Jinx Lennon hates to be the bearer of bad news

Jinx Lennon expressed his anger at Irish society on his last album, National Cancer Strategy, but realised the material was too oppressive for his fans.

Dundalk’s Jinx Lennon has always been refreshingly out of step with the prevailing musical climate, but his last release, 2010’s National Cancer Strategy, saw this dislocation thrown into starker relief.

At the height of the so-called boom, Lennon was one of the few artists to cast a quizzical eye on the charade; his albums pointedly reminded us of the gombeen souls that resided behind the perma-tanned exteriors.

While the damage wrought by these individuals was bringing the country to its knees, titles like the aforementioned, struck too unforgiving a note. A musician who delivered his words with the conviction of a preacher, Lennon was now becoming a little unsure of things.

“I found the last few years to be very challenging just as a writer, especially here in Ireland. I found it quite demoralising actually. I tried to express my anger and talk about what was happening in the country.

“However, I found that I was turning people off and I felt like I was sort of shooting myself in the foot. People were turning away from what I was singing about and I found it very frustrating,” he confesses.

The current music scene in Ireland is an ultra conservative one, he maintains.

“I find a lot of people playing acoustic music, guys with check shirts and beards and sort of Mormon haircuts all sitting around singing songs that are very jolly. !And I find it a bit repressive actually.”

It got to a point where people were telling Lennon that they found National Cancer Strategy too oppressive. He acknowledges in retrospect that it was a less than inviting record, not helped by its overemphasis on various electronic gadgets.

“The whole thing was always meant to uplift people. That’s really how I got into it. I just felt I wanted to express myself in a way that people can empathise with and say there’s somebody else that feels there’s stuff going on in the world that needs to be talked about.

“Having humanity in your material is very, very important. I’m aiming towards an album now at the moment but I won’t put out anything until I feel I have it.

I’m sort of working my way through it. Because I just found it particularly challenging in the last few years and I found with my last album that people found it was very dark.”

In the meantime he has recorded a song as part of a project taking place at the Curfew Tower in the small town of Cushendall in County Antrim.

Purchased by KLF member, Echo & The Bunnymen manager and art situationist Bill Drummond in 1994, the tower has been an artists’ residency since 1999.

Last year, Liverpool’s Static Gallery invited a number of multi-disciplinary artists to spend a little time in the tower and to record a ‘field recording’ on a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. The results are compiled on a limited edition cassette, which is currently for sale on Ebay.

Today the artists, including Jinx and cult indie band Clinic, will perform their recorded tracks on a stage in the garden of the Curfew Tower during Cushendall’s annual Heart of The Glens Festival.

“I was just soaking up the atmosphere,” says Jinx of his two-day residency, which begat a track inspired by the local joyriders called “Get The Tension Out”.

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