PHOTO ABOVE BY VANESSA JORDAN
Honesty and passion to the fore as Jinx gets set for free Galway concert
September 24, 2010 - 6:00am
The Groove Tube with Jimi McDonell
Every day, people can be heard venting their discontent with the current state of Irish society. Many are disillusioned and angry with the government, and voice this on call-in radio shows. But you’d be hard pressed to find any modern Irish music that taps into these feelings.
That is, until you encounter Jinx Lennon. The Dundalk based punk/folk troubadour has been shining an unflattering light on Ireland since back in the boom times and will doing just that when he plays a free show in Róisín Dubh on Friday, October 1. Given his fired-up stance on things, how does Jinx feel about the Taoiseach’s now-notorious night out in Galway?
“I’ve a vision of a fella, he probably grew up with loads of people there,” says Lennon. “I’m just thinking of the mindset of Fianna Fáil people in a certain part of the country. They do what t hey like and they see other people doing what they like; they probably think there’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe he still thinks that way: ‘to hell with the rest of them, this is just the way I am, this is my way of doing things’.”
Jinx feels that a “moral compass has gone wrong” with our leadership but is not in the form to offer any sympathy.
“Of course it’s not good enough to have someone like that leading the country,” he says about Brian Cowen. “But the problem is, on the international scale, it’s done so much damage. People internationally see that Irish people take it, and people will not stand up for themselves.”
Jinx feels that the populace is guilty of misdirected outrage instead of actually taking a stand.
“The thing that really annoys me is what people get excited about in this country which is basically, sport,” he declares. “People will kill for sport. You get Facebook things being sent, there were 30 or 40 groups traumatised by that match where the French guy had the handball incident. People really got forceful about that and started opening up and I’m thinking ‘there something wrong with the way people think in this country’.
“The politicians in this country understand that,” he continues. “That’s why they go to all these matches and make sure they’re seen. Cos it’s like ‘we’re all one big nation together’. We can’t be one big nation when one man’s getting €300,000 and the other fella can hardly afford the ticket to go to the match.”
But Jinx Lennon’s music is not just about getting angry – it’s about getting uplifted. He comes across as a performer determined to shake us out of our malaise. This is very much the ethos behind the title of his latest album, National Cancer Strategy.
“It’s all about erosion of self-confidence in the last few years,” he says. “It’s all about the tension stirring beneath the surface; people are really, really angry. There are loads of things in this album about mindlessness and things going awry. As it progresses it’s about keeping sane and there’s uplifting songs towards the end.”
Jinx Lennon approach to songwriting is akin to that of a novelist, in that he concentrates on little kinks in personalities to create characters.
“I’m very interested in writing songs about individuals who find themselves totally alone in a situation that they’re not used to and have to get out of,” he says.
Over the course of National Cancer Strategy we encounter a woman having road rage on the dual carriageway, a couple breaking up, a man fighting diabetes and adults neglecting their aging parents. Lennon explains why he goes to the darker side of society in his songs.
“It’s almost as if people feel they’re going to live forever and nothing wrong is ever going to happen to them,” he says. “Some thing can go wrong; there are danger spots waiting for people, unknown to themselves. And the whole media thing gives people the impression that everything’s going to be grand and we’re all living in a very safe society. I like to see what happens when some switch is turned – ‘life’s not that at all. What’s going to happen to me, how am I going to cope here?’.”
While Jinx has established a loyal fan base through relentless touring, he still remains an artist with cult appeal. Building on that following is something he is always keen to do without compromising his punk-meets-preacher approach.
“My job as a songwriter is to get the stuff out there,” he says. “As long as people are talking about and giving it a bit of press, that’s great for me. My whole thing is about getting more fans on board, as much as possible.
by Jim Carroll:The Ticket/Irish Times
Jinx Lennon found his voice when he started singing in a Dundalk accent.
WELCOME TO Jinx Country. As much a state of mind as a border town, Dundalk is the place David ¡°Jinx¡± Lennon has called home for most of his life. It's where he woke up every morning as a young lad to the smells and noises from the brewery and the railway line. It's where he first grabbed a guitar in anger and joined a garage rock band to pick up chicks. It's where his band played on the roof of a cinema one night in a Get Back kind of wheeze but only three or four people showed up. Most of all, it's where Lennon finally found his voice ¨C the one he was born with.
