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Thursday, 11 June 2009

Rachel Trezise on Patrick Jones

A feature on poet and dramatist Patrick Jones, taken from New Welsh Review 79 (Spring 2008)


My affiliation with Patrick Jones began seven years ago, on an October evening in Treorchy Library, at the launch of my first book. Patrick's own book, Fuse, a collection of plays and poetry, was being published by the same company the following year and he came to say a few words about how In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl was bound to appeal to teenagers in the valleys, to get them reading, and hopefully in time, writing. I was enormously grateful that an established writer would come and advocate my work in that way because I was anything but established; a shy, anonymous Rhondda girl, turning scarlet as she read her first published paragraph to a few friends, family members and, unbeknownst to me at the time, Ron Berry's eldest daughter. Being a lifelong Manic Street Preachers fan, what I was most excited about was the fact that Patrick was bass player Nicky Wire's elder brother, and I spent the preceding week clinging to the vain hope that Patrick would bring Nicky to the launch. To my mind, The Manic Street Preachers and Patrick Jones were inseparable entities. Patrick was the band member who wasn't a band member, a sleeping partner: His voice had been immortalised on the bands debut Generation Terrorists album, reading snippets of his poetry over the introductions to Love's Sweet Exile and Crucifix Kiss. The tag line in the chorus from Motorcycle Emptiness had originally belonged to him, as had the album title Everything Must Go. But throughout the past seven years I've had many opportunities to watch Patrick perform his poetry live on stage, including a performance in a tiny cafeteria in the Bowery in New York, a few weeks after 9/11. His poetry erupts from him, a torrent of frenzied emotion, spilling out like magma. His work is powerful, memorable and immensely affecting. Very quickly I came to realise that he is very much his own man, and very much his own writer.

Patrick grew up listening to Canadian blues inspired heavy metal band, Rush, and describes himself as 'an old rocker.' As a child and a young teenager, he never read books and like me, was influenced by the lyrics of rock songs, the only form of culture available to him. He wasn't one of these kids, he says, who knew they wanted to be a writer by the age of fourteen. In fact, literature didn't make an appearance until he became interested in politics whilst studying Sociology at Swansea University. He began writing poetry in 1986, six years before Generation Terrorists was released. At least one of his most well known poems, The Eloquence in the Screaming was written during this period. Nicky Wire explains in the foreword to Fuse that he didn't realise his brother had become a poet until they were travelling home from a gig supporting The Levellers in Salisbury Arts Centre in 1990. "... Patrick, who had come along for moral support, began reciting, or better, ranting, a poem. Suddenly everything made sense, alienation felt comforting, the poem was 'the eloquence in the screaming' which still inspires me, the moment crystallised, froze and stayed with me ever since."

That is proof enough that Patrick doesn't write simply because his younger brother is in a band, which is what he claimed everybody thought, when I asked if I could interview him. (When I did get around to interviewing him, his first words, whilst standing at the till in the Chapter Arts Centre café waiting for tea and coffee, were, 'They [The New Welsh Review] couldn?t get the Manics, so they've opted for me instead?' Clearly anxious about public perception to his connection with the band.)

What Patrick and the Manic Street Preachers do have in common, obviously, is a background in the same area, the former mining town of Blackwood in the south Wales valleys. And their work therefore often encompasses the same themes; the demise of mining under Thatcher and the rise of consumerism. Empty adolescences spent in the ailing Gwent Valleys; 'Culture, alienation, boredom and despair.' The Manics' first three studio albums, on which Richey Edwards was the predominant lyricist, as well as the subsequent five, to varying degrees, are political manifestoes questioning racism, apathy, sexism, consumerism and war. Patrick's poetry and drama does much of the same. From The Eloquence in the Screaming, the poem that inspired Nicky Wire:

the belt the greed the maggot the money magic seed
of destruction and defraction
into us it comes
replacing our sad eloquence with the obscene apathy of
?have a nice day it could be you forget it all in an instant he was
killed by friendly fire of collateral damage and business relations?
a language of distraction
smothering the screaming with the businessed smile the teacher's
pen and the credit sale

The other attribute which both artists share is a burning desire to inspire and enable young and/or disadvantaged people to become artists, or at least to think about the world surrounding them. Much of Patrick's work has involved young writing groups and adult literacy classes in his community. When the local pit closed and the unemployed miners were told to retrain, part of their retraining concerned learning how to type. Having spent their lives doing hard physical labour, their fingers were too thick to use standard keyboards. Patrick initiated a weekly poetry class, giving them a means to vent their frustration. The Manic Street Preachers are renown for decorating their record sleeves with quotes from poets, philosophers and politicians in an attempt to alert their fans to the work of other thinkers. In fact, on that October evening in 2000 when I told Patrick I was a Manics fan, he asked me if those quotes had had anything to do with my becoming a novelist. They sent me out in search of the writing of Valerie Solanos and Sylvia Plath, which was at least a start. Patrick seemed overjoyed when I admitted this. 'I'll tell my brother,' he said. 'I'll lend him your book.'

