“Childhood curiosity has genuinely never left me,” says Blindboy. “I’m curious about everything. All the time. Whatever it is, I’m always wanting to know: Why? How? What if?”
This ceaseless curiosity is what has made The Blindboy Podcast such a sensation in the world of audio. Written, recorded and produced by one man in Limerick and released once a week like clockwork, it regularly pulls up to a million listeners a month from around the globe.
The man behind it, Blindboy – or Blindboy Boatclub to use his full alter ego – is also a bestselling author of books such as the recent short story collection Topographia Hibernica. He keeps his identity secret by wearing a plastic bag on his head; something he will continue to do when touring his podcast live this year.
In a landscape that feels dominated by endless true crime and samey celebrity shows, The Blindboy Podcast is a genuine one-off that serves up a feast of subjects to devour. Alongside Irish and Greek mythology, mental health, history, art, academia and politics, you’ll find numerous episodes that dive headfirst down rabbit holes on everything from the colonial origins of the pumpkin spiced latte and fish fingers to the history of bootcut jeans, or how everyone’s favourite Christmas tipple, Baileys, is rooted in an 18th-century satanic sex cult.
Blindboy is intensely softly spoken, striking a tone that sits between impassioned, smart, funny and sincere. “I call it a podcast hug,” he says. “A little bit of mindful silence from the noise of everything around you and social media.” The episodes have a wandering, free-flowing air, somewhere between a conversation and an essay – with Blindboy weaving in theories, connections and allegories along the way – but they are always meticulously written. “I make sure there’s balance and harmony but I don’t want the listener to be aware of it,” he says. “You never want to show people the hand that’s gone up Kermit the Frog’s arse. You just want Kermit talking.”
Since beginning the podcast in 2017, Blindboy has released an episode every week without fail. Each one takes him around four days to make. He takes his duties incredibly seriously. “If I miss an episode, it’s because I’m in the emergency room,” he says. “It’s a real routine for a lot of listeners. They walk their dog to it, or go to a coffee shop to listen. One lad told me his mother no longer calls having a bath ‘a bath’, she calls it ‘having a Blindboy’ because she plans her weekly bath around the podcast. I get a lovely sense of responsibility from that. I adore making the podcast and I never take it for granted.”
Now in his late 30s, Blindboy came to prominence in his early 20s in the comedy hip-hop group the Rubberbandits. In 2010, the duo – comprising Blindboy and Mr Chrome – went viral with their track Horse Outside (as of today it has 22m views on YouTube). An infectious piece of bouncy pop music, it took aim at boy racer culture with the pair attempting to woo a bridesmaid at a wedding, proclaiming “fuck your Mitsubishi … if you’re looking for a ride I’ve a horse outside.” It narrowly missed out on Christmas number one in Ireland, charting at number two, and as a result of the success the pair soon started working in TV.
They created satirical sketches and shows for RTÉ, wrote and starred in a Channel 4 comedy pilot, and wrote and narrated the ITV2 series The Almost Impossible Gameshow. The success of the latter led them to do something similar in the US, and they were commissioned to make two seasons for MTV. “It went out for one episode and was so bad it got cancelled,” says Blindboy. “I became toxic waste!”
Blindboy continued to work within the conventions of the industry – well, relatively speaking for a man with a bag on his head – making shows for the BBC such as the documentary series Blindboy Undestroys the World. But the longer he stayed in that environment, the more he began to realise he needed to create something outside the confines of traditional broadcast media.
“The model is kind of broken,” he says. “You slowly realise you don’t have much creativity, because at the end of the day it’s about what the channel and the commissioner wants. Then the commissioner is concerned about ratings, then with ratings they’re concerned about advertisers. So within that traditional model of TV and radio, you don’t really get extreme creativity.”
Now he’s entirely listener-funded via Patreon and has given up playing the industry game. “I just say no now,” he says. “I turn down a TV show a month, honest to God. I know the pain of that model and I understand that no matter how good my initial idea is, it will be a piece of shit by the end.”
Instead, Blindboy has created his own world in which he feels free to explore whatever whim he wishes to indulge without having to consider its popularity or relevance. “I don’t even look at what episodes do best,” he says. “I’m always just chasing the feeling within me. What I would hate more than anything would be to have to meet criteria for getting listeners. Because what happens then is you’re going for clicks and shock, and you’re platforming individuals with toxic views just to get discussions going. I don’t want to do that. If I want to do a podcast about the inside of a tennis ball, that’s what I’m gonna do.”
That isn’t an extreme example for comic effect, it’s an actual episode – and one rooted in Blindboy’s upbringing. “I’m neurodivergent – diagnosed autistic,” he says. “So school was miserable for me because I was told: ‘Sit down, shut the fuck up, stop moving around and asking so many questions.’ I’d get punishment essays for misbehaving in class, and often the essay was to write 1,000 words about the inside of a tennis ball.”
What this did was further unlock an already bursting sense of wonder in a young Blindboy that is now the core of his hit podcast. “That essay was not punishment to me,” he says. “It was the greatest, most enjoyable thing I could have been handed. I used to be in detention writing and adoring it – so what literally worked for me, and caused me to excel, was a punishment hell for a neurotypical kid.”
This eagerness for information also proved tricky when Blindboy tried to hold down more conventional jobs. He once got fired from a call centre for printing out 93 pages about CIA crack cocaine smuggling on the office printer. “You get labelled eccentric,” he says. “But I’m a very happy and effective person. I enjoy life. Everything that went wrong for me wasn’t a result of autism; it was a result of a system that wasn’t set up to accommodate it.”
He continues: “I would have done well at school If I’d been able to teach myself from books, didn’t have to sit down, and was able to walk up and down in circles while listening to Slipknot. That sounds like a Guantánamo Bay punishment, but if I can do that, I will not only learn but I will excel. I will excel massively.”
Similarly, the bag he wears on his head has taken on new meaning in the wake of his diagnosis. “The bag is multiple things,” he says. “At its core, it’s a way to give me privacy, as well as a deliberate piece of performance art against solemnity and the false performance of seriousness. But since getting diagnosed, keeping this bag on allows me as an autistic person to live a normal, routine-based, quiet life. That’s not only what I want, it’s what I need.”
Moving forward, he’s doubling down on the carrier bag, referring to it as an “autistic protest”. “I have much more conviction about that now,” he says. “I’m making a stand as a neurodivergent person and saying, no, I’m not playing by the social hierarchies in neurotypical society where people have to look, dress and sound a certain way so everyone is comfortable. Fuck that. I’m a weirdo and that’s fine. I have a bag on my head. Deal with it. Just look at my art instead. My art is good.”
• The Blindboy Podcast Live in Dublin 22 to 23 January and tours the UK from April
