The Two Johnnies
3Arena, Dublin
★★☆☆☆
In a strange way, the 2 Johnnies share corners of the zeitgeist with Taylor Swift songs and Sally Rooney novels, in that people often delight in telling you they aren’t really for them.
It’s easy to sneer at the chicken-fillet roll, the Junior B shtick, the hackneyed jokes and the songs about chasing girls and drinking lots of pints. But it’s hard to sneer when you see 13,000 people fill 3Arena for a live podcast on a Saturday night, many arriving from towns dotted around rural Ireland and all of them fanatical in their support.
Warm-ups begin at 7pm, as the DJ Fergal D’Arcy blasts superpub staples from the decks onstage. He is an expert in pop mash-ups, deftly weaving between Same Jeans, Mr Brightside and Bonkers after conducting a World Cup of Christmas songs.
D’Arcy introduces the crowd to the responsorial psalm. Intermittently, he roars “oggy oggy oggy” and the congregation cheer back “oi oi oi”. The whole show, chats and stories included, encourages the audience to clap along in 4/4 rhythm.
This is only the warm-up to the warm-up, as the Cavan folk five-piece The Highstool Prophets emerge to really light a fire, belting out renditions of Dirty Old Town, Grace and The Fields of Athenry.
The 2 Johnnies – Johnny “Smacks” McMahon and Johnny “B” O’Brien, from Tipperary – finally appear at the back of the room, both dressed as Santa, both hanging from a Pink-style trapeze and somersaulting towards the stage. It’s surreal. Mickey Harte’s We’ve Got the World echoes around the arena.
The all-singing, all-dancing show zips from guest to guest. Dustin the Turkey discusses avoiding Christmas slaughter. Nathan Carter very dutifully performs Wagon Wheel. Mark McCabe, of Maniac 2000 fame, plays a vicious medley of EDM anthems accompanied by an Irish-dancing troupe.
That, of course, leads into a Marty Morrissey soliloquy ripped straight from his playbook of rousing All-Ireland-final-day odes to the diaspora across the globe. Arguably out of place for a live podcast but undeniably emotive.
What might fly under the radar is the horniness of it all. Raunchy stories of anal sex destroying a white couch and menstrual-blood-inspired nicknames. Two swingers, who appeared on the podcast in June, are brought out to teach the Johnnies how to perform different sex positions.
Whoops and hollers indicate that this is what the crowd wants. The duo’s departure from RTÉ 2FM earlier in the year might have widened their margin for crudeness. Fans will say it is a lack of filter that makes them endearing.
A couple of years ago Epic, the Irish Emigration Museum, launched a This Is Not Us campaign designed to eradicate negative stereotypes around Irish people. They pinned it on Paddy McFlaherty, an imaginary, computer-generated Irish character with a big ginger head, drinking a pint of Guinness and wearing a T-shirt that read “I love spuds”.
Many people made the same half-joke. The truth is that plenty of us do love spuds and pints of Guinness and an awful lot of us have big ginger heads. There might be a similar truth in the 2 Johnnies: what feels trite and low-hanging for critics is just relatable to those who enjoy it.
The final hour of the show, a barrage of folk and pop songs largely plucked from their album Small Town Heroes, gets the room heaving. That said, without taking any delight in saying it, none of it is really for me.
