The folks from the Edge08 festival invited a few of us up to Ballina recently to talk about how punk rock influenced Irish literature. That’s a big question. The short answer is ‘not enough’, but of course it’s a little more complicated than that. The corollary is that Irish literature influenced punk rock – or at least the Irish strain of the virus – a lot more than punk subsequently re-influenced modern Irish writing.
Irish punk bands and their new wave cousins swallowed Joyce, Beckett, Wilde and Flann O’Brien, chewed them up in a blender and spewed them back out in a great technicolour yawn. By contrast, modern Irish fiction writers, even the ones who treasured their copies of Never Mind The Bollocks and London Calling, seemed to be looking the other way when the punk stinkbomb let off. The influence is there, but in the most staggered and splintered way, a series of sporadically tossed pipe bombs rather than one big atomic bang.
Punk rock was a musical – some say cultural – revolution that happened in New York circa 1975, instigated by the Bowery bands who played Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs: The Ramones, Television, the Patti Smith Group, the Heartbreakers. Latter-day New York Dolls manager Malcolm McClaren caught the bug from Johnny Thunders and Richard Hell and passed it onto his charges the Sex Pistols a year later. But if the New York strain was an art movement conspired by misfits who’d never been to university, its English counterpart was more seditious. The Sex Pistols were the ultimate Oedipal act: ‘Anarchy In the UK’ attempted to kill the King; ‘God Save The Queen’ stuck it to her Majesty.
These were leery, sneering rebel songs played at high volume, sung by a London-Irish misfit with a wicked mouth and eyes like headlights. The Pistols were a horror show, and like the best horror shows they were conceived on a shoestring, with the production values of a snuff movie, and so their music felt scarily real. Never Mind The Bollocks ripped a fissure in reality through which could be glimpsed a whole new wave of horrors: The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag.
But despite the Year Zero propaganda, punk wasn’t conceived in a void. It was a mutant Eraserhead baby with many fathers: the 60s garage acts collected by Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye on the Nuggets box set, Detroit’s Stooges and the MC5, the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Roxy Music.
Punk lifted bits of its aesthetic from the Decadents, the Symbolists, the Modernists, the Lettrists, the Dada-ists and Surrealists and Situationists, from the Paris Communes and the 1968 riots. It was Un Chien Andalou and Howl and A Clockwork Orange and Catcher In the Rye. Its icons included Rimbaud, Genet, Beckett and Burroughs. It produced poets and writers like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Jim Carroll and John Cooper Clark, artists like Raymond Pettibon and Ray Lowry, filmmakers like Don Letts, Julien Temple, Alex Cox and Mary Harron, was documented by journalists like Lester Bangs, Nick Kent, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, and inspired a hundred fanzines and indie labels.
But if punk began as an homogenous skinny whiteboy noise, it evolved with the speed of mutagen into something that transgressed genre. It refused to know its place, wouldn’t stay within the prescribed lines. It had the gall to speak in bad taste, to venerate energy and innovation over technique, to thieve from previously prohibited sources. By comparison with the old boys’ club of stadium rock acts, punk was multicultural, homo-friendly and equal opportunities.
It acknowledged Captain Beefheart and Neu and Can, ska and dub and street poets like Lynton Kwesi Johnson, and through The Clash’s appropriation of ghetto blaster chic, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. When John Lydon teamed up with Afrika Bambaataa for the one-off single ‘World Destruction’ in 1984, it sounded like a replay of ‘Anarchy in The UK’ set in a New York dance club, and prophesised Public Enemy’s armagedddon effects, the smash and grab sample larceny of hip-hop.
Punk was, on the face of it, aggressively Modernist bordering on dystopian Futurist, even if many of its avatars were of the old guard. Pete Shelley was a Beckett fan. Joy Division channelled JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. The Clash co-opted Allen Ginsberg for Combat Rock. Martin Scorsese considered casting the Clash as a street gang in his earliest imaginings of Gangs of New York. Eraserhead’s Jack Nance looked like a member of Pere Ubu.
Burroughs was celebrated by the punk set at the Nova Convention in New York in 1978. Debbie Harry collaborated with HR Giger, appeared in Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and but for her management’s intervention might have secured Darryl Hannah’s part in Blade Runner. She and Chris Stein forged a friendship with William Gibson, chief visionary of the literary movement that would become termed ‘cyberpunk’, a new wave of streetwise noirish sci fi that proliferated in the early 80s, and whose Neuromancer mantra – “the street finds its own use for things” – could have been a neo-Situationist slogan.
“1977 seemed kind of like a roots moment,” Gibson said. “My take on it wasn’t that it was brand new nihilism, it was like a return to something that had been the real beginning of the ’60s but had been collectively forgotten. I had forgotten it to some extent myself.
