November 11, 1994
New Frontiers
By Joe Jackson
If Jimmy MacCarthy had only occasionally written songs as sublime as Mystic Lipstick and Ride On, he’d still deserve the title as one of Ireland’s finest songwriters. Instead, his credits include compositions that account for more than 60 cover versions, from Katie and The Bright Blue Rose through to Nadine and No Frontiers. At the soul of many of these songs is a sense of spiritual longing that is quintessentially Irish and a poeticism that rarely degenerates into either self-conscious pedantry or sentimentality. Indeed Mystic Lipstick, as interpreted by MacCarthy himself, is an almost unbearably poignant evocation of the tensions that define contemporary Ireland.
Nevertheless, despite his high status among fellow artists, Jimmy MacCarthy readily admits that there is within the music industry a distinct impression that he is “precious” about his work and “difficult” – allegations he only partly rejects. And with good humour.
“A lot of people thought I was difficult to deal with, for a long time,” he says, smiling and placing his mineral water back on a table in the bar of Dublin’s Westbury Hotel. “The other night a fella said to me ‘I often wondered about you. You always seemed to have songs on the radio, and to be successful, but people claimed you were a real awkward little bollix! Yet others said all you’d ever done was stand up for your rights’.
“And that is all I was doing. For example, I’m a songwriter with no publisher because I decided long ago that I was not going to give them away. And there are still aspects of myself that are hard to deal with. Eoin Holmes, from Sony, is finding it difficult to do my publicity because I’m so used to doing everything for myself – from producing, managing myself and making my own record. I have to learn to stand back and let others do things for me.”
In relation to the “precious about his work” charge, is it true that Jimmy once threatened to sue an Irish singer if she didn’t record the lyric of a song precisely as he had written it?
“I am a person who puts great effort and time into my writing – sometimes it takes me up to 15 years to finish a song,” he explains.
“In that context, for so long I was giving Mary Black my best songs. One of those was No Frontiers and, at one point, I heard they decided to leave the last four lines out. Those lines, to me, are the basis of the philosophy of the song – ‘And heaven has its way/ When all will harmonise/ And know what’s in our hearts/ The dream will realise’. That sums up my belief in the facility to imagine and thus turn dreams into reality. That’s what the song is all about. But in the end they used those lines because I told them if they didn’t I’d stop the album going out. I still would.”
Needless to say, those four lines also appear in the cut of No Frontiers which turns up on Jimmy’s latest album, with a quirky arrangement which obviously will not be to everyone’s taste. “It’s a happier arrangement because I want the song to smile at the time we’re living through at the moment, here in Ireland,” Jimmy claims.
“We’re living at a time where the potential for peace has come about. That’s why I felt the Gerry Adams Late Late Show was a disgrace. Instead of focusing on a positive projection of hope into the future the panel were just addressing a hate object, addressing images of Adams that have been fed to them over the past 10 years by the media. But the positive result was that people then had to ask themselves why Gerry Adams was being attacked that way, and this neutralised the image of a man who was obviously being demonised. That turnaround was a great, and a hopeful thing to see happen.”
Casting his mind back to near the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Jimmy suggests that the first time he was ever “seriously affected by anything outside my own family, and life” was when he watched on television the service for the victims of Bloody Sunday.
“None of us who saw that, ever forgot it,” he says, shaking his head and sighing. “And to then throw all that history on to the shoulders of Gerry Adams is ridiculous. Maybe part of it is that, as Catholics, we’re raised to demonise evil; but the powers-that-be tapped into this and manipulated our emotions in that sense. But I myself, met Adams years ago and was amazed how much he knew about my songs, Mary Black, Christy Moore and all Irish music. In fact, on that day somebody gave me a green, white and gold T-shirt, with a green root coming out of concrete and above that a white dove. And I said to him: ‘is this what it looks like?’ and he said ‘yeah’ and from that day on, I was convinced that peace was in the air. I still am.”
That said, although certain tracks on Jimmy’s latest album were written since the unveiling of the Downing Street Declaration last December, he claims that “none of them refer specifically to this”, although he hopes they capture “the general optimism around, at the moment”. For a clarification of his views on Ireland he harks back to Mystic Lipstick: “The song doesn’t point a finger, saying who’s right or who’s wrong. It just states things like ‘she wears mystic lipstick’ which is the voice of a country, the way we speak, as a poetic nation rooted as much in the realm of the imagination as we are in the sod,” he elaborates.
