 I wrote ‘Long Balconies’, and knew it was going to be the second track, that the two things were really close. It’s only up the road. Strange things happened like that.
I didn’t know ‘Long Balconies’ was inspired by O’Devaney Gardens. I had visualised Dolphin House. There are lots of long balconies.
Yeah, completely. It was initially inspired by a short documentary by a film-maker called Joe Lee, who spent a lot of time in social housing complexes and he was filming. But it was inspired by early memories as well of Granny Brannigan in the flats in Ballybough. Those barrelled stairwells are some of my earliest memories.
I wonder if some of what people are emotionally connecting with in the songs is compassion. You are telling stories of people who have difficulties for which they are punished – disproportionately to put it mildly. People for whom things are set up so: you are born into difficulty and struggle, and then we punish you for being born into difficulty, thereby creating further difficulty for you. And you don’t hear these connections being made much in songs, do you?
No. Maybe in Jinx Lennon or Damien Dempsey’s stuff. But yeah, there’s a huge divide in this country, and it’s getting worse. But again, this wasn’t a big statement that I was making. To me, they were very small stories that I was focusing on.
So you take ‘Lemon 7s’ for instance. It was a couple that lived out beside me in Maynooth. They begged for cans outside the shops. I was just telling their story. It’s mostly a true story. A little bit of drama added, but mostly true. And it just so happened that they were sleeping in a tent, which is what’s happening all over Ireland at the moment. But you know, I was just writing their story and that’s what it is. And there happened to be addiction and there happened to be homelessness in the song. But really I was telling a love story in darkness. But what really struck me about that relationship was, they seemed to be madly in love, even as, as I say, they were on the bottom rung. And they had nothing. Actually sleeping in a tent.
So, you know, to me I was just telling a sad, tragic love story. Both of them died in the end. One had died when I wrote the song. Like you’re saying, people don’t tell them stories and that’s my place, to tell them stories.
I’m thinking about homelessness and addiction and the role that we don’t really acknowledge that a person’s circumstances play in their addiction. We treat addiction as if it’s a decision that individual makes.
Yeah, completely. You know, one of, one of the big struggles I had with this record was ‘Funeral Sessions’, and it was using the word “junkie”, which I hate. [“All the drunkards they stay local / All the junkies go to town”.] It dehumanizes people.
And I went to great lengths on Last of the Analogue Age to tackle this on the last song, which is called ‘Last of the Analogue Age’. And I was rallying against people like that who use the term “junkie” or write people off, you know, so they almost become invisible. It’s like homeless people or people with addiction and how people just completely ostracize them.
But ‘Funeral Sessions’ came and that line came to me and I thought the best way to say it was to use the word. I struggled for six, seven months with whether I should put that song on the record just because of using that term. But I think in the greater context it worked. It’s a striking term and I was writing from someone else’s point of view if you like, so it kinda made sense to use it. But yeah, I definitely think that society ostracizes these people. They dehumanise them in a way. A lot of the time it is probably a product of circumstance or area or whatever.
‘Metal Railings’ touches on the same thing: how a person’s chances of going to prison depend so much on circumstances of birth and and on social forces for which they’re not responsible. It makes me think about how individuals can represent more than just who they are. You’ve got an individual judge passing down a judgment on an individual person but really what you’ve got is two quite different worlds meeting represented by those two people.
I think you hit the nail on the head. People that are in charge of people that are making them decisions can never fully understand or, in my opinion, don’t care about the people they’re passing sentence down on. They’re part of the problem because the system that we have is fundamentally flawed. Poverty makes money for people and I don’t think there’s any great appetite in this country to fix that.
Those people can never understand jail. They can never. It’s a different story if you’ve come through something and gone on to something else. If you’ve been there and you’ve moved on, you can look back, I think you can understand it. But if you’ve never been there, you can never understand it.
I mean, I grew up in Finglas. My family went on to get social housing. I was the youngest of nine so I used to go with my sisters who were a lot older and stay with them while their husbands were working, in fledgling estates like Primrose Court out in Darndale, and in Tallaght. I loved these places and I’ve seen them grow up and I’ve seen what they’ve become. Fettercairn out in Tallaght as well. So you grow up seeing them and you can understand how they work. Someone in the system can never understand, I don’t think. I don’t think they care.
When you say you love those places and you’ve seen what they’ve become, just explain that to somebody who maybe doesn’t know what that means.
It’s very hard to come out of them places. To me, social housing should be mixed with private housing. You know, you take people who are not well to do, you put them all together, and these places get stigmatized. It’s very hard for people to get jobs. Accents even stop people from getting jobs. They’re neglected.
You take Ballymun for instance. Not only did they leave thousands of people living together, there was no bus route out there. When they started there was no bus route or buses would go out very seldom. It’s almost cutting people off. Until something becomes real estate, there’s no real appetite to fix them problems and they just let the places run down.
But in saying that, what happens is that people in them places band together and you get an amazing community. People help each other out, you know, people share, help each other to the next bill, so you get an amazing community as well. But there’s so much social problems around these places as well that ultimately they’re gonna fail. So I think you need to mix up social and private housing.
OK. Can I ask you about Elvis Costello? I believe you were not thrilled about his accepting an OBE [the day before this interview – NC].
Oh, me and Joe [Chester] are just like [sighs dramatically]. It’s like, I grew up a huge Morrissey fan and a massive, massive Smiths fan. And we were talking about how your heroes eventually let you down. Joe mailed me some piece on Morrissey last week and it was appalling. He’s a mad Elvis Costello fan so I mailed him back, he’s like – it’s not quite as bad (laughs), but, yeah, we were both really disappointed. Joe actually adores him. So yeah – it’s just sad when people let you down like that.
What did you think of his explanation?
Rubbish. It’s rubbish. It’s like Nick Cave’s reason for playing Israel, you know.
What was Nick Cave’s reason for playing Israel?
Transcending something or other.
Yeah, yeah. And I’m a huge Nick Cave fan as well. So.
I am in the middle of reading Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and a band that keeps coming up as an inspiration to the 1980s generation of American post-punk hardcore bands is The Birthday Party.
I loved, I was absolutely mad about The Birthday Party. Yeah. Just the power and energy and the violence and everything about that band, I was fascinated with.
Hardly at the time?
No, no. I got into Nick Cave on Henry’s Dream. I heard Henry’s Dream outside Freebird on O’Connell Street and I was just completely smitten by it. And I went back and I love The Good Son, Your Funeral My Trial, you know, all them records. Not so much after that. Let Love In is a good record, but to me, Henry’s Dream’s the pinnacle. But sometimes when you come to people, the album you come in on is the one. Like I know a people that came to Nick Cave later, and they love albums that I think are dreadful. But that’s their experience with him.
The Boatman’s Call? You wouldn’t rate that as much?
No, not at all