And then when that happens, even when the danger is gone, everything's okay, there's a rational explanation for everything. That act of walking away from the petrol station, just... Do you remember when you were, remember when you were a kid?
16:12 Blindboy Boatclub? And you're walking home at night time, when you're like 11 or 12? And you're walking home by yourself and it's night time? And you just start running, you just start running. And you're telling yourself, come on, you're 12, there's nothing to be scared of. But like, fuck that, and you run as fast as you can just to get home. That just took over me. That feeling came back and took over me because I just turn on my back, turn on my back on, on the blackness of that forecourt of the petrol station. Turning my back on that just felt chilling. And I ran, I ran really fucking fast. Which was ridiculous because who the fuck?
16:55 Blindboy Boatclub? Who's gonna haunt a Celtic Tiger petrol station? That got abandoned during the last recession? Some fucking, a ghost holding a breakfast roll dressed like Ronan Keating? Getting haunted by a defaulted mortgage? But it was, it was an interesting experience, especially in the context of having done a mindful walk, where I'm checking in with everything.
17:20 Blindboy Boatclub? To have become so overcome with childhood panic, knowing full well as well this is completely irrational. Why are you running away from the petrol station? What if some, what if someone saw you? But I'm like, fuck that, fuck that, I'm getting back up onto that road and getting back up there to where those streetlights are. But I'm not that. It was definitely the fox. It was without a doubt, it was, it was the fox because it's because it was the metallic sound. So it was the sound of the fox.
17:55 Blindboy Boatclub? Who had been either in the forecourt and that was the sound of its voice. Hitting off that metal roof or it was inside in the, the building itself. But that's the noise that the fox was making.
18:08 Blindboy Boatclub? A strange, lonely yelp, a long. I thought it was a little, a little girl. I thought it was a girl of about 11 or 12. That's what it sounded like, who was in pain. But if I hadn't investigated that noise and got to the source of it.
18:29 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm fairly sure I'd have. I don't know what the fuck I'd have thought about that, but. I, I'd, I'd have a banshee story. I'd have to say to you, I think I heard the banshee.
18:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Because it fits, it fits the template. You're walking home alone by yourself. And you hear a ghostly wail in the distance that chills you. And then you go to bed terrified that someone close to you has died.
19:02 Blindboy Boatclub? And then in the, in the off chance that someone you do know does die, you can say, I heard the banshee, I heard the banshee and they predicted that person's death.
19:12 Blindboy Boatclub? So when I got in home after my walk. I immediately went researching the banshee and what I went researching was.
19:22 Blindboy Boatclub? Here's the thing, mo-most Irish people listening to this podcast now, mostly are gonna have a banshee story. A lot of people have heard the banshee, or said they heard the banshee, or that their parents heard the banshee, and they might follow it up with a story about, "And then my grandmother died." But it's very common, very, very common. Now, do I believe in the banshee? Do I believe that there's a ghostly woman in the night who cries and foretells people's death? No, I don't.
19:58 Blindboy Boatclub? I believe that it's a deep part of Irish culture and superstition, and I believe that we-we will hear things in the night time, and then wrap a story around it. We will hear noises and-and make that the banshee. So I researched, wha-what do people hear? What do Irish people hear when they think it's the banshee? And the answers that I found were, it's usually a barn owl,
20:25 Blindboy Boatclub? sometimes a sheep or a lamb, and a fox, a vixen. Specifically, foxes when they have coughs. A horse fox wailing in the night time
20:39 Blindboy Boatclub? is often what people hear, and they attribute to the banshee. So I went scouring the internet, looking for audio clips of screaming foxes, until I found something that sounded like what I heard, what I heard coming from that petrol station. And I found this recording. It's a vixen with a cough, calling in the night. And if you're thinking, you know, I overreacted and, I did, I overreacted and freaked myself out when I went down into that petrol station.
21:13 Blindboy Boatclub? But I'd ask you, if-if you heard this, if you're on your own, and you heard this, and you definitely know it's coming from a fucking petrol station in the dark, an abandoned petrol station, if you heard this, you'd-you'd shit your pants too. So this is a recording of a-a female fox with a cough, screaming in the night time.
