Welcome To Bandit Country

It’s several hours before The Rubberbandits sold-out Galway Comedy Festival show is due to kick off. The boys are already in costume, however, when Hot Press arrives at the Roisin Dubh to interview them. Which is to say that Limerickmen Dave Chambers and Bob McGlynn – better known by their daft stagenames Blindboy Boat Club and Mr. Chrome – are both wearing faded tracksuits, cheap jewellery, and balaclavas expertly fashioned from plastic shopping bags on their heads.
No surprise there. The acclaimed comedy duo have never shown their faces in public, and they always do their interviews in character. Their style is satirical, surrealist and deliberately crude, but also usually scalpel-sharp. This writer interviewed them before a live audience in the Hot Press Chatroom at Electric Picnic 2011, and they effortlessly batted back every question with a witty riposte, delivered in an exaggerated Limerick hardman drawl. Well, almost every question. Whenever they got flummoxed, they simply accused me of pushing “the Viking agenda.” The audience loved them.
Very little is known about Ireland’s least recognisable celebrities, other than that Chambers and McGlynn met while attending Ardscoil Rís in Limerick, and were entertaining their schoolfriends with recorded prank phone calls from their mid-teens. Those calls were compiled into bootleg CDs, which eventually became successful radio broadcasts, both here and internationally. They switched to television: having entertained Irish audiences with weekly sketches on RTÉ’s Republic Of Telly (which spawned the viral YouTube hit ‘Horse Outside’), the ‘Bandits are now doing shows for MTV and
Channel 4.
Their debut album Serious About Men – released on their own Lovely Men Music label – has just been released. It will be fascinating to see if their popularity as a live act translates into mega sales. And they are hugely popular. As Róisín Dubh owner Kevin Healy tells me, “The Rubberbandits have been a consistently great seller for us over the last couple of years. One time we had them here, at the height of the ‘Horse Outside’ thing, they sold out two shows in 24 hours. There’s been a slight dip between then and now, but they’ve sold out again tonight, and I think they’re going to be really huge again after
this album.”
While some commentators dismiss them as a novelty act, The Rubberbandits are deadly serious about what they do. Not that they’d ever say it to
your face...
According to a band spokesperson, “The word ‘novelty' is something that gets thrown at them now and then, but it stems from peoples lazy desire to label things rather than deal with the anxiety of ambiguity. Novelty music is gimmick music that lacks substance or talent, ie. ‘Crazy Frog’. The lads make comedy music, or as they describe it, music that happens to be funny. More importantly, their music is not merely a vessel to carry jokes, but rather it is equally as important as the joke. They write, perform, record, produce, mix and master all the music themselves. The songwriting, production and melody are just as important as the jokes and satirical undertones in
the songs.
“Take ‘Horse Outside’ – remove the lyrics and just listen to the structure and the melody. You are left with a pure pop song that sticks in your head. Because they take the piss all the time, people assume that their music has no creative merit. Just like the way that some people think that they’re fools, because the characters they play are fools. The fact is that they’ve had the biggest-selling Irish single since Westlife, with a song they wrote, performed and produced themselves in a Limerick bedroom. That requires talent, creativity and an understanding of the artforms of both songwriting and comedy.”
Back to backstage in the Roisin. The Rubberbandits are in fine fettle. Spin South West disc jockey Paul Webb – who regularly appears onstage with them in the guise of Willie O’DJ (a pisstake caricature of Fianna Fáil’s Willie O’Dea) – brings up a tray of drinks. A burly minder named Derek watches quietly from the corner of the room. Hot Press hits the record button and the madness begins...

The Original
Pet Shop Boy
OLAF TYARANSEN: Does it take you guys long to get into character or do you just put the bags over your heads in seconds?
MR. CHROME: Four-and-a-half hours of make-up!
BLINDBOY BOAT CLUB: They’re specially moulded to our heads! It’s moulded to my head, do you see? Honest to god, he’s got a mould of my head that he made and he gets a dryer and it shapes exactly to my head so I don’t get sweating issues or breathing issues or anything like that.
You both come across as Limerick skangers, basically, and reportedly you’re not...
