What is the first news event you can recall?
The beating of Rodney King by the LAPD. I was a small child, I’d never seen violence like that, I remember my da and my brothers watching it on the news. Witnessing the looks of terror and disgust on their faces is what etched the memory into my mind.
If you could spend a day in one city or place at one moment in history, what would that be?
I adore Córdoba in Spain. I go there to write. I’d like to spend time there during the Umayyad Dynasty, around the year 1000, the height of science and the arts during the Islamic Caliphate. Ireland was a centre of science and learning around that time, too, but I’m not travelling back then to experience sideways rain and wind. Fuck that—I’m time-travelling to somewhere warm. I suppose I also wouldn’t mind having a craic at the Cretaceous period, get a squint at a velociraptor; they had feathers and honked like geese. There was 50 per cent more oxygen in the atmosphere, so I’d realistically die from oxygen poisoning because of my Anthropocene lungs. That would be some way to go, getting autoerotic asphyxiated by the Cretaceous atmosphere while freaking out a pterodactyl with my iPhone. You couldn’t explain that to Saint Peter at the gates.
Which of your ancestors or relatives are you most proud of?
My grandfather was a member of the Irish Republican Army, in Tom Barry’s flying column down in West Cork. They fought the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries, who were British forces, instructed by Winston Churchill to commit acts of terror against the civilian population. My granda was only a 19-year-old farmer. He and his brothers took part in the Kilmichael ambush, which was a decisive battle in helping end British colonisation of the 26 counties. That Ken Loach film The Wind That Shakes the Barley is based around those events.
What is the last piece of music, play, novel or film that brought you to tears?
I cried to “Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence” by Ryuichi Sakamoto when I learned that he died last year. I loved Ryuichi; I don’t think his contribution to popular music is recognised appropriately, especially his stuff with Yellow Magic Orchestra. They were such a huge influence on hip hop, electronic, video-game music. Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi are massively important in their own right, too.
Which writers should we be keeping an eye on?
Wendy Erskine from Belfast, possibly the greatest living short story writer.
What is your best single piece of advice for any artist who wants to protect their creative independence while also making a living?
Don’t be scared of being cringe. Promote yourself, share praise of your work, do questionnaires for magazines. Self-promotion is cringe, do it anyway. Who cares? It doesn’t hurt anyone. Buy my book Topographia Hibernica, please, and support me on Patreon if you can afford it. Leave the performative humility to the generationally wealthy artists.
What would people be surprised to know about you?
My da worked in an airport in Ireland, which saw all transatlantic travel to Europe during the 20th century. One day they were throwing out the fine woollen carpet from the VIP lounge, and my da salvaged it from a skip, and had the carpet installed in my living room. So, when I was growing up, my living room carpet had been stepped on by JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, David Bowie, Liz Taylor, Pope John Paul, you name it. If they were famous and travelled from Europe to America from 1960 to the 1980s, they stepped on my living room carpet. There’s only a small rectangle of the carpet left now, my ma keeps it in the boot of her car for the dog to sleep on during long journeys.
What do you most regret?
All the art that I never created in my twenties because I was scared of failing. I have books and albums that don’t exist because I was too scared to fail. Embrace failure and try it any-way. There’s no such thing as failing when you try, because all creative failure informs future success. The only real failure is doing nothing because you were scared to try.
Blindboyboatclub’s latest book, Topographia Hibernica (Coronet), is out now in hardback