21:57 Blindboy Boatclub? So, I, I
22:00 Blindboy Boatclub? I, I heard that. I heard that. Mine was a little bit more childlike. I heard that in the night time. Coming from a long abandoned, darkened petrol station. And what made it more, what made it more terrifying is, like I said, I identified, because I've got ears on me because I'm a music producer. I identified that sound against galvanized metal. And that made it terrifying because it made it real. Because I could have just thought, oh, it's someone in their car and they're playing something really loud, or someone's watching a scary film and their window's open and they have a big speakers.
22:45 Blindboy Boatclub? What I heard was that sound definitely against vibrating against metal in a small space, definitely from that abandoned petrol station over there in the dark. So it was chilling, it was chilling. And the realness of it was why I had to check it out just in case it was a human in pain. Just in case I had to just go, fuck. Imagine if that was an injured person or an injured child. And I chickened out and then tomorrow I find out they're dead. So I had to go and check it out. And it was, it was a fox. It was a female fox, most likely with a cough.
23:29 Blindboy Boatclub? Maybe she has a nest in the petrol station. I don't think foxes have nests. A den in the petrol station and she has little pups. Or maybe, you know, she's an urban fox. So she's smart enough to know that petrol stations, the bins behind them have loads of food, but she's not smart enough to know that here that one's been abandoned since 2007, fuck off. Maybe that's what she was screaming. Where's the sausage rolls? Where are the hash browns? You cunts. But when Irish people hear the banshee, what they're probably hearing is that. A vixen at night time, or I've never heard an owl, but apparently barn owls can do
24:13 Blindboy Boatclub? a screech that's quite chilling. And certain lambs can make noises too. And that's what people hear as the banshee. And every family in Ireland has got their banshee stories. Like you won't find. It's the banshee stories are interesting because they've survived, you see. No one talks about fairies anymore. No one's scared of fairies anymore. But we're still, even as rational adults, we're all still a bit wary of the banshee. And, and it's because. When you hear a sound like that and you think it's the banshee, what happens is you immediately think of the people you love.
24:59 Blindboy Boatclub? When you hear that noise and you're entrenched in Irish culture and you grow up with these stories, when you hear that noise, you go, you, you think immediately about the people you love the most. And you think of the loss and you wonder, fuck, where are they? Oh my God, are they in a car crash? Is my partner in a car crash? Is my mother in a car crash? Has something terrible happened to someone I love? And I think that's why we still hang on to the banshee.
25:35 Blindboy Boatclub? Because it triggers your fight or flight. It triggers your fight or flight. You hear the noise and now you're thinking about a person that you love dying and you can't confirm it. Because they might be in a car crash. That's completely possible. So then we get flooded with the emotion of fear and anxiety. And as soon as that happens, we will interpret our environment to confirm our fears.
26:04 Blindboy Boatclub? So you're not thinking, maybe it's an owl, maybe it's a sheep, maybe it's a fox. You're just immediately entertaining ghost. Or for me, it was either that's either the banshee or a child being injured. I didn't think, that's an animal, that's an animal, this is fine, there's most likely a rational explanation. I wasn't going there, I was going into catastrophe territory. It's either a ghost or a child actively being murdered. Two of the most unlikeliest outcomes. What is it? It's a fucking fox. Of course it's a fox, you're in the middle of a city, there's loads of foxes, of course it's a fox.
26:48 Blindboy Boatclub? Or it could have been a cat, could have been a screaming cat, of course it is, could have been a crow, of course it is. The anxiety wouldn't let me go there because I'm already thinking about people who I love dying. Every town and village has its own banshee story. Like the big one we have in Limerick is
27:10 Blindboy Boatclub? there's a bridge, Thomin Bridge, very fucking old bridge.
27:16 Blindboy Boatclub? Could be eight or nine hundred years old, it just comes out of King John's castle. But on this bridge,
27:23 Blindboy Boatclub? if you look over the, the side, at the far end of it, if you look over the side, you can clearly see there's five scratches, looks like a hand scratches in the stone. Now they've been there for fucking years, these five scratches. Now someone probably put them there with a chisel, two, three hundred years ago, we don't know what they are. But the story is that those scratches in the stone of the bridge, that there was a fella about a hundred and fifty years ago called Drunken Teddy. And he was into all sorts, he lived in, in Thomin Gate. And he was into all sorts, drinking, riding, gambling, the whole shebang. He lived an absolute life of debauchery.