MC: We’re not, we’re middle-class gentlemen. We’re kind of like... we’re between classes. We’re between middle class and upper class. We’re upper upper upper class.
BBC: Everyone thinks we grew up in the suburbs and all of that, but we grew up in mansions with butlers. Upper upper upper upper class. That’s why
we love drugs and horses, cause we’re upper upper upper class.
Er... right. How did you guys meet?
MC: We first met on a dating agency on the internet. Nah. We met in school. We both hated everything in school except art. We loved art both of us, and in art [class] we had a teacher called ‘Bog Man’ and he let us do whatever we wanted.
BBC: When we got in trouble in other classes they’d send us up to the art room to do loads of art.
What kind of stuff did you draw?
MC: Drawing pictures of Tupac…
BBC: Tupac and Bob Marley, and then you draw pictures of Tupac and Bob Marley together, playing tennis and doing all this fantasy stuff that they would never ever do… like going to Venus…
Your Twitter account states that you “are the tortured breath of Bob Marley that bullies its way through the air and extinguishes the candles on Brendan Behan’s birthday cake.”
MC: Bob Marley’s been following us on Twitter for a long time. From Heaven.
BBC: The ghost. Our Twitter was haunted. Haunted by the ghost of Barry White for a while actually, would you believe. Gospel truth! [his mobile bleeps and he takes it out and examines it].
MC: (incredulous) Put your phone away!
BBC: I’m fuckin’ silenting it for Olaf!
When did you form The Rubberbandits?
BBC: Erm… I was stalking a girl who worked in a pet shop when I was 17, or 16, and my heart was broken because she didn’t want to go on a date with me, and then he started hanging around with me because he could see that I had a broken heart…
MC: I wanted to fix it.
BBC: …then he told me to fix it, that I should show her how good I am at art and stuff. And then we forgot about that idea and went to his house, he had a free house, and we recorded a lot of prank phone calls.
MC: You wrote a poem about her! Do you remember that?
BBC: I did yeah, I wrote a poem about her, and I made all the boys watch me read the poem down by the church when we were smoking fags.
MC: Daniel read it and I was like, “Don’t show it to anyone because they’ll all laugh at you and think you’re a steamer for writing a poem,” but then it
turns out that Daniel was already a poet and he didn’t know it.
Do you remember the poem?
MC: Do you remember the line? I remember some of the lines…
BBC: Don’t be quoting the lines of the poem in Hot Press! She still knows me!
MC: The pet shop, you used to have to walk down steps to get into, and the last line was something along the lines of…
BBC: Don’t! Come on, she’ll read that, stop!
MC: … ‘Subterranean lair into which I dived in, my pet shop girl’ (laughs). I was trying to tell ya, “Look, people are going to think Pet Shop Boys and it’s like you’re subconsciously telling the world that you’re a member of the steam theatre!” There you go.
BBC: Awh, fucking hell. That’s how it started.
So it was prank phone calls that started you off?
BBC: Yeah, yeah, prank phone calls.
MC: Daire Durkin, big shout out to Daire Durkin, he started it all.
BBC: Daire Durkin, yeah. So we made a CD of prank phone calls for the benefit of about six people in our class, and then we found out that people in another class liked it and we couldn’t believe that someone in a different class liked the CD, and then half of Limerick was passing it around. And this was like fucking 2001.
What age are you guys?
MC: We’re both 21. We’ve been 21 now for about… 16 years. It’s great though because you get 21 kisses every year. They’re all from our mothers but they still count, you know?
Are your mothers happy with your success?
BBC: Oh yeah. We love our mas.
MC: My ma’s a gas bastard. His ma is a gas bastard.
BBC: They’re both gas bastards!
Anyway, back to the CDs of prank phone calls...
BBC: So yeah the CD passed around all of Limerick and we couldn’t believe that. And then we spent a long time doing nathin’ and then, then I’d my heart broken again by his cousin. And then he said to me, ‘cos I was making music in my bedroom, he said, “That music is good enough for people to listen to,” and I was, “Fuck off!” He said, “We’ll make a few tunes.” That was about 2007, so we started making songs, we made ‘Bag Of Glue’, we put it onto MySpace, didn’t think anyone would like it…
MC: And then... boom! Half of Limerick were listening to it.
