Music
27 Oct 04

Zoo Station

To mark the release of his new album, Jape main-man Richie Egan took comedian David O’Doherty to the zoo on condition that he write 1200 words about it for Hotpress.

There are no penguins in the zoo today. Wild foxes have been sneaking into the penguin enclosure late at night and biting their heads off. The penguin head, the keeper informs us, is a great source of protein.

There aren’t many people at the zoo today either. It’s a wet October weekday morning, so it’s just a couple of school tours and us. Still, I’m excited. I’ve only been to Dublin Zoo once before, and that was with my under 12 football team and I had to pretend that I was so over zoos. Richie is excited too. He’s excited about his new album, he’s excited generally.
“I had this huge revelation last year,” he explains as we pass the Brazilian tapir (the tapir looks like a customised aardvark – Pimp My Aardvark). “I realised for the first time that eventually I am going to die, and realising that is the biggest thing that has ever happened to me. It has completely changed my whole life. It has given me a focus I’ve never had before. All the lyrics on the album are based around that one experience”
The Monkeys in the Zoo Have More Fun Than Me is the follow up to his 2003 debut Cosmosphere. The gentle electronic landscape and impressionistic lyrics of the first release have evolved into a more melodic kind of groove, with some of the smartest lines you’ll hear on any new record this year.
“We took our first pill/When the music was shit/I said fuck dancing all night/But then that’s just what we did/ It felt like floating”.
“If you listen to the lyrics of a lot of supposedly serious bands, half the time they don’t make any sense. I love Leonard Cohen. I love Bob Dylan. I love Cass McCombs. Lyrics that stop you in your tracks and make you say holy shit, that’s a great line.”
He began writing the lyrics last autumn between engagements with his two other projects, playing bass with David Kitt and as a member of instrumental rock overlords The Redneck Manifesto. Two weeks after recording the new Rednecks album I Am Brazil in April, he began recording the new Jape disc.
“It took ten days to record. I had some rough sketches of songs but I didn’t really know how I wanted it to sound.” With the input of musicians such as Glenn Keating of Connect 4 Orchestra, David Kitt and producer Jimmy Eadie, the album began to form.
Although a studio album, it manages to retain much of the charm and a sense of spontaneity of a home recording. By drafting in musicians on a song by song basis, different songs have entirely different dynamics, from the sideways funk of How Much Light to the kind-of samba of Autumn Summer.
“The best way I’ve found is to give everybody space, don’t tell them anything and it takes shape by itself. Then everybody gets excited when it starts to come off.”
Special mention is reserved for long term musical sidekick Mattie Bolger, also of Redneck Manifesto and the David Kitt band. “I met Mattie years ago at a Jackbeast gig in the White Horse, and we discovered we both lived in Crumlin and started hanging out. There are certain people that you just trust. The great thing about Mattie is that he’s so honest. If he says something’s not the best, you know he’s not just saying it to be a prick.”
The rain stops as we reach the City Farm section. I want to pat a pig by way of an apology for sticking chips up one’s nose at The Spring Show when I was ten, but he doesn’t want to come out of his hut.
“You’d think the Irish animals would be used to the rain,” says Michael the photographer. He’s got a point. The elephant and the meercats didn’t seem to mind. Still, maybe they have high protein heads and were on the look-out for wild foxes. Or maybe this is the same pig as The Spring Show.
We discuss the possibility of adopting an animal and decide we’d prefer to adopt a zoo-keeper. I think it would be more fun, especially if we got one with a car. He could drive us around. Richie thinks of a downside. “We’d probably have to go over to his house and clean up. And maybe he’d shit everywhere.”
It’s feeding time at the sea-lion’s pond so we talk about record labels.
“I believe you have to keep doing what you’re doing to the best of your ability, and if someone is going to take notice of it, it will happen anyway.”
In the case of Jape, Richie has hooked up with the fledgling Trust Me I’m a Thief label run by sometime musical collaborator and one-time member of The Idiots Brian Mooney. “Brian is on the same level as me. I like the ethos of it, which is just about music.”
Aside from masterminding the release of the album, Mooney also contributes guitar to several tracks.
There don’t seem to be any flamingoes around, but the pond is full of ducks, the healthiest, least Dubliny looking ducks we’ve ever seen. Richie wonders if there is a way to tell the ducks on the canal getting cans thrown at them by winos to move up here. “If we could take one in a car and show him the signs, he’d tell the others. We’d be duck legends.”
Over on Monkey Island, chimps Betty and Judy are having carrots for lunch. They suck down on four each, simultaneously, like a dribbley pan-piping duo. The sign says they’ve been here since the mid-sixties, and while home-thoughts may have occupied their minds once, today they seem perfectly happy to sit on their beam and watch us watching them. Their contentment strikes a chord with Richie.
“I read an interview with Leonard Cohen last week, and he was saying that what you do as an artist is never going to change the world, but it offers you a safe harbour, somewhere you can go and get what he was calling a kiss of peace. If you’re working on something it can satisfy you like nothing else can. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m getting closer to that.”