28:08 Blindboy Boatclub? And one night, really laid on his own, he walked across Thomin Bridge to get home and he met the bishop's lady. And the bishop's lady was a banshee.
28:23 Blindboy Boatclub? I believe at one point, she'd been a woman, a woman that the bishop was having an affair with, and then the bishop had her killed, because people were gonna find out that they were having an affair. And because the bishop had her killed, her soul didn't have any peace. So then she existed forever on the bridge, as an angry banshee, as a woman who'd been terribly wronged in her life, and now she's stuck on this bridge, as an angry banshee. So anyway, this fellow, Teddy, drunken Teddy, he's walking home one night, and there's no one else around, and the bishop's lady appears on the bridge, and she starts wailing.
29:06 Blindboy Boatclub? And then, she tries to drag him into hell, over the bridge. And he grabs onto the bridge as best he can, and he grabs onto the bridge so hard that his fingernails scrape into the stone, and he manages to get away, and then he never drinks again, he never gambles again. And that story, that's part of limerick fucking folklore. Everybody knows that story. It's just beside the treaty stone. And when I was a kid, when I was like twelve or thirteen, and I'd be hanging around near Thoman Gate with my friends, if there was a thick fog, you often get a thick fog around
29:47 Blindboy Boatclub? the Shannon River, if there was a thick fog, none of us would go near that bridge, in case we saw the bishop's lady combing her hair, because that's what we were told, and that's what someone's granny, that's the story that they would have, that when the fog comes out at night time on that bridge, just where those nail marks are, and you can see them today, you can go to them today, just where those nail marks are, we were always told, when the fog is out, if you look at that spot where the nails are, you'll see the bishop's lady. She's green and she'll be combing her long hair. And if she starts singing when you see her, someone you love is gonna die.
30:32 Blindboy Boatclub? And it's, it's a wonderful story. It's a brilliant story and obviously it's a lot of horseshit. And it's a brilliant story, but it had a grip on us. It had a grip on us and gr- grown men, grown men would run across the fucking bridge if they were drunk, terrified of meeting the bishop's lady. And it was like, like this story's three, four hundred years old, could be longer. But men who drink too much, men who were out on the lash or out too late, that story would keep them in check. They'd run across Thoman Bridge terrified. Okay, let's do an Ocarina pause now, because I wanna get into this. Support for this podcast. Wait, no, what do I do?
31:14 Blindboy Boatclub? Ocarina pause first. I'm gonna blow into a bottle. I've no fucking, I'm after losing all my Ocarinas. I've misplaced them all. I'm gonna blow into the top of a bottle of water.
31:25 Blindboy Boatclub? You're gonna hear an advert for something.
31:31 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm just gonna drink the water because I need it. I'm gonna drink, I'm gonna drink this water and you're gonna hear an advert.
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35:04 Blindboy Boatclub? I'll have to do it silently because I don't want any getting misophonia.
35:13 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm shaking water, look. I have a kazoo.
35:23 Blindboy Boatclub? I can't play the kazoo with the remnants of a chest infection. Look, that was a pause of some description where you would have heard fucking adverts, alright? 405 episodes, we know the crack at this stage. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if you listen every week, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever. This is my full-time job, this is how I earn a living. I'm only able to deliver this podcast every week and put in the research and writing because it's my full-time job. So if you are a regular listener, please consider becoming a patron. Fund this podcast directly.
36:07 Blindboy Boatclub? That's what that means, fund the podcast directly. If you can afford it. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. But if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free, you can listen for free. Because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everyone gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living. It also keeps us... Means I'm not beholden to advertisers, advertisers can fuck off. They want to advertise they've do it on my terms. But they have no say on the content whatsoever. Because I never want to... I never want to make a podcast episode because I think it's going to be popular. I just don't want to think like that. I want to make what I'm passionate about, that's what fucking works.
