Julian Gough

Three subjects guaranteed to polarise participants in any Irish pub debate: The Pope, Eamon De Valera and Julian Gough.

As the former leader and driving force behind Galway’s legends-in-their-own-UCG-lunchtime Toasted Heretic, you could say Gough made his name as a writer of intelligently crafted, iconoclastic pop songs, providing a much needed maverick sensibility in the grey area of Irish pop in the early ’90s. Unbelievers, on the other hand, might’ve dubbed him a smarty-pants fop-rocker with more mouth than trousers.

But then, Gough’s case history is similarly double-sided. He was born in London in 1966, moved to Tipperary at the age of seven, and spent his college years in Galway studying Philosophy and English. Once spat out the wrong end of the educational system, he formed Toasted Heretic and put out four albums of quirky, wordy pop tunes on a shoestring budget, the most celebrated of these being the 1992 top ten Irish hit ‘Galway And Los Angeles’, an account of a close encounter with Sinead O’ Connor in RTE.

Given his facility with the written word, it was no surprise that Gough turned to plying his trade as a writer when his band split. He spent the next seven years shaping his prose style, an apprenticeship that has borne fruit in the shape of Juno & Juliet, a work of fiction somewhere between – if you’ll pardon the soundbite – Austen and Auster.

The book tells the story of Juliet Taylor and her twin sister Juno, two beautiful Tipperary students astray in Galway, beset by love, literature, stalkers, bad acid trips and various other manifestations of campus interruptus. It’s probably one of the better examples of boomtown Irish fiction on the shelves right now, although not without its flaws.

More of those later, but for now, Gough is still basking in the afterglow of last night’s festivities, presided over by Tommy Tiernan, an event so emotionally charged the writer confessed to almost “doing a Gwyneth”.

“I don’t think human beings are designed to receive that much affection in that short a period of time,” he reflects, taking a seat in the Clarence Bar. “I was meeting cousins I’d never met before, and relatives from down the country I hadn’t seen in ten years, and all my oldest school and university friends and exes were all saying nice things to me one after the other, and it was just a bit overwhelming. It’s very strange having a book that you wrote while you were on the dole and had basically no idea what you were going to do with suddenly become this real thing that you can hold in your hand, and it’s in the shops and you can go into Hodges Figgis and have a poke at it.”

Perhaps because he feels equally at home in London as Galway, with his accent sometimes swinging between the two, you won’t find much evidence of unChristian Brothers, martyred mothers and sullen, semi-alcoholic fathers in Gough’s work.

“I’m afraid I’ve no angst to dig up there at all,” he says. “The parents were brilliant. They’ve always been supportive, even when I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. One of the things I stuck into Juno And Juliet was a ‘good dad’ who gets on with his son. I was totally sick of all these bad dads. Dads get a hard feckin’ time, because every writer has a dad, and they’re easy targets for male writers. My dad’s brilliant.”

One gets the impression Gough was the kind of youngster who existed in the third person, starring in his own private bio-pic a la Jarvis Cocker in ‘I Spy’: “I used to compose my own critical notices in my head: ‘The crowd gasp at Cocker’s masterful control of the bicycle, skilfully avoiding the dog turd next to the corner shop’”. This gets a laugh, not least because Gough is a Pulp fan who reckons This Is Hardcore to be one of the great lost classics alongside Lou’s Berlin and Neil’s Tonight’s The Night.

“There might’ve been a little bit of that alright, yeah,” he concedes. “I tended to see everything in terms of how it would look in the biography in 70 years time. You’re the hero of your own movie. It’s great, it’s a good way of getting through things.”

As a teenager, did he sit in the corner at parties reading some grim and unwieldy tome?

“Oh Jesus, yeah,” he affirms. “I always had a book in the pocket in case the party was bad – and the party was always bad! Or it could never match up to the book. I couldn’t afford to drink until my early 20s so I was always the sober one at the party. I had very high standards for reality and reality was seldom able to live up to them, so I’d take the book out of the pocket and ignore it for a while.”

Shades of the raincoat class of ’83, sporting gladioli in their back pockets and quoting chunks of The Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now’.

“I loved where he (Morrissey) was coming from because it was a similar place to where I was coming from,” Gough confirms. “The one time I met him . . . Johnny Marr had tried to score drugs off me which was funny, because I was the only guy in the Great Southern Hotel after a Smiths gig with long hair. So we were off on the right footing because he’d come up to me, which was the only way you can have a decent conversation with somebody a lot more famous than you. And I didn’t know what drugs were at that stage, but I looked like the only guy in the room who he’d be able to score off – a constant misunderstanding throughout my life.

