We get to make a living with our best friend
They’ve gone alligator hunting, were shook down by a Mexican guard and catfished by a trickster – but The 2 Johnnies say it’s all worth it as...
JUST a few short years ago, Johnny McMahon and Johnny O’Brien would have been classed as a pair of dreamers. They both had ambitions to ditch their day jobs — as a butcher and a hurley maker — and become singing and TV stars.
It’s a dream that would be familiar to many but not many actually make it come true. Fast forward to 2022 and now ‘Johnny Smacks’ and ‘Johnny B’ are two of Ireland’s biggest stars.
The 2 Johnnies, as they’re collectively known, have a podcast listened to by millions, present a radio show on 2fm and have yet another TV series coming out on Monday, ahead of a soldout 3Arena Show this December. It only took nine minutes for the tickets to fly out the door.
‘We are living the dream,’ says McMahon. ‘Another day, another dollar. It’s unreal. I feel like Garth Brooks himself bar I lost my cowboy hat up at the concert but other than that it’s unreal. When you put tickets on sale you are always nervous, no matter what. People can tell you, “oh this is going to go well” but until you get to see the tickets selling you don’t know.’
So who are these two lads from Tipperary? Are they comedians? Podcasters? Broadcasters?
‘We’re full-time mad b ****** s,’ quips O’Brien before revealing the secret of their success. For in a world where misery upon misery seems to be heaping on to our young people in terms of the housing crisis and difficulties in moving forward with life, the Johnnies feel their job is to cheer people up.
‘We get up every morning and go at it, like,’ says O’Brien. ‘We’re hungry for it. We love what
‘That’s what we see our job as being – having the craic’
we do and we love talking to people, we are energised by the interactions we have with people and the texts and messages we get sent.
‘People are mad for the craic and that’s what we see our job as being — having the craic. There is enough doom and gloom out there. There are reports that seven out of ten young people are thinking about emigrating. Our job is to keep the craic pumped out.’
I counter that craic might be all very well but even this dynamic duo can’t fix an economy that is doing little to help today’s youth.
‘Ah we will have a go,’ says O’Brien. ‘We are going to give Dublin’s economy a fair rattle in December now, I’ll tell you.’
Despite their easy friendship, the pair aren’t lifelong pals. It was when they were paired as performer and compere at a GAA event that they really hit it off and noticed they worked well together.
‘We come from different backgrounds,’ says O’Brien. ‘I was in a band so I was writing songs and playing music and having the craic with people, and any of the gigs I used to do were as much talking as dancing. That was the side of things I came from. Johnny [Smacks] is more of a storyteller and presenter at heart I think.’
McMahon is actually from New Ross in Co Tipperary while O’Brien is from Cahir, where the pair are both based.
After dropping out of college in Waterford where he was studying law, McMahon became a butcher and worked behind the counter at Supervalu among other places. Outside of performing with his band, O’Brien’s day job was the age-old art of making hurleys.
‘I was in college for a year,’ says McMahon, who is witty and engaging. ‘I just learned how to party — they don’t give you a degree for that and they don’t pay off the loans you built up. It’s the experience, isn’t it? I met new people and I learned to live on my own. Life skills, but nothing that would get you a degree.’
Why though, did he want to study law? ‘I watched Legally Blonde a couple of times and said if Elle Woods can manage it then there’s nothing I can’t manage,’ he laughs. ‘No, it was either that or a sports course and my mother said I would be more likely to get a job doing law than doing a sports course.
‘I think she knew that college wasn’t for me — she just wanted me to go down and get the experience and get it out of my system,’ he says, before adding, ‘I don’t worry too much about it now!’
Nor should he, given the phenomenal success that he has, which both he and O’Brien put down to working hard at what you want. For so many parents whose children are currently in flux about college courses and Leaving Certs, the story of The 2 Johnnies is a heartening one but McMahon feels teens are under a lot of pressure to decide about the rest of their lives when really they are too young to know what they might want to do.
‘I think there is always that pressure on kids of that age — what do you want to do for the rest of your life? Jeez, I’m 31 now and I’m only starting to figure it out. When I was 25/26 I was on the dole for nine months thinking, what the f**k am I going to do? I wasn’t going to earn a living from sitting at home watching Law & Order every day.
There is always that pressure but everyone will find a way. Sometimes it comes later in life like it did for us and I’m glad it did. If we were 18 we’d be throwing televisions out of hotel room windows!’
It was their ambition to do what they do full-time. ‘Everybody wants to get away from their normal jobs and do something they love so it was always our ambition to go fulltime and make a living,’ he says. ‘It’s coming true, thank God.’
Their latest escapade is a new documentary series — their third — trip to the States in The 2 Johnnies Do America... Again.
‘America is such a crazy place there is so much that is left undiscovered,’ says McMahon. ‘The last time we went to LA and San Francisco and places that I guess Irish people are a bit more familiar with. This time, there aren’t too many Irish people heading out to Atlanta to meet a rapper and go and lay a verse on one of his tracks. Also, tour operators will not do the stuff we do in this series. America is f ***** g wild and we want to show people just how wild it gets.’
So just how wild did it get exactly? Wilder than a Waterford college term?
‘We went alligator-hunting in the Bayou — you can’t do that in Laois,’ laughs McMahon. ‘We met a police officer who showed us his 27 guns he keeps at home with a shotgun always loaded beside the porch. He let us fire his police issue firearm as well — you can’t walk up to a cop here and say: “Let us fire that gun, will ya?” First of all, they probably wouldn’t have a gun.
