Mind matters as Bressie eyes Cork show 

Following 2023’s successful run of sold-out shows of his live Where Is My Mind? podcast tour, Niall ‘Bressie’ Breslin is doing another run of dates around Ireland and appears at Cork Opera House on Sunday, April 21 .

He is eager for the ticket holders to know in advance that these events are a lot more than just one guy talking into the microphone, he explained.

“The key to this type of thing is that I make a point of it being called a show, you have two hours to properly entertain the audience. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for more than 20 years, so whether it’s a mental health podcast, a general talk or it’s music, you still need to have people walk away being entertained. So this show has a lot — for instance, there is a lot of live music. I use music to tell my story. It’s me and the piano, which is my first instrument really — like I only started playing guitar when I was younger because girls didn’t like piano players! I tell the audience a story through monologue and music. For example, there’s a track called ‘Teen Spirit’, which talks about the death of Kurt Cobain and the impact it had on me as a 14-year-old. I talk about the words that I should have heard about that but instead I was told by my teacher that he was a coward. That kind of type of stuff stuck with me. So it’s me and music that makes up the first half of the show, and then the second half show is completely unstructured. I have a different guest every night and anything goes. I specifically don’t have a set of questions for them but I have done my research; it’s a conversation rather than an interview. So that is the template for the show.”

He pinpoints one reason for his decision to not have prepared questions.

“I think when I have questions, I don’t listen as much and I don’t give them enough space, because you kind of panic and keep thinking, ‘I gotta get through these questions in front of me and I’ve seven more in front of me’. So I don’t do that. That does help disarm them a little bit, some people think I’m there to psychoanalyse them but it’s not that at all. I’ve had people such as Adam Clayton, Michael Harding and Conor Moore on the show, people like that, and when you talk to them, you realise that a lot of people who are in the public eye in some realm or another, they can be terrified of context and terrified of things being taken out the context, because that’s what happens to them generally, the media landscape. So they close up and my job is to try not to let them do that, but also not to force the atmosphere. So structuring things on stage in advance isn’t ideal, and you can get some real magic in that setting.”

Bressie’s guest for the Cork date is a well-known online presence, the much loved Trisha Lewis, perhaps better known as Trisha’s Transformation on Instagram, a chef and author who tackles issues such as stigma, health and happiness. It is hard to imagine Bressie being any more enthusiastic about her taking to the stage with him.

“I’ve met Trish a few times, and I always say that, honestly, if I could rent her to just be around all the time, I would. She just makes me feel so good about life. Also, obviously, coming to Cork you need someone who can have a lot of craic with you as well. She’s an incredible communicator and she’s so witty. When I asked her to join me on the night, she said ‘no problem, you can pick me up as you drive past my house on the way to Cork!’ I don’t always get a guest from the area I’m going to, but, look it, there’s an abundance of great guests I could have from Cork, so I might as well pick from those options.”

While the first half of the show has an overarching framework, Niall does allow himself to react to current events and add new sections as he goes.

“I have a track called ‘The Voice Of The Small’, based around a JFK speech in 1963 and I started playing that after Israel went into Gaza. And then when Sinead O’Connor died, I did another piece for her that I wrote that week as the outro, so I do try to move with something when it happens, slightly zeitgiesty. Like I sort of mentioned when Sinead passed away that I found that week really interesting because I had thought Ireland was further on than where we are with mental health. I think I was a bit shocked, I think that while people are comfortable enough talking about things like stress and anxiety but we’re not yet comfortable with the deeper stuff. My PhD research is looking at 200 years of mental health intervention in Ireland, and obviously, it’s grim reading.

“When you look at people, I still think the stigma is very much still there when it comes to things like schizophrenia and bipolar and psychosis, and it’s always been there. I think around the time of Sinead’s death there was a kind of misunderstanding of who she was really.

“However the piece I wrote about her for the show was purely about her voice and nothing else ... ‘just for one second, shut up and listen to her voice, you’ll never hear anything like that again ever’. I met her a few times, but I didn’t ‘know her’ so I interviewed Nóirín Ní Riain, who was her biggest inspiration — Nóirín was a Sean-nós singer — and about Sinead’s life. And she was just like, ‘someone like Sinead will never happen again, No one will get close to it, she was something different,’ and I wanted to remember [Sinead] for that.”

Bressie’s Where Is My Mind Podcast Live comes to Cork Opera House on Sunday, April 21, at 8pm, tickets available from Cork Opera House or www.corkoperahouse.ie