Louth Mouth: An Interview with Jinx Lennon

“I was like one of those big trawlers scraping the bottom of the sea,” says Jinx Lennon of his lengthy absence from the music scene. “I’d just pulled everything out and there was nothing left.” Although the Dundalk-based punk poet released the compilation album, Hungry Bastard Hibernia, in 2011, it’s been a full six years since his last studio offering, National Cancer Strategy.

While Lennon married and became a father in the interim, it wasn’t just those domestic distractions slowing his productivity. “To me, songwriting is like a Garden of Eden,” he explains, speaking in a strong, unadulterated Louth accent. “There has to be something there that you can go back to, and a few ideas at hand that you can sort of pick and choose from, but there really was nothing left. So it took me a good while to get back into the frame of mind to get back to writing again.”

Part of the problem was that he seriously disliked the fictional characters he had been singing about. “What happened with the last album I had out was that I suddenly realised it was a poisoned chalice for me,” he reflects. “I always feel like a Bible salesman when I’m trying to push the albums. I have to believe in them. And what happened with the last album was I realised I hated all the characters in it.

“There was a song about a gangster getting revenge on a barman, and another song about a priest who’s being kidnapped by a guy whose brother was in fear of him when he was younger; and another about a girl who’s being chased by a road-rage perpetrator on the motorway. But I had no sympathy for any of those people. I was thinking, ‘I hate all these characters!’”

Obviously back on creative track, Lennon is now set to simultaneously release two wonderfully titled new albums – Magic Bullets of Madness To Uplift The Grief Magnets and Past Pupil Stay Sane. He completed the latter (which clocks in at over 60 minutes and features support from his vocalist wife Sophie Coyle and producer/engineer Marc Auberle) in February of this year. The far shorter Magic Bullets was completed shortly after, and recorded in part collaboration with Ade Blackburn and Jonathan Hartley of cult Liverpool band Clinic.

The two are being sold separately. Why didn’t he just release a double album?

“Well, because the sound is totally different,” he says. “I did the Magic Bullets one with Marc, who works with Bell X1, and it’s just a different feel from the other one. And as I finished both I thought, you know, ‘These aren’t gonna work together.’

“There are similarities between them, though,” he continues. “One album has more gentleness, and one is fuller, with more beats, but they each complement the other. And I didn’t want them lying there because I wanted to get onto the next thing after this, because the songwriting is coming steady again.”

It’s fair to say that there’s a touch of Marmite about Lennon’s often abrasive and in-your-face sound. His lyrical themes are quite divisive, too. While some may not like his music, however, it’s difficult not to admire him for saying the things that need to be said.

“It isn’t something you’d put on during dinner parties,” he concurs, “but it’s something I need to say about things going on in the world that I’m not happy about. It’s dark, yes, but it’s injected with enough soul that it’s uplifting for people – and it has humour, too, which is the spoonful of sugar.”

Thematically, both albums see Lennon addressing such topics as the hypocrisies of small-town Ireland (‘I Know My Town’), corporate corruption (‘David Drumm’), the scourge of unemployment (‘70,00 New Jobs’) and backbiting co-workers (‘10 O’clock T Break Bollix’).

“I’ve written quite a lot of songs about various workplaces that I’ve gone through. I’ve worked so many shitty jobs in my life, so I might as well put the experience into songs now.”

The opener of Magic Bullets, ‘Xanax’, takes on the HSE’s often appalling attitude to those suffering from mental health problems. “I have a friend who had a very bad experience with the Irish mental health service, and he explained to me what was happening to him. A friend of his from Sweden managed to rescue him, and took him back over there, and he said the difference was like between night and day with the care he got.

“They were just firing tablets at him when he went into the mental health service in Ireland. So I was writing about that, and just about people that are getting older, and maybe they’re a bit out of hand in hospital, and they’re being controlled, or given tablets to zombify them.”

Truth be told, Jinx Lennon’s view of Ireland seems incredibly jaundiced. Is there anything that he likes about his homeland?

“Yeah, I really like the people,” he affirms. “I find that there is a thing about Irish people where you just can’t really keep them down. There’s a lot of faith in each other, there’s a great sort of friendship. There’s a great madness in the Irish people.”

Magic Bullets of Madness to Uplift the Grief Magnets and Past Pupil Stay Sane are both available now on Septic Tiger Records.