Today, he ¡s sitting in the lobby of the tallest hotel for miles around, drinking a cup of coffee and talking about himself and his new album. You probably know Jinx Lennon already from the hundreds of gigs he's played up and down the land, telling the truth to the believers and the scoffers alike. You'll know him from dozens of scrappy, heart-on-sleeve testaments about what ¡s really going in the streets and fields of your town and parish. No-one else has songs that poke the scars and scabs of modern Ireland like Lennon's.
The new album is called Trauma Themes, Idiot Times , and Lennon is proud of it. There's been a lot of work put into these songs and it shows. The songs, says Lennon, are about making what he does universal.
They're universal themes. People anywhere can relate to the isolation I'm singing about. The isolation felt by someone living in a rural area who is getting bullied and harassed and ends up murdering somebody.
The isolation where people have lost the run of themselves and are committing suicide and killing their kids when the picture isn't perfect.
The isolation where families have turned into something from The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers where they're fighting with each other over trinkets after a parent dies.
Plenty of people have come up to me recently and said: Jinx, plenty of stuff for you to sing about now. But I don't want to sing about the banks or bankers,you need someone like Beckett to sum up those pathetic figures.
The music has also changed. There's a lot of pessimism and darkness and misanthropy in the songs, so I wanted the music to be really good, says Lennon. t took me a year and a half of going in and out of the studio to get it right. I was listening to a lot of Howlin Wolf and I wanted that raw rockabilly feel as the backdrop. I did a few songs with a few local lads who did that sort of thing, and that got me over the hump. It was important to make the music on the album more psychedelic, colourful and three-dimensional.
Trauma Themes, Idiot Times is an album that will bring a lot more people round to Lennon's gaff to marvel at what he is doing. It's where Lennon has been heading since he wrote a song called Get the Guards back when the garage-rock band were running out of gas. In some ways, muses Lennon, this record could have been made 25 years ago.
All the influences were there, but I wouldn't have felt comfortable doing this in my own voice back then. I had no self-confidence. I thought no-one would be into it and that I'd be a laughing stock. It was easier to try to be to cool and put on a façade and think I was Sterling Morrison. We thought we were changing the world because every other band locally had poodle haircuts and wanted to be Prince. In our own tiny bubble, we were the avant-garde.
When I listened back to the tapes of band practices, though, I always liked the throwaway stuff I'd come out with, like about courthouses and the local nightclub owner and the guards. Eventually, I stopped trying to sing in a mid-Atlantic accent, surrendered to my local accent and never looked back. But there was fierce stubbornness there for years before I found the headspace to do it.
When he started performing Get the Guards , people began to pay attention.
That song became a base and everything grew from there. Patrick Kavanagh used to always say that the parish is the cornerstone of great civilisations, and I do think singing in your own voice about local parish events creates an atmosphere. When I listen to Tinariwen, for instance, I get the sense of the Mali desert.
Some people mightn't think that Dundalk is exotic, but then Pat McCabe wrote Frank Pig Says Hello and did the surreal thing with Clones and turned it into a different world. That's what I am trying to do with my own stuff, to take the surreal stuff and characters from my life and join them up with the stuff I've been listening to for the last 40 odd years.
By now, he's past the stage of caring what people think when he opens his mouth and starts to sing. When some people hear my voice, they expect me to be jumping around the stage pulling funny faces and putting on goggly eyes,he says. When they see me, you can see them going where's the punchline?and getting annoyed because there isn't one.
The voice antagonises certain parts of an audience and they just can't get their head around what I'm doing onstage. And that's alright; I'm totally happy with that. Fuck it, like. If you're lucky, half of the audience will love you and half of them will hate you.
Yet he hopes he has now reached the stage where he doesn't have to do shows where he's kicking against the pricks for the night.
We've paid our dues, we've done shows in places like Letterfrack and in Donegal, where we've gone down like a lead balloon. You walk into a venue and you can smell a bad show. It doesn't matter. I always play a show as if there are 300 people enjoying it.
But we want to do shows which are positive for us and which get us out to as many people as possible. There's no need to make martyrs of ourselves any more. It's a necessity to keep working. There are a certain amount of shows we do every year, but we're realistic that there is a certain level we can't go beyond at the moment.