“And I had a book sticking out of my pocket, Dubliners, James Joyce, and Marr was saying ‘Morrissey has that practically tattooed all over his body. You should tell him you’re into that.’ Of course Morrissey had gone to bed with a glass of white wine as soon as the gig was over. But I bumped into him the next morning, ’cos I lived across the other side of Eyre Square at the time. Johnny Marr recognised me from the night before and called me over and we were chatting away. He was one of the nicest guys I met in the music industry; he gave me his breakfast to cheer me up. And Morrissey and me got introduced and we talked about James Joyce. But I didn’t enjoy that encounter because it was the wrong way around, I found myself in the fan position, which I didn’t really enjoy.”

Symptoms of Gough’s unease with fandom would recur a few years later, when he turned down the chance to meet Sinead O’ Connor after the release of ‘Galway And Los Angeles’.

“A friend of hers wanted to introduce me,” he recalls, “and at the time I was very self-consciously living my life through my art and I didn’t want to talk to her until we’d had a number one hit and we could talk as equals! So I just said hi and ran away. Looking back I’m a bit pissed off ’cos we didn’t have a number one hit single so I never got to have the conversation.”

Was he an arrogant little so-and-so?

“Oh yeah.”

Is he still?

“Nah, I’ve been humbled by life. Crushed! As a human being it’s very good for you.”

Bearing in mind the arch Anglo-Irish nature of Toasted Heretic’s music (one of their albums was called Songs For Swinging Celibates for god’s sake!), did Gough ever look at The Divine Comedy and think, ‘That seems familiar?’

“I’ll say nothing!” he laughs. “They supported us twice, if that’s any use to your grand theory. I’d be delighted if what we did influenced anybody, but I don’t think so. In the same way as Morrissey was coming from the same place that I was coming from, Hannon (also) comes from the same place. Any guy who reads a hell of a lot of books and then writes intelligent pop songs is going to sound a bit like the other guys who do the same.”

For this writer, Toasted Heretic’s finest achievement was not the co-opting of the Tayto man for the cover of one of their cassette albums, but ‘Galway Bay’, a tune which makes the jump from the Irish pastoral to the post-Catholic pornographic via one of the finest couplets in Irish pop: “The sun goes down on Galway Bay/The daughter goes down on me”. Shades of Seamus Heaney’s oft-quoted line about Ireland going from the medieval to the post-modern in one generation.

“That’s what I’m trying to do with the new novel I’m writing,” Gough points out. “I think that’s the Irish experience in the last 40 years, it’s going from the middle ages to the 21st century in one go. I think mainly our parents did it more than us, they walked to school in their bare feet and now they’re sending e-mails to their cousins in Australia. Respect is due.”

We can’t let the Heretic years go without documenting an event that has long been lodged in the annals of Irish music industry lore, but nevertheless bears repeating one more time for the record. Insiders who’ve heard the one about Gough, Bill Graham, lawyers, guns and lubricant at Feile ’92 should fast forward to the next line of bold print. The rest, listen up.

“Toasted Heretic had just played Feile,” Gough remembers, “and it was great, loved it, and we were staying around for the weekend. And the next day we were in the VIP area, but there was this super VIP tent for Simply Red and their entourage that Warners had put up, and it was just ostentatiously separatist, these ever escalating levels of bullshit. Simply Red and their entourage very sensibly couldn’t be arsed going in because security was so tight hardly anyone was allowed in there, so it was no fun. We had a peek in and there were two security guys and a barman and that was it.

“So myself and a friend of mine who’s now a very distinguished journalist – I won’t mention his name – stole this huge 20-foot Warner Music Ireland banner that was branding the tent and headed off with it. But the security saw us – hard not to – and chased us all around the car park. And I was saying to my friend, ‘Look, you don’t need to get involved in this, I’m in a rock band, what can they do to me? You piss off and I’ll take the blame.’

“So he pissed off,” Gough continues, “and I kept going with the banner and got caught eventually. And they were very annoyed with me at this stage. The security guys were lovely; they were entirely right and justified in ejecting me. And as they were dragging me through the ordinary VIP tent – the sort of semi-IP tent – I got it into my head to start screaming and roaring that they were taking me out to the car park to be buggered by Peter Price, the head of Warner Ireland. There was no element of truth whatsoever in this, but it amused me to shout at the top of my voice: ‘Help, I need a lawyer and some lubricant, I’m about to be taken as a pleasure toy to be sacrificed to the evil desires of Peter Price!’ Which was childish and juvenile, but because all the press were in the tent, suddenly there were all these reporters standing on chairs to get a look and trying to take photographs, and the security guys were paralysed by all these flashlights, and the more they tried to stop them, the more of a story it became.