BBC: And that’s when Dublin got involved.
MC: Yeah Dublin got involved. All you need to do is impress half of Limerick – that’s how David Bowie got Ziggy Stardust off the ground.
BBC: He did, yeah. Before you know it...
Aladdin Sane.
Where and when did you play your first live show?
MC: Our 21st.
BBC: No, it was the courtyard of the Trinity Rooms at a moustache party on the banks of the Shannon.
MC: Ah that’s true, yeah.
BBC: Our first ever show had 1,500 people, because we had already built up an underground legacy.
MC: It was half of Limerick. And 1,500 people.
BBC: We played on the banks of the Shannon and it was a moustache party, as in… our manager Coco, at the time, it was the first time that we met him and he organised this because he was running a nightclub and there was 1,500 people there and they all had moustaches on. If you wore a moustache you got free drinks or something, and that was our first ever gig. Limerick had been waiting about six years to see The Rubberbandits, and the first time they saw the plastic bags, we did one song and we fucked off, and they were very disappointed (shakes head sadly).

Sticks And Stones Will Break My BoneS, But Names...
Why did you call yourselves The Rubberbandits?
BBC: When I was 17, it just came to me. And I went into the art class and I said to him, “I have the name for our group, it’s called ‘The Rubberbandits’,” and he didn’t contest it, he said, “Yeah great name!” and now we’re stuck with it.
MC: We fight tooth and nail over everything, you have the ideas parties where you sit down and talk about ideas and all that kind of shit. The Rubberbandits for some reason, we had no discussion about it, and we fucking hate it.
BBC: Yeah we don’t like it at all. It’s a silly,
silly name.
MC: We want to be called loads of brilliant things.
BBC: I hate my name, (disdainfully) ‘Blindboy
Boat Club’!
MC: I hate my name ‘Mr. Chrome’!
BBC: I want to be called ‘Freddie Honey’.
MC: I want to be called ‘Vincent Fist’ (shakes
head wistfully).
BBC: And what do we want our band to be called?
MC: ‘The Gorillas In The Ass’. Or ‘Don’t Tell Dennis’.
BBC: Or ‘Steam Theatre’. Loads of brilliant things. ‘Lying About Malta’. All great names, great names for a band. And we’re stuck with The Rubberbandits.
Lying About Malta?
BBC: Great name for a band, ‘Lying About Malta’.
MC: With ‘Rubberbandits’ you think, “It’s shit, but at least people will remember it” – no they won’t! Everyone goes up and goes, “Aren’t you in that band… the Rubberduckies?”
BBC: I know ye, you’re The Spanish Pirates.
MC: The Gay Terrorists. Just, the list of names goes on that aren’t The Rubberbandits. It’s a silly name, for silly boys.
I see you have a minder with you...
MC: That’s our father, Derek. Derek drives
us around.
BBC: And he busts heads whenever he has to. Just earlier on I was in Burger King – at a service station – and the woman overcharged me, the lady behind the counter, he went over right and he gave her a headbutt straight in, I got my money back, my change like, and more. My dignity, too.
Do either of you guys have criminal records?
BBC: I’ve got a copy of Never Mind The Bollocks on original vinyl and Sid Vicious was a criminal when he recorded it. I’ve got all of Dr. Dre’s. Snoop Doggy Dog was caught selling hash, so I’ve got plenty of criminal records. Gil-Scott Heron, that’s another one of my criminal records. John Lennon, he done a couple of silly protest things, I’ve a few of his records.
So you’ve never been arrested?
BBC: No, no, us, no (shakes head unconvincingly).
MC: Never, never was arrested.
You just never got caught?
BBC: When I was 15 actually… will I tell him about the bins?
MC: Yeah go on yeah.
BBC: When I was 15 there was a school enterprise project and my idea for the enterprise project was to wash the wheelie bins of all my neighbours, but then I hung around with these hard boys from another part of town…
MC: Give him the names, go on!
