Louth mouth

Jinx Lennon found his voice when he started singing in a Dundalk accent.

WELCOME TO Jinx Country. As much a state of mind as a border town, Dundalk is the place David "Jinx" Lennon has called home for most of his life. It's where he woke up every morning as a young lad to the smells and noises from the brewery and the railway line. It's where he first grabbed a guitar in anger and joined a garage rock band to pick up chicks. It's where his band played on the roof of a cinema one night in a Get Backkind of wheeze but only three or four people showed up. Most of all, it's where Lennon finally found his voice – the one he was born with.

Today, he’s sitting in the lobby of the tallest hotel for miles around, drinking a cup of coffee and talking about himself and his new album. You probably know Jinx Lennon already from the hundreds of gigs he’s played up and down the land, telling the truth to the believers and the scoffers alike. You’ll know him from dozens of scrappy, heart-on-sleeve testaments about what’s really going in the streets and fields of your town and parish. No-one else has songs that poke the scars and scabs of modern Ireland like Lennon’s.

The new album is called Trauma Themes, Idiot Times, and Lennon is proud of it. There's been a lot of work put into these songs and it shows. The songs, says Lennon, are about making what he does universal.

“They’re universal themes. People anywhere can relate to the isolation I’m singing about. The isolation felt by someone living in a rural area who is getting bullied and harassed and ends up murdering somebody.

“The isolation where people have lost the run of themselves and are committing suicide and killing their kids when the picture isn’t perfect.

"The isolation where families have turned into something from The Invasion of the Bodysnatcherswhere they're fighting with each other over trinkets after a parent dies.

“Plenty of people have come up to me recently and said: ‘Jinx, plenty of stuff for you to sing about now’. But I don’t want to sing about the banks or bankers – you need someone like Beckett to sum up those pathetic figures.”

The music has also changed. “There’s a lot of pessimism and darkness and misanthropy in the songs, so I wanted the music to be really good,” says Lennon. “It took me a year and a half of going in and out of the studio to get it right. I was listening to a lot of Howlin’ Wolf and I wanted that raw rockabilly feel as the backdrop. I did a few songs with a few local lads who did that sort of thing, and that got me over the hump. It was important to make the music on the album more psychedelic, colourful and three-dimensional.”

Trauma Themes, Idiot Timesis an album that will bring a lot more people round to Lennon's gaff to marvel at what he is doing. It's where Lennon has been heading since he wrote a song called Get the Guards back when the garage-rock band were running out of gas. In some ways, muses Lennon, this record could have been made 25 years ago.

“All the influences were there, but I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing this in my own voice back then. I had no self-confidence. I thought no-one would be into it and that I’d be a laughing stock. It was easier to try to be to cool and put on a façade and think I was Sterling Morrison. We thought we were changing the world because every other band locally had poodle haircuts and wanted to be Prince. In our own tiny bubble, we were the avant-garde.

“When I listened back to the tapes of band practices, though, I always liked the throwaway stuff I’d come out with, like about courthouses and the local nightclub owner and the gards. Eventually, I stopped trying to sing in a mid-Atlantic accent, surrendered to my local accent and never looked back. But there was fierce stubbornness there for years before I found the headspace to do it.”

When he started performing Get the Guards, people began to pay attention.

“That song became a base and everything grew from there. Patrick Kavanagh used to always say that the parish is the cornerstone of great civilisations, and I do think singing in your own voice about local parish events creates an atmosphere. When I listen to Tinariwen, for instance, I get the sense of the Mali desert.

"Some people mightn't think that Dundalk is exotic, but then Pat McCabe wrote Frank Pig Says Helloand did the surreal thing with Clones and turned it into a different world. That's what I am trying to do with my own stuff, to take the surreal stuff and characters from my life and join them up with the stuff I've been listening to for the last 40 odd years."

By now, he’s past the stage of caring what people think when he opens his mouth and starts to sing. “When some people hear my voice, they expect me to be jumping around the stage pulling funny faces and putting on goggly eyes,” he says. “When they see me, you can see them going ‘where’s the punchline?’ and getting annoyed because there isn’t one.

“The voice antagonises certain parts of an audience and they just can’t get their head around what I’m doing onstage. And that’s alright; I’m totally happy with that. Fuck it, like. If you’re lucky, half of the audience will love you and half of them will hate you.”

Yet he hopes he has now reached the stage where he doesn’t have to do shows where he’s kicking against the pricks for the night.

“We’ve paid our dues, we’ve done shows in places like Letterfrack and in Donegal, where we’ve gone down like a lead balloon. You walk into a venue and you can smell a bad show. It doesn’t matter. I always play a show as if there are 300 people enjoying it.

“But we want to do shows which are positive for us and which get us out to as many people as possible. There’s no need to make martyrs of ourselves any more. It’s a necessity to keep working. There are a certain amount of shows we do every year, but we’re realistic that there is a certain level we can’t go beyond at the moment.

“Creativity is the main thing. If the gas and oil ran out, as long as I had a guitar, a candle, a pen and a bit of paper, I’d be happy. It would probably be better if there was more turmoil because it keeps you grounded and makes you realise that the other stuff, the business stuff, is superfluous.”

Trauma Themes Idiot Timesis released on Septic Tiger on March 20th and is reviewed on page 14. Jinx Lennon plays Cork's Pavilion (today) and Dundalk's Spirit Store (tomorrow). www.jinxlennon.com