“So Bill Graham wades into the middle saying, ‘Unhand this man, I’m a journalist, what right have you to be manhandling (him)?’ I was being dragged along the ground at this stage, ’cos I’d let all my muscles go limp. And this guy pressed a card into my hand and said, ‘I’m a lawyer for Sony Music!’ So I actually got a lawyer – I didn’t get any lubricant! And it became very messy and confrontational, and my ejection from the site was negotiated.

“Serious Security were really pissed off at me, and rightly so, because I’d made them look appalling, I was accusing them of running a homosexual vice ring for the head of Warner Ireland. It ended up in Melody Maker, photographs of me with all these security guys with their eyes blacked out. So I sent them a note saying, “To whom it may concern, I’d like to put it on the record that Serious Security behaved entirely like gentlemen throughout the incident yesterday, and I would like to apologise for forcing them to eject me from the premises and would like to take this opportunity to state that if I’m ever being ejected from any venue in the future, I sincerely hope and will request that it’s by Serious Security who are the finest in the business and a credit to their trade”. Apparently they got it laminated in the office. I gave them flowers later on.”

Perhaps because they couldn’t top that performance, Toasted Heretic split up not long after. And in the great tradition of rockers turned writers, Gough felt the relief of going from being a failed pop star to a promising scribe.

“It’s great,” he affirms. “I’ve enjoyed the same thing. In America, I read this publicity stuff, and suddenly I’m ‘the young Roddy Doyle’ or whatever, and to be the young anything when you’ve been in a band for ten years is great. It’s like being reborn. I still have a terrible habit of trying to help put up the PA at readings and things.”

Gough remarked recently that boom-time in any country is a bad time for art. How come?

“This is something Tommy Tiernan was talking about last night at the book launch,” he says. “The dole culture in Galway in the late ’80s and early ’90s was fantastic, it was one of the most talented dole queues in Europe! I was signing on, Tommy Tiernan, Mike Casey who I’ve got a production company with now – his first documentary’s coming out on the 30th of May on the eco-warriors in the Glen of the Downs.

“We used to give our accounts to the dole and they’d just dock us whatever we earned. You’d be called in to be interrogated by someone from the Social Welfare, and they’d be saying, ‘Well, we have literally hundreds of complaints about you. Every time you’re on television you get reported by another 50 people who’ve seen you down the dole office.’ But we’d always been totally honest with the dole, we said, ‘Look, we’re in a band, we’re going to do our best to earn a living out of this, we’re not going to try and get jobs in SuperMac’s and we don’t wanna go on a FAS scheme, we just want to keep playing and recording and putting our dole money into the band. And we’re not going to be able to give you letters saying we’ve applied for 12 jobs ’cos we haven’t.’ And you’d end up with these really Kafka-esque situations where you were being honest with them, and they’d end up saying, ‘Look, well, couldn’t you just lie to us a bit more, ’cos we have procedures to go through? We can process your cases if you lie to us!’

“The whole system had no way of dealing with people who were hugely ambitious, but not financially, and who knew exactly what they wanted to do. In some ways, the Back To Work scheme was one of the best things that they ever brought in because it acknowledged that you can’t go from zero to 60 in one step. I only sold the novel and saved my arse with about six months to go on the Back To Work scheme.”

One sign of encouragement during this period was when an excerpt from Juno & Juliet was featured in the Shenanigans anthology of emerging Irish writers. In fact, Gough’s contribution received virtually the only good press in a ream of pretty savage reviews. How does he feel about that?

“It’s a mixed bag,” is his verdict. “Shenanigans was more a progress report on what will be happening in the future rather than what’s happening now. It takes ages to become a good writer, not everybody in the book has got the hang of it yet, but that’s what you expect. It’s not fair to review something like that as though they’ve all had five novels out and they’re under-performing. Some of the stuff was great, some of it wasn’t. I mean, I had the advantage that I’d written four albums’ worth of lyrics and two novels and had done a lot of work before I’d actually published anything in a literary context, so as a result my stuff looked good, I got some of the good reviews. But give the poor hoors time.”

The excerpt in question concerned Juliet Taylor’s impetuous gobbling of a tab of LSD at a Tipperary disco. But as Gough admits, writing about lysergic states of mind isn’t just a matter of abandoning syntax and becoming an instant Irvine Welsh, just add acid.

“It probably wouldn’t be telling the world a gigantic secret to say that I had taken acid and had a bad time on it myself,” he says, “so I knew what the subjective experience was like. But putting into words, you can’t just write the way you would if you were on acid because the stuff you write when you’re on acid is absolutely fuckin’ useless, it doesn’t communicate anything at all. So you’ve gotta find a very disciplined, structured way of expressing completely undisciplined, unstructured, disintegrated thought processes. I dunno, I’m happy with how the scene worked, but it is a tricky one, because you can’t really express hallucinogenic drug experiences in words, you just can’t.”

