Tricks Of The Trade

It's official. Magic is the new rock and roll! At least it will be if Keith Barry has anything to do with it. Fast making a name for himself as a trickster par excellence, the young Waterford magician has performed for Bono, The Fun Loving Criminals, and Gerry Ryan, among many other luminaries he is far too modest to mention. As the resident magician in The Kitchen (owned of course by U know 2) his unique approach is, he says, designed to offer something new and different to the clubber.

"I'm a close-up magician," he explains, when I meet him at a corporate function where he is due to perform. "I do intimate, one-to-one magic, as opposed to stage magic. For a long time magic had moved further away from the audience with everyone trying to outdo everyone else, using bigger more elaborate props, more Las Vegas, the whole David Copperfield thing. I'm trying to bring things back down to a level where I can affect peoples' emotions directly."
Barry demonstrates the kind of a trick he specialises in. He produces a deck of cards, I pick one out, memorise it and put it back in the pack, which he shuffles. He then spreads the cards out, face up. One card however is face down, presumably the one I picked out. But instead of flicking over the card, he takes off his glasses, directs me to concentrate closely on both of his eyes. The pupils of each eye are jet-black and more unnervingly clover-shaped. (The card I picked out just happened to be the two-of-clubs!) Later I see him perform the same trick for a small group of females. As they look in his eyes and the penny drops, they emit loud shrieks and jump back, visibly shaken.
He then takes out a balloon, blows it up and hands it around to each of the girls to examine. He takes out a cigarette lighter bursts the balloon in mid-air and out pops a full bottle of vodka!
"Most of the tricks I do involve sleight of hand," he explains "I use quite a bit of verbal miss-direction and I'm doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes that you can't see. That's where the magic comes in. All the tricks that I do aren't done by anyone else in Ireland," he adds. "I've invented some of my own tricks and customised others."
Barry has been interested in magic ever since he was given a Paul Daniels Magic Set as a kid. "It was good fun but it's hard to make the transition from being a kid messing around with magic to fooling adults. You have to search out books in libraries. I was lucky. On a school trip to Scotland I came across a book which gave a list of magic societies around the world and I took it from there."
When he moved to Dublin two years ago he approached The Kitchen and asked if they would be interested in doing something different. They agreed to try him out and he has been performing regularly on Friday and Saturday nights for the past year and a half.
Has he ever met any resistance among clubbers while trying to ply his unusual trade amongst them?
"Not really," he says. "Where a lot of magicians fail is in their initial approach. If you ask people 'sorry would you like to see some magic?' they'll hesitate and probably say 'no thanks'. But I go up and say 'Hi I'm Keith, I'm the resident magician here and I want to show you something'. They realise that you mean business and usually you have their attention."
His meeting with the Fun Loving Criminals came about on the night of the MTV awards, as he explains "I went into Eamon Dorans and was chatting away to some people This head popped in and it was Huey from the FLC. I did some magic and got on really well with him. I gave him my business card and two months later they were back playing The Point and I happened to be in Eamon Dorans again. Huey came in and came over straight away. He invited me backstage at the Point and we've kept in touch ever since."
Barry's star is set to rise even higher over the coming months. He has just given up his day job as a chemist and has been contracted by Champion Sports to work on a special Christmas promotion "It hasn't been done before so it's quite exciting," he explains. "I'll be working in their stores performing for the customers. Their slogans is 'putting the magic back into Christmas'. We're going to go around Ireland and eventually Europe with this promotion. And on the 30th of November I'll be entertaining 30,000 people in Grafton Street. We're going to do something that's never been done before. It'll be pretty special."
Sounds magic!