‘Alleged sponsors’: The AA bond powering Bleech 9:3’s explosive rise
On a mid-May evening in a Camden pub, Bleech 9:3’s frontman Barry Quinlan channels the jagged intensity of Ian Curtis — hunched, jerking around the microphone, boring a hole in the back wall as teenage bodies collide in a circle pit. The show has the same I-was-there electricity that marked early Arctic Monkeys or Fontaines DC. Major labels on both sides of the Atlantic are signing the Dublin four-piece, their self-titled five-song debut EP is drawing breathless praise, and this summer they will play dozens of festivals. Soon, the rooms will be much bigger.
Yet when Quinlan and his bandmates gather hours earlier in a quiet meeting room at their management company’s offices, the stage energy is gone. Bleech 9:3 bring a calm that, as it turns out, has been hard-won. Quinlan and guitarist Sam Duffy are each other’s sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous. ‘It’s an anonymous programme, so we’ll say “alleged sponsor”,’ Quinlan says with a smile.
From chaos to clarity
Bleech 9:3 formed from two separate pairs: Quinlan and his younger bassist brother James in one band; Duffy and drummer Luke O’Neill in another. In his previous group, Quinlan — buoyed by early sobriety and a new spirituality — had written what he calls ‘bright, nearly saccharine’ songs. Now, he says, ‘this is the real story that I wanted to start telling’. The band’s name, Bleech, speaks to a clean start (the meaning of the numbers 9:3 remains a mystery).
The EP’s autofictional portraits include the nihilist protagonist of Jacky and the doomed romantics of Cannonball. On No Surprise, Quinlan sings: ‘So to change your yesterdays / Call an angel in to sow your heart around your head.’ He describes the line as ‘a how-to. Like a book: Sort Yourself Out for Dummies. Seek some spiritual thing to take what’s in your heart and plant it around your head as if it was a garden. Grow love in your mind as opposed to the barren wasteland there.’
That clarity has been a long time coming. Quinlan, now 28, grew up in Dublin ‘in a house of five kids, a madhouse’. Music ran deep: ‘In my granny’s cottage in County Clare, I have an image of these big bulbous glasses of red wine, cigarette smoke, and then these songs and acoustic guitar. It really resonated in my heart.’ But so did addiction. ‘My dad’s dad was an alcoholic. Mum’s dad was a gambling addict. So we kind of had it coming from both sides. You’re born with that illness.’
He began drinking in his teens and was in rehab by the age of 20. ‘I didn’t fight it at all: please put me in somewhere.’ After leaving his first residential centre, he relapsed quickly. ‘That brought me into the real isolation period of my using — I couldn’t do it with my friends because they all knew I shouldn’t be doing it.’ A second 15-week stint ended the same way: ‘I was drunk after one day being home.’ Then, on 22 February 2019, he entered what he hopes is his last treatment. ‘I went into my last place — please God — and thought: how have I ended up in a place like this again? In that questioning, it all hit me. I was so far away from myself, from everything, and I knew that was all coming for me again, like the bullet had left the gun.’
He let his mind wander, ‘into the darkness of the room and beyond, into the ether, out into the night: there has to be something. “All right, God, you better be real because I’m fucked if you’re not.” And in that moment, I felt something touch my heart and the obsession to use was taken away.’ He finally engaged with an exercise he had been asked to do before: writing down the ten most serious consequences of his addiction. ‘I went into group therapy the next day and read those things out and just erupted into tears. It was beautiful; it felt like an exorcism, like finally reaching the shore.’
Barry’s brother James was sent to rehab at 17 because of what the family had endured. ‘My parents had gone through the nightmare years in the house, with Barry, and my sisters as well,’ James says, more gruff and halting than his brother. ‘We were all … The fucking thing was fucked, for lack of a better word. I was kind of showing signs. So, like: do you want to go to rehab?’ It didn’t last — unlike Barry and Sam, James and Luke are not alcoholics. ‘The therapist wasn’t convinced; I probably didn’t belong there. But I learned a lot.’
Drummer Luke O’Neill was also shaped by alcoholism around him. ‘Where we come from, it’s more common than not,’ he says. ‘Overconsumption is socially normalised in Ireland. I started drinking when I was young, we all did, at 12, 13. And addiction runs in my family. I guess I know how to deal with it well, and I know that it should be treated very seriously.’ When Duffy first reached for help to get sober, O’Neill was the one he called. ‘When Sam called me, I could sense that it was just panic. I only wanted to be there for him.’
