Rhythm 'n' booze

Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me, the second novel from Hot Press alum and current Sunday Independent columnist Declan Lynch, is about the music business and about the equally deadly-serious business of drinking. It’s about a windfall, a swindle and a suicide. It’s about the nature of genius and the nature of addiction; and about how it suddenly becomes a lot harder to be “principled” when you actually have choices for the first time in your life. It’s also a love story about a father and a daughter, whose quiet, strange, lovely relationship is echoed in the Duke Ellington lyric that gives the book its title. Not least, it’s also an incredibly well-observed satirical novel set within the Irish music industry.

…Sorry, no it isn’t. “No,” Lynch declares when asked whether he sees either this, or his previous book All The People, All The Time, as satirical novels. “No. I don’t regard myself as a humorous writer at all. I’m a very serious writer who happens to have jokes in his stuff. I’m quite serious about this,” he insists when I start laughing. “Anyway, I don’t think humour works, if you set out to be funny. I don’t think I’ve ever set out to be funny, in my whole life. That’s just the way I write.”
Lucky guy. The way he writes involves a rather Simpsons-ish approach, hence the accusations of satire: he’s funny, yes, but deals in serious themes, is still emotionally believable and, not least, sets his novels in a ‘fictitious’ world you kinda… sorta… recognise.
Hence, there are Dublin neighbourhoods, restaurants, personalities and scenarios that aren’t exactly drawn from fact, but which are more than a little familiar (witness, among other delights, a showbiz restaurant called the Bandillero; a boyband called, hilariously, Fellaz; and a posh south-Dublin seafront community called Kilbrittan Hill). Also Simpsons-ishly, Lynch’s humour, his treatment of these familiar people, places and things, is always of the naughtily intelligent mickey-taking variety: it’s never bitter or mean.
That’s not to say Lynch doesn’t have some extremely serious bones to pick with Irish pop culture in 2003: namely, the pop-cultural profit-ocracy that says that if something sells, it has cultural value – and if it doesn’t, well, you’re a sucker for wasting your time with it. Gratifyingly, in an age where you really find yourself longing for someone, somewhere, to be writing about this, it is one of the main themes of the book.
“One thing that happens when there’s a lot of money around, is that there’s a lot more rubbish around,” Lynch suggests. “For some reason, this whole corporate culture builds up, and you suddenly have, like, Cats on at the Point for six months or something – and everyone thinks, ‘Oh, isn’t it great? There’s loads of culture around now.’ No, there’s not,” he says. “There’s just more shite.
“With both of these books, I would have been going round with my head full of this idea about how difficult it is for anything culturally good to happen: certainly in music, but in television and books as well, in anything,” Lynch says. “It’s so difficult, it’s almost impossible: the world doesn’t want you to be good. If someone like, say, Phil Spector – who made these hugely popular, massively successful, and incidentally absolutely fucking wonderful pop records – if he came along now, he probably would have great difficulty working in the record industry. He’d be told, What do you want these fucking orchestras for? We just want you to make records that sell loads of copies. We don’t need them to be good.”
If Do Nothing’s gallant defence of decent pop culture fills your heart with glee, and if its lovingly documented father-daughter storyline gladdens your soul, then its depiction of alcoholic benders will supply more than a few unwelcome truths the next time you’re deliberately overstaying your welcome with Messrs Guinness, Daniels and/or Cuervo.
Lynch’s characters’ binges are not the fearless, careening cartoon jaunts of Hunter S. Thompson protagonists – they’re pathetic, cringe-making tragicomic episodes, with the emphasis on the ‘tragic’. Anyone who has ever either watched themselves drink too much, and/or been even a little addicted to anything, will recognise the endless internal monologue that goes on in his characters’ heads: full of denial, justification and bullshit, followed by the same again.
Lynch is in a position to know about these things, having given up drinking for good eight years ago.
“To some extent, with drinking, there is actually something in it,” Lynch says, somewhat ominously. “Do you know what I mean? It’s not complete rubbish. There’s always something in the idea of just getting completely off your head: it’s a very natural impulse, there’s a great anarchic thing in people.
“And going back to the books I love most – like Hunter S. Thompson, whom I would consider one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century – in my day, as a serious drinker, I would quite often read Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, just to get myself into the mood. It captures, better than any book I know, whatever that mad gene is that we all have, that instructs us to go out and go completely fucking spare. And there’s something great about that, there’s something very life-affirming about it. But unfortunately, it also can get you into terrible, terrible shit.”
Lynch has zero time for the currently vogueish notion that young people are the primary victims/offenders in the “fight” against alcohol (“Young people have been supposedly ‘getting out of hand’ since the time of Julius Caesar, practically,” he snorts). However, “I think there’s a great deal of, if you like, ‘unreported trauma’ in relation to alcohol in this country,” he posits. “I mean, we tend to still have, at some level, the idea of ‘the alcoholic’ as someone lying in the gutter, more or less fucked, you know? There are whole other areas, though, where people are kind of on the borderlines – an awful lot of people, who drink a certain amount, and who think it’s probably a bit too much, but that they’re not drinking enough for it to be a huge problem – and yet, they’re in a place where it can actually get quite a lot worse.
“And of course, the awful thing is that most people don’t actually see themselves moving across that line. It doesn’t happen like: one day, bang, you do it. You just find yourself over that line,” he says. “And then… it’s extremely fucking difficult to get back.”

Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me is published by Townhouse and is in good bookshops now