January 2018

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

The Radiators From Space, Ireland’s first punk band, captured the subversive mood of 1979 in the groundbreaking ‘Ghostown’ album. Now they cast a long shadow over Trouble Pilgrims who have inherited band members Steve Averill and Pete Holidai. But the iconic pair of Irish rockers are not just surviving, they’re thriving. The reason for this must be the strength of their collaborators in Trouble Pilgrims. In fact, Trouble Pilgrims now are almost an Irish post-punk supergroup. The lineup includes Bren Lynott who was a member of The End and The Cathedral, and Johnny Bonnie who comes via the Skank Mooks, Those Handsome Devils and The Baby Snakes. Tony St Ledger was in The Myster Men, The Deep and Vatikan3. So there are plenty of ghosts in this album, and ghosts of hopes. The 1970s and 1980s Dublin’s scene’s glimmer of dreams. Prospects of stardom; the price – a ticket on the B+I ferry. As ex Radiator and Pogue, Philip Chevron said: “where the hand of opportunity draws a ticket in the lottery”. ‘Dark Shadows and Rust’ is a triumph, an essential piece of modern Irish art. It takes all of the hopes and aspirations of those Moran-ish, Baggot-y, Ivy Room-y (although that’s an oxymoron), McGonagle-y, college and Magnetic first steps of young bands and welds them together into an unholy celebration of the power of rock. While ‘Dark Shadows and Rust’ is a very Dublin album, it also celebrates the dust and grit, the sweat and blood, the tension and release of the blues, from the Delta to Canvey Island. It wears the ghostshirts of glam, of Bolan and Bowie and Roxy and the candyfloss pop of the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison. In the key word from the opening track, it’s a carnival. Snake Oil Carnival sets the tone for the album in grand style. After an introduction featuring a cacophony of traffic, cymbals and radio drone (a riot in Chatham St music academy perhaps), Steve Rapid and Tony St Ledger combine to sizzling effect in a Doors meets Queens of the Stone Age sixties stomper. It’s almost overflowing with taut guitar whose sinewy histrionics pulse in this rock and rollercoaster. And then without warning, with the sharpest of shocks, the Carny is over. It’s breath-taking. Another outstanding track is Tony St Ledger’s, Instant Polaroid, which celebrates a Dublin character, snapping pics on O’Connell street. Capturing moments of bliss, delirious smiles, and the beauty of youth, and developing them in what must have been a lonely dark room. It’s an intensely evocative song and is delivered with the panache of early Bauhaus, the sparkle of Spizz Energi and the invention of the great post-punk bands. And that’s why ‘Dark Shadows and Rust’ is such an exultation: it captures the moment punk was a kaleidoscope of images and sounds, of personalities and dreams. It marshalled a sense of power and glory for the people who felt powerless and inglorious. Death Ballad and Queen of Heartache are a pair of Moore Street meets New York-flavoured gems. The first contains a candyfloss melody combining with barbedwire guitars. If Debbie Harry fronted the Outcasts this would be the song to record. Queen of Heartache is the Ramones twisting with the Royal Showband. Style icons hucklebucking trends, throwing shapes at the mineral bar in some maple-sprung dancefloor of dreams. It’s the song the Golden Horde shudda wrote. I am only pointing out the points of comparison that I imagine because: a) it’s fun, and b) the album refuses to be typecast or to fit into any neat compartment, and that makes it thrilling. These kicks are encapsulated when Pete Holidai grabs the mic for Animal Gang Blues. To my ears, he’s never sung truer, more convincingly, more intensely than on ‘Dark Shadows and Rust’. It’s a career-high. The song itself is a prequel to ‘Ghostown’. It’s a bloody B-movie of a song, a scare-a-thon, washed in acid guitars where Holidai is the grinderman, voicing the moral panics that stalked deprived Dublin. Scorning the hopeless souls with finger wagging and wondering where it all went wrong. The characters of the first two Radiators’ albums are here in spirit, although it documents pre-1970s Dublin. That’s one of the best things about the album. As rap did in the 1980s and early 1990s when it celebrated the tenements of New York City, Trouble Pilgrims take the same razor-sharp cinema lens to their own surroundings. Most rewardingly the Pilgrims invoke the past, but never wallow in it.