Duffy had long been ‘incredibly attracted to the idea of just getting fucked up all the time, because I was so uncomfortable in my own skin for so long’. Each attempt at sobriety would last a few months, then fail. ‘When that itch starts to tell you to have a drink again, you can never remember how much shit it caused you before,’ he says. ‘Luckily, enough bad shit had happened to me, and I’d failed enough times, that the last time the itch came to me, I said to Barry: I need to do something about this or something really bad’s gonna happen.’ By then, the two had been introduced through a mutual friend, and Quinlan — who had ‘sponsored a whole legion of dudes’ in AA — helped Duffy through the 12-step programme.
Quinlan had already passed 1,000 days sober, but it had not been smooth. ‘When you get rid of the alcohol, you’ve still got the -ism, you know?’ he says. ‘I was carrying this sickening feeling all the time.’ Trying to understand it, he visited a Buddhist centre near Cork where a room held a statue of Buddha on one side and Christ on the other. His earlier spiritual awakening crystallised. ‘I sat in the middle, not looking at anyone. And then I heard Jesus speak, as clear as day: “Come and speak to me.” I can’t ignore that; I’m not foolish enough to put that down to psychosis. So I did, and since then I’ve felt a presence in my life that I can’t ignore. For me, recovery is proof that there is a God, and addiction is proof that there is a devil. You see the destruction that happens in an addict’s life, to them, to their family: nothing but carnage and evil.’
Duffy, for his part, spent the first year of sobriety on what is known in recovery as a ‘pink cloud’. ‘Then the first year to second year was very difficult.’ He also experienced a spiritual awakening — common in AA, which encourages belief in a power greater than yourself — but different from Quinlan’s. ‘I didn’t understand Catholicism at all. I tried it, hard, but in the end I have a belief in a personal God. It is still Christian.’
The sponsorship brought an extraordinary closeness. The pair began making music together, and eventually all four members left their previous bands. Duffy’s girlfriend lived in London, and he realised ‘in order for [the band] to do this properly, we needed to be here, in front of the industry’. He moved over and started working in a guitar shop; Quinlan joined him and got a job at All Saints in Spitalfields; the other two arrived four months later. Everything they had been through fed the songwriting. For all the noise in their EP, O’Neill says the sound is ‘lightning and thunder, a big explosion. There was communal feeling that there was something different about this group — we were smiling more when we left the room.’
Musical influences and the stories behind the songs
The EP’s Cannonball was inspired by Duffy’s failing relationship, while their most-streamed track, Ceiling, came from a different source: another addict who had been in recovery with Quinlan and Duffy and later relapsed. ‘I remember my last phone call with him,’ Quinlan says. ‘I was saying, “Brother, I understand”, and he said: “No man, I don’t think you do”. And he hung up the phone and a month later he was dead. People our age that died as a result of the illness, that’s something that keeps calling to me, keeps coming up in the writing.’
Bleech 9:3 are part of a wave of Irish alternative talent that includes Fontaines DC, Kneecap, CMAT, Sprints and many others. For Quinlan, the vibrancy of the scene feels hard-won after ‘the long years of being occupied by another country, your culture being this thing that if you openly share in it you might be attacked or thrown in prison’. He points to the poverty Ireland has historically faced, arguing it forced art from minimal materials. ‘Anyone can write a poem. Instruments are slightly more expensive but they were all over the place. You imagine people gathering in the pub, sheltering, it’s warmer than the place they live. People share in these difficult things through art. You come from the same soil as these people, and you inherit the idea that everyone has the right.’
What’s next for the band
The band have been touring relentlessly. Last week they supported Nick Cave. ‘I feel empty, dude,’ Quinlan says. ‘You turn into this machine that comes to life for like an hour every day [for a gig] and the rest of it you’re just trying to conserve your energy.’ Duffy outlines the itinerary: ‘We’re in the middle of a five-week UK tour, then we write the album, then we do 40 festivals. Then October we record, and then tour. But how lucky are we, to be tired in pursuit of our dreams?’
The forthcoming album, Quinlan says, will ‘tell the broader story of those years back home’. But even now, with just an EP to their name, the band feel they have condensed lifetimes of wisdom into their songs. Playing them live, Quinlan says, ‘is the best test of all: of how true to your art you have really been. And I’m so glad that we’ve done what we’ve done with those songs, because that’s a little lifeline every day. You get to play them.’