Creativity is the main thing. If the gas and oil ran out, as long as I had a guitar, a candle, a pen and a bit of paper, I'd be happy. It would probably be better if there was more turmoil because it keeps you grounded and makes you realise that the other stuff, the business stuff, is superfluous.
| Lennon gives us reasons to be cheerful |
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| Written by Alan Jacques |
| Wednesday, 18 November 2009 |
| WITH Christmas only around the corner there doesn't seem to be much to be cheery about at the minute with the constant media bombardment over our crippled economy, swelling national debt, staggering job losses and endless scandals implicating greedy politicians and businessmen. The Celtic Tiger is dead and gone, the good times are over, and one man who vehemently tried to warn us of our impending doom is Dundalk noisemaker Jinx Lennon. A true original, Jinx's 2006 album Know Your Station Gouger Nation!!! was filled with savage, bile-filled rants about our sinful lust of material things and voracious appetites for cheap thrills, all at the price of losing our souls and national identity. Back with a new album, Trauma Themes Idiot Times, Lennon is not the sort to gloat and say I told you so. A bigger man than that he has now taken his scalpel to get at the malaise that lies below the surface of modern Ireland ¡ª isolation and de-humanisation. People are definitely more distracted with life nowadays because there is more clutter to occupy the blank spaces. Watch people, they always need to be looking into some screen or just moving their mouths talking any old crap for the sake of it into their phones. The advent of the mobile phone ringtone is to me a sure sign of the end of civilization, Jinx nihilistically declares to Alan Jacques in that famous Louth brogue of his. There are a myriad of distractions in the modern world and with a bit of discipline you can pick and choose from the things that are healthy for your wellbeing to become as happy as possible. The problem with people in 2009 is that there is a sort of Americanised list of medical conditions they can use to explain away anything to do with giving oneself a good kick up the arse and taking responsibility for oneself which would be more apt Lennon proclaims. Trauma Themes Idiot Times examines our spiritual deadness and how as a people we've turned into empty and soulless zombies. Jinx, hailed by everyone from author Patrick McCabe to comedian Keith Allen and songsmith Christy Moore as the best songwriter in the country, is now calling on us on his new record to take up arms. He wants us to stand up and be counted to break free of the shackles of consumerism and the suffocating apathy of the world around us. The problem is that I find the whole zeitgeist of the nation at this moment in time dreadfully predictable and spiritually dead. We were touring the UK a couple of weeks ago and as soon as we came back I noticed the immediate diarrhea of gloom on the news, the never ending barrage of it and I realised that people love wallowing in it, love the doom-mongering. I am long past getting angry at people like Brian Cowan because he's a pathetic figure. His face seems to say 'why are these docile creatures of this island getting mad at me. Are they not happy getting zonked out on GAA and soccer and shite TV? he supposes. People are basically animals with a couple of extra faculties so they are not a million miles from being sheep. There are a myriad of distractions and not a whole lot of heroic figures to look up to in modern Hibernia so it's much more realistic for some young people to want to become the next Paris Hilton than the older traditional heroic figures or archetypes. Ireland is still colonial in nature, the populace as a whole need to look to their lords and masters for moral guidance in a slavish way. The clergy took this role when the English bailed out and now the FF government have adapted themselves to it because of the downfall of the religious orders. They understand the people probably better than they understand themselves, the last ten years are a testimony for this. They understood that the people of this country didn't care what crooks were running the show as long as their noses were all stuck in the same trough all sucking up as much swill as possible, and that they are only becoming indignant nowadays because the swill has all but dried up for the majority. That's why Cowan and his team don't look like they are panicking, never mind NAMA they know there is a moral bankruptcy in the heart of the people of this land. Not afraid to mince his words, that's for sure, Jinx Lennon is a true maverick. Songs such as Protect Thyself And Home, Everyone's Got A Mental Home Inside Their Heads and The Men Who Saved The Face of Football are as humorous as they are confrontational and for those that get him there is no other artist as awe-inspiring and original as this visionary and poetic Louthman. And so as not to end on a gloomy note, I wonder what ¡s Jinx's vision for the future. Is there any hope? There are good people everywhere, there is always hope. But the nests that are feathered by smug p****s like ex-Ceann Comhairle O¡¯Donaghue and Bertie Bassett Ahern will not be losing any of their plumage unless people finally 'lose the rag' altogether and the guillotine makes a welcome re-appearance in modern Hibernia. The Romans were right, Hibernia it still izzzzzzzzzz! |
RETURN OF THE NOISEMAKER :By Peter Murphy/Hot Press
Jinx Lennon is back, and boy is he pissed. The 45-year-old Dundalk man's fourth album Trauma Themes Idiot Times is a state-of-the-nation rail against the reduction of all human experience to Cubism: the centrally-heated cube of the home; the fluorescent cube of the classroom; the sealed cube of the car; the honeycomb cube of the office; and ultimately, the lead-lined cube of the coffin.
