The first time I realised that I was finally getting the chemistry right in my stage show was in the Spirit Store, Dundalk in early 2000. It felt like a lightning bolt up on stage. I felt like I being picked to go on some form of crusade. Some of the audience were telling me things like the songs really sent a tingle down their spine but it resonated more because I could feel it just as much as I could see the look on their faces that was telling me I was doing something right.
I’d been writing songs since I’d been about 14 and here I was nearly 36 finally finding the muse. The profound feeling of that night stayed with me since then and even though the candle almost burned out several times that initial feeling of finding the Rosetta stone in music has sustained me ever since.
I’d been in several original bands and we were totally apolitical. In fact we looked down on people that sung about causes. I think it was because politics was everywhere in the eighties and in Ireland it was rammed down your throat so we were dreaming about Andy Warhol’s Factory and trying to will it alive in a local context which was bloody hard work because we were broke and jobless. And all this time all around us turmoil reigned car bombs in the centre of my home town, mayhem over the border, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Eastern Bloc, Mandela, Gulf War one, the fall of USSR, Rwanda, The Balkans and Omagh still nothing encouraged me to write about what was going on in the world because I didn’t know how to put myself into the subject matter as an observer.
It was only when I went on to be a counsellor for a helpline that I had to delve deep into the murk of my inner turmoil that I realised what was essential to becoming a listener and to be emphatic. Part of that was writing out pages full of the equivalent of mental vomit but it was quite liberating and I began to put the writing into song splurges and I realised it was through the flaws and the mistakes that make art manifest itself and not me trying to write the perfect pop song the whole time.
That’s why I like to see rawness onstage, pure energy that isn’t artifice. I’d prefer to see someone come onstage and bang their head against a wall and talk to themselves if they really went for it rather than see a huge act play a massive light show because then it turns into magic tricks and firework and it misses the point.
The muse is the most important thing, it’s the child that makes the art within. It’s got free energy and intuitive and it doesn’t pay to piss it off. One way to destroy the muse is by letting other people define who you are and so you begin trying to adopt to a criteria you know in your gut doesn’t sit right. I see raw hungry energetic acts who are a force of nature destroy themselves when they sign up to be big and that’s the end of it. The muse doesn’t care about fame or money just the joy of playing and messing about and you must honour it or annoy it at your peril.
The other way to destroy the muse is by working and playing with other people who manipulate and dismantle the work by criticism or malice disguised as advice.
If I get envious of someone who has gone onto bigger stages than I have managed to do, it’s usually because I am sitting back on the work and not trying hard enough. When that gets a resolution and I put the work in again then I’m usually at peace once more until the next time i need to kick myself awake to what reality is.
Being a travelling musician can be a great adventure and it will bring you places you wouldn’t have gone otherwise. Having a family will keep the ego in check but it will not interfere with finding the magic needed to sustain you as long as you retain the appetite for it, and the buck always stops with yourself in the end.
Jinx’s Imagine! show – with support from rarewitch – is at The Deer’s Head on Friday 28th March. You can book tickets here.
