The L Word

Late one summer’s night back in 2006, Dublin-born novelist Anna McPartlin was watching her childhood friend, acclaimed Irish crooner Jack Lukeman, performing in front of a capacity audience in the Olympia Theatre when creative inspiration suddenly struck.

“I was standing on the balcony with his manager watching a show and Jack was doing an a cappella song and the whole crowd was completely silent,” she recalls. “You could’ve heard a pin drop. And then he went into this fantastic uplifting kind of gregarious vital song. So he took the crowd from an extreme low to an extreme high. And this character suddenly came into my mind and then she was kind of fermenting for ages. And I talked about her to Jack initially, and he was definitely interested in the idea of me writing something based around his songs.”
Three years on, McPartlin and Lukeman are meeting Hot Press in the Central Hotel to discuss her resulting novel So What If I’m Broken? and his compilation album, the superb collection, The Story So Far. The novel tells the story of a missing wife and her husband’s desperate attempts to find her. A chance meeting with three strangers at a Jack L concert changes all of their lives forever. One of the sub-texts of the collaboration is the belief that Jack L’s music has that effect on people – and especially on women.
Every chapter in the novel opens with a verse from one of Jack L’s songs.
“All the rest of the characters came from the music; every one of them is born from a certain song,” she explains. “There isn’t just lyrics slapped at the top of each chapter. Every lyric ties in with what’s going on, the mood and the tone of that chapter. So the music is really part and parcel of it.”
McPartlin and Lukeman have been friends since they were teenagers. Although living in Kenmare at the time, she used to visit relations in his native Athy every summer. They remained friends into adulthood, and she was a regular visitor to the South Circular Road home where Jack and his then band had set up base-camp in the 1990s.
“It was like Friends in that house, only with a very low budget,” Lukeman laughs. “We had a rehearsal room and lots of Kramers from Seinfeld coming in and out. Songs like ‘Georgie Boy’ would’ve been written there. We had the recording gear upstairs and the rehearsal room downstairs, and people living in various rooms. I actually made a few albums there, including the Universe album.”
He says he found it a genuinely satisfying experience compiling the new record. Featuring 24 tracks, both originals and covers, mostly pulled from his albums to date, it highlights what an extraordinary singer and interpreter he is. It includes old favourites such as his own ‘Georgie Boy’, ‘So Far Gone’ and ‘Little Man’ alongside impassioned cover versions of standards by Brel, Newman, Leonard Cohen and Hugh Cornwell (his famous Kylie cover is also included).
“It’s great doing a retrospective because I’m always looking forward. It’s funny to stop and to look back at what I’ve done so far. I wanted to do something that would go with the book, but would stand up as a broader retrospective thing as well. I’ve put songs on it that haven’t been released before so I think it’s a bit special.”
He maintains that putting the album together made him realise how much ground he has covered in his career. In a nutshell: “I started off with the Black Romantics, started doing the Brel stuff, and that grew from the Da Club to an Olympia show, and the album did really well and all that, and coming outta that I made my own album Metropolis Blue, which was original stuff, and that led on to The Point and then doing America and all the various things that you do. And thankfully I’m still getting away with it. ”
At times, the extent of his achievements may be underestimated in Ireland. He points to a recent gig in the Big Apple as a particular career highlight. “I did a thing in August with the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, which was just amazing. There was about 10,000 people at this big open-air thing beside the Brooklyn Bridge, looking in on Manhattan, with the orchestra behind me and this big fireworks display. I did some of the Randy Newman stuff, I did some of me own songs and then I did ‘New York, New York’. It was amazing, just looking at Manhattan with the orchestra belting it out. I was going, ‘Jesus, I better remember this moment!’ So there’s lots of mad, surreal moments. That was a recent high point.”
Not that it’s all been completely plain sailing. “There’s been a couple of times when I’ve been bankrupt, more or less, but you learn after a while that good economics breeds artistic freedom, so you try to keep your boat afloat so you can do the next thing. But I’ve had a pretty good trip so far.”