Yes, the new album has moments of tenderness and great beauty (The Ferris Wheel At Dowdallshill and The Orange Cranes Of Greenore are two of Jinx's most poignant love songs), but mostly it's the testimony of a placard-wearing soapbox prophet desperately seeking answers from a robotic congregation too harried to pay heed to his sermon. The album is full of fixed faces and fisheyes Taxi Man Face (His eyes are like two sultanas on the face of a fruitcake), The Glazed I Club, Funeral Faysis. Modern life, Jinx seems to be saying, is rubbish. We've become zombies transfixed by the glass tit, the phony shangri-la of Saturday night, the oral soothers of fags and pills and booze, the bread and circus of the football stadium. ¡°It's turning into the invasion of the bodysnatchers, the singer says, on a recent afternoon in the Library Bar in Dublin's Central Hotel. That's really what it is ¨ a sort of a concept album about isolation, people not realising themselves, getting desensitized. See, when I started off the album I was worried, because I thought it was very negative or misanthropic. The songs were mostly written in 2007, and at the time there was an attitude in the country that (if you were critical) you were raining on the parade of the good times, the feeling that the future ¡s so bright you have to wear shades. But now the album is out, I've never heard so much negativity, from every angle of the media, it's almost like the apocalypse is about to erupt. So in the light of that, the album is actually very positive, it's all about scraping beneath the veneer, to basically look at Caliban in the mirror and point the dirty stick and say, What are the problems here? It wasn't written about the recession, but I always find lots of things about this country very murky.Including football fascism. It's not the sport per se that Jinx has a problem with, but its social role as grand panacea, the opium of the masses. Hence the track The Men Who Saved The Face Of Football. I used to work in a factory,he recalls, and it was an American firm, and basically nobody opened their mouth to the firm because they were afraid of losing their jobs. But the lads who were football fans, that gave them their masculinity, and they didn't have to complain about anything, they were walking around the place like some Greek god, and it was enough that they were a football fan because it gave them the right to feel like a hero. When the World Cup was on in 1990, it was their way of showing the American firm that this is the way we have pride in our country, by being football fans. To me there was a totalitarian thing going on, that if you weren't smiling or talking about Jack¡e's Army, it was almost as if you were commiting a cardinal sin. You were pulled into it and told to take this half day off whether you wanted to or not, because the football was on that afternoon. And the song is about people who think that being a football fan, feeling part of this thousand-strong army every Sunday, is going to get them through life. At some stage they're going to come out of their club and find their car broken into and no one gives a shit. It's like Oisin falling off the horse outside Tir na nÓg. The billions these guys are making, and the supporters are going, We won last night!You didn't win, you fucking nearly lost your mortgage during the World Cup! And the fascism thing with the kids, that the parents have to buy seven or eight team strips a year to keep up. Now I can see it's a great bonding thing for parents and kids, Jinx concedes, I'll give it that much. But I hear the soccer from my window, and it actually sounds like Nazi Germany film reels, because they've got these big fuck-off speakers up there, so you can hear from about ten miles away when the matches are on. I see the funny side of it now, but as a kid I wasn't into football and I might as well have had two heads, because you were either United or Liverpool, and if you weren't it was like you had leprosy. But I'm very glad, because otherwise I wouldn't be doing music. In some ways Trauma Themes is the soundtrack to the ideas raised in Jinx fan Pat McCabe's latest novel The Holy City. Lennon hasn't read the book yet, but he knows all too well what McCabe was talking about in a recent HP interview when he described the modern malaise as a sort of an atomisation, a terrifying ennui. It's the old thing, like in England, A strange smell came from the room. That would never have happened in Ireland because Mrs McGinty would have been on the case long before it happened. Now it could happen here anytime.That frightens me the singer admits. Your neighbour could be getting attacked up the street, and you might hear somebody shouting, but for all you know somebody's got a DVD on. Or if you're in a housing estate, you could be living in your house for about five years and