No More Putting The Audience's Safety At Risk

Jason Byrne picks up the phone in the dead of night at his Irish countryside home, and yawns. That morning he’d been engaging in perhaps typically Byrne-like shenanigans.

“I spent the morning rolling around the ground with a man who trains professional cage fighter Conor (“Notorious”) McGregor,” he says, pointing The Music towards a YouTube clip. “So you can write ‘Byrne in training for Melbourne’.”

Last year in a raucous parody of Miley Cyrus he came out literally swinging, perched on a wrecking ball. For this year’s show, 20 Years A Clown – marking his 20th Edinburgh Festival, his tenth year doing Melbourne – he says he wants to pull out as much “mental shit” as he can.

"Every venue we went into with it – fucking nightmare."

“I’m still working on my opening for this year. My lawyers and all are talking about it. The wrecking ball was most dicey in Edinburgh because I came swinging from the back of the stage towards the audience, out over the top of them, and my promoter was saying ‘Please don’t do this,’ and I was saying ‘It’ll be all right.’ Apparently if I fell on anybody I’d be up for a million in sterling damages if I killed or hurt someone. So I don’t think I’ll be doing anything as risky as that. It was great fun but every venue we went into with it – fucking nightmare. You can’t hang it here, you can’t hang it there, you can only swing here. In Liverpool I couldn’t get off the fucking thing – it just kept going faster and faster. It was the bane of my life but it was great craic.”

Byrne’s known for his high energy manic entrances, over the years having hit the stage to a dance routine, or skipping, or bouncing from the wings on a space hopper – and for good reason. “It wakes me up! My nerves work by trying to shut me down and put me to sleep so that’s why I open the show that way; it’s a shock to my system.”

"I wanted to wrap myself in bubble wrap and roll down and let the audience play with me."

But when he’s not on stage, Byrne’s brain won’t let him rest. “One of the things I wanted to do (last year) was just wrap myself in bubble wrap and roll down and let the audience play with me for ten minutes at the end of the show, and if they want they can take me outside into the street. But in Melbourne I’m playing the Forum, and I think the seating’s raised... so the chances of me falling over the edge are quite high.”

This year Byrne’s annual visit is taking in the nation’s capital – “I’ve been to Canberra once and I described it as like licking cardboard” – and Hobart which The Music tells him is quite a bit like his native land.

“You mean ‘miserable’,” he chuckles. “You said it’s very like Ireland in the climate and that means it’s shit. I fly out there for the sunshine! It’s snowing here right now. But that’s Ireland. It’s like a teenager. ‘I don’t care if it’s March, I’m fucking snowing. I hate ya.’”