Armageddon is in effect, go get a bus pass. Jinx Lennon is back, and boy is he pissed. The 45-year-old Dundalk man’s fourth album Trauma Themes Idiot Times is a state of the nation rail against the reduction of all human experience to Cubism: the centrally-heated cube of the home; the fluorescent cube of the classroom; the sealed cube of the car; the honeycomb cube of the office; and ultimately, the lead-lined cube of the coffin.
Yes, the new album has moments of tenderness and great beauty (‘The Ferris Wheel At Dowdallshill’ and ‘The Orange Cranes Of Greenore’ are two of Jinx’s saddest love songs), but mostly it’s the testimony of a placard-wearing soapbox prophet desperately seeking answers from a robotic congregation too harried to pay heed to his sermon.
Trauma Themes Idiot Times is full of fixed faces and fisheyes – ‘Taxi Man Face’ (“His eyes are like two sultanas on the face of a fruitcake”), ‘The Glazed I Club’, ‘Funeral Faysis’. Modern life, Jinx seems to be saying, is rubbish. We’ve become zombies transfixed by the glass tit, the phony shangri-la of Saturday night, the oral soothers of fags and pills and booze, the bread and circus of the football stadium.
“It’s turning into the invasion of the bodysnatchers,” the singer says, on a recent afternoon in the Library Bar in Dublin’s Central Hotel. “That’s really what it is – a sort of a concept album about isolation, people not realising themselves, getting desensitized. See, when I started off the album I was worried, because I thought it was very negative or misanthropic. The songs were mostly written in 2007, and at the time there was an attitude in the country that (if you were critical) you were raining on the parade of the good times, the feeling that the future’s so bright you have to wear shades.
“But now the album is out, I’ve never heard so much negativity, from every angle of the media, it’s almost like the apocalypse is about to erupt. So in the light of that, the album is actually very positive, it’s all about scraping beneath the veneer, to basically look at Caliban in the mirror and point the dirty stick and say, ‘What are the problems here?’ It wasn’t written about the recession, but I always find lots of things about this country very murky.”
Including football fascism. It’s not the sport per se that Jinx has a problem with, but its social role as grand panacea, the opium of the masses. Hence the track ‘The Men Who Saved The Face Of Football’.
“I used to work in a factory,” he recalls, “and it was an American firm, and basically nobody opened their mouth to the firm because they were afraid of losing their jobs. But the lads who were football fans, that gave them their masculinity, and they didn’t have to complain about anything, they were walking around the place like some Greek god, and it was enough that they were a football fan because it gave them the right to feel like a hero.
“When the World Cup was on in 1990, it was their way of showing the American firm that this is the way we have pride in our country, by being football fans. To me there was a totalitarian thing going on, that if you weren’t smiling or talking about Jack’s Army, it was almost as if you were commiting a cardinal sin. You were pulled into it and told to take this half day off whether you wanted to or not, because the football was on that afternoon.
“And the song is about people who think that being a football fan, feeling part of this thousand-strong army every Sunday, is going to get them through life. At some stage they’re going to come out of their club and find their car broken into and no one gives a shit. It’s like Oisín falling off the horse outside Tír na nÓg. The billions these guys are making, and the supporters are going, ‘We won last night!’ You didn’t win, you fuckin’ nearly lost your mortgage during the World Cup! And the fascism thing with the kids, that the parents have to buy seven or eight team strips a year to keep up.
“Now I can see it’s a great bonding thing for parents and kids,” Jinx concedes, “I’ll give it that much. But I hear the soccer from my window, and it actually sounds like Nazi Germany film reels, because they’ve got these big fuck-off speakers up there, so you can hear from about ten miles away when the matches are on. I see the funny side of it now, but as a kid I wasn’t into football and I might as well have had two heads, because you were either United or Liverpool, and if you weren’t it was like you had leprosy. But I’m very glad, because otherwise I wouldn’t be doing music.”
In some ways Trauma Themes… is the soundtrack to the ideas raised in Jinx fan Pat McCabe’s latest novel The Holy City. Lennon hasn’t read the book yet, but he knows all too well what McCabe was talking about in a recent HP interview when he described the modern malaise as “a sort of an atomisation, a terrifying ennui. It’s the old thing, like in England, ‘A strange smell came from the room…’ That would never have happened in Ireland because Mrs McGinty would have been on the case long before it happened. Now it could happen here anytime.”
“That frightens me,” the singer admits. “Your neighbour could be getting attacked up the street, and you might hear somebody shouting, but for all you know somebody’s got a DVD on. Or if you’re in a housing estate, you could be living in your house for about five years and walk out one day and say hello to somebody from around the corner and they wouldn’t even pass any remark. It’s that sort of desensitivity, people walking in a sort of half-trance through life.
“What really fascinates me is the whole thing about people killing themselves and their families,” he continues. “When you read about the Jews being exiled to Babylon, there’s a part in it about smashing their children’s heads against the rocks – it’s almost like people being in exile from themselves, that their image of themselves has changed to what they have. Their individuality has been wiped out.”
And yet, these songs are complex. One of the album’s highlights, ‘Protect Thyself And Thy Home’ could be easily if wilfully misinterpreted by the tabloids as a call to vigilantism. It poses some tough questions, such as, what would you do if an intruder broke into your house while your wife and children were sleeping? And at what point does the self-defense clause of ‘reasonable force’ become unreasonable? Jinx leaves us in no doubt as to his position: the song culminates in a scene of almost Joe Pesci-esque comic menace, with the threatened householder’s boot on the burglar’s neck.
“The song was written at the time I was reading Comrac McCarthy’s The Road,” Jinx explains, “putting yourself in this position of the characters in that. If things get so bad, they’re going to become more animalistic, it’s not going to be a static time where people have cheap food for the next hundred years. Something’s going to give.
“It’s alright if you’re living a feudal lord’s existence, and you’re making up the laws, looking down at people, watching all the little dots and protozoa moving along the street, it’s okay to say you shouldn’t do this and you shouldn’t do that. But if you’re living in a community where there’s somebody around the street intimidating you, you’re going to have a different mindset, no matter who you are, especially if you can’t depend on the authorities to look after you.
“The song is about the cold fact of, if someone’s going to attack your family, you’re gonna look for the nearest blunt instrument, the animalistic thing is going to kick in, whether it’s right or not, the fact is you’re going to protect your family. It’s not as if you’re going to become a vigilante or a mass murderer. I would never like to think that I would become some kind of a psychopath, but…”
If all this sounds like Jinx is taking on the role of end times doomcryer, it’s a mantle he’s only too happy to assume.
“I always think about Greek and Roman civilisations,” he says. “There were periods of peaceful times where people could be immersed in culture, bettering themselves, reading Plato, and the Dionysian thing of excess, wine, whatever, and then all of a sudden you had the Barbarians, the Visigoths coming from the mountains. There’s a time for everything, and I get a feeling there’s a fin de siecle at the moment, that maybe things are movin into a different era. Like, it’s 65 years since the last World War, there is gonna be some sort of burst-up this century, there has to be, the resources of the world are depleting, so there’s gonna be some sort of big bang between the major powers. There was trillions being spent over in Iraq: that had to come from somewhere. There had to be a judgment day.”
Trauma Themes Idiot Times is out now on Septic Tiger records.
