It’s much better now with the hurling snob version. I’d listen to the bog ball one as well in the car though. I occasionally look at the league results now.
It is the best of them. Keep her lit.
phx
BLINDBOY BOATCLUB – real name Dave Chambers (33) – has gone from off-the-wall comic as one half of The Rubberbandits to omnipresent cultural figure in the space of seven years. But is Chambers the radical artistic voice he’s presented as or is he, like the Blindboy character he plays, not quite as clever as he thinks?
From the Ennis Road area, Chambers met his partner Mr Chrome (aka Bobby McGlynn) when the pair were secondary school students at Ard Scoil Rís on the north side of Limerick City. He went on to study graphics at Limerick School of Art and Design before enrolling in a master’s degree programme at Limerick Institute of Technology. He graduated from there in 2015. The duo came to local attention off the back of a series of prank calls they recorded, posted to YouTube and promoted on their social media pages before morphing into a plastic bag-wearing comedy hip hop act in 2007.
Blindboy has been on his trajectory since the Rubberbandits came to national attention. Around Christmas 2010, when Chambers and McGlynn were beginning to take off following the success of their song Horse Outside, the inevitable tedious Liveline row blew up about how Limerick was portrayed in their act. Objections were raised to drug references in Horse Outside and also their Song for Willie O’Dea, a cutting satire of parish pump politicians and an absurd rendering of the veteran Fianna Fáil TD as a local kingpin. O’Dea, a good sport, stood by the two boys on Joe Duffy’s show but Chambers ended up ringing Liveline anyway to give his side of the argument.
His resulting spiel, an eloquent defence of the Bandits’ “art” and a call for the public to go beyond a literal interpretation of their act delivered in his character’s amped up Limerick City twang, seemed to stun both Duffy and his irate callers. The clip of Blindboy’s apologia was a hit on social media and went a long way towards convincing people there was something else going on with the Bandits, something more substantial about them than your average RTÉ comedians. It also helped establish Blindboy as the group’s de facto spokesperson.
Arguably, the Bandits as a duo have never really kicked on as comedians from their initial success. Their debut album, Serious About Men, that featured all their hits, never went above 16th place in the Irish album charts. Their previous edginess was also somewhat blunted by a fawning Irish press, which almost from the word go was comparing Blindboy to Flann O’Brien and, following the traditional path of Irish comedians and artists, the boys tried to break into the UK market without much luck.
A series for Channel 4 never went beyond the 2012 pilot episode. Chambers and McGlynn followed it up with, of all things, a gameshow for ITV called The Almost Impossible Gameshow, a minor hit with audiences. That ran for two seasons in 2015 and 2016 but there’s no word yet on a third. A US version of the series, also presented by the two lads, premiered in 2016 on MTV but it was a ratings disaster and was cancelled abruptly.
There’s not much going on at their company, Lovely Men Ltd, either. Accounts filed last week show the boys were sitting on accumulated profits of under U30,000 at the end of 2016.
Chambers reappeared on Irish screens in 2016 with The Rubberbandits Guide to Everything. An episode-length version of their original Republic of Telly segments, the loose sketch show saw the lads delving into topics from money to sex to the internet. Around this time, Chambers had started to become a talking head in the Irish media, essaying the problems faced by his generation in the wake of the recession, particularly around mental health. A solo video he produced for Des Bishop’s Election Special on the eve of the 2016 election that took aim at party political stasis on the issue went viral online and an interview with Channel 4 News that year copper-fastened Blindboy’s status as an advocate. Chambers is a capable speaker on the topic but mental health being the issue du jour for a lot of Irish celebrities like Niall “Bressie” Breslin, it also helped to heighten his profile, guaranteeing him spots on the Late Late Show and praise from the usual luvvies (See The Phoenix 01/12/2017).
Politically, Chambers is loosely on the left. Although not party political, he supported the Dunnes Stores strike in 2015, criticised neo-liberalism during a Late Late Show appearance and the Rubberbandits’ social media output bangs the same drum. Yet, despite his radical posturing, media darling Chambers is very much an acceptable figure in the press and he’s even drawn praise from some of its most reactionary corners.
As part of RTÉ’s 1916 Centenary schedule, the Bandits produced a guide to the Rising, a cock-eyed and very funny look at Easter Week and its aftermath. The pair even took a brief detour to discuss the Limerick Soviet of 1919 when, “being a pack of awkward bollockses”, Limerick workers seized power for two brief weeks before “the priests shut it down”. Blindboy used this segment to segue into what happened after the War of Independence and, doing his best Bob Geldof impression, he veered briefly into the now-typical anti-De Valera, anti-church line. The episode and their analysis, tongue-in-cheek as most of it was, fit perfectly into RTÉ’s sanitised centenary programming.
It’s not necessarily Chambers’s fault that the Indo’s resident right-wing grouch, Ian O’Doherty, was the show’s biggest fan. Iano described the Bandits’ guide to 1916 as a “stealthily brilliant deconstruction of the myths and fables that have propped up this country”. O’Doherty is actually a long-time fan of Chambers and McGlynn, writing in 2010 in praise of how they had “managed to seriously piss off Republicans” with their song Up the Ra. That song, where the boys garble events in Irish history like “the Great Potato Famine of 1916”, was what they described as a satire of “armchair republicans”, among the easiest and most popular target groups for “satire” in the country. Chambers and McGlynn said at the time that if it resulted in “even one armchair republican picking up a history book… the song is a success”.
Chambers’s book of short stories, The Gospel According to Blindboy, has been a big success selling an average of 776 copies a week since it was released and generating plenty of good reviews. His new podcast has been well received, giving the Limerick man an outlet to preach as much as he wants. Both should help solidify the perception of Chambers as the serious artist he wants to be.
But he wears a bag over his head.
Middle class cunt.
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I listened to his podcast last week, a very fawning interview with Kevin Barry, interesting enough though that was mostly because of Barry, his brothers band ‘Woodstar’ were probably the best local band I’ve seen since I moved to Limerick,
I did enjoy some of the stories in the book 
the article no one else no one bothered to write, for good reason.
What a prick.
15k each last year? 
I’d say they’re pocketing money big time… Didn’t they charge chocolatemice 1k for a 45 talk in 2016? They do a lot of that shit outside of gigs and whatever else.
Ooofffttt. That’s a put down and more than a half. I agree with the thrust of it in that the Blindboy chap appears to be an absolute fucking gimp.
Always thought Woodstar were somewhat underwhelming. Nice and all but there was a lot of that Dave Fridmann-sounding stuff being produced at the time.
For the money behind them - it was the fellas who were the accountants for the cranberries that managed them - they didn’t do much.
dancing on a string
You should let this one go, if he wants to wear a bag on his head let him off
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This is about mental health. His. I applaud glas’ edit to his post though, his first was simply beneath him.
And ours looking at the state of the cunt.
How did Murphy keep a straight face. He once said how unrealistic the scarecrow character was in the grand scheme of superhero movies.
And along comes his weirdo then.
Throw up a picture of yourself there pal and lash up your name and Twitter account while your at it.