BBC: Bobby Bennett and this crew from a hard part of town and I used to say to my neighbours that if you don’t give me a pound a week, that your bins are gonna go on fire.
MC: It was, “Gimme a pound a week in case your bin goes on fire!”
BBC: In case your bin goes on fire, and I had a contract drawn up and everything. It was going before the school enterprise board but then my business teacher, Dessie Hearty, spotted that it was actually extortion and racketeering. I was earning a pound a week from, like, 30 people in the neighbourhood because they just didn’t want their bin going on fire. I had the muscle to make it happen. I got brought to court when I was 15. I was made donate all the money that I had made to charity.
What charity did you give it to?
MC: Spastic hawks.
BBC: Either the spastic hawks or Vincent de Paul or something like that, but the thing is I told them I made 70 quid and I actually made £200, so I made a profit.
MC: But you’re going to hell.
Were you surprised with the online success of ‘Horse Outside’?
MC: On a serious note, Olaf, yes. Absofuckinglutely! Shocking.
BBC: Here’s proof of the fact that we didn’t know it was going to be popular. We just released it as a video on TV and made no plans for it to be released on CD or anything whatsoever. None. We were on Republic Of Telly every week so it was just, here’s another sketch. A little bit more effort put into it than the other stuff but this is a song we made on our computer.
MC: I think if you expected it to be [big] then you’d sing in key and have better jokes in it. The video would be more expensive we would have made our cocks look bigger, all that kind of stuff, but no.
BBC: Total accident. At the time we were getting about 100,000 views from the sketches we put up from Republic Of Telly, which was good for us at the time, and we were expecting this one might go about 200,000. We knew it would be a little bit more special than the sketches because there was music in it. But it’s around 8 million now (8,185,222 views at the time of writing – OT).
MC: It’s a song and you can walk away with a song in your head.
You wound up competing with The X-Factor for Christmas number one last year...
BBC: That was a complete pain in the hole. We wanted nothing to do with it.
MC: It was moronic. We weren’t trying to be cool. We didn’t give a fuck about the Christmas number one. It’s for (adopts particularly strong Limerick accent) cuuunts. Christmas number one is for cunts.

THE STORY OF THE MOULDED BAGS
Actually a DJ friend of mine played it at a music festival in Portugal recently. He told me the whole place went mental...
BBC: Really? My bag’s from Portugal. This Brazilian woman got in touch with us and started supplying
our bags and she sent boxes and boxes of bags over from Brazil and Portugal. That’s where we get our bags now.
How many bags a night do you go through
on stage?
BBC: One bag a night on stage. This one has had a few uses though. The sickener is that you get three or four uses out of it, you get used to it and then you have to throw it away. It gets comfortable and it gets nice but there is a time when you have to part with the bag. This will reveal my face eventually and that’s when it has to go.
How quickly can you put a bag together?
MC: I could knock a bag out now in 30 seconds.
BBC: He could. With the mould of the head and the heat gun. Yeah.
It’s that advanced, is it?
BBC: You think we’re taking the piss! That’s heat-moulded to my head. Honestly, look (leans head forward to show the mask properly).
MC: I’m a professional make-up artist.
BBC: He’s a professional make-up artist. ‘Cos if you use a normal bag that you just put holes in, you start choking, it doesn’t work like that. This one, no matter what you do, my eyes are where they’re supposed to be, my nose is where it’s supposed to be and so is my mouth, and that’s the only way I can perform, because if I didn’t I’d be… Van Morrison did 15 years with a bag on his head and look what happened
to him.
Seriously, you’re a professionally trained dancer, aren’t you, Mr. Chrome?
MC: No. That’s a delicious lie. That was the Daily Mail getting it not on the money. I come from a family of dancers. My ma is a choreographer. My sisters are dancers, so I was in a house of dancing but I was never trained. In fact, the thought of going out on stage and dancing was as inviting as getting a kick in the balls, to me. I hated it. But you can’t avoid what goes on around you. That’s what happened there. But I’m not a professionally trained dancer, I’m just fucking brilliant at dancing!