“And it actually wasn’t so much the punk from England that did that for me, it was the stuff from New York that slightly predated what happened in London: Television and the first Patti Smith album. They were very consciously subversively retro in a really irony-free way, they seemed very, very sincere about it, and what I was seeing and hearing out of London was much more self-conscious material.
“Now, decades later, I know that Malcolm McClaren had been reading the Situationists, and the stuff from New York was somehow way less considered and in fact didn’t really go anywhere. Most of those people vanished or took too much heroin or wound up pumping gas, which is actually a more traditional fate for young artists at that time.”
Here in Ireland, punk did something unprecedented: it occurred in real time. Pre 1977, the future was on a five year sattelite delay. Ireland received its inklings of a brave new world via Radio Luxembourg. The country didn’t have a pop music station until 1979. But London and New York punk generated a direct current that jumpstarted The Radiators, The Boomtown Rats, U2, The Virgin Prunes, The Atrix, Stiff Little Fingers, the Outcasts, DC Nien, The Blades, The Undertones.
Except Irish punk acts were different. They resisted the Oedipal pose, acknowledged rather than erased history. On The Radiators’ second album Ghostown, Philip Chevron wrote about ‘Kitty Ricketts’, one of the prosititutes from the Nightown section of Ulysses. U2’s debut album Boy namechecked Dorian Gray and stole from William Goldman’s Lord Of The Flies, a sacred text shared by The Virgin Prunes. Gavin Friday took Wilde as his oracle on Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves. The Pogues’ brilliant, bawdy carnivalesque songs referenced Brendan Behan and James Clarence Mangan and James Stephens.
Nor did Irish punk bands necessarily disassociate from their musical predecessors. They were more likely to consult members of Horslips or Thin Lizzy for advice than badmouth them in the press, and if they didn’t exactly pay homage to Rory Gallagher and Van Morrison, they didn’t deny them either.
Van, always a contrary figure, started out with Them, a snotnosed Belfast R&B band who wrote the all time great garage staple ‘Gloria’, but he made his reputation with Astral Weeks, an emigrant’s recurring dream of an East Belfast demimonde populated by hustlers, heroin casualties and persecuted drag queens.
The songs had strong literary associations – the dirty old man obsessed with a thirteen year old schoolgirl in ‘Cypress Avenue’ could’ve been Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; the tragic drag queen Madame George was straight out of Last Exit To Brooklyn by way of Tennessee Williams.
Like its weirder twin, the Velvet Underground & Nico, Astral Weeks was a seminal album dealing with adult themes of vice, mortality and deviance. And like the Velvets, its influence vastly overshadowed its sales. In time it came to occupy the same place in pop music as Joyce’s Ulysses does in literature.
But if Irish musicians were galvanised and inspired by the country’s literary history, its post-war writers were always in danger of being paralysed by the towering figures of Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O’ Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’ Neill – the litany invoked by by Kevin Rowland in Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Dance Stance’. To any young scribbler, such figures could seem as ancient and ominous as the Tuatha De Danaan, mythic beings, ten feet tall, casting shadows of influence in which few new forms could grow.
The revolutionary example of punk rock – and the free for all polyglot of styles and sounds that it permitted – did not find expression in an identifiable Irish literary movement akin to the Beats of ’50s New York, or Scotland’s Children of Albion Rovers in the 90s. Throughout the 1970s it seemed more furtive, more covert. There were secret meetings and small presses, cellar rendezvous and writers’ groups that numbered among their suspects Dermot Bolger, Neil Jordan, John Banville, Colm Toibin.
Punk’s impact on writers like Clash fan Roddy Doyle was manifest in form rather than content. His first novel The Commitments chose proletarian soul rather than white noise as its motif, although the book’s self-published DIY ethic, plus its use of sawn off rapid fire dialogue and Northside Dublin vernacular, was pure punk. Elsewhere, the cover of Boomtown Rats disciple Joe O’ Connor’s Cowboys and Indians featured a London postcard mohawk. Novelist and playwright Billy Roche started out as singer with The Roach Band, who combined Springsteen-ish smalltown visions with a the taut energy of Elvis Costello and Graham Parker; his first play A Handful of Stars climaxed with a James Cagney stand-off soundtracked by PiL’s ‘Rise’.
Despite these strobe flashes, Irish fiction seemed still preoccupied with trying to make sense of the grim and grey preceding decades – a landscape of domineering fathers, martyred mothers, ogre-like Christian Brothers, despotic priests, skeletons in family closets, valleys of squinting windows, incessant rainfall. Throughout the 1980s it operated under the influence of the late John McGahern, the big daddy of rainy realism, a writer many modern Irish novelists still feel compelled to define themselves in alliance with or opposition to.