Following the success of his recent album of Randy Newman covers, Burn On, he’s currently midway through recording a new album of original material. “I do write my own songs, but I’m not strict about it. I mean, I came to the fore singing Brel’s stuff. I consider myself first and foremost a singer, after that a songwriter, so when you hear a song you like, I’ll often think ‘I’d love to do a version of that’. I just like singing great songs.”
While Lukeman’s own career path was always clear in his mind from a young age (ignoring a brief, half-hearted foray into the greasy world of the truck mechanic!), McPartlin took a more circuitous route. Originally she wanted to be an actress. “I made a big fuss about leaving college and becoming an actor,” she says. “I was convinced that I wanted to be the next Meryl Streep. So I joined an acting class and within five minutes realised, ‘Jesus, this is not for me!’ Somebody was re-enacting the life of a plant or something, shivering in the rain, and I was going, ‘Oh no!!!’ After making such a fuss, I had to stick with it or I’d lose face. So I did it for ages and I really didn’t like it at all. I made no effort. I was the laziest actor in the history of the universe.”
Fate intervened when she was knocked down by a car in the early 90s. Although she fully recovered from her injuries, her outlook on life utterly changed: “I realised that life is too short to be dicking around doing something that you don’t wanna do. I liked writing and had always wanted to write, but again found a way into it through stand-up comedy. So I did stand-up for a while, realised again that performance was the thing that annoyed me – I just didn’t want to be there on the night, doing the same bloody thing over and over again – but I loved the writing.”
She figured that she’d have to move to London in order to further her stand-up ambitions. The thought didn’t appeal. When her musician husband landed a major tour of the US, they decided to buy a house in Ireland (“he didn’t want to be coming home to London off tour and I didn’t want to be living in London on my own”), so she jacked in the stand-up and went to work in an insurance company for almost a decade – only leaving two years ago, following the success of her second novel The Truth Will Out. In the time-honoured rock’n’roll tradition, she is Big In Germany, where she sells a lot of books.
Curiously, she admits that she was unhappy leaving her job to become a full-time writer. “I actually really loved my job. I hated leaving. It was the power. The power of the claims examiner!”
She listened exclusively to Jack’s music while writing the book. “Up to now, every one of my books has its own soundtrack. I’d literally get maybe 10 or 11 artists and put them all together on my computer, so there’d be about 150 songs. Now, it’ll be a cross section of music, but that’s all I’ll listen to because it gets me straight back in to the mood and the place.
“Usually the story comes first and then I’ll choose the music. But for this one, the music came first, and the story came from the music, so I listened absolutely exclusively to Jack. To the point where my husband was banging on the ceiling going, ‘Please, you’re killing me!’ He used to be Jack’s drummer and he was saying, ‘I’ve heard more now than I heard travelling around America with him’.”
The process was prolonged following a computer virus attack. When she was just 20 pages from the end, she lost the entire manuscript.
“I hadn’t backed it up at all,” she admits, sheepishly. “I freaked out for about two weeks and then I started it again. Even without that happening, I suppose it was a long time coming, because I’d approached Jack about this a couple of years ago. I was working on book two when the idea was formulating, but I approached him with the idea then, because I needed him to be completely on board before I went and invested time. So he knew that this was coming – and depending I suppose on whether it was good or bad, he was gonna do something with it. And luckily he liked it.”
He did indeed, turning Jack L: The Story So Far into an epic of sorts that thoroughly deserves the acclaim with which it has been greeted. The result? An independent Irish Top 10 album that will battle it out with the heavy hitters on the run-in to Christmas. Meanwhile. So What If I’m Broken? will be coming out in Germany and the US in the coming months and Jack and Anne will be travelling together to promote the book and the album. But will they be collaborating in any other way? For instance, would she write some lyrics for him to sing?
McPartlin looks aghast at the very thought: “No! He’s a much better lyricist than I could ever be – and I sure as shit can’t sing!”