Plus, Gough was pursuing more traditional literary standards. Indeed, his mission statement comes early in the book, when, in Juliet’s voice, he admits, “My vice is the Victorian vice of sentimentality, not the modern vice of irony”.

“I think there’s too much irony and too much cynicism and too much post-modern shite going on in the ‘younger’ novel,” he declares. “Sometimes it’s brilliant, but I don’t wanna do it. And I want to make it really clear that I wasn’t even trying to do it, and there’s a lot of identification between me and the character.”

There would also seem to be a fair bit of identification with Juliet’s English tutor David Hennessy, or at least his views on literary criticism and the championing of vital popular fiction over the accepted canon of musty classics: “I’m saying that a good thriller can be better than a bad Booker nominee. Not just as entertainment, but as literature.”

“I’d have a lot in common with David Hennessy, yeah,” Gough smiles. “I’d buy him a pint if I met him. I’ve had loads of conversations with people and some really like it and some really hate the fact that the book basically discusses itself. There are points in the book where a lecturer is talking about the modern novel and essentially he’s talking about the book that he’s in.”

But that’s a post-modern device in a book…

“…in a book that’s saying it’s not post-modern! (laughs) Never trust a writer! Or put it another way, the story Juliet’s telling and the story I’m telling are not always the same story. You can’t help but do a little bit of that now and again. But in some ways the meta-fictive parts of the book, the kind of post-modern parts, are explaining or saying why the rest of the book isn’t post-modern.”

That’s either very clever or very dumb.

“Whatever, yeah. Feel free to think whatever you like!”

Gough’s identification with so many of his fictional creations raises one of the most common criticisms of his novel: that it’s weak on characterisation, and everyone seems to speak in similarly prim tones.

“I dunno, I wouldn’t agree with that,” he responds, “I don’t think it’s necessarily true. You have to bear in mind that it’s a story being told by someone in their mid-20s looking back at being 18, so it’s kind of limited by her ability to tell the tale. She’s not that hugely interested in other people probably, so choosing to tell the story through her voice is going to impose a certain amount of limits – you can’t suddenly be Balzac and have a 65-year-old’s grasp of reality and understanding of character and the motivations of people around her. I dunno, thinking about it now I don’t actually agree with that.”

On reflection, I do, although I must profess a blissful ignorance of how college students actually speak. And while Gough is an accomplished and economic storyteller, the book’s first couple of chapters threaten to be capsized by an overdose of wit. He’s far better when he dispenses with the quippy cleverality and tells it straight.

“I’m a problem, I think, with the book in Ireland,” he suggests. “Some of the Irish critics seem to know who I am a bit, they’d be aware of my persona or whatever. I found the English reviews that came out were (a) more positive, better reviews, and (b) they engaged more directly with the book. Okay, I’m a novelist, but Juliet Taylor who tells the story of the book, isn’t. And I think there’s been some confusion in a couple of the Irish reviews between me and her.”

For pig iron, I read Julian a couple of quotes from Nadine O’ Regan’s review in the Sunday Business Post: “Unfortunately, Juno & Juliet presents… a collage of clashing genres combined with very funny but erratic prose and consistently weak characterisation… Gough aims to present writing that is all things to all people. Unfortunately, he actually succeeds in showcasing only confusion, lack of narrative focus and character inconsistency. A frustrating read.”

“Well I think that’s confusing me with Juliet,” he reiterates. “I think that’s pretty much the classic problem with the Irish response to the book. Gimme that.”

He peers at my notes.

“‘Confusion’,” he repeats. “‘Lack of narrative focus’. ‘Character inconsistency’. Well, that’s basically what you’re gonna get when an 18 year old tells you a story about a really confusing, unfocused year in her life. That’s not the problem with the story; that is the story. She’s just coming out of the kind of adolescent, self-obsessed shell. She’s finding out about herself by thinking about her twin sister, and I think that’s a classic example in that review of mistaking the novelist for the character.

“She (Nadine O’ Regan) talks about confusion, lack of narrative focus and character inconsistency – if there was no confusion, a totally focused narrative and utterly consistent characters, it couldn’t be that story told by that character, it would be a different book.”

Smart arses might say a better one. But let’s not nit-pick. Gough’s novel is a polished debut, and one fine quality Ms. O’ Regan accurately detected in it is the heartfelt lyricism of descriptive passages about Galway; the ever-present benediction of rain, the fog on the harbour, the early morning stillness on campus, all of which lend the book an element of soul which bodes well for the future.

“Good,” Gough pronounces. “That’s nice.”

Suits you sir.

Juno & Juliet is published by Flamingo at £9.99