A live man who plays the bass from Crumlin

Despite an online campaign to give him a Christmas number one (with ‘Phil Lynott’ a song about another “[dead] man who played the bass from Crumlin”), Richie Egan isn’t the most Christmassy chap in the world. On the other hand, he’s more than eager to reminisce about times past over a Yule log and mulled wine (actually a cup of coffee in the Central Hotel – we met in November).

“When I was a kid I was mad into American hardcore – The Dead Kennedys and Minor Threat and all that stuff,” says Richie Egan, aka Jape. “I got into it through the Hope Collective [idealistic Dublin punk collective in the early/mid ‘90s]. I’d started off being into REM and Nirvana, but then started going to Hope gigs and seeing small little bands that were really, really good. There were two scenes back in the day. There was the one surrounding Hope, who were more political, and then there was the Old Chinaman scene. That was the pub where the street punks went. I used to hang around with this guy called Fletch and we managed to skirt between the two crowds. There were good points and bad points to each of them. The Old Chinaman was a strange and scary place. I remember Blackbelt Jones [his early hardcore band] were doing a gig there, and Glen our drummer said that there was a smell of benjy in the place, and someone shouted in a scary voice ‘If you don’t like it FUCK OFF!’ That kind of summed the place up. There’s a pub up near Smithfield market – an early house filled with really hardcore dudes that look like they’re just out of prison and on E, and they’re in there with their grannies who’re also on E. It reminds me a bit of the Old Chinaman.”
Apart from a healthy sense of fear, punk rock also gave him an important feeling of old-fashioned, DIY agency. He went from Blackbelt Jones to instrumental post-rock Dublin behemoths the Redneck Manifesto, and then at some point during the last half decade had his life-affirming, guitartronic solo act, Jape, signed up to V2, and when that folded, Co-operative Records.
“That whole ‘do it yourself’ attitude of punk and hardcore was always hugely inspiring to me, but I was always into loads of different types of music,” he proffers. “Even when I was listening to all those hardcore bands I was still into Simon and Garfunkel, and I always had these songs I used to write on the side. Then I reached a point where I had loads of songs, so I did a few gigs and got a good reaction. When you’re making music there are two important points – when you do your first gig and when you make a record. Those are the points where you start to realise how to do it better. At the same time I was humming and hawing about whether to ever get signed. I’d seen how it had gone for other people so I’d no illusions. It made me realise that however things are going now, in two years time nobody’s necessarily going to give a shit. That’s why I used the advance to get loads of equipment. You don’t want to think ‘I had all this money and I spent it all on a studio where someone was taking cocaine off the mixing desk.’ I’m hyper-aware of how it goes – you’re pushed, you’re hyped, people are into it and then nobody gives a fuck. Even if I’m back working a job again, I want the ability to make music and be self-sufficient in it.”
Of course, it does mean his flat looks like a warehouse.
“It’s fucking ridiculous really,” he laughs. “I brought it all back into the house yesterday and it was flight-case after flight-case after flight-case. Matty [Redneck Manifesto guitarist and Jape collaborator] was going ‘What the fuck! You can’t be putting all this here, you have to find a place for it!’ But my girlfriend doesn’t mind too much. I’d just brought it down to Ventry to do some songwriting and then spent most of the time in a conservatory with a beaten-up nylon fucking guitar. I hardly used it.”
He takes the writing process a lot more seriously these days.
“The first album was me with a bag of grass and an ADAT machine,” he confeses. “The second one was a little more thought out, but really I wasn’t that happy with either of them. So Ritual took three years. I don’t know if you’re into Werner Herzog at all. He’s a German film director, and he’s unbelievable. Anyway, he talks about this thing called an ‘ecstatic truth’. He gets it in film. It’s something you can’t put your finger on, but it’s this feeling that inspires you. A sense that you haven’t really done this yourself, that it’s come from somewhere else. When it’s not there it’s really hard to create, but when it is...”
He trails off. Jape’s music is also marked by a joie de vivre which, it turns out, comes from a slightly darker place than is immediately apparent.
“Around the time of writing the second album, I had this realisation of the reality of death. Some people say it happened to them a lot earlier in their lives, but that was the year it happened for me. But you go through all that and you come out the other side and then it doesn’t feel so bad and you start feeling happy to be alive a lot more. You start to appreciate it. A lot of the songs on the record are about being alive,” he laughs, “but they’re all about death when you get down to it.”
And making the most of life, for Richie Egan, means playing lots and lots of music. As well as writing new songs for Jape, his old comrades in The Redneck Manifesto are also thinking of recording again.
“Someone told us recently that RMG had money for us which we never collected,” he shakes his head. “We’re not lazy when it comes to writing songs, but we’re lazy about things like that. So we’re thinking of going back over to the Blackbox studio in France to do another studio album. We have eight or nine new songs we think are really good. Being in a band with other people is good for you and I miss it sometimes with Jape. I think maybe a lot of singer songwriters have never been in a band where people just go ‘that’s shit’ – not out of meanness but to make things better. It’s very healthy. But at the end of the day, the only thing you have to do is look yourself in the mirror. Dublin’s a small place and you can walk around here like you’re cock of the walk very easily if you want to, but at the end of the day you know if your songs are no good. I believe that everyone making shit music knows in their heart that what they’re doing isn’t great... even if they’re very successful. They’re probably weeping on their big pile of money at night.”
Richie Egan has no such concerns. He doesn’t have a big pile of money. And he’s pretty content with the music he’s making. He’s looking forward to his Tripod gig on the 18th, Christmas in Sweden with his girlfriend, and not playing on New Year’s Eve (“I’ve done gigs every New Year’s Eve for the past few years so it’s kind of a relief. Everyone is always so hammered”). And if he’s lucky he might have scored a number one with his Christmas single ‘Phil Lynott’ (“I wouldn’t be placing any bets on it,” he says, laughing). Any advice for the Christmas season? “Keep the head down and eat the turkey.” So to sum up –‘bah-humbug’ but in a life-affirming, punk rock kind of way.

Jape plays Tripod, Dublin on December 18