Not so Jinxed after all
Not so Jinxed after all
The Dundalk folk-punk DIY musician has been through his share of dark days, but now in his late fifties, he's dad to a young family, creatively driven and releasing new albums at a rapid rate.
Jinx Lennon is on daddy duty when I call.
His youngest son, just eight months old, provides an endearing running commentary of his own as we chat.
“This little man just wants to see what the craic is; you can’t forget this man here,” Jinx says fondly, partly to the baby, partly to himself and partly to me.
At 58, the legendary Dundalk folk-punk singer-songwriter finds himself father to three small children with his wife, the illustrator, garden designer and fellow musician Sophie Coyle.
“Rose is in school, Oisín’s in the creche and I’ve to pick him up at twelve, and we’ve Diarmuid here,” he says. “Yeah, I love being a dad. I can’t believe I’m a dad, really. I’m well on now, and 12 years ago I was in my late forties and living with the parents. There you go now: there’s someone for everyone.”
There’s that well-worn (and as some have pointed out, tiresomely rooted in misogyny) quote from literary critic Cyril Connolly that the enemy of good art is “the pram in the hallway,” but for Jinx, who’s real name is David Lennon, this is certainly not turning out to be the case.
“Having a few kids makes you even more determined to stick at it and do it,” he says.
“We split the day up between us; Sophie will be away until lunchtime and then I’ll get time in the afternoon. It sort of works. It is very busy, but to be honest I’d prefer that to being sitting around the house doing nothing. And it gives the songs more bite as well. I’m really writing from real life now. Before, there was less to sing about.”
Be your own hero
It’s 20 years since Jinx enjoyed some mainstream attention for his song Bubble Electrician. Since then, he’s honed his unique songwriting skills over a staggering 11 studio albums, working all the while as a porter in Louth County Hospital in Dundalk.
For many years, he slogged along and released albums with precious little recognition, but it feels like that is changing: watch him hailed with affection on the Tommy Tiernan show below. The day after we chat, he’s set to take to the stage of The Olympia for the first time, supporting fellow Dundalk man David Keenan.
This time, he says, is “the pay-off for years of feeling like, what’s the point in going on? I had a very dark period there in the 2010s and I was inclined to give up, but I just sort of stuck with it.”
“If things are looking bad you have to sort of be your own hero, does that make sense? You have to own that in your life; there’s a sense of heroism to keep going no matter what life throws at you, to just keep at it. It’s very, very important. But I’m in a good place now, and I’m constantly writing songs.”
Ireland’s greatest living songwriter?
A personal aside, and a hazy summer festival memory….we were somewhere in a field at 2am, circa 2018, and some musicians were having a fervent debate about who the best living Irish songwriter is.
Eventually, the argument was narrowed down to just two: Christy Moore and Jinx Lennon.
Jinx won out, for his gritty realism, his ability to stare post-Celtic Tiger, post-austerity Ireland unflinchingly in the face and still find love and beauty in it, right there amongst the housing crisis and the prescription drug problem and the racism and alcoholism and swirling garbage.
This may have been in part because two of the musicians present and arguing the loudest were the Hendy brothers of Dundalk folk trio The Mary Wallopers, unceasing champions of Jinx whose voices you can hear on his 2020 album Border Schizo FFFolk Songs For The Fuc**d.
Of course, there’s no need to pit songwriters against each other and Ireland has endlessly genius lyricists, but I’m using the story to illustrate something: that although the mainstream world of pop and radio play has largely ignored him, amongst musicians and on the DIY scene, Jinx is a living legend and considered a songwriter of at least equal standing to Ireland’s finest.
His songs often appear to be rough sketches, hastily assembled from bursts of inspiration, and his punkier material frequently relies on repetition, a clever phrase drilled into your skull with almost shouted delivery, accompanied, on stage, by a bass drum and electronic loops, all operated solo. Very punk, very DIY. But he’s also a balladeer of considerable skill, capable of incredible poignancy and observations on the human condition.
As a writer, he is capable of poetic turns of phrase as well as deep human insight. Listen to him describe porn magazines as “bibles of pink flesh” in City of Styrofoam Cups:
Genre, like so many of the norms and trappings of the music industry, is not important to him; there’s a decidedly country slant to some of his songwriting. He name-checks both cult punk figure Jonathan Richman and mainstream pop queen Taylor Swift in our conversation. In a past interview, he told me his greatest inspiration for his stage performances was James Brown.