walk out one day and say hello to somebody from around the corner and they wouldn't even pass any remark. It's that sort of desensitivity, people walking in a sort of half-trance through life.What really fascinates me is the whole thing about people killing themselves and their families,he continues. When you read about the Jews being exiled to Babylon, there's a part in it about smashing their children's heads against the rocks ¨ it's almost like people being in exile from themselves, that their image of themselves has changed to what they have. Their individuality has been wiped out. And yet, these songs are complex. One of the album's highlights, Protect Thyself And Thy Home could be easily if wilfully misinterpreted by the tabloids as a call to vigilantism. It poses some tough questions, such as, what would you do if an intruder broke into your house while your wife and children were sleeping? And at what point does the self-defense clause of reasonable force become unreasonable? Jinx leaves us in no doubt as to his position: the song culminates in a scene of almost Joe Pesci-esque comic menace, with the threatened householder's boot on the burglar's neck. The song was written at the time I was reading Comrac McCarthy's The Road, Jinx explains, putting yourself in this position of the characters in that. If things get so bad, they're going to become more animalistic, it's not going to be a static time where people have cheap food for the next hundred years. Something's going to give.It's alright if you're living a feudal lord's existence, and you're making up the laws, looking down at people, watching all the little dots and protozoa moving along the street, it's okay to say you shouldn't do this and you shouldn't do that. But if you're living in a community where there's somebody around the street intimidating you, you're going to have a different mindset, no matter who you are, especially if you can't depend on the authorities to look after you. The song is about the cold fact of, if someone's going to attack your family, you're gonna look for the nearest blunt instrument, the animalistic thing is going to kick in, whether it's right or not, the fact is you're going to protect your family. It's not as if you're going to become a vigilante or a mass murderer. I would never like to think that I would become some kind of a psychopath, but If all this sounds like Jinx is taking on the role of end times doomcryer, it's a mantle he's only too happy to assume. I always think about Greek and Roman civilisations,he says.There were periods of peaceful times where people could be immersed in culture, bettering themselves, reading Plato, and the Dionysian thing of excess, wine, whatever, and then all of a sudden you had the Barbarians, the Visigoths coming from the mountains. There's a time for everything, and I get a feeling there's a fin de siecle at the moment, that maybe things are movin into a different era. Like, it's 65 years since the last World War, there is gonna be some sort of burst-up this century, there has to be, the resources of the world are depleting, so there's gonna be some sort of big bang between the major powers. There was trillions being spent over in Iraq: that had to come from somewhere. There had to be a judgment day.
| Jinx Lennon |
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| Written by Graham Lynch |
| Thursday, 13 November 2008 |
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IT'S been over two years since Jinx Lennon was last interviewed in these pages and in that time the Dundalk native has been keeping himself busy on a number of fronts. He's played the festival circuit including Electric Picnic and Oxegen, been the subject of an RTE television and radio documentary and even supported Christy Moore at the singers behest, while his life and musical partner Paula Flynn scored a big hit with her Nouvelle Vague-ish cover of David Bowie's 'Let's Dance'.
He's also completed work on the follow up to 2006s widely lauded Know Your Station Gouger Nation!!!, a chronicle of everyday observations, detailing the grips of modern life, the trivial pursuits, the absurdly banal and the banal absurdities as seen through the eyes of a man torn between the guises of lunatic preacher and factory-line worker and played through the hands of an anti-folk punk rocker with more then a passing interest in hip-hop.
While welcoming of this increased exposure, it has also necessitated a change in Jinx, who, it can be said, has always been something of a divisive character. Eager to address the issues of how he is perceived, Lennon told the Cork Independent, ahead of his upcoming gig at the Crane Lane tonight (Thursday, November 13) how he has become more comfortable in his own stage skin in recent times, the results of which are a more confident and focused live performance.
