Wide awake in Dublin

“Somebody told me that they always had a hole in their soul because at the end of the Evel Knievel movie he goes off that massive ramp, but you never find out whether he made it or not. And basically that hole was filled when they discovered an accordion in a rock band. That’s my favourite thing anybody’s said to us yet.”

So says John Dermody, drummer in the Jimmy Cake and one of three siblings who make up the spine of not just that band, but the ever-morphing web of independent quasi-experimental musical ensembles breeding like vermin in the city of Dublin in this year of our lord 2003.

Indeed, the band’s multi-instrumentalist Diarmuid MacDiarmada (‘D’ to his friends, resplendent at soundcheck time in a Misfits t-shirt gleaned on a recent Mexican recce) seems intent on staging a single handed revolution of sorts: besides working with The Jimmy Cake, The Tycho Brahe and David Kitt, he has also been involved in a whole plethora of releases including Chokchai 3K Battery and the recent Orang Utan album on Goppa Records.

We’re living through a golden age of Irish independence. Until the late 90s, Ireland had scant evidence of an avant-garde pop art tradition. After the Tara Telephone beat/poetry happenings fostered by shakers like Eamonn Carr, plus the odd psychedelic hangover, there were only isolated figures in the Lypton Village enclave, or lone operators like Roger Doyle, Stano, David Donahue, a few others. When I started writing for Hot Press in 1996, you could count the number of left field operators on one hand: The Plague Monkeys, Jubilee Allstars, Pet Lamb, maybe one or two more.

Within three years the place was teeming. Irish musicians woke up to home recording, got organised, started bypassing the big money record deal sham and set up their own labels. No Disco and Donal Dineen’s radio show provided vital media oxygen. Soon there was a scene; or rather, several scenes: the friends of The Frames (Mundy, Damien Rice, Gemma Hayes etc) the avant-guitarde (The Redneck Manifesto, The National Prayer Breakfast, Joan Of Arse), and sundry vagrant souls who didn’t belong anywhere except in their own heads (El Diablo, The Warlords Of Pez, The Last Post).

Some of these were awe-inspiring, some unlistenable, but in a way it didn’t matter. What mattered was the level of activity and activism, the emergence of a parallel industry made up of maverick record shops, labels, publicists, pirate radio stations and all round head-the-balls: Road Records, Volta Sounds, Catchy Go Go Records, Independent Records, Reverb Records, Supremo Records, Alpha Relish Records, Friction PR, the Kicking Against The Pricks compilation, the Wonky happening, DJs/journalists like Leagues and Eamonn Sweeney and many more.

It wasn’t destined to be some kind of elitist trip that existed only in its own basement either. The last two Jimmy Cake shows in Whelan’s were so jammed the lines stretched out the door and around the corner, the kind of turnout you usually only saw at Frames shows five years ago. Something’s happening, Mr Jones. It may have been under the radar for the last three years, but its there, and like The Thing, it’s weird and if not pissed off then wide awake. Watching the nine-piece Jimmy Cake slam through the overpowering dynamics of new songs like ‘Quartz Cat Waltz’ and ‘Death Fall Priest’ and ‘The Width Of The Black’ at their soundcheck – waves upon waves of brass, banjo, distorted guitar, jazzcore rhythm section, fever dream saxophone and yes, that Evel accordion – is a visceral trip, not a cerebral one.

The Jimmy Cake evolved over a six-year period from a combo called Das Madman, who split up over, believe it or not, musical differences.

“Eventually it just blew apart,” recalls John Dermody. “We were asked to headline for someone about a year later and we just changed the name and changed the set. The original plan was to change the name for every gig, so we were starting with The Jimmy Cake and then we were gonna do Bag O’ Mickeys and then Joined Up Writing and stuff, but we ended up sticking with the name because loads more people came than we were expecting. And there was a bit more singularity of purpose.”

Initially the Jimmy Cake’s sprawling orchestrations began as jams with structure imposed on them after the fact, but of late John admits the process has become more thought out, more verbal.

“There’s only so far you can take the extended jam thing,” he admits. “I think we’ve done that as far as we’re going to do it really.”

“But it still shows in our live set,” adds his brother Vinnie, one of the group’s two guitarists. “If we’re finishing off, the extended jam takes over at some point ’cos none of us want to stop; in fact we don’t know when to shut the fuck up musically at times.”

It’s a thin line. Unless you’re John Coltrane, jamming can be a lot more fun for the band than the audience.

“We learn all our harsh lessons in the rehearsal studio and tend to basically weed out all our bad habits there,” says Vinnie, “and by the time we go on stage we almost instinctively know when to stop and start; all it needs is really a quick glance around from all of us to know what’s going on.”

When this reporter first heard The Jimmy Cake’s debut Brains a couple of years ago he could scarcely believe his ears. Here was an Irish band, a Dublin band at that – not even a band, more a multi-instrumental non-vocal 18-legged mutant – that understood the free jazz gospel of improvisation without ever leaning on the crutch of bar-band blues scales or shoegazer noodling.

A group that didn’t sound of this hemisphere let alone this parish. A combo that could’ve fit equally on labels like SST, K, Kranky, or Dischord, who could’ve been neighbours with both Sonic Youth and John Zorn, who had a saxophonist that knew the difference between Ornette Coleman and Kenny G. And above all, a band who understood that experimentalism didn’t automatically necessitate a ban on tunes.

They reminded me of some of the bands I loved on the Constellation label: Do Make Say Think, Godspeed You Black Emperor, A Silver Mt. Zion. Were they aware of such acts?

“No,” says John, “when Das Madman was going there was parallels being drawn with Mogwai but we hadn’t actually heard them at the time and they were always about four months ahead of us.”

