Culture

For over a decade now, Dublin-based five-piece The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock have been fusing the folklore and musical traditions of their home city with sounds and processes from further afield, with elements of drone and post-rock sitting alongside the foundations of folk and trad across their previous pair of full-length records. In addressing and recontextualising tradition during the ‘decade of centenaries’, though, The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock have set themselves some massive tasks. In 2013, the band undertook to document and chronicle the lived experiences of the hundreds of thousands of workers denied basic human rights in the 1913 Strike and Lockout. The final product, ‘Lockout’, is a concept album in four movements, finally releasing this March via Dublin/Sapporo label Transduction, after a number of live airings in the intervening years. Having lived with their work for a while, band founder/vocalist/ lyricist Allen Blighe is content with the band’s work: “Initially it was planned as a short piece to tie into the Lockout anniversary but it grew legs. A lot happened, many were born, and many passed away in that time. We feel both happy and relieved to have created something original and ambitious, yet still quite cohesive”. Bassist/vocalist Enda Bates, himself no stranger to large-scale musical endeavours, expands on the size of the task at hand: “It was a big, complex project, both in terms of the writing and the production. We’re never stuck for ideas as a band, but the music does seem to take its own time. In the end, we’re very happy with the result and, despite the logistical demands, it was really great working with an electric-guitar orchestra”. Tackling the story of the Strike and Lockout with nuanced ramifications that lasted for generations, and that continue to reverberate in Irish society, and making of them a work for an eighteen-piece guitar orchestra was always going to be demanding on storytelling, compositional and logistical levels, according to Bates: “We knew we wanted to tell the story of the Lockout chronologically, and Allen had a list of key events he wanted to cover in the narrative. So we developed a timeline for the piece based on that, and it seemed to fall naturally into four sections. We already had some fragments of music written that seemed to fit nicely with certain events, and I had an idea for the opening in which each guitar comes in string by string and builds to a big crescendo before dropping back down to just Allen by himself. From then on we just worked through the timeline, sometimes arranging existing ideas for the orchestra, and sometimes writing new material to fit the narrative. The story of the Lockout contains moments of great hope and unity, but also plenty of violence and despair. We tried to represent this through very consonant material and this big, open C tuning on all the guitars, alongside some very dissonant rhythms and harmonies for the darker moments”. Blighe is keen to outline the serious research done on both the story’s main plot, and on concurrent events of the time, aiming to present a fuller picture of a society in turbulence. ”Much reading was done on the subject. Padraig Yeates’ excellent ‘Lockout: Dublin 1913’ was a big influence. Also, Jer O’Leary’s impassioned performances of Larkin speeches really struck a chord. There were many challenges in compressing such a complex story into an album. For example, we just didn’t have time to fit in anything on the controversy surrounding the so called “Dublin kiddies’ scheme”, where the church blocked efforts to send strikers’ children to sympathetic English families to escape the deprivation of the Lockout. Some other themes, such as those presented on ‘Suffrage’, part of the 4th movement, were important to include. This deals with the struggle for voting equality, and Markievicz’s legacy, one as chequered as many of her male contemporaries but judged more harshly for no other reason than her gender. Matching the music to the narrative was a really interesting process. In the past we’ve written the music first, and then found lyrical themes to apply. For this project we flipped that around, which was a rewarding change of approach”. There’s obviously a great resonance to the story today, over a hundred years later, with the current ideological impasse plateauing across Irish politics and working conditions getting ever tighter for countless people since the introduction of austerity. Blighe discusses the similarities: “The decade of centenaries has been an interesting time to reflect on what exactly Ireland is. Where 1916 and the war of independence were about the struggle for national sovereignty, the Lockout and the Civil War were struggles to define exactly what this nation might be. Things are different now but ‘history rarely repeats but often rhymes’. The Lockout was a struggle for a fairer deal for workers against a very hostile and callous bunch of Dublin employers headed by William Martin Murphy, head of the DUTC, the tram company and owner of the Irish Independent, who enjoyed the tacit support of the law and state. Today we have a few similar characters. Ireland since the collapse has been murky to say the least, and there are many questions about banking regulation, the wind-up of Anglo, NAMA deals such as Project Eagle, the sale of Siteserv, the write-off of debt at INM, the constant policing scandals as the disclosure tribunal continues to unfold, and most importantly, the housing crisis. There is a sense that the gains of the trade union movement are being systematically stripped back in the name of competitiveness in a system that hothouses inequality”. While that might seem grim, Blighe continues to outline what can be done domestically, and what lessons can be taken away from previous popular mobilisations. “Our fear is that if a positive left-wing movement, in the mode of the water protest movement is not generated to deal with this inequality, then we will see a slide to the far right. Irish nationalism