"I have developed the stage show to a point that I am really confident in the songs myself and Miss Paula Flynn currently perform for the set list onstage as opposed to where it was at even two years ago. Sometimes that has been a problem in the past. I have been perceived in the past as a neo comical entity which was galling to me but understandable to a certain extent so I have been definitely aiming to counter that perception with the newer material and the way we present ourselves onstage."
What Jinx's new record actually sounds like is anyone's guess. Whereby on stage he is the minimalist personified, letting his force-of-nature persona and irrepressible energy boil over in a blur of rapid strumming, elemental casio-keyboard beats and evangelical outbursts, on record his music takes on a more studied approach with frequent contributors, such as Cork's own Stanley (he of the Super 800 fame), bringing their own diverse touches to Jinx's stripped down anti-folk stories. The new record, due out early next year, promises even more radical changes.I have been very much trying to take things forward all the time. Its very important to me to try and be an original entity and one of the best ways to do that is to use your own voice or accent. It's no coincidence that anyone I feel an affinity with in this country use their own accents while striving for originality. One of the complaints about the last album was that the music failed to match the lyrics. It took a while to work out how I was going to improve on this because to me the lyrics come first so there was a couple of false starts cos I wasn't happy with the music beneath the words. "I spent two years listening to old rockabilly, stuff I heard on great websites like Honey Where You Been So Long, which specialised in blues and roots music from the 20s and 30s which led me to the great compilations like 'Goodbye Babylon' and stuff recorded by Lomax in the prisons, Howlin Wolf, old Gospel. Also I got back into psychedelic music in a big way, especially the German 70s bands. Also I got into some Fluxus, Musique Concrete stuff, Rhys Chatham, New York No Wave."
The expanded musical palette is matched by Jinx's desire to also move forward lyrically. Not surprisingly, given all that's currently going on here, he's not been short of inspiration, although, as is typical of Lennon, he has chosen a less obvious path. "The new album is a progression from the last one in that it deals with stuff I see going on in this country but instead of dealing with the more predictable issues and slogans, this album deals with isolation in its different guises. In fact the first seven songs on the album are snapshots of isolated people in different situations whether it be slowly losing their minds in their houses, confronting intruders in their homes, people becoming de-humanised by money and greed. I point the stick at myself of course and overall I do think people will be surprised."
As for his thoughts on the direction the country is taking in the current political and social spectrum? "I felt very bemused at the way ordinary people in this country lost the run of themselves in the last 11 years, especially those that could ill afford to do so. The whole Hello magazine culture, the omnipresent smug face of Taoiseach Ahern calling people 'whingers'. I found it personally disgusting that the country was made to vote twice for the Nice Treaty back in 2001/2002 like the populace were some sort of confused children that needed to be shown the light and I was disappointed that the people went for it especially since hindsight has shown the type of ugliness the Taoiseach and his conniving 'merry men' were/are capable of. People are being neglected where it matters in this country, while the Taoiseach and his Ministers fall over themselves in China of all places trying to promote Hibernia, China! Not exactly a beacon of light for human rights is it?
"On a positive note I do feel people will get their heads out of their x boxes and plasma screens if things get bad enough that it will make them stand up for themselves. I still find it hard to believe there is a black man in the Whitehouse which is a great momentous thing which I find absolutely amazing and it shows that the world is changing for better or worse. I fear that the loss of jobs here is going to create real problems of animosity towards minorities in this country and the government needs to tackle that instead of moralising to people while they sit on their arses staring out at the seagulls in their Norman Feudal Lord type Mansions far away from the flashpoints of misery."
With the new album due out in 09, people can expect to hear and see Jinx Lennon a lot more in the coming months, with the Dundalk native expressing an interest in further exploring opportunities in the media, following on from his successful stint as an RTE documentary subject. "This is the way I definitely want to go no doubt about it and even more so in the future," he says referring to a crossing of mediums between music, TV and radio. I didn't expect anything to develop and I was a little bit wary about how I would be perceived but I do think that 'Noisemaker' is quite a good stab at showing people what I am trying to do with my music. Having a radio play based on my songs is especially great to me as is the Prix Europa Award nomination especially as we were going up against some heavyweights from all over Europe."
