Tonie Walsh

My connections with ThisIsPopBaby go back a long time, long before the group was formally constituted. Producer Jenny Jennings has often regaled me with stories of being at warehouse parties I did under the Horny Organ Tribe/Elevator banner in the mid-1990s. She would have been a teenager at the time, connected with the work of The Corn Exchange, the Commedia del Arte group set up by my dear friend Annie Ryan and whose work I championed on the cusp of The Septic Tiger.

I can’t take credit for inventing the type of mixed-media, multi-disciplinary event that was Elevator but it was unique for its time in Ireland, shook up the entertainment scene and was the making of the Ormond Multimedia Centre. And it was like honey to a bee for Jenny, so no surprise that our paths would cross again many years later and we would end up doing similar-themed events at Electric Picnic, etc.

Philly McMahon would co-write my one man show, I Am Tonie Walsh, that ThisIsPopBaby premiered at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre in Winter 2018. When he first set me the task of writing my life story I couldn’t imagine how we could turn it into a coherent and compelling piece of [quite dark] theatre but that’s his extraordinary gift as a dramaturge.

Philly was the first person to call me “chicken”, aeons ago when he was moonlighting behind the bar in a wee speakeasy called Centre Stage on Parliament Street. I remember it quite clearly as he also pinched my arse and I devoted a paragraph to it in my journal.

Years later, he and Jenny got me to curate an exhibition on the history of LGBT Pride in Ireland. It went up as part of the Queer Notions cultural sidebar to Dublin Pride. That was about ten years ago. Such a brilliant and necessary intervention in public discourse, not unlike what ThisIsPopBaby has attempted with Where We Live. Not enough people are doing this type of utterly critical work and I laud them for it.