Maybe the satellite delay was still in effect, because 1977 finally arrived in 1993, in the unholy form of Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. Notwithstanding the fact that it was written in the late early 90s and set 30 years before, this was the first true Irish punk novel, the Never Mind The Bollocks of letters, and its impact on modern Irish fiction was analogous to that of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting on Scottish writing: an adrenaline jab to the heart. Pitched halfway between slapstick and horror, the tale of Francie Brady was a shocking but moving hybrid of Huckleberry Finn, A Clockwork Orange and Lord Of The Flies, and Pat McCabe became the dragon young upstarts had to slay – or at least sneak past – before they gained entry to the crypt.
“I remember reading The Butcher Boy and recognising something about small town Ireland, and the dialogue struck me as amazingly vivid,” says Mayo writer Mike McCormick. “I was really sickened, because I was about halfway through the writing of the Getting It In The Head when I read it. McCabe’s work was important, as was Roddy Doyle’s, in that it also allowed people to use popular culture, songs and comic books.”
McCormack is, as the old saw goes, a man out standing in his own field: in this case a wind-blasted pasture in a mythologised Co. Mayo where the natives veer between decent skinnery and intemperent religiosity, where speaking statues of the Sacred Virgin drive local women to apocalyptic ministry, where earthbound angels coast across bay waves the colour of hammered lead, where you can’t move but for masonry saints and shrines and visitations and plastic Jesuses luminescing day-glo green.
Both McCormack’s full-length novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes From A Coma (2006) meld the fantastical and future-shocked with the local and parochial. If Pat McCabe’s feverish inner monologues trace the southern gothic bloodlines of Faulkner and O’Connor back to their Irish origins, McCormack’s yarns are rendered with a rigorous, almost Anglo-Irish formalism on a par with Patrick McGrath.
“I was asked to describe Notes From A Coma towards the ending of my writing of it,” McCormack recalls, “and I say this respectfully now the man is dead, and I respected his work hugely, but the book was like if you imagined John McGahern and Philip K Dick were contracted to write an episode of the X Files, this would be the result.”
This, I believe, is under-explored territory in Irish fiction. We’ve had books like Eoin McNamee’s Belfast noir classic Resurrection Man, Joe Ambrose’s squat culture dispatch Serious Time, Conor McPherson’s rewiring of ghost stories and strange tales for the modern depopulated rural Ireland, Julian Gough’s metafictional Jude trology, John Connolly’s Nocturnes, Claire Keegan’s tales from the county hell. But the literary chattering classes are still more likely to cite John Banville over Blade Runner.
Maybe writers like Roddy Doyle and Joe O’Connor and Colm Toibin confuse the argument when they produce their richest writing in the guise of stately historical novels like A Star Called Henry, Star Of the Sea and The Master. But imagine a climate where Irish writers, and, crucially, non-Irish writers resident here, co-opted punk’s refusal to observe protocol, where there’s no confining delineation between so called serious and popular literature, where language, theme, storytelling craft and imagination all co-exist.
The equivalent, maybe, of the generation of writers who’ve thrived in the realm of the slipstream, an umbrella term wide enough to encompass Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Joe Hill, AM Homes, David Foster Wallace, Steven Hall, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggars, George Saunders, Katherine Dunne and Tom Spanbauer.
The compost theory of culture holds that what was once held as ‘low’ entertainment – gothic, southern gothic, pulp fiction, westerns, post-war noir, horror, magic realism, new journalism, the new wave of 60s sci-fi, EC and Marvel comics, tales from the crypt, performance poetry, graffitti art, graphic novels – gets turned to precious metal by the pressure of successive decades heaped on top of each other, until, at this end of the process, what was once derided as common has become retroactively transmuted into art.
Anybody feeling queasy here should note that Cormac McCarthy, maybe the most respected living American writer, has worked exclusively in genre for decades, be it the post-apocalyptic (The Road), modern noir, (No Country For Old Men), western (The Border Trilogy) horror masquerading as western (Blood Meridian) or southern gothic (Child of God, Outer Dark).
The Serious Fiction Factory, the Man Booker mill, seems a long way from the surreal, funny, hyperbolic, fantastical tales that reside in the national body of mythology, legend, folk tale, gothic yarns, murder ballads and outrageously tall tales. Celtic storytelling has always been by turns bawdy, mystical, absurdist, and prone to gross exagerration. The Midnight Court contained lusty couplets that’d make a sailor blush. The Song of Amergin was a visionary shape-shifter hymn. And there’s an account of Cuchulainn’s bersker fit in Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin that reads like a live review of Iggy & the Stooges:
“The first warp-spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of… His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t poke it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek.
“His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat.
“His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire – the torches of the Badb – flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury.”
Now that’s what I call punk rock.