Dundalk's finest poet Jinx Lennon on 911, the town, drug slugs, thugs and energy vampires (etc)INDYMEDIA OCT 2006
 (This is how you do an interview with a mobile phone in 10 minutes flat and make Indymedia safer for the arts (or anything else for that matter))
Were U really 'in a sex shop on capel street when the twin towers blew up'? Tell me more about that tune.
yes all true but what happened initially was i had been in Abbey St in a hardware place to get a key cut or a lock or something similar and i overheard the clientele talking about a plane and stuff to do with a hi-jacking so i automatically thought it was a PLO/ Entebbe Airport type situation they were talking about, and i had no idea this major episode had happened ,i just noticed they looked at me funny like i should automatically be joining in with the conversation so i thought something felt slightly odd .I was walking through Capel St a few minutes later when a mate of mine name of Hovy ran out of Slattery's in a bit of a panic roaring at me to come into the pub.When i went in they were all glued to the screen like it was JFK's assasination and it all got a bit hairy then cos i was trying to decipher what was obviously Manhattan covered in smoke.I went one of the Utopia sex shops later and they were playing showing endless replays of the Twin Towers exploding and collapsing but no one in there seemed to be really interested ,it just seemed like another porno clip on the screen,its just one of those surreal situations so thats fed into the song.
Your songs are very vividly 'Dundalk' in landscape humour and horror. Do you think those from 'the town' get more out of them than others?
I think people from other places get more out of them in ways , and people from Dundalk who have moved away and live across the water cos i suppose they can get a better perspective on things cos they have been away from the place a while.A lot of Dundalk people living in Oz,the States and England cherish them cos it is a bit like a snapshot in ways cos of all the map reference points and places of interest.I have a good following nationwide and in some places in England and I aim to make the North East Irish borderland universally understandable to people ,i look to Kavanagh or Pat Mc Cabe writing about Monaghan and the border towns or some of the Dublin writers or James Ellroy writing about LA.Its important to me to get my hands dirty when i'm writing and stop pretending everythings Listerine mouthwash up here ,but equally i want to make my home town more romantic and human to outsiders instead of writing something superficial and sitting up on a pedestal writing some paddywackery shite.
I heard you work in the hospital in Dundalk and you have a tune about standing up for our hospitals. What do you think of the health service?
I just felt that when it comes to standing up for stuff in Dundalk we get it hard to come out with strength in numbers.Six years ago when the maternity unit in the local hospital was being closed most of the people standing out in the cold were middle aged ,while those that should have been there,the ones that would soon be potentially having kids were off shopping in the spring sales.Its a border town thing i suppose this reluctance to stand up for what we are entitled to ,but i was a bit annoyed to see the bad turn out for the protest that and the way that certain local politicians sat back.
Can you list your albums and tell me a bit about each and the circumstances of their making?
I have three albums
1. Live at the Spirit Store Dundalk 15:11: 2000
I spoke to Derek Turner who runs Tumbleweed Studios/ gigs at the Spirit Store about recording a gig in the autumn of 2000 cos it was time to get some document of my live shows down at that stage as i'd been doing the Jinx Lennon solo thing since the end of the previous year.He encouraged me to bring out a live album saying it would be the 1st live album from the Venue and Juliet Turner had been already threatening to do a live cd so i'm glad i got in before her.Its a good representation of my live shows at the time,and also the halcyon days of the venue and its a very rowdy record cos the crowd were totally pissed drunk so its a bit like a Dubliners live album in a way.I was actually shitting myself and you can hear it in my voice and the way the songs threaten to fall to bits and that keeps it fresh and real.Theres 14 of my own songs including "Get the Guards"and "Lookout Posts of Forkhill"none of which i ever re-recorded and four cover versions from Genius,Public Enemy,Wu Tang Clan,and Culture Beat. Some people like this one the best and d'ont think i've made a better one since
2. 30 Beacons of Light for a Land Full of Spite,Thugs,Drug Slugs,and Energy Vampires
I did this in Dundalk again in Tumbleweed with Jason Varley the studio engineer.I had been getting it hard to write songs i was happy with during 2001 ,then the 9/11 thing happened and it made me sit up a bit and i wrote a load of new stuff.I wanted to bring another live album out and i actually recorded two more live gigs at the Spirit Store but i realised i would not get the same energy as the 1st release due to a number of factors so i decided to record some studio stuff with some really good local musicians and singers and we did this over 2002.It was great fun doing it with Jason and we took our time,i wanted to make a sort of "Swordfishtrombones "Tom Waits type thing with loads of different styles like that album,also Magnetic Fields "69 Love Songs" a monster of a record with loads of musical genres on it.Theres a mixture of live songs overdubbed with other instruments and studio tracks.There was a lovely old microphone in the studio that i used more and more for guitar and vocals as the album went on.I was really happy to get the Dundalk Brass Band in to do "Boys of the Blue Bag Brigade"it was tight work trying to get them all in the studio (and Colin Berrills from the Gurriers on drums) and Bernie Bingham the arranger of the song for the band was a true gentleman,it works a treat.Its a true heads album and i had plenty of smoking and drinking sessions with friends to make sure i felt at ease with the way it panned out.Its still got a good live feel and because of that and the fact that most of the vocals and instuments were done in one take keeps it sounding fresh.