‘We met rappers in Atlanta and hung out with them. For two lads from Tipperary, it’s very hard to fit into the nightclub scene in Atlanta, where everyone has $25,000 chains hanging around their necks. We were going round the place in a pair of runners we bought in duty free on the way out.’
McMahon admits they got themselves into a few hairy situations too, some that will maybe have his mother wishing he was a solicitor now instead.
‘It never gets old if you pull up to get chicken wings in a shop and a lad is carrying his handgun openly on his hip,’ he says. ‘You are always uneasy. In America, while you are looking forward you are always looking back, you would want your head on a swivel.
‘We crossed the border from the United States into Mexico and it did not go smoothly. A Mexican guard trying to shake us down, cartel members ringing up the person we were with to ask what we were doing there. We visited a neighbourhood in East Flatbush and they were fully convinced we were undercover cops because we were white. So it gets dicey at times but the aul bit of Irish brogue and charm wins them over in the end.’
It’s certainly not a life for the faint-hearted but McMahon and O’Brien have already gone where few dared in their podcast. Their catfish story — after O’Brien was tricked by someone online using a
false identity and subsequently found he was not the only victim — became a smash hit at home, in the UK and as far away as Australia.
They wanted, says McMahon, to ensure the catfisher got the help she needed and have never revealed her name. But as yet there are no plans to make a follow-up, simply because they are too busy.
‘I haven’t time to walk my dog at the moment,’ says McMahon. ‘As soon as we get time we will sit down to revisit it. We might do something with it but it’s not high on the priority list at the moment.
We have the TV show, the radio show, the podcast and we have three other TV shows in development as well.
‘When we get offers, we consider them and the main thing for us is, would we enjoy doing them, can we fit it in and can we do it justice? So I wouldn’t rule anything in or out.’
Though they don’t like talking about their private lives, O’Brien is now in a happy relationship while McMahon is getting married to his long-term girlfriend Annie this December. It’s been a whirlwind year for the pair, not least because their 2fm Drive It With The Two Johnnies show plunged into controversy just three days after it began, when a video excerpt from their podcast that was branded sexist landed them in hot water.
‘That was rocky at the time,’ McMahon admits. ‘We came out straight away and owned it. The video went up on our Instagram and as soon as we saw it, we took it down, we took responsibility and said sorry, we will do better. Certain people wanted to push a different agenda,’ he says.
‘It’s not nice when someone from the papers is ringing your mam at your house and ringing your exemployers. That’s never nice, that’s not what we get up in the mornings to do. You have people saying, “ah sure you put yourself out there to expect this” and I mean you do expect a certain amount of scrutiny but you don’t expect that kind of stuff.
‘We have gone on to better things and we are back sucking diesel.’
These two country lads, who adore every day they work together, never set out to get a radio show but boy, do they love it. ‘The radio is brilliant,’ says McMahon. ‘Any day you get to wake up and do a national radio show from your hometown of Cahir is such a buzz. We have our own studio there in Cahir and we get to do it every day and we are enjoying it.
‘We probably hadn’t seen ourselves going into radio. We filled in for Jen Zamparelli for a week last year and Jen invited us on her show several times before that. Once we started doing that we thought, we’re good at this. We enjoy it because we can say, “what are you up to for the weekend?” and two seconds later a lad will ring you and say, “Jayz boys I’m headin’ dancing in Drumlish” and we can get him up on air and have the chats with him, which we can’t do on the podcast.
‘The podcast is great and we get lovely messages about making people laugh and helping with their mental health during lockdown, which is super — that’s lovely to hear. But the radio is immediate — you get a text three seconds after you say something, which means
‘The aul bit of Irish brogue and charm wins them over in the end’
‘We are the same as we were five years ago’
anything could happen and it often does on our show. It’s great fun.’
They are giving a voice to the rural youth of the country and engaging everyone in a bit of a laugh as really it’s very hard not to like The 2 Johnnies.
‘We are pretty much normal lads,’ says McMahon. ‘We aren’t Billie Barry kids — no disrespect to them, as they are great as well. But I would be singing in my room in front of the mirror holding a can of hairspray and now I get to hold a microphone in front of 10,000 people in the 3Arena. It’s mad.
‘We are not media-trained, we aren’t stage school lads, we haven’t been brought up in the broadcasting media, we’ve got where we are because we are who we are.
‘We feel responsibility as well for people in rural Ireland who are down the country and voices like ours that haven’t been brought up on the radio. We are the same as we were five years ago when I was working behind the butcher counter and Johnny was making hurleys. We are still the same fellas, we still have the same ethics, we still like the same stuff.
‘Also we show the pack that anyone can make it if you work hard enough and jeez we work as hard as we can,’ says McMahon, and they do as during our interview, O’Brien ghosts off to prep for his 2fm show. ‘But I used to be in a bacon factory dreaming about being on television and now Monday night at half nine I’m on the telly for a third series, so it’s mad.’
McMahon has a sister and so does O’Brien, but effectively they are each like a brother to the other. In spite of the fact that they have so many plates in the air, McMahon insists they never fight.
‘We’re far too honest,’ he insists. ‘If we are annoying each other we will say, “you are annoying me now”. No, we never fight and we always get on and that’s why it works, that’s why it’s so special.
‘We are like long lost brothers. That’s how we treat each other — like brothers.
‘We are best friends too and it’s quite common in Ireland for brothers to be best friends so it works for us. Any day you wake up and get to make a living with your best friend is a good day.’
■ THE 2 Johnnies Do America... Again begins on RTÉ2 on Monday at 9.30pm