Hex and the city

Finding out that your interviewee has been arrested the night before you’re due to speak to them is a worrying experience. Okay, it might be understandable if you’re about to speak to Pete Doherty or some other hellraiser, but surely not bloke-next-door magician Keith Barry?

But the proof was undeniable, the tabloid headline ‘Keith Barry Arrested’ plastered across posters on a newsstand. But there was nothing about the magician in the paper, and at the appointed time, Keith was waiting in the hotel bar, no electronic ankle tags in sight.
So what happened? The unsurprising truth was that the media got it wrong. Keith was repeating his trick of driving down a road blindfolded with a journalist in the car, when for a joke, he got one of his mates to step out and stop the car. Of course a hack from a rival publication got wind of this, but not being in on the joke, presumed Keith really had been in trouble with the boys in blue. Someone at the paper made a call, and the story was pulled, but too late to stop the posters going out. He might have pissed off a few journalists before even getting out of bed, but Keith doesn’t seem too concerned.
“You kind of know coming into the game that you’re going to get good and bad press, it’s part and parcel of it, so it doesn’t bother me,” he says. He’s just back from America, where his success and reputation continue to grow. This year alone Keith’s had his own special on CBS, appeared in CSI:Miami, and edged even closer to that lucrative residency in Vegas.
He reckons his appeal overseas might have something to do with the fact that he’s so, well, normal. “[In the US] they only have weirdos as magicians," he reasons. "They’ve got David Blaine – weirdo. Kriss Angel – weirdo. So it’s refreshing to them to see that not all magicians are weirdos. Even Copperfield’s a weird nerd… I suppose I’m the ordinary guy that just happens to do weird shit. I’m the guy that you could go down the pub and have a pint with, but you’re still that bit nervous around.”
Although what one newspaper described as his “boyband good looks” didn’t hurt, it was shocking the likes of Jessica Simpson, Harrison Ford and Lindsey Lohan that really launched Keith in the US. And he reckons there’s a reason the beautiful people are so keen to be amazed by a former cosmetic scientist from Waterford.
“They’re under the spotlight all the time, and if I’m doing tricks with them, for one minute the spotlight’s not on them,” he says. There have been some stars that had to be won over though. “I enjoyed Bob Geldof because he was such a cynical cunt, and he was a cunt. He was so nasty, and at the end we had to throw him out of the room, he was dying to see more.”
With his profile much lower in the US than here at the time, Keith had to source the celebs himself for his CBS Special, resulting in some spur of the moment bookings. “I booked Nicole in Mel’s Diner at 4 o’clock in the morning, drunk out of my mind,” he says of Nicole Schwerzinger, lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls. Keith’s gotten used to the networking side of the US entertainment industry, but hasn’t totally bought into stateside culture. “You gotta embrace it, but you also have to know it’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and it’s all bollocks. The problem is, some people buy into the bollocks.
“You have to put in the work. A lot of people go out for three weeks and think, ‘I’m going to break the States’, and no, that’s not how it works.”
Keith has spent a few years working hard in America, just about finding the time to fly home and marry his girlfriend of 12 years in May.
“It’s hard being on planes every week," he says. "It sounds great, but it knocks the shit out of you going over and back, over and back, especially the amount I do. The year before last I was Contintental’s second highest transatlantic flyer, and the only reason I was number two was because my manager was number one.”
When he’s back, does he notice the begrudgery that Irish people are so famous for?
“It’s hard to say it, it’s sad to say it really. But I was down in Waterford a few months ago… and I found a few people were saying, ‘Who the fuck does he think he is’, that sort of thing. But I am finding it is changing, people say, ‘Fair play to you, good to see you doing well’… but you have to prove you’re not an arsehole.”
He’s aiming to prove it all over again this winter, when he plays 12 live shows across the country. One thing Keith hopes to do with the show, titled Mental, is to make people laugh. “I think that’s the problem with most magic these days is that people don’t laugh… and that’s why I try not to take it too seriously. Other magic acts out there are quite serious – Paul Zenon, Derren Brown – but I can be quite raw… I kind of think, 'What would I like to see?'”
The answer is a mix of the sort of mind control and psychology tricks that Keith and Derren Brown have popularised, as well as some old school sleight-of-hand and magic tricks. As usual, audience participation is a necessity. “Sometimes you get people and I bully them up on stage, I don’t give a fuck… but I find in nearly every show once we’re two or three routines in, people then become comfortable.”
Right now life is a balancing act for Keith. There’s a live special planned for the UK next year, more television work in the US, including another show for CBS. But it’s the Irish shows that excite him most. “The first date is in The Excel Theatre in Tipperary, and I’m more excited about that, and it sounds like bollocks but it’s not, than the CBS show. Simply because you’re performing live and it’s real… I actually really do love it.”