3. Know Your Station Gouger Nation!!!
It took a long time to get my head round a follow up to "30 Beacons" cos i did'nt think i'd better it. I wanted this one to be more of a protest album about Ireland cos i was tired of listening to insipid singer songwriter types sounding like greenfly on a rose bush waiting for a german shepherd dog to piss over them while the world fell to pieces around them ,also the Iraq invasion and our response to it as a nation made me feel very disturbed even though i d'ont really sing about it on the record. Paula Flynn had been playing with me since 2002 and i had been using the tiny yamaha keyboard onstage more and more and felt less awkward about writing songs on it as it had been a disaster in several gigs in 2003.I was doing a radio show for a gig in Dublin in Radio na Liffe in Merrion Square with Steve Lynch who also engineered in the studio there.He asked me if i was interested in doing an album at the studio and i decided it was time to get off my arse about it.We started it in november 2004 ,we'd record during the early morning hours which is a great time to record and it was bloody cold in there and i initially had my doubts about recording until Paula laid her vocals down on three tracks,then it started to sound like a record coming together.Steve was a more disciplined head and a great musician to boot as the record testifies, we'd be tooth and nail about some of the songs but that was all to the good.Its definately a more distilled record that i feel is the essense of Jinx Lennon .Its produced and mastered a lot better than the other records but its still a raw sounding bastard of an album and again there are some great musicians on it
Are you DIY in terms of your label ideologically? Do you always want to release your own stuff?
I released the albums myself because i did not believe that anyone else would be sufficiently interested in releasing them,and i do like the freedom to mess around and release my own things and i do believe in the DIY ethic as far as the belief that lack of technical ability will not be a major problem once you believe in yourself and have something pertinent to say about yourself and the world once you sing about it in your own voice .At the same time i would love to do a soul music type record with the calibre of musicians Al Green plays with,or the great heads T Bone Burnett used for that great record released by bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley a couple of years back and you need a lot of dosh to do those sort of things and if a label was willing to give me the sort of spondulicks needed then i would sign with them as long as it was understood that the records i make will always sound like Jinx Lennon no matter what way you gut the fish.
I saw your wild gigs at the Electric Picnic. Did you enjoy them? Are they always like that?
The Electric Picnic gigs were the best ever ,everything just seemed to click,i loved the church pews in the Leviathan tent,i loved the way the whole crowd sang along and danced to my one chord numbers and the Dundalk funk keyboard tunes,i felt a bit like James Brown or even sunday at the Baptist Church with the Rev Green,Paula was on fire on all the songs she sang.The next gig i play might be a total disaster,but thats show biz and i would,nt change it for the world ,thats what i love about gigs.
Who or what are 'chuckies in the mountains' and 'filing cabinets of 3am'?
The "chuckies in the mountains" are very unhappy people, the local equivalent of the NRA in Detroit or the hillbilly characters that go berserk in the movie Deliverence The "filing cabinets of 3 am"are the ones that "take everything in" as they stand there eating their curry chips observing the world around them yet oblivious to the fact that they are standing in pools of vomit .
I heard you are to be immortalised on film. Can you tell me more?
Bord Scannan and the other "Documenting the Arts "people awarded a grant to finish a documentary by Dara Mc Closkey about myself and my music which we have been filming since april last year and which will hopefully be completed by the new year ,all things going well.
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hey like and they see other people doing what they like; they probably think there’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe he still thinks that way: ‘to hell with the rest of them, this is just the way I am, this is my way of doing things’.”