Vinnie: “Literally. Whenever they introduced an instrument, we didn’t know that and then we introduced it; we were kind of living in this really irritating parallel universe. As far as the Constellation thing goes, we were aware of it, but in the same way we were aware of jazz and pretty much anything anyone was going to compare us to. We got Godspeed comparisons simply by virtue of how many people are in the band and we’re both instrumental. It kind of irked for a while.”

You could attribute it to the gooseflesh-inducing surges of noise at the live shows. Sometimes you want to call The Jimmy Cake apocalyptic, but it won’t stick – there’s an eeriness to them that tends to seep through despite the clamour of the music.

And yet, despite Vinnie’s diagnosis of their sound as being “a lot more optimistic than Godspeed”, they chose to call their new – frequently stunning – album Dublin Gone. Everybody Dead.

“We were waiting for a tirade of questions on that,” John admits, “but nobody even fuckin’ asked! In truth it’s actually a joke. Vinnie’s mate Niall was on holiday in Barcelona, and Vinnie got everybody he could find with mobile phones to text him saying, ‘Dublin gone. Everybody dead.!’”

“It is a fairly pregnant phrase though,” Vinnie concedes, “you can read it in loads of different ways. In fact, if you want to see a pattern, you can see a zombie theme in both of our titles, but they’re not deliberate. We just thought Brains was a fuckin’ deadly word and we thought ‘Dublin Gone. Everybody Dead.’ was a deadly phrase. There was no real intention behind it, but if people want to find it, then fuckin’ go for it.”

The humour is crucial to the Jimmy Cake gestalt. The song titles sometimes come off as a bit art installation, but these are Mel Brooks fans, readily fessing up to a fetish for films like Dead Man Don’t Wear Plaid and The Man With Two Brains. And whatever you do, don’t call them elitist.

“I don’t even know what that term means,” Vinnie says. “If someone accuses us of being elitist that just means they don’t get what we’re doing. We don’t make music to not be listened to, we make it for as many people to hear as possible. It just so happens that it takes a bit of exploration to really get into it.”

John: “Somebody wrote on the wall of the toilets in Whelan’s that we were pretentious and spelt it wrong: ‘The Jimmy Cake are a bunch of pretenious wankers!’”

At least they’re getting a reaction, the only scientific proof of action. The new independent sector has not gone unscathed by accusations of clique-yness, with one or two scribes sniping about The Scene That Celebrates Itself. With regard to the old question of parochial begrudgery, Vinnie says this:

“I don’t think the point has been made that in every other country where bands emerge and collaborate and a scene is developed, it is considered a very healthy and wonderful thing. Whereas for some bizarre reason it’s perceived as a clique in Ireland. I’m genuinely bemused and really irritated by it. More music has been coming out of this country than in an awful long time and that can only be a good thing.

“Fuck the quality of it. It could be teething problems in that it’s the first time there’s been a really cohesive underground scene in Dublin. I think this basically is the first real (Irish) movement of left-field artists moving collectively. And they might never have tried it had there not been the sort of fertile soil that all these bands have been allowed to create. We’ve known someone like Kittser for a long time.”

John: “He used to support us back in The Funnel. The Funnel would’ve been fairly important in giving this thing a slightly bigger stage, ’cos the Rednecks and half of this band and lots of other guys were playing in small quasi-hardcore bands and punk bands years ago, just doing Behan’s and The Chinaman, The Fusion Bar, all that stuff. D was in a band with The Tycho Brahe before they were The Plague Monkeys.”

“Everything stuck,” Vinnie concludes. “People just stayed around each other ’cos they were genuinely enthused by each other and it’s really brilliant. I can’t believe how many amazingly talented people I know, just being, in Dublin. We’re all fairly optimistic with a decent healthy dose of cynicism regarding life in general. We don’t see a golden egg, all we see is continuing to do what we do within the means that we have, and if the means continue to expand then we’ll happily expand with it.”

The old weird hibernians
100% Irish maverick

Nine Wassies From Bainne
Flying on the right side on the kind of polyrhythmical and pyrotechnical crackpot flash associated with Beefheart, Zappa and Bad Brains, this Cork band showed that Golden Horde drummer Peter O’Kennedy could do a hell of a lot more than a Ramones 4/4 and that Giordai O Laoghaire, christened “Ireland’s other interesting guitarist” by Bill Graham, was one of the great unsung players of any parish.

Stump
Dadaist ex-pats fronted by Mick Lynch, who showed brief signs of spearheading the lunatics-take-over-the asylum movement emerging from the second capital in the late ’80s with their second album A Fierce Pancake. Best moment? The undisputed genius of a chorus that went: “Charlton Heston/Put his vest on.” WB Yeats, read ’em and weep.

The Virgin Prunes
The granddaddies of the Paddyvant Garde, Gavin, Guggi and associates grew up in the shadow of the local mentaller, played gigs that out-gored Damien Hirst ten years before the fact, and proved a significant influence on Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson (not to mention Bjork and Moby). Seminal moment: ‘Pagan Love Song’.

Toasted Heretic
Galweigian precursors to The Divine Comedy, purveying a fine line in electro pop hitched to acerbic lyrics courtesy of all round agent provocateur and professional smart arse Julian Gough, now a respected novelist and close contender (alongside Stump) for author of possibly the greatest couplet in Irish pop history: “The sun goes down on Galway Bay/The daughter goes down on me”.

Fatima Mansions
Another outfit with their roots in Cork, Fatima Mansions were led by Mr. Angry and all out agitator of indie Cathal Coughlan (right), who once earned notoriety and narrowly escaped lynching while on tour with U2 in Italy for committing unspeakable acts with a statuette of the Virgin Mary. They made some pretty ferocious records too, most notably Viva Dead Ponies and Against Nature.