Jinx Lennon wears his hometown and his heart on his sleeve, and they're equal parts curse and blessing, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea
'I was fed up going to see acts that didn't inspire me, so I took that attitude with the inspiration I got from watching the Robert Duvall movie, The Apostle - an old Baptist preacher thing - and The Fall's Mark E Smith. Plus, he also used his own voice, his own Manchester accent, and I thought maybe I could do this in the context of Dundalk," says Jinx Lennon.
"I was really trying to put forward a taste of my own home town, aspects I detected in Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynnor Pat McCabe's Frank Pig Says Hello. I wanted to do something more lasting than cover bands playing Oasis songs in the local hotels."
Jinx Lennon - the next subject in RTÉ's Arts Lives series - is some border-town boyo; for the past seven years he's been frightening the Irish music scene with what we shall term, for the sake of comfortable reference, diatribe folk. In other words, armed only with an acoustic guitar, a vernacular accent, a little bit of rabble-rousing and a whole lotta invective, Lennon has managed to construct a compact body of work (three albums) that has as much divided as confused critics and public alike.
It's easy to see why such division and confusion has set in - Lennon walks a thin line between proselytising and comfort zone, between the normal codes of accessibility and the outer reaches of provocation. His music is anti-folk, forty shades of sea-sick green; his lyrics are jabs and darts into the faces of every sensitive singer-songwriter you care to mention. Is he a gobshite or a genius, or somewhere halfway between the two?
In his early 40s, Lennon takes pride in the fact that he is from Dundalk, the Co Louth town best known, in a musical context, for The Corrs. Some of Lennon's cousins featured in the line-ups of 1980s punk and post-punk bands - NRG (one of Ireland's first punk acts), The Choice, Legalised Slaughter. Other Dundalk bands such as Some Kind of Wonderful also proved inspirational to Lennon, whose ill health as a child cut him off from partaking in sports. Like most hospital-bound children, he diverted his attention to reading and listening to music, and when he left school after successfully completing the Leaving Cert it was no surprise that he eventually moved to New York in order to soak up abstract leaks from his heroes: Lou Reed, Suicide, Television.
"I worked in a warehouse on the Lower East Side, bought loads of records. People I worked with were like characters you'd see on television." Lennon spent almost a year in NYC, spending his spare money on building a record collection, assuaging the guilt he felt through such financial recklessness by telling himself that when he returned to Dundalk he'd form a band. "When I came home, I bought a guitar, but things don't always work out and we turned into a run of the mill alternative band."
Gradually, frustration kicked in. "With bands," says Lennon, "there is always someone you have to take care of, always someone drunk that you have to feed pizza with before they go on stage, so about nine years ago I thought, to hell with this, and I went out on my own." It was a slow process; the singer-songwriter scene in Dublin seemed too rooted in bedsit scenarios to appeal to Lennon's rather more declamatory style. He was out on his own, far removed from the likes of Paddy Casey, Damien Rice and Gemma Hayes.
Lennon knew he wasn't going to find overnight acclaim ("anyone I've admired has taken time to be noted") and was also prepared for people to look at each other and raise their eyes to heaven. Did he feel that people just weren't getting it? "Loads of times. I'd play places and you'd see people giving up after the first song. I'd walk out of the venue with my tail between my legs, but that's a great learning process because it keeps you humbled. In fact, those are the most important shows."
To make ends meet, Lennon works as a night porter in a Co Louth hospital; it's a grounding experience, he relates, and a necessary antidote to the rush of blood to the head he receives while performing. He says he prefers the incendiary nature of early gospel and blues music to most of what he hears today - "bands trying to do the late 1970s/early 1980s punk-rock thing, just going through the paces; at least, the originators had some sort of motive". Persistence, however, is a double-edged issue, matching insight with varying degrees of delusion and self-defeat. Lennon, compulsive chap that he undoubtedly is, finds inspiration in his stubbornness. "I'm able to look back at this stage and see a small back catalogue of three albums. I'm trying to put something different into each one, which might make them timeless. The way I view it is that if people don't look at them now, then in 10 years' time they might. The man in the street with the LCD factor will probably never get what I do, but others will. And hopefully, someone in Dundalk will."
His provincial hometown is rarely far from his thoughts, yet, perhaps typically, it hovers around him like a blessing and a curse. "There's something about a border town like Dundalk - when you come to a certain age you settle down, do your work and keep the head down. When I was younger I spent some time in hospital; I'd have to listen to my uncles talking and they were talking just for the sake of it, very cliched, answering-machine stuff. And there was always something in the back of my head that told me not to turn into my uncles." Unless Lennon's uncles are an obstinate bunch of rowdy, wordy, volatile anti-folk singers with guitars that kill fascists, then we can safely presume that he hasn't.
The Arts Livesdocumentary Noisemakershows Lennon to be a committed and genuine performer, a principled man eager to adhere to what he terms "the higher art" of authenticity. Contributor Pat McCabe astutely describes Lennon's artform as a "funny mixture of the Presbyterian and the loquacious Gael".
"The music I'm making, I have to feel that in ten years' time I'm still going to be able to connect with it," says Lennon. Of the warts-and-all approach of the documentary, he says: "There is no use being wishy-washy about it. I don't mind if people pick up on the negative aspects - I think it's brave enough to be able to come out and say, this is my life."
Noisemaker, as part of Arts Lives series, broadcasts on Tue, RTÉ1 at 10.15pm. Jinx Lennon plays the Sugar Club, Dublin, June 1; Spirit Store, Dundalk, June 2; De Barras, Clonakilty, Co Cork, June 5; Dolan's, Limerick, June 7; Half Moon Theatre, Cork, June 8