36:51 Blindboy Boatclub? That's why we're here, almost nine years. Not because I'm trying to go viral or to make podcasts that I think people want to hear. So if you are becoming a patron... Try to avoid using the Patreon app on an iPhone because Apple will take thirty percent. So do it on a browser, please. Unless you're in America, because they're after reversing that now in America. Just the other day, Apple lost a court case and that was considered unethical. So in America, you can actually join on the Patreon app if you want on an iPhone. And Apple can't take thirty percent anymore. Hopefully, Europe will follow.
37:35 Blindboy Boatclub? Gigs, England and Scotland, I think it's two weeks away. Um, where am I going? Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, and fucking Norwich, all right? Those gigs are nearly sold out. Don't miss out on those gigs if you can come along. They're gonna be fantastic. I've got cracking guests. I cannot wait. Where am I looking forward to most? Oh, I've got my tongue hanging out for York, I have to say, because they've got a very good Viking museum in York. Yarvik, as it was known. Really looking forward to York.
38:19 Blindboy Boatclub? Then September, Derry, lovely gig coming up in Derry, come to that. And then Vicker Street, Dublin. So every town and village and city has its banshee stories and its local banshee. And the banshee, what it means is ban is woman and she is the mound, the fairy mound. So the banshee is the woman of the fairy mound. So she's of the fairy, she's of the fairy people. She lives in the other world. Again, going back to that Irish mythology, pre-Christian, before eschatological end times Christianity.
39:02 Blindboy Boatclub? You have a belief system where linear time doesn't exist. So what you do have is the the parallel world, the parallel dimension of the other world where the fairies live and.
39:17 Blindboy Boatclub? Things can come out of the other world, or you can enter the other world through certain points. Either through the mist, through sites of holy wells, sacred wells, or through fairy forts and fairy mounds. So the banshee, she's the woman of the fairy mound. She exists around this portal, this portal to the other world. And she exists in a place where time doesn't exist, in the parallel reality. And in the parallel reality of the other world, in Irish myth, all knowledge exists, infinite everything. So she knows when people in this reality are gonna die.
39:58 Blindboy Boatclub? And what I find so beautiful about the story and the myth of the banshee, it's the musicality of it. The banshee's wail is a form of call and response, song, that transcends space and time. And what I mean by this is, the banshee is actually, it's like two sides of a coin, but we've lost one side of that coin. One side of that coin is gone and forgotten. The banshee had a counterpart in this world, in this mortal reality, and that counterpart was called a keener.
40:38 Blindboy Boatclub? There's a very specific type of traditional Irish singing called keening, and it doesn't exist anymore. It's more than just singing. A keener was a woman, right? A woman in Irish society, whose job was to mourn professionally at funerals. Now, this is an ancient tradition, pre-Christian, and this practice of keening, it died out in the late 1800s. It stopped being a thing. So you had these women, they were usually poorer women.
41:21 Blindboy Boatclub? And if somebody died in the community, and, and the thing is, it didn't matter whether this person was rich or poor, if someone died in the community, this woman was hired. And she would turn up at the funeral.
41:37 Blindboy Boatclub? And she, she mightn't even know the person, she mightn't even know the person who's died. She'd turn up at the funeral. In this, this act of, of great performance, she'd be completely dishevelled.
41:52 Blindboy Boatclub? She would act out the, the extremity of human grief. Anger, wailing, sadness, tears. And her role appeared to be like, almost a conductor of grief.
42:11 Blindboy Boatclub? She, she would lead the way for other people. She'd set the tone for how to cry, how to wail, how to roar. And she'd enter like an altered state, an altered state of grief. And also she'd be allowed, a- a- and she'd invite everyone who was bereaved to join in with her. And, and that was a keener, that's what a keener was. But she would also sing songs, keens, which were laments for the dead. But they were very different to other types of Irish song. We're talking about an art form that doesn't really exist anymore.
42:54 Blindboy Boatclub? We're lucky enough to have a few recordings from the 1930s of what keening songs were. But also some of the women who were keeners by profession, they were reluctant to, they wouldn't perform these songs outside of a funeral.
43:16 Blindboy Boatclub? They could only engage in this performance if a corpse was present. And to sing a Keeningsong outside of the context of a dead person being there would have been strange. It would have been really strange. So they were reluctant to record it or to even pass these songs on. So a lot of the art form and the songs, we don't have them anymore. We don't have them anymore. Like, it's been said that Dolores O'Reardon from The Cranberries, who was from Limerick. It's been said that her way of singing, she had a really a breathy, a strange breathy way of singing. You'll hear it in the song Zombie. And it's said that that comes from Keening.
