‘Being a human is overwhelming at the moment’: Bressie hits the road again
Niall 'Bressie' Breslin is touring with his live podcast show. Picture: Moya Nolan
Whenever he does a live show of his podcast Where Is My Mind?, Niall ‘Bressie’ Breslin will look out at the audience and spot them - the lads who don’t think they should be there. “Nobody knows what to expect with the show, so you always have the few lads at the front with their partners, going ‘what the f**k am I doing here?’” he says. “I love that part of the show.”
Breslin clearly relishes a challenge, but he also knows that last year’s podcast tour was a sellout, and he can no doubt anticipate the same this time around. “It feels like I’m in a sweet spot with it now,” says Breslin. But for those who, like those lads up the front, aren’t sure what to expect, he describes it as “a very irreverent, humorous look at the state of my mind”. He’ll visit Cork Opera House on Sunday, April 21, with chef/motivational speaker Trisha Lewis (“She’s funny, she’s empathetic, she’s intelligent”) as his guest.
At the shows, he wants his interview guests to feel disarmed but also like they’re in a safe space. “This is why sometimes I don't go for these big names, because they're so media trained, because they're terrified. They're terrified about things they say being taken out of context and turned into a cheap headline on Facebook,” he says. “So what you get is a very guarded interview, which I understand completely - because I’ve been in a position where things I’ve said have been taken out of context, and it is really awful.”
Alongside the guest interviews and his own monologues, which include both serious and funny tales from his life, he’ll play several meditative piano compositions that he wrote during lockdown. In the future, we might even see music once again being the main focus of the former The Blizzards frontman’s live performances. “I would love to do just full music,” says the Mullingar native. “The idea of the piano compositions and that type of stuff is something that I've always wanted to do [live], but never had the balls to do it.”
This sort of honesty is typical of Breslin. To judge him on the outside would be to assume the 6’ 4", tattooed, 43-year-old is a paragon of machismo. But since he went public about his mental health struggles in 2013, he’s shown that in reality he’s a sensitive, deep-thinking person. He’s frank and honest about what he finds tough (take social media - he tells me he spends Sundays using a ‘dumb phone’ to avoid going online), and it’s this that draws the fans to him - the sense that he is resolutely himself.
As frontman of The Blizzards in the 2000s, Breslin plied a trade in Ireland’s rock scene. Before that was a stint playing rugby for Leinster, and after The Blizzards he was a judge on The Voice of Ireland. But as he detailed in his memoir Me and My Mate Jeffrey, his rise to fame coincided with several years of mental ill health.
Yet out of that period of his life came his discovery of mindfulness (he has a Masters in mindfulness-based interventions) and a new career doing talks about his experiences. Starting the podcast Where is My Mind? gave Breslin the space to bring deeper discussion about mental health to a wider audience.
The world of podcasting has huge stars and huge earning potential - take Joe Rogan, who has a $250 million multi-year deal with Spotify. But that’s not the reality for podcasters like Breslin. “My podcast is quite niche,” he says. “So I couldn’t have the numbers that other big podcasters would have… so I have to tour. I have costs and they absolutely will not be covered by advertising on my numbers. People like me shouldn't say stuff like that, but that's just the truth. For it to actually make sense and put the time and hours and days of research we put into this, I have to get out on the road. And I love it.
“What I love most about it is that I get to take these weird subjects and try and make them accessible for people,” he continues. “Sometimes they work, sometimes they’re car crash - but that’s the beauty of doing a weekly podcast.”
One of his biggest recent podcasts was a monologue about a health scare. But he also knows when a topic won’t work, joking: “You know when you’re in the middle of a podcast and you want to punch your own face that it’s not something people are probably gonna wanna listen to.”
When he brings Where is My Mind? on the road, he wants to make the concepts in it accessible, relatable and functional. Anyone with preconceptions should let them go, he says, as it’s a show about “entertaining and educating”. Yet does the wide appeal of his live events serve to highlight Ireland’s challenges with mental health?
“I think what Ireland is now is we're comfortable with stress and anxiety and burnout, we're not comfortable with the more serious mental health issues that we see,” is his answer. “I think when Sinéad O’Connor died, some of the rhetoric and discourse around it was so stigmatising. I think Ireland thinks it’s further on than it is. But when you look at our current systems, when you look at the CAMHs reports… we aren't there.”
His PhD at Trinity College Dublin is looking at “failed systems” around mental health, he says. “The issues are complex, the solutions aren’t [complex]. We’re just not doing it.”
But for all this, Breslin is keen for people to realise that anyone who says they have their stuff figured out is lying to them, and he certainly doesn’t feel like he has it all figured out: “You can go up there and do your fridge magnet philosophy, but no one is listening to that anymore.”
That said, he wants people to recognise “you’re a little tougher than you think you are”. He believes we can be vulnerable and powerful at the same time.
“Being a human is feckin’ hard - and it’s overwhelming at the moment,” he concludes. “When people leave the show, what I’m trying to get them to feel is that they’ve taken a deep breath and they feel lighter leaving - that’s the goal.”
- Niall ‘Bressie’ Breslin’s Where Is My Mind? podcast tour will visit Cork Opera House on Sunday, April 21, with special guest Trisha Lewis. www.corkoperahouse.ie, www.niallbreslin.ie
The Scratch and a lot of Jon Hopkins. The Scratch - the rawness of it, I think they’re just this ball of cultural energy. Some of the ambient piano I’m trying to create now is inspired by Jon Hopkins.
The best show I’ve ever gone to was Jesus Christ Superstar in Mullingar Arts Centre, 1987. My mother was doing the props and she couldn’t get a babysitter. I haven’t been to a recent show since the pandemic, though I love them.
Mad in America by Robert Whitaker, and Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis by James Davies. Two books for if you want to understand in a very coherent way why we need to change our mental health systems.
By a mile - Slow Horses (Apple TV). Jackson Lamb is one of the greatest ever characters created. He’s almost the Del Boy of the Spy World.
Season two of Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart. He’s one of the only people who makes me feel sane in an insane world.