Charging rent for pets
His latest album, which he is touring at present, does seem to see him veer back towards a punk sound, though?
“It’s sort of half and half; I’m far happier at the moment playing acoustic with just drums,” he says. “I’m going towards the open-tuned guitar at the moment because that’s what I like doing. It feels like more of a healing thing. I still like my punk rock, but I just like the simplicity of playing with a guitar and maybe one or two other people instead of hauling loads and loads of stuff up on the stage.”
“I’ll be playing more punk stuff in Cork but I’m doing more acoustic sets on this tour as well. It feels right to slide between the two at the moment.”
JInx’s latest album, Pet Rent, in typically prolific style, is a mere 25 tracks, recorded almost incidentally to another recording session for an as-yet unreleased album called Walk Lightly When the Jug Is Full.
Pet Rent sees him collaborate with a veritable who’s who of the punk-folk DIY scene: it was recorded by Chris Barry, who produced Junior Brother’s debut album. It features Barry Semple, guitarist with punk-folksters The Deadlians. Post Punk Podge puts in an appearance, as do a host of others.
“Last summer I had Walk Lightly When the Jug Is Full ready to go, but I was sitting on it because things were still uncertain because of Covid, and I was put off getting it on vinyl because I wasn’t 100% happy with it,” he says. “In the meantime, I was getting together with some friends for Pet Rent.”
The album’s title is, he tells me, based on a new phenomenon that he has seen: Dublin landlords charging extra rent for pets, something he sees as emblematic of Ireland’s fractured housing market.
“I mean, extra rent for pets. Where would you hear it?” he says. “You have people coming over and buying blocks of apartments as investments, and then people can’t get a look in.”
True Grit, and that border terrain….
Jinx has been singing songs of protest about austerity, housing and corruption in Irish politics since some of his recent collaborators were in Senior Infants.
He’s also been providing a commentary on masculinity for as long. There’s domestic violence in his songs, cocaine and drink and men who get away from their wives with football and cars. There are acts of gang violence and provo brutality.
Coming from a tough border town in Co Louth, these considerations, and the damage that came with them, made part of the framework of his formative years.
“There was a lot of punishments going on I was a kid in the seventies, a lot of stuff going on even in school,” he says. “Music was my outlet, but if I hadn’t gotten into music I’d say I could have done some really bad things.”
There’s a song on Pet Rent called Age 12 which is essentially about early intervention, about getting to boys young enough and telling them that they can be good people.
“The way Catholicism was, you were never told you were good. You were told you were an evil sinner. Sex was evil, all of this stuff. There was always more punishment than anything else. I’ve done a lot of counselling to even get away from the mentality. Being young and vulnerable and coming from a bad place, you have to get your head around it and thankfully, I’ve done a lot of work on that.”
As a songwriter, Jinx wants to stare directly at all these things instead of skirting around them. In the grit lies the beauty and the truth.
“Nobody sings about those things; there’s too much pretence that everything is fine,” he says. “But you really have to look at the dark things too.”
Is the Ireland he’s singing about a broken place?
“No, I don’t think it’s broken. We’re actually one of the happiest countries in the world. People are so friendly and there’s a natural care in Irish people. I am optimistic too; the way I see it, there’s a darkness in everyone that’s there to be mined.”
“But you have to see the good in people too. I don’t like sitting in the corner with a big mask on my head telling people it’s all doom and gloom; it’s not. And if it was I wouldn’t want to live in this world.”
Jinx Lennon plays Fred Zeppelin’s in Cork as part of his summer-long Pet Rent Tour, accompanied by Cork punk poet Wasps vs Humans, on Friday May 13 at 9pm. €10 entry on the door. For other tour dates, keep an eye on his social media.
20 Years of Septic Tiger Records
Jinx Lennon’s Greatest Hits
This is a wholly subjective selection, chosen by me and not endorsed by Jinx. Having said that, I think you could do worse than listen to these nine tracks. All these song titles link to Bandcamp tracks, where you can also buy full albums.
That's a helluva playlist Ellie. Some of the best songs ever.
Great to hear what Jinx is up to these days. Regrettably I won't be around Cork for the gig on 13th