Original Sinner

Keith Barry flashes me a devilish smile. I’ve just informed him of Andrea Corr’s confident assertion, in a recent issue of Hot Press, that there is “not a new sin to be found.” Barry’s new show, however, is centred around the revelation of an eighth deadly sin. No wonder the Waterford magician reacts with such glee...

“She’s wrong!” he insists, his grin widening. “I like Andrea, I know her quite well. But she obviously hasn’t heard that I’m doing 8 Deadly Sins. So yeah, there are plenty of new sins out there, Andrea (laughs). I can assure you!”
Ah yes, 8 Deadly Sins. Following the astonishing success of his most recent live show The Asylum, which sold over 20,000 tickets, Keith is primed to return to the Olympia Theatre with his most elaborate act yet: an updating of the Seven Deadly Sins. A fresh spin on a centuries-old concept, the 2009 Mentalist Of The Year intends to unleash nothing less than chaos on his audience.
“I suppose the name conjures up all sorts of thought processes in people’s heads, but it’s more to do with the mind,” he explains. “It has nothing at all to do with religion. I’ve had two giant coffins made – they’re about 11 foot high – and every single night, somebody from the audience will fall into one of the coffins. You won’t be able to see inside, but let’s just say that one coffin will have a very soft landing and the other will have a less soft landing.
“I’ve also got a confession box made for people to confess imaginary sins,” he adds. “Obviously I don’t want to reveal any sins that might get someone into trouble with their partner, or with the law, so they’ll create imaginary sins and I’ll have to mentally extract them while they’re in the box.”
Audience participation is a key component of any magic show, and Barry’s oeuvre is no exception. In terms of sins, greed will come into play when he offers mouth-watering incentives to anyone brave enough to take part in proceedings. Two members of the public, chosen at random, will be invited to tie Barry up as best they can over the course of a couple of minutes. Should he fail to escape in less time than it took for his volunteers to bind him, they will each receive a payoff of €1,000. But of course, there’s slightly more to it than that – because Barry will be risking inevitable death by asphyxiation if he doesn’t beat the clock.
“I’m going to have my head wrapped in cling-film,” he reveals, matter-of-factly, as if such a practice were the most natural thing in the world. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had your head wrapped in cling-film before...”
Em, no.
“...but it’s quite fucking scary.”
I’m sure it is.
“If you put a plastic bag over your head you can actually get a certain amount of oxygen for a certain amount of time, but with cling-film it cuts the oxygen off straight away. If I get in trouble or pass out there’s nobody there to help. There is a chance that my brain could be shutting down. And if anybody tries to help me, I’ll still give the two guys the money.”
I’ll be first in the queue!

While hypnosis will only play a small role in 8 Deadly Sins, mind manipulation retains a particular fascination for the mischievous magician. His latest American television show, Deception with Keith Barry – set to air on Irish screens in the autumn – sees the 34-year-old delving into the minds of an unsuspecting public.
“It’s a very complex area”, he begins. “I’ve examined hypnotism extensively and you actually can hypnotise people against their will. You can get people to do things that go against their values. One of the things in the new TV show is to examine the whole area of MK-ULTRA – the mind-programming things that the CIA did back in the ‘50s and ’60s. They actually did crazy things against people’s permission. For instance, they put people into white boxes, almost coffin-sized, for 30 days at a time, feeding them LSD tablets every day while also feeding them brainwashing commands for 20 hours a day, to try and create sleeper agents. So there’s this whole area of: do sleeper agents exist? Have they existed in the past? Is it possible to hypnotise somebody into a potential murderer without their knowledge?”
So what does Keith think?
“After the experiments I’ve carried out, I firmly believe that sleeper agents existed back then and I’m 110% sure that they exist now, and that we just don’t know about them. We’re very behind here in Ireland and in Europe in general with hypnosis. Over in the States, they’ve actually progressed to the point that ‘hypno-birth’ is a big thing. Women are not getting epidurals; they’re getting hypnotised as a way of controlling the pain.
“And believe it or not, some doctors are also performing open-heart surgery using only hypnosis as the anaesthetic. So for anybody who doesn’t believe in the power of hypnosis, they wouldn’t fucking be performing open-heart surgery without any painkillers unless it was real! You can put somebody so under that you can actually take a saw to their ribcage.”
While insisting that hypnosis works, Keith confesses to being something of a sceptic himself. An agnostic, he attributes the achievements of mentalists not to any higher power but to the human body itself. His background after all is as a cosmetic scientist.
“When I was about 14 or 15,” he recalls, “during my lunch break from school, I used to always go to my granny’s house, and when she would go out to a shop or whatever, I’d sit there on my own and make a Ouija board from whatever I could find in the house and I’d sit there and go ‘Come on, if there’s a fucking Devil come on, come for me now you bollocks!’ and I’d be shouting this out loud. I would have been committed if anybody had seen me, but the Devil never fucking surfaced, sadly.”
The claims of other performers in the field notwithstanding, Barry refuses to believe that we can communicate with spirits, demonic or otherwise. Indeed, the claims of self-styled psychics clearly rankle. There is, of course, a degree of con-artistry involved in performing any trick, and it’s essential that an audience is willing to suspend its disbelief, in order for it to be successful. For Barry, the difference is simple.
“I’m an honest deceptionist”, he laughs. “I tell the audience that I’m going to deceive them, that I’m going to fool them very badly. But that’s what they’re there for. Whereas psychics are not telling people that they’re going to deceive them, they’re telling them that they’re really contacting their dead brother or dead mother or whoever. There’s a mixture of psychics out there, and some are more what we call “shut eye” psychics – in other words they really believe that they’re psychic and they genuinely believe in what they’re doing.
“I think they’re the most dangerous kind because they don’t even realise that they’re not contacting anybody, that they’re just cold reading and using fishing techniques. And then there are other people, lots of them, who are complete and utter charlatans. They’re just in it for a quick buck and to prey on the vulnerable and the innocent and take their cash from them.
“I’ve seen a lot of psychics onstage, I’ve visited them myself, I’ve spoken to psychics here in Ireland and there’s not one that even comes remotely close to what I think a real psychic would come close to. Either you can contact the dead or you can’t. There’s no – ‘I get a feeling that Tom, no Tomas, no maybe it’s Samantha coming through…’ – it’s all fishing. If I’m paying my hard-earned cash for you to speak to my dead mother, then I don’t want you to talk to fucking Houdini or whoever else.”

