In search of the culture

JOE JACKSON calls himself "a post-modern Paddy"

JOE JACKSON calls himself "a post-modern Paddy". For him, popular culture is the signature of national identity and in this ten-year collection of his journalism from Hot Press and The Irish Times, he sets out to demonstrate precisely why. Richard Harris, Gerry Adams, Gabriel Byrne, Anthony Clare and, of course, Bono, feature among Jackson's selected interviews as voices included "not because of who they are, but because of what their reflected views tell us about who we are".

So who are we? Jackson owns up to his influences by telling us about his complex father, a self-educated working-class atheist so uncomfortable in the Ireland of Jackson's youth that he drank too much, abused his family and died at only 49. Joe senior gave his son a love of reading, a healthy scepticism of authority and a passion for music that never left him. Joe junior loved Elvis first and Joyce later, hankering in the meantime after a medley from Beat poetry to Bergman films, via a culture club where Roland Barthes, Raymond Williams and Frank Sinatra sang different anthems side by side.

Within a largely question-and-answer format pioneered by rock journalists in the Seventies, Jackson is a tenacious interviewer. Just as his subjects start to relax, he throws them that question from hell you wouldn't have the nerve to ask. "Tell us about the wife-beating, Richard" - this, more or less, to Richard Harris whose self-deprecating halo was starting to glint. "Is killing children in Warrington part of your peace strategy?" - that, paraphrased, to Gerry Adams in 1993. He returns again and again to his favourite themes: heavy drinking fathers, the stranglehold of the Roman Catholic Church, the injustice of class distinctions. "But you are still the beneficiary of British imperialism," he accuses Henry Mountcharles, some 300 years after his family bought land around Slane. Mountcharles explains how you can be both posh and Irish too.

Match him against someone he believes is a hypocrite and he enters the fray like a latter-day Danton. Ben Briscoe, then Lord Mayor of Dublin, storms off in a huff when Jackson queries his remarks on homosexuality and his support of Charles J. Haughey. But men like musician Christy [Moore, writers Tom Murphy and Paul Durcan open their hearts because they sense they can trust him - and you never doubt it.

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Jackson's research is impeccable, his commitment is everywhere, yet the legacy of rock journalism's conservative ethos takes away almost as much as it gives. His subjects already occupy fairly mainstream positions, even when they aren't power-brokers themselves. Men do most of the talking, women illustrate points. three out of 24 solo interviews feature women - Edna O'Brien (subject: sex), Mary Coughlan (subject: the right to choose) and a tribeless woman called, simply, Theresa, who works as a prostitute. A few more female voices pop up in the "soundbite" notes which pepper the collection, yet not enough to persuade a Martian that women. were other than a whispering minority through those years.

Without Frank McGuinness and Michael D. Higgins, you would barely whiff the huge perceptual changes about women that mark Jackson's chosen decade. Sure, the likes of Moore and Murphy describe how they became born-again supporters of women's brains, but less trusting readers might wonder if waning levels of testosterone played at least a minor part in their transformation. Moore joins a suspiciously-thankul Harris and others on a page of glowing testaments to Jackson's ability which would be a real reddened anywhere else, to the point where you wonder why he needed to include it.

Journalism is popular culture's most articulate form of expression, if not its most elegant. Jackson is right to value popular culture, and he's right to challenge the canon which claimed only high art could say it all presenting these interviews as signposts to issues of Irish identity is a logical next step. But the in-your-face quality of his question-and-answer format reads like play scripts without a director's mediation, making it sometimes tough to find the signposts. In postmodernist lingo, privileging every word leaves you with nothing to highlight, thus opportunities for analysis get lost and context can be hard to establish. Outside that format, Jackson's meandering prose style favours informality over argument, and trusts you to be as interested in his subject as he is. Sometimes you are.