“Another line, ‘she wears stones and bones,’ refers to the people we once were and the stones we prayed at. And ‘she tells myth and legend, she sings rock ‘n’ roll is the same thing, taking in our history from the past right up to now Ireland is all those things, a country ‘wearing chains of bondage’ but also ‘wings of hope’ which will, one day, take us beyond oppression. And whatever you may think about Adams, he says the same things about the Irish freedom that were said by Pearse, Connolly. Mystic Lipstick says all that for me. Ride On also had a deeper element many people missed, in that it is about two people going separate paths because one has a gun and the other can’t go along because he doesn’t believe in bloodshed. But they are lovers and there is that extra layer of loss involved. That’s the way I approach such subjects – even if, as some claim, I do romanticise the whole issue.”
Earlier Jimmy MacCarthy referred to the theological need to “demonise”. A similar negative trait of Catholicism, in particular is the need to deify, as in setting women up as sisters of the Virgin Mary, thus denying them their human potentialities. Don’t his new songs, such as Lorraine with its subject who “came down from the sky” exhibit this tendency? Wouldn’t he serve women better by presenting them as the slime-covered creatures they can also be?
“People could say that I over-romanticise Amelia Earhart, (the first women to fly across the Atlantic), in No Frontiers, too, but the point is that I see her as a heroic figure symbolising flight soaring to the sky, that whole idea” he says “And if some women don’t like being over-romanticised, that’s their problem. My whole philosophy on the new album is an attempt to empower all people, including women. When I refer to the ‘freedom of the slave’ that’s a reference to a wall of suffragettes and ‘dare to leave the cave’ is, again Amelia by the plane. So, what I’m saying is ‘be your own redeemer, dare to fly’. Likewise, the ‘ashes in the wind’ reference is to Gandhi ; the ‘waving to the crowd’ is Kennedy just before he was shot and ‘living to believe he would wake the morning’ is Mandela – though none of those people are mentioned. And the title The Morning of the Dreamer itself refers to Martin Luther King. That, again, can – I hope – relate to what’s happening right now in Ireland. But, the whole notion is to empower people to be heroic within themselves.”
Despite these leanings towards liberal humanism, The Dreamer opens with the clearly Christian Adam at the Window and closes with the similar Sacred Places, plus a reprise of Adam. Does Jimmy MacCarthy finally, fully believe in God?
“Of course I do! Absolutely!” he says, apparently astonished that anyone would think otherwise. “But this album shows I don’t focus outwards while looking for God. I find it within myself. That’s why, when I say ‘Adam’s at the window, painting in the wrinkles and the grey’, I’m presenting him as an everyman and everywoman. He’s paining himself in and out of lives, and therefore defying death – which is something I don’t believe in. And Sacred Places, too, is the artist’s hand, within your own self, creating holy shrones and ‘imagery eternal unto the soul divine’.
“Between these two bookends is my album, and my philosophy. But The Perfect Present probably really sums up where I stand right now, and the age I believe we’re living in. In that song I’ve come to the conclusion that we live in this moment and that, in this moment, below all poses and personae is where the God-energy lives.
Everything stems from there. And when you walk to the door of an empty flat and no longer feel lonely you are living in the perfect present. I’ve only recently got a handle on living in that sacred place. So I really believe you must love the moment, love yourself. Once you love yourself then anyone else you love is going to gain from that.”
Jimmy’s songs would suggest he has, let’s say, loved more than one woman. Therefore, having recently reached in his life the points of resolution that are the hallmark of The Dreamer is he now contemplating marriage, having children, furrowing into those new frontiers?
“It’s a part of my life that has to be fulfilled,” he says, laughing. “And maybe this album does show that I have only recently grown up to the degree necessary to contemplate such things, though that doesn’t mean I think people have to marry to be fulfilled. I also now am finally earning enough money to seriously consider marriage! But, whether I marry or not, I really would have to say that women have been the great teachers in my life. In fact I’d go so far as to suggest that women have taught me nearly everything I know.”
– The Irish Times
© Joe Jackson
Jimmy MacCarthy 