Bring the noisemaker

Dundalk’s Jinx Lennon is an act so singular in character and maverick in nature he deserves to be profiled by Bill Graham, eulogised by Patrick McCabe and given the documentary treatment by RTE's ArtsLives series.

Two out of three ain’t bad. It’s a shame Bill isn’t around to concoct some complex, knotty set of theories based on Jinx’s three albums (Live At The Spirit Store, Thirty Beacons Of Light For A Land Full Of Spite, Thugs, Drug Slugs And Energy Vampires, and Know Your Station Gouger Nation!!!), but McCabe has weighed in with a blurb that joins the dots between the novelist’s tales from the county hell and Lennon’s songs of fear, love and loathing in the borderlands.
“Jinx Lennon is the most singular and original talent I have come across in years,” he wrote, “full of integrity, moral courage and a sometimes quite astonishing verbal dexterity. If there never could be another Bob Dylan in years to come they’ll be saying the same of this garrison town prophet. Bow down Lilliputians and pay due homage!”
As for the ArtsLives crew, they’ve consolidated their burgeoning reputation as the best thing on domestic television (recent highlights include a much talked about profile of Flann O’ Brien and a gloves-off study of the chick-lit industry) with the forthcoming Noisemaker, an account of Jinx’s life and times worthy of mention alongside The Devil & Daniel Johnston and Fearless Freaks as an example of how a cult musical act can make a great story.
“I’m very happy with it,” says Jinx (real name David), over a cup of coffee in the Library Bar around the corner from HP central. “There were parts of it I was looking at and going, ‘Hang on’, ’cos it’s a wee bit close to the bone, but it’s real, and that’s the basic thing. It took about two years to do. Dara (McCluskey), the director, started it in about April 2005, he was just taking a chance to see if RTÉ would be interested, he sent them a promo, and they came back last autumn to say they were going ahead with it.”
Few of us get to watch the stuff of our everyday lives dissected on screen. Jinx, understandably enough, felt a sense of strangeness and dislocation when he watched the finished product.
“There was a promotion night in February, John Kelly was doing it,” he remembers, “and I was standing there with David Norris, it was a sort of wine and cheese evening with canapes, and I was looking at all these people coming up on the screen, Flann O’ Brien and Lady Powerscourt, and then my face flashed up on it, and it was a bit surreal actually, standing there in the audience with Miriam O’ Callaghan.”
Noisemaker tells the story of a life that is at once ordinary and uncommon. Born in 1964, Lennon grew up in Dundalk, an introverted, asthmatic youngster interested in astrology and paleontology, who found solace in the writings of midlands antecedents like Patrick Kavanagh. An aversion to the tribal aspects of football culture cast him in the role of eternal fringe dweller.
“You’re almost like a leper if you’re not into it,” he laughs. “But it’s a good thing. When you’re a loner and you stand outside, it does give you a sense of yourself that you wouldn’t get otherwise. It’s only later on you appreciate it. But Secondary School was a dreadful experience.”
Despite the jagged humour and verbal dexterity of Lennon’s songs, there are undercurrents of violence and self-obliteration evident in ‘Lord Of The Onion Rings’ and ‘Escape From The Planet Of The Apes’, the latter a duet between Jinx and his girlfriend Paula, that plumbs the mindset of a young suicide teetering between life and death.
“That would be a big thing with me now,” Jinx says, “the whole thing about suicide, especially at the moment. I do go and see a lot of acts when I’m really pissed off with life, but they’re not giving me anything, so when I get onstage I try and make a show, it’s almost like trying to get people out of themselves, like a sort of Baptist preacher thing, trying to get a bit of kinetic energy going. It’s something I don’t get from singer-songwriters, so I call myself a punk preacher to differentiate from that whole thing.”
And Lennon, if you’ve never heard him, is the furthest thing from acoustic orthodoxy. Far more akin to proto hip-hop acts like The Last Poets, folk freaks the Holy Modal Rounders, the rap attack of Public Enemy and Eminem, the mongrel punk-poetics of John Cooper Clarke or the dark dub of Lynton Kwesi Johnson, he uses his gob and his guitar as a double-barrelled percussive attack. Songs like ‘Bubble Electrician’ are closer to Busta Rhymes than James Blunt.
“Hip-hop was a big influence,” he acknowledges. “In the ‘90s, apart from a couple of bands like Black Grape and The Flaming Lips, it got me back into music again. You didn’t even have to listen to the words, ’cos the words were like jazz. And I just love the humour and the energy of it. I was never into the macho thing, I just loved the rhymes, bands like Wu-Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Liquid Swords was a fantastic album. I connect that with bands like Suicide, it’s got this New York thing running through it.”