44:00 Blindboy Boatclub? I hear it too in a singer called Elizabeth Fraser. She was in a band called Cocktoe Twins and she has that same breathy way of singing that Dolores O'Reardon has. And I often wonder if she's coming from a Keening tradition because they would have had it in Scotland too. Well, I know that Scotland had banshees. So if Scotland had banshees, which definitely does, it probably also had the tradition of Keening. Only a few actual Keening songs exist that you can listen to. And again, what makes it so strange and unique and different to other forms of Irish music is
44:41 Blindboy Boatclub? melodically, it contains almost what you'd call melismas. It's a bending of notes. It's almost North African. And there is, there's, there's the fringe theories, the fringe theories of Irish origin, where some of the songs and artworks and craftworks of the west coast of Ireland in particular, share a lot of similarities with songs and artworks from the likes of Algeria in North Africa. And we don't know why, we can't explain it. And one theory is that Irish, we either come from North African people
45:22 Blindboy Boatclub? or we had a huge amount of contact with North African people via the ocean, which is if you go from Algeria up, you're going to end up in Ireland. But Keening died out. The practice of Keening at funerals died out.
45:37 Blindboy Boatclub? We don't have a lot of the songs, a lot of the music. A lot of it is lost. A huge amount because of the famine. We lost half the population. And with that, you lose traditions and cultures. Colonisation too. This is an indigenous tradition. It would have been hugely looked down upon by the British. It would have been seen as savage, particularly during the Victorian era. You'd have to assume it was one of the things that was outlawed during the penal laws. But I'm gonna play for you now, one of the few recordings that exist of a Kaining song in the Kaining style of singing. And this was recorded in 1951 up in Donegal.
46:23 Blindboy Boatclub? And there's a woman called Kitty Gallagher singing it. And the song, I think it's called Lament for a Dead Child. So this is, this is a Kaining song specifically for the funeral of a small child. And it's sung in Irish and the lyrics are, "My child infant, what will I do? You're gone from me. I've been left alone after a year. I'm alone."
47:27 Blindboy Boatclub? So that there is
47:30 Blindboy Boatclub? one of the few recordings we have of what Kaining was.
47:35 Blindboy Boatclub? And when you listen to it and the the shifting of the notes, you can hear what I'm saying. Well, it it sounds Arabic, North African. It it doesn't, it's different to other Irish music. It's in it's in its own league. Because it was a very separate thing. It was music with with purpose that was only sung in the presence of death by a keener. By somebody who I don't even think we have words to describe what the fuck that was. I'm using words like performance. They perform grief. They're a performer that's hired.
48:15 Blindboy Boatclub? But it's more than that. It's something, it's something deeply spiritual that we don't really have language for anymore because we live in a different reality. And when I say
48:26 Blindboy Boatclub? banshee and and keening, they're they're both they're two sides of the same kind.
48:35 Blindboy Boatclub? And all we have left is the banshee, but we don't have keening anymore. What I mean by that is so these women, these women whose they were often poor, whose main subsistence was keening at funerals, being professional grievance performers. They were terrified
48:57 Blindboy Boatclub? of becoming banshees when they died. They were terrified that they would end up somehow trapped in a perpetual keen in the other world. And that superstition tells me that they they believed they were doing something magical, like
49:15 Blindboy Boatclub? puchin makers. And I've explored this in my short stories and in podcasts, puchin, which is Irish moonshine. The puchin makers.
