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“A coat and a bridal veil. They are calling him t
heir “business cherub.” Today is doubling up as Ryan’s training cid. Dirt. Acid. Dirt. Acid. Dirt and acid. Dirt. Acid. Dirt. Acid. Dirt. A sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich. Dirt.” Taoiseach Shame has prepared five chicken fillet rolls. Dressed in a cow onesie, the artist – real name Louise Butler – brandishes the foil-wrapped sandwiches in a sizeable Ziplock. They are the evenings sustenance, she says, before stashing them in a schoolbag hooked to the handlebar of a Lidl trolley inside the entrance to the Block T warehouse studios on Bow Lane. The trolley is laden with speakers connected to a car battery. There are miniature synthesizers, power banks, plastic bags, cans, water bottles and a Chinese takeaway box repurposed as a digital amp. Fastened to the cage is a long Casio keyboard. Hanging off the side is a partially banjaxed Dora the Explorer keyboard and an Xbox controller, designed as a Fender guitar, for the game Rock Band 3. Originally, on its front, the trolley had a sign, fashioned from old car old car license plates, bearing the band’s name: Acid Granny. But that, vanished at a forest rave in Kilkenny several months ago. In the middle of the cart is a red ironing board, sourced from a farmhouse in Wicklow. It is folded out to accommodate a spread of guitar effects pedals, a drum-machine, an old iPad and a mess of cables. Fixed to either side of its frame is a microphone. Dangling from its iron rest are six cardboard potatoes. “Before this, we were always bent over at fucking ninety-degree angles,” says Alex Moore, one of Acid Granny’s members. “We were those lads, hunched over, heads bobbing,” says Cillian Byrne. “We’d be on Zimmer frames by next year if we hadn’t got this,” Moore says. On a warm, sunny Thursday evening in late April, Moore and bandmate Robbie Reilly lean over “the Granny”, warming her up for an imminent live session on the streets of Dublin. Reilly, or Minglord Gran Reilly, wears a curly blonde wig, a blue satiny shirt, and baggy basketball-themed trousers. Meanwhile, Moore is in a blue and green frock with white pyjama bottoms. In a corner is Byrne. He wears a witch hat, pink dress and glamour nana sunglasses, and he fiddles with a calculator-like synth. It produces a series of grotesque, squelching beats, which delight him with their almost scatological textures. “Oh, I feel I’m in Coppers,” he says. “Tunes like that.” Behind the trio, and by two boxes of potato wedges, is Oli Ryan, the vocalist and guitarist for the experimental group Tongue Bundle. His face is smeared in make-up. Around his neck is a large metal sign, reading ‘Staff Only.’ He wears a long beige trench 16 day and an on-street rehearsal. After the release of two albums in two months – Urban Hurling in February and Songs from the Radio on April Fool’s Day – the group is eager to impose a degree of structure to their set ahead of festival slots at All Together Now, Open Ear and Glastonbury. Although generally, Reilly says, they would be inclined towards the insane allnight improv-heavy sessions, now is not the time for that. They want some semblance of order to balance out the chaos. Once six o’clock chimes, Moore starts up a gentle, glistening three-chord lounge jazz loop. Butler warms up her voice, turning a stray remark into a lyric, singing tenderly, “I like my life to be in a state of stress.” Reilly generates a spaced-out melody using a delay effect. Byrne barks gruffly into the mic, “mash”, and across the street, a bemused mother and daughter stand in silence, watching as the cart is lugged onto the sidewalk. They roll the trolley up the sloped street, pass the entrance to Swift’s Hospital, and ready themselves for the two-kilometre march to Grattan Bridge. Repeatedly, the wind blows off Byrne’s hat. He duct-tapes it to his head, and proceeds then to ad-lib a call-and-response with Moore, passing observations on nothing in particular. “See that yoke there?” “Yeah, that yoke right there.” Their voices are sampled and warped into abstraction. The smooth opening number is atomised until it is a freeform wall of noise, splattered with