Fresh from his Tulfarris Hotel show in Wicklow, Ireland, Dylan Moran settled in for a chat about fried eggs, social media, and his upcoming Looking for Trouble tour.
Moran ended the Dolla Ho tour fittingly. “The show last night [May 3] was fun apart from when I was leaving the stage,” he told Cult Following from a moving car. “I tripped on my guitar cable, and I went down like a sack of spuds. Leaving the stage, doing the, ‘Thank you very much, night.'”
The stumbling comic will be back on the road from September 19 on a European tour, closely followed by a UK tour (remaining tickets available here). His latest art exhibition, Fried Sunshine, opened earlier this month at the Two Kats and a Cow gallery in Brighton.
He said of the venue: “I’m very lucky to be working with them. They really understand it from the inside out, and top to bottom, because they’re both working artists, and they understand how to make a show look good in a gallery.
“They understand how to make the gallery attractive at all times, really for people walking around and looking at things. There should be a certain feel in the gallery. You should feel like there’s lots of air and space around the things so that you can experience them, and they present things really well. I’m very lucky.”
Moran’s Fried Sunshine exhibition features various sketches of fried eggs (“there’s one wall that’s just eggs”, he said), and the artwork is available to view online following the conclusion of the exhibit.
“I must have done 100 [eggs], big and small,” he said. “A lot of fried eggs in particular, but I became obsessed. Sometimes you allow a passing thought to become a mountain, you let the molehill become a mountain and then see what’s in that. That’s when symbols have potency; that’s what’s happening. They’re allowed to hum or thrum, and you get the full power of what’s in there; the symbol is a visual poem. It has to have a literal meaning, but also it transcends. It presents the essence of something.”
Moran is most inspired not when surrounded by beautiful cities and plains but in the likes of train stations and airports. He said that airports and train stations are “sort of inspiring places because there’s a lot of hanging around and then hurrying. You see these people and these states where they have this floating attention.
“Nobody really wants to be in the airport or at the train station most of the time. You want to be in the place you’re going to, so there’s a sort of honesty in people’s behaviour, and I think I noticed it more and more. I know it sounds perverse to say it[‘s inspiring] rather than, say, talking about Prague or New York or something which are obviously amazing on the eye, but there’s something about humanity moving around that I’m always drawn to because a lot of my pictures are just people talking.”
Martin Parr, the late photojournalist, was noted by Moran as an influence on his sketches. “That is the poetry of the everyday,” he said. “He [Parr] was amazing at capturing that. He was so good at it. How can one man have seen so many moments?”
Many moments more to come for Moran, too, who will set out on his Looking for Trouble tour on September 19, 2026. The run will conclude on May 30, 2027. “You have to [look forward to it], because otherwise you’re dragging your art into this enterprise, and I wouldn’t do it.
“You just wouldn’t do it. It’s too big and it would, you know, you have to want it, you have to look forward to it. It has to be like a tasty dish that you’re going to enjoy, because otherwise it’s no fun at all.”
Part of the show, Moran says, is built around the worries of modern life and the encapsulation of current media trends. He said: “It strikes me that we’re all a bit benumbed by our exposure to the world and through media in a way that we didn’t know. You’re a young fella, for me, I really feel the shift coming from another time when everything was snail mail pace.
“I think I’m over it now, but there was a period of a few years when I felt very jangled by the pace of modernity and modern media and the way we all use it. I mean, the stuff is designed to fry you. You’ll flash fry your mind if you use that shit all day.
“People want things in front of them, and it doesn’t really matter what it is. Then you get to a point where you realise you’re not feeling anything anymore because you’re not. You’re just chasing away the effects of the last thing with the next thing. I think we all have done that. We’ve realised that, you know, ‘Oh, Christ, I’m listening to another podcast’ or something. I’m scrolling again after wasting an hour earlier on, it’s a permanent feeling of being kidnapped daily.
“So are you going to pass your own marshmallow test, or are you going to try and zone out again on the pleasure of some form and find yourself stuck. I think everybody’s doing that at the moment. They’re trying to get out of it or zone out, or get out of the shit situation they’re in or what they feel to be a crappy surrounding. And then they are for two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, six hours, whatever it is, and then, ping, they’re back.”
One recommendation of listening to Chico Hamilton later, and Moran was gone, presumably trundling down some road in the beautiful Irish countryside. On the other end of the line, a press of Instagram to start scrolling, the first video being of a man lighting a firecracker, dropping the lighter, and running out of frame with the soon-to-be-exploded device.
Moran’s Looking for Trouble tour will begin on September 19. His Fried Sunshine exhibit can be viewed online.
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