49:26 Blindboy Boatclub? Believed that when they were making this strong alcohol, distilling it, because they didn't understand the science. They believed that they were stealing this spirit from the fairy world, from the other world. And by stealing this spirit, that they would be targeted, that the fairies would come and kill their children or replace them with changelings. And because of this, the puchin makers used to, they'd dress their kids up in the clothes of different genders. So if they had a little boy, they'd dress the little boy up as a girl. If they had a little girl, they'd dress the little boy up as, little girl up as a boy to confuse the fucking fairies. Because puchin makers thought that they were fucking with the fairy world and that there'd be retribution. Well, the, the keeners,
50:09 Blindboy Boatclub? the women who sang at, at funerals, they obviously had a, a similar belief that something that they're doing, that they're in, in communication or taking some power from that parallel reality, the other world, and that the punishment might be that they would live forever as a banshee, that they'd be trapped in the other world on a fairy mound, forever singing their lonely, lonely song. And that's what I mean when I say
50:47 Blindboy Boatclub? you're talking about call and response. You have call and response in Irish music. You have a lot of call and response in African music and African American music, the blues gospel. But you can view the banshee and the keener as call and response. The banshee exists in the other world and she calls. She calls into existence a person's death or she forewarns about a person's death. The banshee, because also too, if you look through the folklore, the banshee doesn't just wail. She also keens. Now, I'm not pulling this stuff out of my arse. I'm, I'm using solid academic sources. Specifically, I'm reading the work of Patricia Lysit,
51:32 Blindboy Boatclub? who is a legendary Irish folklorist and she'd be the authority on banshees. So a lot of banshees who lived on a fairy mound or whatever, and who you would hear in the night time. Because remember I said, every town, every village, every family had their own different banshees. A lot of banshees were legendary keeners.
51:54 Blindboy Boatclub? There could be a banshee that you hear in the night time, and she was a keener from 300 years ago, who existed in this reality and then ended up in the other world with the fairies trapped as a keener to warn us. So the banshee begins the song, the banshee begins the song and says, this person's gonna die, this person's gonna die tonight. If you can hear this, this person's gonna die. And she calls out that song, then the person dies, and then the keener is at the funeral, and she's keening that person's lament, she's responding.
52:33 Blindboy Boatclub? So that there is call and response in music, except it transcends space and time because the call is coming from the other world. And then the keener herself, she could turn into the banshee. And just to give you, this is a folklore quote from, this is an interview with a man, and I think his mother or grandmother was a professional keener, this was her job. And he said, the good keeners were asked to go to the funerals. And this fellow says, his mother, she had to go. And sometimes she'd hate to go and do her job, but you couldn't refuse it. If you were a keener, you could not refuse the funeral.
53:17 Blindboy Boatclub? And the reason that she hated to go is that as she got older, she said, God help me if I'm turned into a banshee when I die. So this woman who spent her life as a professional keener, as she got older, her fear was, I'm gonna be turned into one of these banshees. When I'm dead, I'll be living in a prison on a fairy mound, and I'll never be able to escape, I'll have to cry into the night for eternity. And then there's another report from Waterford, and they interviewed someone in Waterford who knew about keeners, or who had met a keener in their time. And this person said,
53:58 Blindboy Boatclub? That only the keeners who didn't carry out their duties ended up as banshees. So, once you became a keener, and this was your job, if someone came to you and said, "My brother's dead, my dad's dead, my son is dead, will you keen?" If that keener was to refuse, then she would be turned into a banshee. So, it's almost like the women are locked into it. And you'd have to assume too, maybe they had some gift. Like, I'd love to know, how would a woman become a keener? But how was she picked? Because that there sounds like a gift.
54:39 Blindboy Boatclub? When the person can't refuse, that sounds like she has some type of gift that made her a keener, and she's the only person that can be asked. If you can't refuse, then what she's doing is spiritual or magical to her. It's not of this world. She's not performing, she's not singing at a fucking funeral. There's something deeply spiritual and magical and gifted going on here, as far as the community are concerned. So, we don't have that anymore, we've lost that. But we still have the banshee, we still have the banshee. And it used to be two sides of the same coin, the banshee in the other world and the keener in this world. And they called and responded. And in the middle, someone died.
55:25 Blindboy Boatclub? And we'd have lost it because of the famine, literally entire communities disappearing. And when the community disappears, the knowledge disappears. I mean, we see this in real time with fucking...
