Blindboy podcast celebrates five years

FROM culture and history to creativity and emotional resilience, the Blindboy Podcast has covered some of the most topical issues for the last five years with no signs of slowing down.

Blindboy Boatclub, one half of the iconic Limerick duo the Rubberbandits, celebrated five years of the Blindboy Podcast last week.

The podcast started in 2017 as Blindboy was looking for ways to promote his first book of short stories called the Gospel according to Blindboy.

“This was an artistic departure for me because people mostly associated me with music, or writing for television. I genuinely didn’t think anyone would be interested in reading a book of fiction from the Rubberbandits lad,” Blindboy said.

“So I started the podcast, initially as a way to read out some short stories, to give people an idea of what I was writing. Within a week, the first podcast had about 70,000 listeners and the book was a bestseller.

“I knew fairly immediately from that response, that this was the medium for me to explore,” he added.

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Blindboy noted how his podcast appeals to a wider audience: “I think the reason why it’s still growing after five years is because it’s a monologue podcast, and because I write it, rather than simply sit down at a mic and talk,” Blindboy said.

Stand-out guests from the podcast include American director, Spike Lee and Irish civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin McAliskey who Blindboy called the “Irish Martin Luther King Jr.”

“Interviewing Bernadette was an honour and quite frightening because of the sheer importance of who she is,” Blindboy said.

“Bernadette doesn’t do a lot of interviews but her grandkids asked her to appear with me on my podcast,” Blindboy said.

Blindboy wanted to ensure that he gave her a respectful and spacious platform to speak and to say what she needed to say without interruption.

“I was an outsider, with no lived experience of what is known as The Troubles. It was very humbling to be in the room that night,” he said.

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Half a decade since the start of the podcast, Blindboy is giving no indication of stopping any time soon.

“I have never been happier in my career,” he points out.

“When I was doing Rubberbandits stuff, we were working mainly in TV… you don’t get creative freedom.

“So I get to do a big deep dive into renaissance painting or a few weeks back I did a podcast about the origins of the River Shannon in Irish mythology.

“There’s not a hope RTÉ would have let me do that. They’d want me making jokes about chicken fillet rolls or leaving on the immersion,” Blindboy said.