Culture That Made Me: Waterford magician Keith Barry picks his touchstones

The Williamstown man includes Ozzy Osbourne, The Shawshank Redemption, and several self-help books among his selections 

Keith Barry is coming to both Cork and Waterford as part of his Irish tour. 

Keith Barry, 50, grew up in Williamstown, Co Waterford. In 2003, his first TV series, Close Encounters with Keith Barry, was broadcast on RTÉ, announcing him to the wider world as a magician.  

He has consulted on Hollywood films and published three books, including the children’s book Mind Magic. He is performing his show, Unhinged, nationwide, including Cork’s The Everyman (October 16-17) and the Haven Hotel in Waterford (October 24).

The Klutz Book of Magic

The first magic book I ever got was The Klutz Book of Magic. I got it on a school tour in Scotland when I was 14. It came with five secret magic props. I learned every trick out of that book inside out. The one difference between that book and magic sets, which I’d been getting since I was five years of age, is that the tricks actually fooled adults. Before, they were pretending and playing along with these magic sets. Once I refined those tricks, I straight away went out and started to perform in the public arena.

Practical Hypnotism

Practical Hypnotism by E Wolff is a small pamphlet on hypnotism, but there’s a lot in it, telling you how to capture people's visual attention for hypnosis. On the book’s cover, there was one of those hypnotic spirals. I cut it out and put on a pin and spiralled it in front of people's eyes to start the process of hypnosis. That book was pivotal.

Early skills

I hypnotised a guy in my Irish class in Mount Sion in Waterford. David Burke was his name. I got him to be a chicken in front of the class. He got detention because the teacher thought he was only acting the maggot, not knowing he'd been hypnotized. I gave him my copy of Practical Hypnotism. He read it and became a professional hypnotist. Burkey is still one of my best friends. He never returned the book until years later I was on The Late Late Show. I got him tickets for the audience. I'd forgotten about the book. He found it in his attic, and he gave it back to me live on The Late Late Show.

The Shawshank Redemption

Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. 

My favourite movie is The Shawshank Redemption. It’s an amazing movie. It’s such a well-written story. It's beautifully acted — Morgan Freeman is such an amazing actor — and the film is a message of hope. The end is very poignant.

I got to know Morgan Freeman on the set of Now You See Me. That was a pinch me moment. He's very nice, but he knows he's Morgan Freeman. Woody Harrelson introduced me to him on set: “This is Keith. He came up with all the magic and mentalism for the movie.” Morgan Freeman said to me: “I challenge you to read my mind.” 

So, the first minute of meeting Morgan Freeman, he challenged me to read his mind! I did. It took a while. I told him about a childhood friend of his called “Boo Boo” he hadn't seen or thought about in 40 years. He freaked out. He jumped up and started running around the set. It was an amazing reaction.

Get the Life You Want

The book that got me into mindset stuff was Richard Bandler’s Get the Life You Want. He co-wrote NLP, which is neuro-linguistic programming, with John Grinder. Get the Life You Wantis a really good overall mindset book on exactly what it says — how to get the life you want using your mindset, basically, how to alter your subconscious mind and how to get rid of the fears in there.

The Choice

Edith Eger’s The Choice: Embrace the Possible is a phenomenal book. She was a concentration camp survivor, an amazing human being. She passed away in April, aged 98. Her thing in that book is that regardless of circumstances, you always have a choice on how to think. It’s why it's called The Choice. A powerful quote in that book was, “Escape the concentration camp of your own mind.” It's one thing for me talking about my experience of life and mindset strategy, but when you hear it from somebody who was in the Holocaust, in the horrors of horrors, it’s different. If she can do it, anybody can do it.

Ozzy Osbourne 

Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath at Villa Park, shortly before Ozzy died. Picture: David O'Mahony

My favourite gig ever by a long holy mile was when I managed to get tickets for Back to the Beginning with Ozzy Osbourne. It was in Birmingham, where he's from. I couldn’t buy tickets. Through a friend of a friend, I managed to get tickets the day before in the owner's box in Villa Park. Everybody was at that gig performing — from Guns N’ Roses and Aerosmith to Yungblud. Ozzy did two sets. It was three weeks before he died. They brought him up through a trapdoor on a wheelchair. He was zipping around the stage, rocking it out in the wheelchair. Every single person went bananas. His voice sounded really good. He was phenomenal.

Telling Lies 

Paul Ekman’s Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage is a good book on how to read people's body language and become a human lie detector — on how to detect when somebody's telling lies. A key is how to “baseline” people, so in other words, how to know when they're telling the truth, when talking about the weather, the traffic, their kids, things you can't lie about, and then how to look for deviations from the baseline. There's any number of micro-expressions. A micro-expression is a leakage of information through body language that happens in about 1/16th of a second. You must train your brain to look for these things. There’s all this juicy stuff in that book by Paul Ekman.

The Jinx

Robert Durst in The Jinx. 

I really like The Jinx documentary series. I was intrigued by the psychology behind Robert Durst, by him as a human being and the psychology behind it all. It was clear he was a serial killer. It’s bonkers to me how he got away with it for so long. I love those true crime dramas. That was a good one.

The Staircase

The Staircase is another amazing true crime documentary series. Michael Peterson is a very strange individual. His wife was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in masses of blood. He said she slipped on the stairs, fell and hit her head. Then it turns out that 16 years previous a female neighbour of his in Germany, who he was good friends with, was found at the bottom of his stairs, dead in the same position as the wife. So, is this a crazy coincidence? That's the question. Or is this guy crazily killing these women who end up at the bottom of the stairs?

The Game

The Game starring Michael Douglas is about this character paying to enter a game of life, but then the game becomes so true to reality he doesn't know, am I in a game or is this real life? It gets all dangerous. There is action, plot twists and turns, and surprises. It’s a great movie.