55:37 Blindboy Boatclub? I've had David Keown on this podcast twice, and he's bringing back the ancient tradition of Irish stone lifting. So, he's finding a tradition that was once part of our culture, but we lost it because of the famine. Like, entire villages died, people died, and this thing got lost. But he's able to look at folklore and literally dig up a stone. He can dig up a stone, that's what makes that beautiful. But with this, you can't. Songs die. If no one records them, songs just die. So sadly, we don't have a lot of this and a huge amount of the stuff that's written about
56:16 Blindboy Boatclub? keening is from colonizers. It's from British people from a distance, watching Irish funerals in a state of confusion. This would have been greatly shamed by English colonizers too, because this thing started to emerge in England from about the 1700s onwards, and it really took hold in Victorian times. It was called muscular Christianity. And muscular Christianity was a type of Christianity that focused less on compassion, forgiveness, asceticism,
56:55 Blindboy Boatclub? and instead focused on masculinity and being big and strong and working hard. And that these things became virtuous within Christianity. And from muscular Christianity, I mentioned last week, you know, I was talking about modern concepts of masculinity coming from Darwinism. Well, that Darwinism led into this muscular Christianity. So from muscular Christianity, you get what's considered to be good and virtuous and Christian are big, strong men who don't show emotion. And then by the Victorian period, this is where you
57:37 Blindboy Boatclub? get your British, your stiff upper lip. And then this stiff upper lip, it bleeds into British colonization. So now, British colonizers, they start to view expressions of emotion, crying in particular, as the sign of a savage, of a lesser, inferior race that needs to be conquered. Even fucking like Charles Darwin himself, he wrote in 1872, he had a book called The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals. And he wrote, savages weep copiously from very slight causes.
58:16 Blindboy Boatclub? A New Zealand chief, who'd be a Maori, a New Zealand chief cried like a child because the sailors spoilt his favourite cloak by powdering it with flour. So British colonialism starts to, to be a conqueror, to be Christian, to be close to God is to not show emotion. To show no emotion is to control your emotions and to grieve loudly, to cry, to weep. This is the behaviour of a savage. You need to be civilised now. So that, that attitude impacted everywhere the British colonised, including Ireland.
58:58 Blindboy Boatclub? It's, it's where you get the, I mean, British funerals still. I don't know about working class people, but posh English funerals, very sanitised affairs. I mean, who fucking died there recently? Was it the Queen? Like the fucking Queen, the English Queen. Like, there was no emotion at her funeral. No one was to show emotion. Posh English funerals, they're, they leave like loads of time. Isn't there like a week or something before the person dies and you have the funeral? So that the bereaved have time to get the tears out of them so that you're not showing it at the funeral.
59:41 Blindboy Boatclub? And what's considered good and virtuous is to go to the funeral of the person you love and not show any emotion. Like I remember Lizzie getting praised because she didn't cry at Diana's funeral. You know what I mean? So that's that British stiff upper lip, the stiff upper lip, which, which bleeds into this, the manosphere, the manosphere that I spoke about last week. This idea of the alpha male, the alpha male expressing everything through anger and having no space for vulnerability or sitting comfortably with uncomfortable emotions.
1:00:22 Blindboy Boatclub? You can trace that to the, the British stiff upper lip and colonialism and muscular Christianity, which is a bizarre name, but.
1:00:32 Blindboy Boatclub? In Victorian times, they had a crisis of masculinity. When cities started to become a thing, society worried that men were getting less manly. So this muscular Christianity stepped up, where Christianity stopped becoming about charity, kindness, goodness, asceticism, which is denying the body food, fasting. And then it becomes to be Christian is to be a patriarchal man who is full of muscles and doesn't show emotion. That's muscular Christianity and it greatly informed English colonialism. And they would have viewed, they were colonized in Ireland, they would have viewed keening
1:01:15 Blindboy Boatclub? as utter savagery. What the fuck is this? There's a woman, you're hiring a woman to perform the entire spectrum of grief, to exaggerate grief, to wail, to rip her hair off, to rip her clothes off. What the fuck are you doing, you savages? So that would have definitely impacted that tradition. And all we're left with is the banshee, the fox with a cough. All right, that's all I've got time for this week. I promised you a guest this week. I do have a very, very special guest, a dream guest, but they had to cancel at the last minute, so we're hoping to reschedule for next week if we can.
1:01:59 Blindboy Boatclub? In the meantime, rub a dog, blow a kiss at a swan and misinterpret the wails of a fox with a cough. Dog bless.
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