Culture That Made Me: Folk-punk star Jinx Lennon on Dylan, Lou Reed and Tarry Flynn
Jinx Lennon is at Cyprus Avenue in Cork on April 4.
David 'Jinx' Lennon, 60, grew up in Dundalk, Co Louth. In 2000, he released Live at the Spirit Store, the first of over a dozen folk-punk albums, acclaimed for their wit and gritty realism.
To mark the release of his latest album, , he will perform – along with Cork punk folk outfit Wasps Vs Humans – at Cork’s Winthrop Avenue, Friday, April 4. See www.jinxlennon.com
The parents were into Bob Dylan. is my go-to Dylan album. Visions of Johanna is like a rolling train full of imagery. You're wondering what the hell is the song about? Is it a love song?
The lyrics seem like barbed wire sticking in your head. It sounded like he had a lot in his head, like there was an explosion of lyrics that he had to get out or he’d burst.
The band sounded like they were making it up as they went along, but were still able to keep it together in the best possible way.
Television’s debut album Marquee Moon set the scene for whatever I listened to afterwards. I picked it out for three quid at the local stall in the town centre.
As I listened to it I saw a lot of nuances, particularly the guitar playing. This was the late 1970s. Everyone in the class hated it – they called it “bad Rolling Stones” yet it affected the whole music scene.
U2 had a song called in the charts, Television was all over that. You could hear them in Echo & the Bunnymen and different bands like that. was like a Rosetta stone.
I got into Lou Reed’s album before he got big again in the 1980s. The lyrics were strong. The song was like watching a movie – it affected you because there was so much ugliness in the imagery yet it was also poignant. I like to do that myself – have something bordering on the ugly yet trying to make it beautiful at the same time, getting humanity into the scene of the song.
by Public Enemy is a great album. The way it was put together – a tapestry of beats and sounds, using the sampler as an instrument. In the ’80s, we were anti-politics, thinking people like Paul Weller and Billy Bragg were uncool.
We hated when politics was stuck down your neck because we had the Troubles going on, so anyone that was singing about politics to us seemed pretentious.
But then Public Enemy put this album out, singing about identity, what exactly it meant to be a black person in America. To hear it described that way was educational. It was dignified. It made sense.
I saw Al Green in Vicar Street Years ago. I loved it. He gave out roses to the audience. It was fantastic. I did a gig on Valentine’s night recently in Dundalk. I got some chipped flowers in Aldi’s. I think I ended up spending four quid but it was great to throw them out to the audience. I took a leaf out of his book. Seeing Al Green live is like going to the mass you'd want to go to.
The best gig I was at was Thin Lizzy in Dundalk in 1980. A couple of bands from Derry supported them – The Tearjerkers and The Moondogs.
I felt violence in the air because it was all big lads, dressed in denim, bikers, the whole lot. I thought I was gonna get my head kicked in.
Phil Lynott is the epitome of rock’n’roll. Pure stardom. It was great to see him in his prime. You come home, 15 years of age, look in the mirror, and go, “Yeah, I’m changed, man.”
The only person – apart from maybe Al Green or James Brown – with the same star aura is Kurt Cobain. I saw Nirvana in the Top Hat Dún Laoghaire in 1991, just before they got big. I had heard their album .
I knew the gig was coming up. They were supporting Sonic Youth. The two Sonic Youth lads, Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, had about 15 guitars each tuned to different tunings.
But Nirvana, a three-piece blew them off the stage. They reminded me of The Jam because there was a pop element to the songs. They were great.
I liked James Herbert’s books when I was 10 or 11, like and . Something happened to rats that made them bigger and more dangerous, leading to a spree of humans being killed.
The covers to these books were scary. I remember going to buy them in the newsagents and the people behind the counter looking at you saying, “Should we really be selling you something like that now? Is this gonna disturb you for the rest of your life?”
I love Robert Ryan in , Sam Peckinpah's movie. It’s a classic movie about camaraderie between lads on a last round-up.
The interaction between them is great. I like the herd mentality when men get together, lads coming together and then turning on each other.
Patrick Kavanagh’s is a favourite book about a frustrated farmer living in Monaghan, trying to work the land. It's about politics and people in the parish and his state of mind.
He's got his romantic thoughts about somebody living beside him. I grew up close to the countryside.
He nailed it for the attitude of countryside people – the mad wisdom and magic of country people. There's wildness in country lads I hung about with that was missing from town people. They were more wired. As if people in town were dulled by TV or too much time sitting on their arses.
I was at a point over 20 years ago. I was fed up with working in the factory. I felt l let myself down with the music. I could see myself being stuck in the factory. I decided to hell with it.
I left it to start a band, putting myself out on a limb. I had no money. One way to work through it was to read . I gave myself a month.
It was hard going, but worth it. There's great bits and great characters in it. I loved the journey. It's based on Homer. There's a loneliness in it, somebody just wandering around Dublin. It seems very modern for the time it was written.
is from Adam Curtis, an English documentary maker. It's about the history of the Internet and social media and how it has changed people.
What started off as a sort of a utopia in Silicon Valley by hippies who thought it was going to advance mankind into what it's become now, which has divided people totally. It’s a very interesting documentary, the whole roots of it – lads dropping LSD in the '60s and the rise of feminism, but ending up in the hands of tech bros in Silicon Valley.
