A couple of years ago Glen Hansard rang this writer from the set of Other Voices in Dingle wanting to know where he could find a copy of Kavanagh’s phantasmic poem ‘If Ever You Go To Dublin Town’, the reason being he wanted to quote a chunk of it in his introduction to Barry McCormack’s set, having always thought of the ex-Jubilee Allstar balladeer as more ghost than man.
I was hoping to refute this theory in my opening paragraphs by meeting McCormack for a cuppa and verifying his corporeal state. However, a text message informed me that he was in Paris, so I’m still not sure if the voice crackling down the line is of woman born or a benign spirit nesting in the phone wires.
“That was quite bizarre,” he chuckles, recalling the Dingle set. “He read it out and then I had to sing after it – something to live up to.”
McCormack’s songs are steeped in the history and mythology – real and imagined – of Dublin. So what’s he doing in Paris?
“I’m scopin’ the place out for a month,” he explains, “might stay longer in September. It’s actually my 30th birthday today. I just got an e-mail from my mother-in-law saying, ‘30 is meant to be a fearsome event with first intimations of mortality!’”
Well, as anyone who’s heard a single Barry McCormack song will know, he’s never been short on intimations of mortality.
“That’s what she said: ‘It probably won’t come as a revelation to you!’”
There are many revelatory moments on McCormack’s splendid second album Last Night, As I Was Wandering, which functions not just as a set of great songs, but a sort of speculative map of Dublins that were, are and will never be.
“In your review, some of the things you said were fictional actually did exist at one stage,” Barry points out. “The Marshalsea was a debtors’ jail, I think it’s a youth hostel now, on the quays heading down towards Heuston on the southside. When I was in school we had this teacher who was obsessed with failures in history, and one of them was Isaac Butt, who could’ve become Charles Stuart Parnell but he had a gambling problem and spent a lot of time in a debtors’ jail. They actually signed themselves into it to protect themselves from their creditors.
“I pilfered from guides to historical Dublin and this sort of stuff,” he continues, “all these characters like this guy Billy In The Bowl, who I think Shane MacGowan used in ‘The Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn’– this guy who had no legs and he went around in a bowl, using his hands to move the bowl along. The madness of old Dublin characters.”
Not least being Matt Talbot, the holy flagellant who scourged himself with enough chains and hairshirts to make the Opus Dei barbed garter look like something from a Victoria’s Secret catalogue.
“There’s a Matt Talbot boxing club on the quays,” Barry says, “and I used to wonder if you went in there, would everyone just be punching themselves in the face! But I lived nearly 10 years between Kelly’s Corner and Capel Street, and it is quite a gothic city if you go out at night and walk around. Dublin has history, but it also has a dinginess and a darkness and if you’re a songwriter or a writer you tend to take these things in. It surprises me that other singer-songwriters are writing about their love lives. I kinda think, ‘I can’t write love songs – I’m married!’”
That’ll earn him a smack in the chops when he gets home.
“Well, y’know, I find it easier to walk around and see a strange street name or hear some story about a bar. If people spent longer in their room writing songs I don’t think they’d have to spend as long in studios hiding the fact that they’ve nothing to say. I’m just old fashioned like that.”