Death, and avoiding it, has gradually become a central theme in Barry’s life. His forthcoming attempt to wrestle his way out of a cling-film death-mask is just the latest in a long series of stunts that has seen him confidently stare death in the face, from driving a car blindfolded at breakneck speed to catching a bullet in his teeth. So far he has walked away unscathed.
But Keith had his own very real brush with death offstage in 2007, when he and long-term manager Eamonn Maguire were involved in a horrific crash, when a car came careening across the centre-island on the MI in Northern Ireland and smashed into them as they headed south.
Keith was very lucky to survive.
“I was in a massive amount of pain because I stayed awake throughout the whole thing,” he recalls without emotion. “I looked down at my left leg and my foot was wrapped up around my shin pointing the wrong way and basically I had the worst possible leg injury you could imagine. They were considering amputation for about 20 minutes until eventually they got my foot back into the socket.”
The experience left Barry with a new awareness of how flimsy our hold on life really is. The birth of his daughter soon followed, offering an antidote of sorts, but tragedy would strike again when his grandfather Paddy passed away in violent circumstances. The 82-year-old was the victim of a burglary and assault at his home in Waterford City and died as a result of the injuries sustained in the attack.
“He had a lot of years left in him”, says Barry. “He was walking seven miles, three days a week still, at 82 years of age. And he was just sitting down, having a drink in his front room and then ended up dead from whatever happened in the house. We’ll never know exactly what did happen because I don’t think anybody will ever get caught.”
In the aftermath of the crime, Barry lobbied the Government for tougher prison sentences in cases of aggravated burglary.
“I suppose I lashed out at the time, due to anger,” he reflects. “We’re nearly two years on and nobody was ever caught for what happened to my granddad and it’s an absolute disgrace. People don’t realise that I went as far as I did. I was in the Dáil. It wasn’t really in the press, but I was in there. Funnily enough, I bumped into Enda Kenny and he said ‘Oh if we’re ever in government, things will change’. And I did lobby a lot and the law has been changed in our favour. It’s a lot clearer now than what it was. If somebody had broken into your house before it happened, the law was very unclear as to what you could and could not do. Now, in your grounds – the boundaries of your garden are included – you have a full right to defend yourself. So at least something came out of it, but the law has not changed insofar as there are no tougher sentences and the prison service is still a revolving door system.
“I know the prisons are full, but they’re full of the wrong people,” he adds. “You look at the people in Mountjoy and there’s a whole bunch that are there because they haven’t paid their fucking TV licence. It’s ridiculous – and that’s what’s filling up the prisons. The real serious criminals are going in and out the door. People don’t realise that, it’s not reported in the press. Do I think it’s going to get better? Not really. I’d love to see someone that I have faith in given a chance. I mean the last Justice Minister – personally I think he was a fucking joke.”
At least Dermot Ahern has retired. So what’s the solution?
“I heard Gerald Kean recently, talking about what happened to Lisa Murphy,” he says, referring to the raid at the couple’s Wicklow home, which apparently saw hundreds of thousands of euros worth of the latter’s jewellery stolen after she was threatened at knifepoint. “He was saying we need zero tolerance, and I actually agree with him because we’re up ten per cent on aggravated burglary from last year, so it’s only going up – and up. I’ve lobbied as much as I can but I didn’t want it to take over my life either. It’s a juggling act.”
The notion of zero tolerance is a potential minefield, but Barry is quick to point out that he is specifically referring to aggravated burglary.
“If someone comes into your house – that’s it, I don’t give a fuck. If it’s aggravated and they’re threatening you and your family, it’s black and white. And I couldn’t care less if they’re on drugs or drink or any of the excuses all the civil rights people use. If they’re on drugs or drink they still shouldn’t be in my fucking house. That’s it. If somebody spits chewing gum on the ground, I don’t think they should go to jail or anything, but I think the laws should be tougher for certain cases.”
For better or worse, he will have the opportunity to get in the ear of the new Taoiseach and remind him of his promise when the two come together to launch the Waterford Tall Ships Festival. With Barry used to having power over his own audience, how will he react to the country’s most powerful figure?
“I suppose the most important thing to do is to question what they’re doing with this sort of stuff and see where they’re at with it, to see if it’s any kind of priority for them – and then decide what to do after. But I’m not holding my breath. The Government need to affect positive change in the people around them, fire people who are not performing, that kind of thing. But look, they were handed a shitty hand, so give them a bit more time.”
And if that doesn’t work, there’s always hypnosis.