During the lockdowns the magician and mentalist Keith Barry’s work schedule was wiped out and he became housebound. Rather than dive into DIY or gardening projects, he decided to write a book. Though it’s subtitled Everyday Mind Magic for Creating the Life You Want, and its jacket promises to give “a variety of techniques” to those who are “stuck in a rut or need help in life”, Barry insists that Brain Hacks is not a typical self-help book, wasn’t written for financial gain, and nor was it a project he particularly relished.
“I enjoy the challenge of writing a new stage show, and I think the reason the book wasn’t written when I initially attempted to do it was because I found the process of writing painful,” he grimaces, as we talk over Zoom. The 45-year-old certainly put a lot of his life into the book, which is surprising, because on previous promotional tours of duty he has been careful not to reveal too much about himself or his family.
“What’s lacking in some self-help books is that the authors don’t explain their own situation or where they come from,” he says. “They give you all these techniques that they say work, but do they really? And have they had any [of these] issues in their own lives?”
Even when they have had personal problems, some self-help authors don’t necessarily share those moments, he believes. “For me it was important to have that authenticity. I’ve put in issues I’ve had, and normally I like to keep my private life very private,” he says. “I think it was important for people to realise I’ve been through troubling times, as well as successful times and wonderful times.”
An example? In 2007 Barry was driving back from the funeral of Jim Aiken, a leading music promoter, when he was involved in a head-on collision that left him trapped in his car. After being cut free he was transferred to Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry, where he was treated for various injuries, including a broken knee and a smashed tibia and fibula. A doctor attempting to put his foot back into its socket was unable to do so because Barry was writhing in pain. After several unsuccessful attempts the trauma surgeon told Barry that unless he relaxed the foot would have to be amputated.
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As he explains in Brain Hacks: “I took a few deep breaths, calmed my mind down and began to dissociate myself from the pain, take my mind out of my body and basically self-anaesthetise my leg in order to allow the surgeon to pull my ankle back down my shin and into place.” This worked and Barry kept his foot, but faced months of operations and physical therapy. He says keeping his mental attitude positive aided a full recovery, as did a programme of physio at Anfield stadium in Liverpool.
His mind over matter techniques was used again when his daughter, Breanna, was born with damaged nerves in her left shoulder, leaving her arm paralysed. The condition is known as Erb’s palsy, but as a new father he was determined to do what he could, and put on an “invisible yellow Bob the Builder hat and looked for the best outcome” with a mantra of “Can I fix this?” After researching the condition, Barry did physio on his daughter’s arm every day for three months. Eventually his wife’s parents noticed Breanna had moved her arm above her head while she slept. “I kept doing the physio every day until eventually her arm recovered fully,” he writes.
Barry was first captivated by magic as a child and began performing in public in his teens, taking a different approach to the usual route of talent shows. “A lot of people think I started magic when I was 14, but actually I started at five, when I got a Paul Daniels magic set — that’s when the bug hit,” he says with a smile. “I got the Klutz Book of Magic at 14 when I was on a school trip to Edinburgh and I learnt every trick from it. I went into Waterford city centre wearing my dad’s suit, even though he’s a foot smaller than me. The plan was to go from restaurant to restaurant to ask them could I perform. I went to the Wine Vault, and I didn’t even need to show the owner a trick because he had seen guys in France doing magic in restaurants. He was probably the only person in Ireland at the time who had seen ‘table hopping’ magic. So he simply asked, ‘How much do you want?’ and I chanced my arm and asked for IR£20. I was there for years making that, plus tips, on a Friday night.”
He came to public prominence with the RTE show Close Encounters with Keith Barry, which ran from 2003 for two seasons. Since then he has had shows on MTV, CBS, the Discovery Channel, ITV and Virgin Media in addition to several tours of Ireland. While the public might tag him as a magician who reads minds, he sees himself differently. “There are two separate Keith Barry brands. I’ve been using and helping people with hypnosis for well over 20 years now, but very quietly. Bar the odd stunt that I would pull off to promote a show, people didn’t realise hypnosis was part of my business. In the past four years I really knuckled down and specified that I do executive coaching and mind coaching for athletes and businesspeople.”
According to his book, Barry has used “techniques that can transform your life forever” to “inspire thousands of people all over the world to dig themselves out of whatever hole they were in”. Sportspeople, from Olympians to international rugby players, have been among his clients, as have Hollywood A-listers. More prosaically, Barry has done stop-smoking seminars and helped people overcome fears, phobias, anxiety and stress. Visualisation is one of the key techniques, one he says he uses every day. Everything he has achieved, Barry says, “is a direct result of deep, repetitive visualisation”.
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Ultimately he thinks “brain hacker” is a good umbrella term for his combination of mentalism, magic and escapology. “If I had to give myself one title? I see myself as an entertainer, because the most pleasing aspect of what I do is entertain people.”
As almost all of his work had to transition online over the past 20 months, he has invested in a home studio and gives me a guided tour, via his laptop, of the equipment he has installed. Does this mean his future will be more about virtual entertainment? “When the pandemic hit I decided I needed to pivot online and it’s all state-of-the-art equipment in here. This is a broadcast-quality television studio,” he says. “I certainly became the busiest entertainer in Ireland online. That’s tapering off now, but I think there will always be a demand for online from the corporate world. Companies have figured out that if they have divisions worldwide, rather than flying them all to London for a conference, they’ll have it online, and that’ll continue for me.”
He does have a tour, Reconnected, planned for next spring and hopes it sells well, but admits: “This is the only time in my career that I feel a certain sense of nervousness about whether I’m going to sell out or not.”
“I am going to do a one-day motivational seminar [too], and the question is: do I go for the Bord Gais Theatre [capacity 2,000] or ring my agent and tell him I want to do it in the 3Arena [13,000]? It is a lot of seats, but I’ve always been ambitious. If you are going to do something, go for it full hog,” he laughs. As his book proclaims, anything is possible when you put your mind to it.
Brain Hacks is published by Gill Books at €16.99. keithbarry.com