The revised edition of ‘Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast’ (Kiely, Liffey Press, Dublin 2007; Areopagitica, NC 2017) coincided this year with two other biographies about Nora O’Mara and John Lodwick, close friends of Stuart’s in wartime. The challenge for the biographer is to interrogate the sources about Stuart, O’Mara, and Lodwick each of whom was lured to a war zone, and establish the truth about their psychology, actions, personality and politics. Stuart and O’Mara became lovers while working for the Propaganda Ministry (Fichte Bund) in Berlin. Stuart’s notorious broadcasts made him, according to critic Cyril Connolly, “the Irish Haw-Haw”. Lodwick, who worked for British Special Operations was a Croix de Guerre hero and novelist hailed by writers from Somerset-Maugham to Anthony Burgess. O’Mara held many aliases: Nora O’Mara, Deirdre O’Mara and Roísín Ní Mheara. She is mentioned in James O’Donnell’s ‘The Bunker’ (2001) as Rosaleen James aka ‘Mata O’Hara’ so-nicknamed by Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Günsche. O’Mara was in fact Phyllis Ursula James, born in 1918. Her natural father is unknown, her mother Nora James “a ladies maid of Hyde Park”. She was adopted by Sir Ian and Lady Hamilton of 1 Hyde Park Gardens, and despite a privileged education, including at a finishing school in Germany, suffered psychologically as an orphan. This is also attested to in ‘Black List, Section H.’ The Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg holds a letter from the Nazi Propaganda Ministry of 12 March 1942: “Frau O’Mara is being sent for 14 days of convalescence to Baden-Baden”. The letter suggests finding “a decent theatre engagement…and to help Frau O’Mara in case of need; it is requested to appropriate 500 RM (Reichmarks) from the Goebbels Fund”. The letter focuses on O’Mara’s status as an actress while working in the Haus des Rundfunk as a radio broadcaster alongside Stuart. O’Mara’s connections made her an insider with the Nazi regime. For example, Hitler’s personal pilot Hans Baur says he met her at a party in Goebbels’ villa in Schwanenwerder. The letter is intriguing as to how O’Mara penetrated the Reich’s higher echelons. She features in Stuart’s ‘Black List, Section H’ (King Penguin) as Susan Loyson, a distressed mother trying to get into German movies and theatre. The tempestuous O’Mara-Stuart relationship is pervasive in the book: she had two children, as did he back in Ireland from a failed marriage to Maud Gonne’s daughter, Iseult. While Stuart recanted his years in Berlin in interviews and especially ‘Black List, Section H,’ O’Mara’s loyalty to Nazism is clearly stated in two memoirs under the name Roísín Ní Mheara, ‘Cé hÍ Seo Amuigh’ (1992) and ‘I gCéin is I gCóngar’ (2006). The first caused a media scandal representing ‘neo-Nazism in Europe’ under the auspices of Gaelic-language publisher, Coiscéim. The government funders of the publisher had to answer for a text that evinced Holocaust denial like David Irving’s ‘Hitler’s War’ (1977). O’Mara’s overt anti-Semitism had first surfaced in January 1978 in her column in ‘Inniu’ denying the genocide in Bergen-Belsen. Her words are redolently vile: “there is plenty of evidence that the Germans did their serious best to solve the ‘Jewish problem’ humanely”. Stuart and O’Mara were blacklisted for being friends of pro-Nazi IRA activists Sean Russell and Frank Ryan who retain nationalist hero status. Russell died aboard a German U-boat on a mission with Ryan to Ireland during the war. Stuart was imprisoned by the French but released after a year. O’Mara’s release shortly after her arrest in Paris at the request of the post-war American and British authorities is mysterious since “MI5’s file on her was made to go away”. O’Mara’s foster-father, Sir Ian Hamilton, led the British Legion delegation in 1938 and was hosted by Hitler in Berchtesgaden, Obersalzberg. Making international news, Hamilton was photographed with Hitler as had other deviant foreign nationals including the runaway king Edward VIII. The memoir states O’Mara was “born in Switzerland” but in 1938 O’Mara was listed in Berlin’s Reichstheaterkammer Jahrbuch having established her identity as ‘Irish’. Her background and lineage were fake in a milieu where the bogus Nazi obsession with Aryanism and Jewishness in particular led to many reinventions of identity. The Abwehr, the SS, and the Geheime Staatspolizei sanctioned her profile as ‘Irish’, and her shadowy activities. O’Mara appears in John Francis O’Reilly’s ‘I Was A Spy in Ireland.’ He believed her cover-story. She was “Irish looking with unusual blue eyes and a peculiar walk as if she had at one time injured her back. Good-looking, but with rather an unwashed appearance”. O’Mara was obviously a spy for the Germans among their ‘adopted’ Irish gang of anti-British, pro-IRA supporters residing in Berlin and on the payroll. They included Stuart. William Warnock, the Irish chargé d’affaires in Berlin put on the record that O’Mara “was responsible for a raid by the SS on fellow broadcaster Liam Mullally’s flat”. The fact that she was quickly declassified by MI5 and the Americans after the war points perhaps to some sort of double-agent status. Francis Stuart’s novels had been highly praised, notably by Yeats who lost out in the tug-of-love with Iseult Gonne who married Stuart. Yeats’ proposed to Iseult twice but was blankly refused and he moved on speedily to marry Georgette Hyde-Lees. Yeats admired Stuart as poet and novelist, stating “he will be our great writer”. Stuart had returned to Berlin in January 1940 on a cultural visit organised by German Academic Exchange’s Helmut Clissmann (later assigned to the SS). This gets much space in ‘Black List, Section H.’ It has the highest political resonance in the novel since he acknowledges “being branded as a Nazi by those from whom most of his readers would have to come, scarcely augured well for his future”. Stuart’s Berlin years achieved everything he wanted for his art, albeit at the price of infamy. His twenty-five novels present a unity of thematic structure about war and its reality as counter-flow to so-called peace time. The extremes of Nazi Germany fulfilled his personal and psychological needs. The politics of