For further evidence of Lennon’s Suicide fetish, consult ‘The Flesh Taxi’ off Gouger Nation. In his melding of smalltown Irishry with cosmopolitan NY Babble-on, Lennon is the latest in a long line of marginal, if not regional, outsider artists, from David Donohue to Pierce Turner. A good 15 or 20 years older than most of his contemporaries, Lennon has a frame of reference far wider and a sense of lineage deeper than acts weaned on third generation coffee table folk-rock, garage retreads and Gang Of Four redux.
“I’m big into The Fugs, all that Lower East Side stuff,” he says. “Lydia Lunch would be a big thing with me as well. A lot of that post-punk stuff sounds great now. The Pop Group – you can hear bits of Can and stuff like that in it. I was really into magazines like Melody Maker and Sounds when I was 15 and 16. And a lot of people in my class, even though they never formed bands, they were very astute music listeners, guys into The Fall and Durutti Column. At the time I was still in to Thin Lizzy and Queen.
“But around about ’81 or ’82 I was noticing the alternative charts and bands who were moving beyond punk into something more interesting. I was reading the likes of Paul Morley and interviews with Genesis P Orridge and Mark E Smith and that got me interested. So years ago I went to America for the summer and took all these records home with me, The Fugs and Suicide and stuff.
“But then when I got into a band, it was 1986, we were playing some shite that was the C86 sound, and everybody in the band was happy, so I never really got a chance to do my own thing until really about seven or eight years ago when I took the bull by the horns. This thing was gestating in me the whole time.”
A robust and brawny figure, Lennon might be disqualified from the Sindo style supplements, but, having already evolved through the porous and suggestible stage most callow rock acts play out in public, he’s honed a distinctive voice that is unmistakably Dundalkian. When Jinx employs the word “bollocks” on ‘(Stop Giving Out About) Nigerians’ or hollers “get the Guards!” in the song of the same name, or when he essays the magnificent ‘You Must Forgive The Cunts’, he makes Damien Dempsey sound almost mid-Atlantic.
“I think my problem was, for the last couple of years, the Rosetta Stone for the voice of disaffected people was the North Dublin accent,” he considers. “If you didn’t come from Cork or speak as gaeilge, and you spoke in your own accent, people would say ‘Richie Kavanagh’. People putting on gigs around the country wouldn’t know how to describe me, they’d say, ‘This is Navan man crossed with Eminem.’ So I’d could come down to Trim or somewhere and they’d be expecting some guy with a big red jumper and a hat.
“But I use this thing, the Free State Nova, that’s my sort of persona for stage, the same way Tom Verlaine or Richard Hell or Johnny Rotten did, it’s a way to stand apart from yourself and be able to let yourself go. It’s still me, but when I’ve the dark glasses on I become wilder onstage.”
Perhaps the most important thing about Lennon’s music is that it strip-mines deep veins of comedy and tragedy. Like any bordertown, Dundalk is a somewhat schizoid region (“a San Andreas fault of the mind” as Lennon describes it) that to the interloper can seem at once jovial and menacing.
“Dundalk is almost a cross between the north and the midlands,” Jinx says. “It’s got a strange thing goin’ on, a sense of doom and gloom about it, but there was always a real Bernard Manning type humour as well. I always identified with the characters in those comedies like Love Thy Neighbour. There were guys like that in Dundalk, that nudge-nudge, wink-wink Benny Hill seaside postcard humour. And with all the factories around, it was almost like a northern English town. I connected Mark E Smith with that.”
Given such a potent environment, it’s a wonder there’s not more of his kind.
“Y’know, I always wondered about that. As I say, there were some really astute people in my class into music. I remember Elvis Costello or someone saying that when you go to Dundalk, the first thing you think about is The Indians. It’s a real showband type of town: ‘Play something everyone likes.’ The bands that went down well in Dundalk were always the Australian David Bowies or the Icelandic Oasis or whatever. I can understand the mentality – the more you got drunk the more they looked like the real thing, so why pay to go to Oasis?
“But a lot of bands that start off are more interested in sounding like somebody else because they think they’ll make money that way, or they make music for bank advertisements, the way most bands in the country are doing at the moment. But I met so many characters growing up in my hometown, if they wrote the way they talked in a book, or wrote songs, it’d be fantastic, but they piss it away with soccer and drink. The wit and the repartee, I wouldn’t be able to come up with it in a million years. It’s almost like they come to a white line and they cannot cross into creativity. It’s frowned upon where I come from really: ‘Why is he doing it? Sure he’s not making much money out of it. He must be mad in the head.’ There’s this Northerner thing about the money, the Protestant work ethic.
“Dundalk is almost like the movie Logan’s Run,” Jinx concludes. “There’s a big bubble around it, if you cross the bridge going out of town, you’re gone. And when you’re over 25 in Dundalk, if you haven’t settled down, there’s something deeply wrong with you. Birth, school, work, death, that’s it. But I always try and make a point of trying to inspire other people.”

Photo: Graham Keogh.