Blindboy Boatclub – Irish podcaster, satirist and religiously bag-faced, resolutely anonymous former half of the Rubberbandits – talks to Julia Bottoms about his upcoming live tour, the end times and whether the kids will be alright.
This summer, Blindboy has been getting his hands dirty, growing potatoes in his garden. It’s been a good way to show his young children the joy of growing produce, he muses on the most episode of his eponymous podcast – until the spuds were struck by a nasty strain of blight. Then he turned to making music from them.
“I got a piece of equipment you can attach to tune into the signals!” he tells me over Zoom – with his camera switched off on account of his de-bagged status. “It’ll turn any organic object signals into electrical signals – I was using it to control synthesisers.” From there, it doesn’t take much from our conversation to careen through the Irish potato famine, the fart lamps of Sheffield and The Prodigy.
Such conversational sidequests are on brand for Blindboy, whose podcast discusses history, cultural critique, politics and fiction with over a million monthly listeners. Episodes range from Nazi yoghurt folklore to interviewing autistic bird experts. He speaks to me in the same hushed, fable-telling tenor as on his podcast – the only difference is the absence of the ASMR-friendly rustle of his plastic bag against the microphone.
Such details lend his episodes an intimacy Blindboy hopes to recreate on his UK tour this October. The goal, he says, is for the audience to lose themselves in the conversation. As for what will happen at his Cardiff show, he has “no fecking clue” – other than it’ll include a guest appearance, “anyone from a butcher to Cillian Murphy”. (He was joined by Charlotte Church in his previous appearance in the capital.)
Blindboy began podcasting in 2017, before podcasts became synonymous with filming oneself in a confined space in the hopes of Instagram virality. Much has changed since then, he says, and we are more isolated than ever, depressingly. “Boredom has been taken away from us. The high street is disappearing, cost of living is going up; I wonder how much of that has to do with the doomscroll.”
While the concept of a man with a bag on his head talking about the disproportionately gigantic penis of the shrew for an hour is, one might argue, a spectacle that AI could never autonomously conjure, conversation inevitably turns to the topic. Researcher Jacob Coxon recently made headlines on resigning from leading AI firm Anthropic, sharing his fears of the technology threatening life as we know it in the process. Blindboy, though, is less convinced.
“I don’t fully believe that shit. Every time those AI billionaire dudes come out and say, ‘Something scary is coming! I can’t tell you exactly what it is, you just gotta be afraid!’ it reminds me of when the Catholic Church was selling indulgences in medieval times. Every time someone says that, the AI stock price increases. There is definitely an incentive in freaking us out about something they can’t define. When you start talking about Armageddon, it distracts from real issues we can actually try and tackle,” he says, pointing to data centres as an example.
For all the talk of end times as there is, though, there’s no saying Blindboy’s next episode won’t be a feminist deconstruction of the world’s longest-brewing perpetual soup, or an hour-long ramble into the claggy film that forms atop microwaved milk. It will, indefinitely, be strange and erudite, which is what attracts listeners seeking something human – and hopeful.
“Pain isn’t necessarily caused by what’s happening to us. It’s caused by our attitude towards what’s happening to us,” he offers. “So, no matter what my environment is, I’ll try and be realistic and flexible – and positive – about it.”
The Blindboy Podcast Live, New Theatre, Cardiff, Tue 20 Oct
Tickets: from £36. Info: here
words JULIA BOTTOMS
