More songs about drinking and death

The circumstances could hardly be more appropriate. The Mighty Stef is speaking from an old-fashioned coin-operated phone booth in Barcelona airport on the Monday morning following his stag weekend. There’s always a story with Stefan Murphy, whose second album 100 Midnights is a rough-edged but hugely impressive panorama of songwriting styles and sounds, from the bolshy, Brechtian title tune to the poolroom blues of the closing ‘A Pretend Sailors Goodbye’; from No Wave Spector (‘Downtown’) to shlockabilly country death dirges (‘Golden Gloves’).

If the songs frequently invoke Tom Waits’s description of The Pogues as sounding like sailors on shore leave, that’s no accident: both Cait O’Riordain and Shane MacGowan make cameos on the record (Stef is handled by ex Pogues manager Frank Murray), the former on the mother-son duet ‘Safe At Home’, the latter on a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s classic ‘Waitin’ Round To Die’.
“Shane came in armed with another verse for the song,” Stefan recalls, “he thought that this verse he had concocted in his brain was very apt: “A friend, he said he knew how some good money could be made/We found a rich boy walking all alone/I got me a razor blade/And I took him in the shade/And I started me a graveyard of my own.”
Holy shit – that’s some verse.
“He thought that he’d ripped it off Hank Williams, but I searched for those lyrics and I couldn’t find them anywhere, so it was just a little bit of Shane magic that we were privy to at the time. I’ve been asked a series of times by people doing press stuff and friends and family, ‘What was it like meeting Shane MacGowan?’ Well, first of all he was an absolute gentleman and a really good, spirited person to be in the company of. And yeah, when we were finished, we got drunk, we had a great time, we sat around listening to music and playing pool and drinking whiskey and gin and everything else. For somebody of the pedigree of Shane to be contributing to my work was a real thrill – I still don’t understand the full weight of that.”
Given that Stef tends to write from the belly of the demi-monde, one wonders if he feels the temptation to temptation to live a dissolute life in order to acquire the authority to sing these kinds of songs? In other words, is he in danger of adopting some spurious version of the Method, like so many middle-class baby Bukowskis before him.
“I haven’t by any means walked in a straight line,” he says, “I’ve probably wandered in the darkness in different ways, very different from the stuff I sing about, but I wouldn’t consider myself qualified to be a social commentator of the underworld, although I’m still very fascinated by that. Even as a kid, I had a fascination with anything that was chaotic. I was a pretty well behaved kid, which a lot of people can hardly imagine, but I was very interested in reading about situations I didn’t understand. I remember the first time I heard Nick Cave singing, maybe about eight or nine years before I actually got into him, I knew there was something wrong about it that made it so right.”
For such a literate songwriter, Murphy professes himself more influenced by films than books, specifically the work of Shane Meadows.
“‘Safe At Home’ is influenced by his films, and a lot of stuff that’s been jogging around in my brain for the past few years have been direct results of seeing Dead Man’s Shoes, which is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. I’m fascinated with the subject of revenge, I think it’s a very dangerous and very negative emotion, but a very powerful one all the same.”

100 Midnights is out now on The First Born Is Dead Recordings