In the video for ‘Róisín, I Want To Fight Your Father’, there’s definitely a homoerotic vibe happening between you…
BBC: Ah yeah, we’re bent with each other now.
MC: We’re bent with each other now. We decided, “Fuck it!”
BBC: Yeah fuck it, there’s a recession on, they’re after discovering a particle that goes faster than the speed of light so we just decided… fuck it!
MC: Fuck it. We’ve been living together for 21 years now so we just decided to start sleeping together.
Right. How’s that working out?
MC: It’s a bit gay, but we’re getting used to it. It’s grand, it’s good, we like it.
Are you planning on getting married?
MC: Yeah. Eventually, for tax reasons.
BBC: For tax reasons. If you’re a couple in a band the tax cuts are brilliant.
There must be some disadvantages to working and sleeping together…
BBC: No. I don’t think so.
MC: Sure John Lennon and Yoko Ono did nothing but gold after they started shacking up. Like that album they had, Woman Is The Nigger Of The World.
There’s a song on your new album called ‘Black Man’. Are its lyrics – “I need a black man in my gang/ A black man doing black man thangs” – not slightly racist?
BBC: It’s gay racist. It’s a Freudian concept. It’s about wanting to be gay with a man because you hate his race.
MC: It’s a Freudian concept that you just made up right there.
BBC: Yeah I just made it up. It’s not real, like.
MC: It’s a song about stereotypes. Everyone gets a mention in it, not just black men. Puerto Ricans. Jews. Mafiosos. Men in wheelchairs. Russians. Gays. The whole shebang. It just sounded better to use ‘Black Man’ as the chorus.
BBC: But as well, according to Hollywood the best gang members are black men so if that’s what Hollywood’s telling us…

The Making Of Serious
About Men
How was the album recording process?
MC: It was grand. We went up in a hot air balloon, come down about three weeks later and we’ve got an album on our hands. That’s pretty much it. Do you ever fall out artistically?
BBC: Not fall out, we’d have the odd disagreement, which you have to do if two people are making the
one thing.
What’s a Rubberbandits disagreement like?
BBC: I call him a ‘faggot’ then he calls me a ‘faggot’, then we go round the back of my shed and start shifting each other (laughs).
How are the people of Limerick taking to
your success?
BBC: Limerick are grand, Limerick are… they like it. I don’t know, I haven’t been there in a while.
MC: What does Limerick make of us? (pause) They love it, I suppose. I mean, anything that comes out of Limerick everyone just latches onto and says it’s great, no matter what the fuck it is. There’s a statue of Richard Harris down in Limerick that’s shit and everyone says it’s great. It’s shit. It’s like the one of Phil Lynott up in Dublin. It’s a shit statue and everyone says it’s brilliant because it’s Richard Harris and he’s from Limerick. So I assume that they think we’re great because we’re from Limerick. They might just think we’re shit.
Will there ever be a statue of you in Limerick?
MC: I hope so. I’m gonna make one anyway.
BBC: Just put it up there.
MC: Or else we’ll put a plastic bag on the Richard Harris statue.
Have you been in touch with Dolores O’Riordan?
MC: No (shakes head). She won’t return our calls. And we baked her a lovely flan and stuffed it underneath her door. She wasn’t having any of it.
Tell me a little bit about the new TV show that you’ve done for Channel 4.
BBC: We did MTV in June… they just pointed the camera at us and we went around acting the bollocks. We just did one for Channel 4 with the director of Father Ted, Declan Lowney. He’s a fucking mad cunt, he’s brilliant. We put effort into this one. That was a whole different shebang to MTV or RTÉ.
BBC: Yeah, we put effort into sets and lighting. The whole thing amounted to what, 24 minutes of footage? Three by seven? That’s 21 isn’t it? I’m shit at maths, I failed maths for the Leaving Cert. 21 minutes of footage but a ridiculous amount of effort just for those 21 minutes. About three months of work. Two months writing, one month preproduction.
Are you making much money doing this?
BBC: No we make about as much money as someone managing a line in Dell. After the government has its way with you and management and all of that, you just end up with a normal wage, but we don’t give a fuck. I’d rather earn a normal wage doing this than, I dunno, skinning chickens. What do normal
people do?
