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Ohn a stage in a Camden pub, Barry Quinlan, frontman of Irish rock band Bleech 9:3, shares the energy of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. He hunts and swings around the microphone and his eyes pierce the back wall as the excited youths increase and fall into the surrounding pit. The play in the middle of May has the same energy that I had as the first Arctic Monkeys or DC springs demonstrations; with the big signings Bleech 9:3 on both sides of the Atlantic, many festival dates this summer and an impressive, exciting five-song EP, the band will soon be playing bigger rooms than this one.
But when I meet Barry and my three bandmates earlier that day, there’s no such thing as a terrible energy. Bleech 9:3 brings a sense of calm to the boardroom of their management company’s offices while employees wander outside. This sobriety is hard-earned: Barry and guitarist Sam Duffy are fellow Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) supporters. Quinlan smiles: “It’s an anonymous program, so we’ll say ‘sponsors’.”
Bleech 9:3 started out as a duo: Barry and his younger brother James on bass in one band, and guitarist Sam and drummer Luke O’Neill in the other. In his previous group, inspired by austerity and a new spirituality, Barry wrote “bright, almost saccharine” songs, but now, “this is a real story that I wanted to start telling”. That “bleech” refers to the white origin (although they keep the meaning of the numbers a secret).
With his vocals soaring over haunting guitars, the EP features iconic images such as Jacky’s protagonist, and the likes of Cannonball’s slaying. On No Surprise, he sings: “To change your evening / Call an angel to plant your heart around your head.” He calls that line “how to do it. Like the book: Prepare Yourself for Dummies. Seek something spiritual to take what’s in your heart and plant it around your head like a garden. Grow love in your mind instead of an empty desert.”
He has been trying to develop his mind since he was a child. The Quinlan brothers grew up in Dublin “in a house of five, a mad house,” says Barry. Family life was full of music: “In my grandmother’s house in County Clare, I have a picture of big glasses of red wine, cigarette smoke, and then these songs and an acoustic guitar. But, he says, “their father’s father was an alcoholic, my mother’s father was a gambling addict, so we had it as if it came from both sides.
Barry, now 28, started drinking as a teenager and was in rehab when he was 20. But when he got out of the shelter, he quickly relapsed. “This brought me a period of isolation that I used to do – I couldn’t do it with my friends because they all knew I shouldn’t do it.”
He also did 15 weeks of rehab, “and I was drunk after one day at home”. Then, on 22 February 2019, “I went to my last place – to please God – and I thought: how have I been in a place like this? In those questions, everything affected me. I was very far from myself, from everything, and I knew that everything was coming to me again, if the bullet left the gun.”
He let his thoughts wander, “into the darkness of the room and beyond, into the ether, out into the night: there must be something, well, God, you better be real because I will commit a conspiracy if you are not there. And at that moment, I felt something touch my heart and the interest in using it was removed. “He decided to do an exercise that he had already been asked to do but did not do well: to write 10 dangerous consequences of his habit. The next day I went to group therapy and I read the stuff and I just cried. It was so beautiful, I felt like exorcism, like I had reached the beach.
As a result of Barry’s trials, his brother James was also sent to rehab at the age of 17. “My parents had gone through the rough years at home, along with Barry, and my sisters too,” he says, resentful of standing more than his brother. “We were all … Bad was bad, for lack of a better word. I was like showing signs. So, like: do you want to go to rehab?” It didn’t last long – unlike Barry and Sam, James and Luke are not alcoholics. “The expert couldn’t believe it, maybe I’m not from there, but I learned a lot.”
Luke was also affected by the alcoholism around him. “Where we come from, it’s more common than what we do,” he said. “Overuse is normal.” Ireland. I started drinking when I was young, we all did when I was 12, 13. And in our family there is a habit of alcoholism. I think I know how to deal with the problem, and I know it needs to be taken very seriously. “Luke was the first person Sam reached out to when he wanted to relax. “When Sam called me, I saw that he was just scared. I just wanted to be with him.”
Sam was “very attracted to the idea of going to bed all the time, because I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin for a long time”. Every attempt at abstinence lasts a few months, and then fails. Sam says: “Luckily, bad bad things happened to me, and I failed enough times, that the last time I got the itch, I said to Barry: I’ve got to do something about this or something is going to happen.” Meanwhile, Barry and Sam had been introduced through a mutual friend, and Barry “helped a whole bunch of guys” in AA, so he helped Sam through the 12-year AA program.
Barry had already passed 1,000 days, but it wasn’t good. “When you take away the alcohol, you still have the -ism, you know?” He says. “I was always in pain.” In an attempt to understand, he visited a Buddhist temple near Cork, which had a room with a statue of Buddha on one side and Christ on the other. His early spiritual awakening was evident. “I sat in the middle, not looking at anyone.” Then I heard Jesus speaking clearly: ‘Come and talk to me. I can’t ignore it; I’m not stupid enough to put it down to psychosis. I did, and since then I have felt a presence in my life that I cannot ignore. To me, recovery is proof that there is God, and addiction is proof that there is a devil. You see the destruction that happens in the lives of addicts, to them, to their families: nothing but killing and evil.”
Similarly, for the first year of abstinence, Sam “was on this ‘pink cloud’ as it’s called recovery, this new way of life. He also had a spiritual awakening – common in AA, which encourages belief in a power greater than yourself – but his was different. “I didn’t understand Catholicism at all.
AA’s support led to a surprising closeness: Barry and Sam started making music together, and eventually all four left their old bands. Sam’s girlfriend lives in London, and he realized that, “for (the group) to do this properly, we had to be here, at the forefront of the industry”. He moved and started working in a guitar shop; Barry agreed with him and got a job at All Saints in Spitalfields; the other two arrived four months later. Everything they’ve gone through has been fed into the music industry, and the whole sound of their self-titled EP, is clearly broken down; Luke compares the noise they make to “lightning and thunder, a great explosion.”
As well as their problems – Cannonball was inspired by Sam’s failing relationship – there are also real people from outside the group: their most famous song to date, Ceiling, was inspired by a recovering person who recovered with Barry and Sam, and started again. Barry said: “I remember the last time I called him. “I was like, ‘Brother, I got it,’ and he said: ‘No, I don’t think you do.’
Bleech 9:3 is a huge part of some Irish talent today, from Fontaines DC to Boxing, Price CMAT, Sprints and countless others. For Barry, in Ireland having such a visible event is difficult after “years of being taken over by another country, your culture is that if you share freely you can be beaten or thrown in jail”.
And the poverty that the world has historically faced means that art was created from “very few and ubiquitous things. Anyone can write a poem. The tools are a little expensive but they were everywhere. You think that people are gathering in squares, in hiding, it’s warmer than where they live. People share these difficult things through the use of art. You come from the same soil as these people are, and everyone has an idea of what to do, and everyone has a right heritage.”
The group has been working continuously; last week he supported Nick Cave. “I feel like I’m worthless,” says Barry. “You become this machine that lives for one hour every day (in the game) and the rest is just trying to keep your energy up.” Sam explains about their tour: “We’re in the middle of a five-week UK tour, then we write an album, then we do 40 festivals. Then in October we record, then we tour.
When the album arrives, it will “tell a bigger story about those years at home,” says Barry. But there are already intelligent and enlightened beings that have been included so far. Playing it live, Barry says, “is the best test of all: how true you are to your art.”
