Nope, his city is a purgatorial stripmall façade of Nightown populated by ghosts who walk: Kelly, Kavanagh, Behan, Dylan, MacGowan, the brothers Palace and Louvin, James Clarence Mangan and the flagellant Matt Talbot all blundering into each other after hours. The ex-Jubilee Allstar is a diehard balladeer, old school, observing a stubborn fidelity to the meters of his metier (check out the scrupulous comma placement in the title) – come-all-ye’s and unquiet-minded ditties equal parts old Elizabethan and new worlde Irish.

He also understands the psychogeography of cities, how they become illuminated, distorted and remade in the observer’s imagination. His writer’s eye scans imaginary landmarks – Redmond’s Hill, the fields of Crookedwood, Onion Tower, the Marshalsea debtor’s jail – but also glimpses the laudanum phantoms and whiskey priests that lurk in the filigree, and renders them songwise in the language of the Protestant Hiberno-Gothic and the Catholic-alcoholic supernatural (“I awoke down in May Oblong’s hous e/ With a bad case of the fear”). Here’s a body of song which understands that any port town is also a portal town, a hell-mouth that admits all manner of strange sailors, strumpets and shape-shifters home on shore leave from far flung territories where the maps are always stamped Here Be Monsters.

Granted, McCormack’s no Caruso, but he doesn’t have to be. The voice is harsh and cautionary, complemented by banjos, mandolins, singing saws, harmonicas and harmoniums all chiming in with canny counterpoints. Recorded in Capel Street and mixed in Kilmuckridge, this is a sort of Appalachian chamber music reinterpreted by sessioneers in early houses with names like The Hag’s Bed and The Maggot Bin. Indeed, ‘In The Watches Of The Night’ is a bockety cross between spoken-word what’s-he-building-in-there bedsit nightmare and ‘Frank’s Wild Years’, replete with nails being hammered into the dissonant background.

Consider ‘Last Night…’ a lost weekend in a phantasmagorical theme park. I’d lobby for its creator to be awarded the freedom of the city, but going by these tunes, he’s already got it.

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One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

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© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.