The story of the contemporary rock diva, Lady Gaga, who literally could not stand to be alone, is a philosophical fable for our times. A few years back, according to claims in a legal action filed by the rocker’s former personal assistant, who sued for overtime pay, the singer could not tolerate being in her bed alone. The assistant was required to be with her boss 24 hours a day (including sleeping with her), yet was not paid for the extra hours. What is going on?   A Globalised World Specialising in the torture of Sleep Deprivation No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation, according to Professor Matthew Walker, director of the Centre for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. “It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. And yet no one is doing anything about it. Things have to change: in the workplace and our communities, our homes and families”. It’s not just margaret Thatcher who suffered from lack of sleep, you do yourself… In the book ‘24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep’, Jonathan Crary argues that the expanding non-stop communication technology of twenty-first-century capitalism is ruining individual attentiveness and impairing perception. The 24/7 marketplace is endlessly pushing us into constant activity, damaging the fabric of everyday life. Humans are endlessly diverted and distracted by the images, demands and noises of ubiquitous technology, including mobile phones and other electronic devices. There is never any peace. Doctor Frank Lipman, who treats conditions of stress and fatigue, has noted that: “feeling spent is an understandable response to the 21st century. If you put a human being in a modern city, and add computers, mobile phones, credit cards, neon lights and 24-hour shopping…what do you expect?”.   The ‘Wired Life’- or the Death of Solitude But the modern condition engenders more than just the death of sleep, chronic fatigue, and pointless frenetecism. This famous saying of the philosopher Blaise Pascal has never been more relevant to the contemporary world – yet never more violated. “Our unhappiness arises from one thing only, that we cannot be comfortably alone in our room…That is why the pleasure of solitude is seen as so incomprehensible”. The Wired Life of hyper-capitalism and its world-wide-web – think of a massive spider’s ‘web’ in which we are all entangled – is designed to be intrusive and overweaning. To want solitude is to be an oddity. Experiments summarised in the journal Physiology & Behaviour suggest that, given a choice of physical pain or isolation, social mammals will choose the former. Capuchin monkeys starved of both food and contact for 22 hours will rejoin their companions before eating. Children who experience emotional neglect, according to some findings, suffer worse mental health consequences than children suffering both emotional neglect and physical abuse: Though he wrote his short story ‘The Pedestrian’ in the era of Big Box TV pre-cable, pre-streaming media, Ray Bradbury grasped the effect of emerging electronic communication, which tended to undermine both the right of – and desire for – privacy. The pedestrian Lawrence Mead is out walking alone: “And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard, because only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows… In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time”. Shortly thereafter Mead is arrested by a robotic police car and taken to a psychiatric institute for treatment for regressive behaviour, that is, seeking solitude in a world saturated by media. Unlike the rock star who cannot sleep alone, the Pedestrian wants to walk alone but a technocratic world won’t leave him alone. Non-stop video games, omnipresent online streaming, iPhones, social media, multiple cable channels, all conspire to make humans into Outer-Directed Machines always looking to be attached to the Wired World for their amusements. Montaigne in his essay, ‘Of Solitude’ said: “We must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat. And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there”. The reference to finding solitude away from “exotic knowledge or communication” – a harbinger of the WWW – is a battle cry for those seeking to liberate themselves from the endless distractions of a 24/7 Interconnected Info-World. The philosopher Arnold Schopenhauer assailed those who constantly seek happiness through external stimulations (food, entertainments, games, wealth, etc). Such a life “cannot protect a man from being bored”, Schopenhauer cautioned. The rock singer could not be alone because she no longer had the capacity to entertain herself with herself. The ability to be comfortably alone in her room was beyond her. She is a contemporary casualty of the age-old War against Solitude. George Monbiot, who believes capitalism has inspired a generation of loneliness, has written: “Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and perhaps the most dangerous”. He and Gaga are only half right: we should relish company but thrive too, because it is sometimes inevitable, on solitude.