With its loud bars and hordes of drunken revellers, Temple Bar on a Saturday night is not, by most standards, a magical place. But it was in this unlikely setting that Keith Barry pulled off the trick which changed his life. Barry had recently arrived in Dublin in 1999 to work as a cosmetic scientist when he found himself down in Temple Bar after a few drinks too many.

Before he decided to jump the queue for the Kitchen, the then-flourishing nightclub owned by U2, the Waterford-born chemistry graduate was no more than an aspiring, part-time conjuror with a gift for card tricks and visual pranks. Within a few minutes, however, Barry had taken the first steps that would launch his career.

“There were about 200 people outside the Kitchen: I tried to get in but they wouldn’t let me of course,” says Barry. “So I said, ‘Don’t you know who I am? I’m the celebrity magician.’ Even though I’d just moved to Dublin, I hadn’t done any gigs and nobody knew who I was. So they said, ‘Show us a trick’. I showed them a couple of magic tricks and they called the manager who said, ‘Yeah, come in’.

“It ended up that they asked would I mind staying back with the staff later on to do some more tricks. They invited me back the next week and then said, ‘Come here every Saturday night and do your thing’. So I did that for two and a half years and that’s where a lot of the breaks came.”

Barry’s chutzpah paid off handsomely. It was at the now-defunct nightclub that he first developed his trademark shtick of bamboozling celebrities; and it was while performing there that he landed his first full-time magic job. Within a couple of years Barry had his own RTE television series, an MTV special and the patronage of Principle, U2’s management company. Barry didn’t just jump the queue that night; he took a fortuitous short-cut into the big time.

But he knows better than most that appearances can be deceptive. While he may have taken advantage of his opportunities since that night in Temple Bar, the naturally confident Barry feels it’s not luck that has got him where he is. Between sips of mineral water in a Dublin hotel he repeats the same mantras of steely self-belief, relentless graft and unbending desire one hears from the likes of Westlife. “I really believe in visualisation: if you visualise something then it will happen, if you work hard at it,” is a typical line. It is no coincidence that Barry sports the voguishly spiked hair and trendy casual gear more normally associated with pop stars than magicians.

“I love to try and break rules and flip them around,” he says. “For years I’ve been reading that you’ve got to wear a suit if you’re a magician because they take you more seriously, but that’s all rubbish. And the teenagers, they appreciate that, I think — that I’m not going the normal route.

“Years ago, Eamonn Maguire’s (Barry’s manager) whole thing was: ‘We’re going to treat you exactly like a pop star and that’s the way we’re going to build your career.’ I agreed with that and it has worked.”

There is a crucial difference, of course: unlike the anodyne boy bands, Barry has talent to back up his ambition. He may project an off-the-cuff manner as he fools members of the public in his series Close Encounters with Keith Barry — he certainly pulls off a couple of impressive card tricks with casual aplomb after the interview — but perhaps predictably for a man whose stunts have included being dropped from a gallows and catching a bullet in his teeth, his craft has been obsessively honed.

Barry’s interest in magic started early, pricked by American imports on RTE television. By his mid-teens he had graduated from children’s box sets — “All magic sets are pretty much crap: you can’t really learn anything out of them,” he says — to more challenging books and tricks bought in Britain. “That’s what really got me interested because I thought, ‘I’m actually fooling people now’, and I really got a buzz off that. And it all snowballed from there.”

Even so, with his schoolfriends more interested in music and sport, Barry realised a hobby most associated with Paul Daniels seemed fatally naff.

“At school I kept the magic thing to myself because you’d just end up being ridiculed for it,” he says. “But I used to always mess with the gambling thing to take guys’ lunch money from them. I used to do the old three card monte: they went hungry a few times.”

Barry’s repertoire soon extended beyond schoolyard chicanery as he started performing at children’s parties each weekend. But rather than pursue magic full-time, at his parents’ insistence he moved to Galway to take a degree in chemistry. It was while studying there that his hobby started to take on a different hue.