arhythmic digital percussion. A respectable suited pedestrian on her phone awkwardly attempts to walk by, avoiding all eye contact. Noticing this, Byrne inquires, “are you on yer way to work?” “I think they’re just terrified of us interacting with them,” Butler says later. “Yeah,” Byrne says. “It’s like if they acknowledge us, they’re somehow complicit or a part of it. It’s, ‘no, I’m just going to pretend they’re not there.’” “Fair enough, like,” Butler laughs. Though a parade of urban nomads now, the idea that germinated into Acid Granny was sown in Bayside by Howth, around 2015. Moore and Reilly started out as the bassist and guitarist in Spudgun, a band with between four and fifteen members at any given time. Their music drew from the likes of Frank Zappa and post-punk, and on-stage they were noted for their “space-related theatrics.” “We wore random, weird clothes,” recalls Sam Burton, lead vocalist for Spudgun and I Am The Main Character. “We were like an alien group who crash landed on this planet and raided a department store, not knowing what was intended for what gender. So, we blitzed the women’s section of Penneys.” Spudgun’s initial plan was to write an entirely new set for each different gig, Burton says. “We just didn’t want to bore ourselves, and I think, over three years, the most we ever did one show was three times.” Artist, director, model and Acid Granny collaborator, Katie Freeney says seeing the band live “spurned her on to start making videos again.” “After a fairly sterile four years at art college, I was so happy to see that there were weirdos making absurd art in Dublin.” In late 2016, a “shock opera,” evolved out of Spudgun, titled Schindler’s Fist. Butler came on board at this point, characterising the show as a less “PC version” of Acid Granny. Moore calls it “fetish techno with real instruments and people dressed in drag.” “We did a wedding with the birth of the anti-Christ onstage,” says Reilly. “Cillian was a priest, and then a member of the Galactic Senate, and then a God,” says Moore. “Naturally.” The first of the Acid Granny Trolleys was stumbled on in a warehouse one day in 2018. It was a Superquinn trolley, Moore says. “It was being used as a bin.” “We wanted to bring a car battery and a couple of amps to Portobello Square and play some psychedelic music,” Reilly continues. “It was guitar and bass, our expensive equipment,” Moore says. “Then we started messing around with small Casio keyboards, silly little funky grooves, which we’d put through mad effects pedals, and it was like, ‘wow, you can get mad shit outta this.’ If we just put these toys in the trolley, easy. We don’t need to care about this equipment half as much.” “And we just kept on doing that,” Reilly says. “It was just casual, like we’ll do that again and people were picked up along the way.” Byrne says he joined up after having fallen out of regular contact with the group for a brief period. “I was in town on a sunny day after work, and I saw the lads with their weird wonky beats.” “I had this flute in my bag which I can’t play. It was like, ‘okay, this is perfect’ as I was playing two notes along with them.” In April 2019, they began selling an eleven-track mixtape out of the trolley. Now titled Just Be Hoors, at first, the CD was given a new name with each sale – the estimated total being 90 – including Hoors Dying of the Flu, Hoors in Lourdes and Don’t be a Dry Balls in the Swimming Pool. “We’re just fucking built for marketing and branding,” Reilly says. The next month, Acid Granny went viral when, a pair of construction workers filmed Reilly and Butler wheeling “Granny” home after an all-night session. Praised online by Blindboy Boatclub, the result of this “taste of fame” as Byrne puts it, was Smells Great, their grubby, woozy debut single. “We became more of a unit after that,” Butler says. “The main thing before had been singing ‘give us your money, give us fifty quid,’” Byrne jokes. “Yeah, we started trying a little bit more,” Butler says. “We’re a bit more classy, now.” “CASUAL! CASUAL! CASUAL! CASUAL!” Outside St. James Church, a deafening mantra bellowed by Oli Ryan attracts the attention of a security guard and a family of stunned tourists. All Times No