Rock and roll is a funny old game. I tried my hand at it a few years ago, and met with mixed results. I liked standing on stage, making a racket with my bass guitar, falling about like an idiot, and singing VERY LOUDLY. But ultimately, my major downfall was that I was a terrible songwriter. My songs rarely meant anything to me, never mind anyone listening to them, and tended to be just a load of words that I’d thrown together for the sake of having something to sing. If I was being clever, I’d say that I was using a William Burroughs-style cut-up method, destroying words and finding new meanings, but in reality I was just bluffing, and in some cases, trying to work words into songs that I’d never heard used before. Words like ‘linguistics’ and‘hypothesised.’
In the end, I never really managed to move away from the first Law of being a Ramone:
Second verse, same as the first.
Part of the problem of being a songwriter is that when you put yourself out there, in a medium that literally anyone can in this day and age, you have to compete with other people, and if they are better than you, then you have to learn to deal with that. Being an outgoing, sociable type, I had the pleasure of keeping company with almost exclusively musicians, and they were almost always far better than me. Immediately one ‘gig’ springs to mind where I turned in a spectacularly inept solo performance, telling myself that it wasn’t so bad. Immediately afterwards, a very good friend took to the make-shift stage, (it was in a cinema, fact-fans), and proceeded to play one of the most intelligent, literate and moving set of songs your correspondent has ever had the pleasure – or misfortune – to hear. I gave up performing for 6 months after that. The cruel amongst us would quietly mumble that it’s a shame I didn’t give up for longer.
So, whilst it’s bad enough when close friends are better than you, what do you do when you’re confronted with someone who’s light years ahead of you? This is the question I had to ask when I found myself conducting an interview with a gentleman who has won a rather prestigious award for his way with words. I myself won the Aberdeen music award for ‘Best Indie Band 2005’, so I know the pressures of fame, but this man won the Pulitzer Prize. My commemorative tea-tray doesn’t really compare with that. He also has better hair than me.
An uncharitable man would describe it as a rich-man’s folly, but Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon really had something to say when he picked up a guitar and began combining his words with the garage rock stylings of his band, Rackett. Playful, thought provoking, moving – it’s exactly what you’d expect from one of Northern Ireland’s finest exponents of the written word.
And he understood the ridiculousness of it as well, which helps when you’re being a rock and roller. At the age of 56, Muldoon has been digging rock and roll for a long time, and shows no signs of letting go of it. Becoming more animated as he was talking about it, he told me, "I’ve always been interested in rock and roll. I guess I’m of that generation that was reared on rock and roll. It has a renegade aspect that is part of its great attraction." And it was very hard not to believe him.
In all honesty, I’d not been looking forward to the interview, because as I mentioned before, he is far, far better than me, and I felt a bit intimidated. Muldoon’s career as a writer has gone from strength to strength over the years, and it’s difficult not to feel a little bit in awe of him. Emerging out of the same circles as Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, Muldoon’s work quickly developed a distinctive style, looking towards pop culture, utilising an understated wit, along with a fairly radical approach to format, using archaic words, and difficult meter, lending his work an often impenetrable obliqueness, which is as likely to frustrate the casual reader as it is to entice. Muldoon’s work requires that the reader put a lot into it, and as is so often the case with these kind of things, the reader gets an awful lot out of it.
Adding to this the fact that I’m actually a big fan of his work, and my nervousness increased even more. Muldoon has long been one of my favourite poets, his words greatly affecting me and appealing to my innate sense of Northern Irishness whilst I lived away from home. But not because they have anything inherently Irish about them, but rather they articulate the notion of being from here, whilst existing within the shadow of the big bad world. Or at least that’s what I got from it anyway.
All artists are interested in that notion of not quite belonging to any mainstream. They’re making the laws as they go along.
Almost immediately, he had disarmed me, and I started to relax. It stopped being the legendary poet and the awestruck fan-boy, and became two dudes talking about rock and roll. We began throwing names about, checking each other out to see if we were really into it, with Muldoon offering,
My influences range from the obvious people from the 60’s, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, Paul Simon. Dylan, Leonard Cohen. But one of the things I’ve been doing is going back a little bit and looking again at Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin Irving Berlin and seeing if we can’t integrate something of the wit, and humour that they brought to popular lyric.
And he does, but not in the way that you might expect – after all, this is rock and roll we’re talking about. In front of an audience at Crescent Arts that seemed to consist mainly of academics, fellow writers, and contemporaries who were clearly anticipating a wordy and literate, Dylan-esque performance, but instead were greeted by the sight of one of Northern Ireland’s most well respected poets prowling about the stage with a Fender Telecaster, doing high kicks and sneering, whilst a band consisting entirely of academics made a massive noise. The lyrics were frankly unintelligible, and perversely, I got a real kick out of this, knowing that all the people who had come down to see a poet were not getting any sense of the words at all. Pure rock and roll, you might say.
Muldoon had told me,
One of the things we’re very keen to do is to make a wide range of music. We don’t want to repeat ourselves from one song to the next. Our songs certainly don’t sound the same from one song to the next.
And, indeed, the band ploughed through a set that took in brooding ballads, twangy surf music, noisy garage rock, and even a possibly ill-advised stab at reggae. And both Muldoon and myself were clearly loving it. Ok, you could argue that there’s an element of ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ about it all, but that would only be true if Muldoon was taking himself entirely seriously. And he wasn’t.
It was all good fun, and I am proud to say that I also got to see some of the most amazing dancing I have ever witnessed from a man clearly well over double my age (cartwheels were involved). The whole experience left me pondering my own rock and roll days. I’d never taken it entirely seriously, I tell myself, but I’d never felt I was good enough for it. As a bluffer, if you fail to convince yourself, then how can you hope to convince anyone else? I’d never really trusted myself, and after watching Muldoon, I kind of regretted it. I found myself thinking back to my conversation with Muldoon, and something he had said stuck with me.
Poetry and songwriting are similar in a lot of ways, but they are quite distinct also. One would hope that in both cases that some kind of change had taken place, some sort of engagement. And that I think is true of both forms. In a strange way, I find trying to write songs more difficult, because they’re much more fixed formally than most contemporary poetry, certainly the kind of poetry that I write. One’s only got to try to do it to realise that it’s not as easy as it seems.
If someone as talented as Muldoon could admit that songwriting is hard work, and could also go out there, ham it up, and have fun with it, then why couldn’t I? Many people have said that when punk rock first broke in the 70’s, one of the most inspiring things about it was the way in which it encouraged the audience to have a go themselves, to get involved. Now here I am in the 21st century, talking to a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, who is telling me that songs aren’t easy to do, and I found myself thinking that perhaps my rock and roll days weren’t so bad after all.
Being inspired by poetry to make noisy, inept rock music; it’s the new punk, obviously.