Independent music is odd: for a wide umbrella of music that breeds the creative freedom and cultural autonomy needed to help progress the overall artistic discourse, there’s no shortage of revivalists of various stripes, rejigging and refreshing previously well-worn sonic tropes. It’s been hard in the past to look at Corkonian psych-poppers The Shaker Hymn and not get some degree of the warm-and-fuzzies: emerging from teenage adventures in the folk and alternative genres, second album ‘Do You Think You’re Clever?’ self-released last year and veered wildly into tape-hiss, big sounds and the kind of vocal harmonies the like of Supergrass would have been envious of at the outset of Britpop. It was a mix that intrigued a lot of people, and preceded a furious touring schedule in small towns and minor venues all over the country, before the band took a breather to try other things and collect their thoughts, ready for another salvo of new material. In that context the band’s new single, Dead Trees, is a surprise. Vocalist/guitarist Caoilian Sherlock, a naturally happy-go-lucky fellow, drops the youthful distrust of the band’s postMillennial fug in favour of fire-and-brimstone doomsaying, warning of an uncertain future, in direct contrast to his fine fettle as we meet at L’Attitude on Cork’s Union Quay. Sherlock is relaxed about the response the single has met with at the band’s gigs so far this winter, a return to live activity that foreshadows an upcoming third album. “It’s been good. I forgot what it was like to do gigs. We hadn’t performed in about a year, except for one gig in Belgium where we tested out all our new songs. It’s nice. The songs are different. It seems boring to other people, but they’re longer. I guess we’ve given up the idea of trying to impress anyone else, I think. When you’re a bit younger, you try and write something to get in the charts, or something. We’ve been doing that since we were sixteen. We’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, now. The point of us being in a band is to give us that expression that comes from being together, so there’s less rules and a lot more of a democratic process going on between the four of us. The intention is to make the most exciting thing we can”. The process of creating music for record is obviously very different now from what it would have been in the days of the band’s broader influences; and in trying to bequeathe a document of where they are now the outfit have opted to keep recording their third album on tape to instill the same sense of urgency, immediacy, and the finality of limited takes into their tunes, though with permanence now underpinning the hard-won authenticity of fuzz and hiss,. “Music nerds will say, ‘oh, how exciting!’, but for those who don’t really care about the musicrecording process: we’ll be recording to tape, like they did up until the late Eighties, early Nineties. It means everything has to be done live. That’s exciting for us, ‘cause it’s a different process, there’s no sitting at the computer and redoing things. If you sound good or bad on the day, it doesn’t matter: that’s what happened, and that’s really exciting for us. We recorded two albums in three years and before that tons of EPs, so the recording process can get a bit flavourless. So for us, this is a bit of spice”, smiles Sherlock. Dead Trees itself touches on fairly hefty business, shifting creative focus from benign appraisals of the maladies of twenty-somethings in the binds of austerity and ladder-pulling, like in previous single Trophy Child, to altogether broader subject matter including the aforementioned doomerism. The question is: what prompted this turn for the thematically heavy? “Trophy Child was on our last album, and I couldn’t help but write about things that were going on around me. All my friends were going away to the UK, leaving Cork to go to Dublin, go to Australia and New Zealand, coming back, then going to South East Asia… much of that album was about that lost kind of feeling, not that I was stymied staying in Cork, but a lot of people around me were having the conversation about not knowing where to go. So a lot of the songs were about that. This time around I wanted to write from a more thematic point of view, as much as I could, but not so personal, more universal. So, I was doing a lot more travelling, as this album began to be written. I got to go to Iceland and LA, and other places I’d never seen, new landscapes, so I wanted to write something about nature, and the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t not write about the world after Trump, and Brexit. There was a heavy feeling at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, so there’s a lot of that on this new album. There’s also a lot of joy and excitement, and a feeling of ‘ooh, what’s gonna happen next?’”. The band’s recent downtime allowed Sherlock to spread his wings, solo, as Saint Caoilian, releasing his début one-man effort, ‘The Faraway’, earlier in the year. Away from a shared creative endeavour, Sherlock’s tendencies toward lovelorn pop, summoning power-pop pioneers like Big Star, are writ large all over leadoff single I’ll Be a Fool For You. It led to a busy summer of gigs, both in support of his own record and of fellow Corkonian troubadour Marlene Enright, and with accelerating momentum, there’s little stopping him from continuing this in between bursts of band activity. “I’m recording another EP this December! It’s funny, the reason Saint Caoilian came about was because I had about fifty demos at home. They weren’t going anywhere, and they weren’t necessarily Shaker Hymn songs. On top of that, I’ve been in this band since I was sixteen, you can’t expect three other people to travel all