MC: Skin chickens.
What are your expectations for the album?
BBC: We don’t care. We make songs that make us happy and put it out.
MC: We don’t care. I suppose that’s an across the board answer. “What do you want from it?” Oh we want to become millionaires and make loads of cash from it and get butlers…
But you’re already upper upper upper class…
MC: Ah yeah, but we were born into that. We wanna make our own line out. We want to get loads and loads of famous money… nah, we don’t.
BBC: We want to put out a product that makes us happy. And if people like it, great. And if they
don’t, grand.
MC: Nah, actually I want loads of money.
BBC: Okay, we want loads of money and we want to smash champagne bottles off each other’s heads and go up in hot air ballons and piss into the
Atlantic Ocean.

HEY, MR. ICE CUBE, HERE'S A HURLEY FOR YA!
Why do you feel the need to disguise your faces?
MC: We’re cowards.
BBC: We’re cowards. I want to go to fucking Dunne's and buy carrots and not have people coming up talking to me.
MC: That’s why we wear the bags. We want to go to Dunne's and buy carrots.
During our Electric Picnic interview, you said that you wore the bags to attract women by “looking like shopping.”
BBC: Well, yeah, we do wanna look like shopping as well because women will want to fuck us if we look like shopping. And if you have a bad experience they won’t be able to find you because they’re looking for the guy with the plastic bag – ah shit, we became too famous for that now, they’ll know who it is.
Do you wear the bags out and about in Limerick?
BBC: Loads of men do and say they’re us, so we might as well, yeah.
MC: Yeah our friend Sully got a threesome and a free hotel room because he told the man in the hotel he was us.
BBC: I got a text from a friend the other night about a girl who shifted me in Limerick. I wasn’t in Limerick at the time.
The basic premiseof 'Shift Girls' seemed to be that you guys “shift” girls but you don’t ever actually fuck them...
BBC: Yeah, yeah. The song is about just loving shifting girls and not having any of the complications of fucking them because if you shift them they think you’re holding out on sex so they’ll start doing things like washing your jocks.
What about blowjobs?
BBC: No no, ‘cos even that you’re teasing them too much. If you just shift them they think you’re a gentleman and they’ll start ironing your clothes.
MC: I believe it was Peter Kay who said, ‘I like sex but you can’t beat the real thing’ (makes wanking motion with hand). Riding girls is… so 2009. So we ride each other and shift girls.
How do you feel you’ve been treated by the
Irish media?
BBC: Grand. Though the Daily Mail fingered us. They followed us down the road and got photos of our two buddies who pretended they were us.
MC: I think it’s flattering that they followed us. Now sadly, they photographed our hipster friends. Our hipster decoys.
BBC: We were in the Davenport Hotel. We were inside in the jacuzzi. They were following us, and we knew, so we sent out our two buddies.
Did they actually do that?
BBC: Yeah! They followed us down the road with telephoto fucking David Attenborough type lens. I remember you even flirted with the journalist, she was writing in shorthand.
MC: She was, she had lovely shoes.
BBC: And then she burnt you.
MC: She did, she tried to burn me. We sent out Davey and Brian. Who else burnt us? The Independent burnt us… no. Who were the crowd that thought we were from Clare?
BBC: There was a big article about us masquerading as Limerick men when we’re really from Shannon. Which was great.
Did you grow up in Limerick all your lives?
BBC: Yeah yeah, 100%. Both our families.
MC: My ma grew up the road from Terry Wogan. He’s a Limerick man. Apparently he doesn’t wear his wig in down time. Have you heard this? When he’s with his friends and family, it’s wig off. He just does it for the telly so he doesn’t frighten people.
BBC: So it’s a hat! He’d terrify people. Remember when Marty Whelan fucking stopped dyeing his hair? I couldn’t deal with that.
MC: We all got a bit of a fright there.
BBC: That was too much for me.
MC: Not as much of a fright as Marty got. It turned his hair white.
Going back to the Irish media, Joe Duffy gave you a pretty hard time on Liveline...
BBC: Ah no he didn’t.
MC: Ah fuck Joe, he’s grand.
BBC: Joe is a professional bastard. He was just doing his job. I’ve no problem with that at all.
MC: He’d milk sadness from the teat of
howling women.
BBC: I actually liked it when Joe was being a sneaky cunt on the radio because I was like, ‘You professional bastard!’. He’s a professional cunt.
You famously explained the concept of satire
to him.
BBC: I’d say he knew already, but he acts like he doesn’t because he’s empathising with his listenership. The detritus of Irish society.
What’s been the biggest moment so far in
your career?
MC: Giving Ice Cube a hurley.
A hurley or a Harley?
MC: A hurley. Fuck that, Gay Byrne speaking about him being great, he got a Harley off U2... so he gave it to Vicar St.? What’s his fucking problem? Drive around on it! How insulting is that? Seriously. That’s like publicly getting Connect 4 off you (points at OT) for Christmas and then giving it to you (points at BBC) for your birthday. And never playing with it. So yeah, meeting Ice Cube, giving him a hurling stick, autographed by us.
BBC: We’ve got a song called ‘Pure Awkward’ and the whole premise of that song is about going over to south central Los Angeles, getting to meet your hero Ice Cube, getting to hang out with him during the day in the early hours of Monday morning. And Snoop. And it’s like, “Oh my god I can’t believe I’m hanging out with my heroes,” and then Ice Cube gets you to over to a corner with him and tries to get you to smoke crack and tries to shift you and it turns out that Ice Cube is gay all along. We got to perform
that song…
MC: (interrupting) But here’s the rub. There’s a line in it; “It’s a Monday, I got up pure early, I showed Ice Cube the proper way to swing a hurley.”
BBC: That’s an actual line in the song. Two young fellas from Limerick in their bedroom.
MC: So we did the gig… Sunday night we went out and played that song, a support slot at Ice Cube’s concert with him and another band, and we met Ice Cube at about five minutes past 12 on a Sunday night so technically speaking…
BBC: (nods seriously) Monday morning.
MC: …we got up pure early, presented Ice Cube with a hurley stick and I told him, you swing it much like you would a baseball bat. It’s a Monday, we got up pure early, we showed Ice Cube the proper way to swing a hurley. It happened!
BBC: So we’re there writing a song in a bedroom, in Limerick, on a computer and then a year later…
MC: It happened!
BBC: And afterwards we said, we really have to write a song about winning the lottery. ‘Cos something else got prophecised as well. Did we prophecise something else?
MC: Er... well, we don’t have horses.

DULEEK, CO. MEATH IS DECADENT AND DEPRAVED
What’s been the worst reaction to your shtick?
BBC: A gig in Duleek. A gig in Duleek, Meath, with Joe Rooney and Andrew Maxwell. If you can imagine an entire room of people, in Duleek, an entire room not getting the joke. So basically, this was before ‘Horse Outside’, we go in there and their minds are made up, these two lads on stage are real, hard scumbags and they want to fight us. So we had a lot of people with pint glasses doing that (waves fist) – we had to leave the stage after 15 minutes because they were gonna kick our heads in. But Andrew Maxwell told us that all the audience were fucking doing coke. He was watching them. But it was a particularly misinformed crowd.
You actually feared for your lives?
BBC: Yeah it was really scary, because we’ve had loads of gigs where people don’t get it and that’s grand, but I don’t want to get a glass into the face. Now I’ve played the Bogside. I’ve played a song called ‘Up The Ra’ in the Bogside, and the song takes the utter piss out of the IRA and they were grand!
At least you can step off stage, pull the bags off, and nobody knows who you are!
BBC: That’s fuckin’ handy. A total ‘they went that way!’ type of thing. And worst of all, the one good thing about the gig is that it was relatively well-paid. The cheque bounced. Twice! The curse of Duleek!
Do The Rubberbandits have a motto in life?
BBC: What’s the motto? Always be true to yourself and… wait we do have a motto, don’t we?
MC: Take every day as it comes…
Both: (in unison) … and let no-one say that you can’t do nathin’.
BBC: That’s it. And up the Ra!

Serious About Men is out now on Lovely Men Music.