A year earlier, following the premiere of Everything Must Go, a journalist had asked Patrick why he'd written the play, and he answered, 'Libraries gave us power,' echoing the famous first line of The Manics' Design for Life. 'Language is the best tool we have for articulating rage. I've got a lot of rage at what Wales has become. Richey had it too.' So the point it seems, in the existence of both Patrick and the Manics' work, is exactly that, the picking up of the pen, doing something to oppose the status quo, which is what The Eloquence in the Screaming is actually about:

BUT
between the billboard masturbation
across highways of metallic isolation
there
there lives the deafening screaming of you me us
wiping out the diseased pages of apathy
that bleed our eloquence

And as Patrick himself describes Generation Terrorists in a very early album review: '?we are conditioned to an oblivious mass, into a catatonic dead life of false desires and created needs, we are force taught to hate, be greedy, cheat and follow some false dream, the candle needed the flame and MSP lit the dying wick of all our secret revolutions?' Raging creatively against the Tory/New Labour machine is a kind of socialism in action, the closest to socialism we can now hope to get. As Patrick and Aneurin Bevan have said, 'the verb is more important than the noun.'

But that is where the similarities between Patrick Jones and The Manic Street Preachers end. Having been influenced by music so early on, Patrick has always been interested in using music to enhance literature. Commemoration and Amnesia from 1999 is a recorded collection of his poetry, set against music written and recorded around his words, by various artists including members of The Super Furry Animals and Catatonia. The music is a welcome second dimension that softens the often harsh content of the stanza, and which, along with Patrick's gentle voice lulls the listener into a position of calm, leaving them open-lugged and taking note. But this ploy would be utterly useless if Patrick's poetry was not superbly crafted and thoroughly engaging to start with. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Scalpel & Heart, where Ashley Cooke's placid guitar and Alison Gillies' delighting cello accompany Patrick as he talks of his child's five tiny fingers growing, making the juxtaposing conclusion of the poem appear even more severe:

So how can I tell you
That fingers pull a trigger
That hands make a fist smash jaws
Push buttons

What Commemoration and Amnesia adroitly demonstrates, is that Patrick's work has never been reliant on music, but that a large section of the audience he would like to attract are. He has never wanted to be a musician, despite having had a few guitar lessons much earlier on. 'Songs have a way of capturing a moment in time,' he says, 'an instant which relates to a certain period. But poetry and drama can transcend eras. Encapsulate whole stories, people's lives.'

Everything Must Go, perhaps Patrick's most well known work, a play dealing with drugs, unemployment, crime, self-mutilation and alienation in the Gwent Valley is interspersed with songs and lyrics from Catatonia, the Stereophonics and principally, The Manic Street Preachers. It is a revenge tragedy in which main character, A, avenges his father's sacking at the local Japanese manufacturing plant by shooting his father's former boss with a gun his grandfather used in the Spanish Civil War. Scenes often begin with a Manic Street Preachers song, and one character is so detached, he only communicates in song lyrics. The play was first performed in February 1999 at the Sherman Theatre before touring in early 2000. At that time, Welsh pop music was hugely successful throughout Britain. The 'Cool Cymru' phenomenon filled the pages of Melody Maker and the New Musical Express with photographs of Kelly Jones and Cerys Matthews flying the Welsh flag. Q Magazine, the most respected of the music publications even released a Welsh issue celebrating St David's Day. To all intents and purposes, Wales looked from the outside like a culturally identifiable nation, teeming with confidence. In fact in the south Wales valleys, the opposite still was true. In Caerphilly, where the play was set, the unemployment rate was 8.1%, and 29% of the population had no educational qualifications. The whole play seems to be an attempt to fill in the blanks between the lyrics, informing the audience that Wales was in fact still crippled by the departure of the mining industry and the low pay and anodyne employment of the fly-by-night Japanese factories; a reaction to the success of Welsh music, which Patrick says is true. This from the narrator at the beginning:

how green is my valley how grey is the sky - ooh lovely love - fucking daffodils dancing in the spring sun - fucking new deal employers fucking leeks and rugged scrum halves up to their bollocks in mud shouting numbers in the rain - the pubs puking souls out out out on Saturday nights the the the fucking joyriders burning the hillsides - the temazes stuck on tongues - the sulpher glow of orange lamps - the sound of factories at dawn - the karaoke queens in cymmer - green hills - choirs - male of course - come on taste it feel it come on down - lissen to this choir - cunts - lissen Welcome to your fears welcome to your dreams welcome to the welsh tourist board?s translation clinic - welcome to the real nuts and fucking bolts welcome to the burning eyes the torn torsos the gaping wounds - the - history - pistory - piss story - welcome welcome - to the psychiatric hospital we all live in...

Amazingly, at the time, none of the reviews from journalists based outside Wales pick up on what Patrick was trying to say, except maybe Toby O'Connor Morse, who, writing for The Independent, said, 'Everything must Go is not a feel good play... There are times when [it's] less Cool Cymru and more Whinging Wales. Either this play is a decade too late in its description of the Welsh zeitgeist, or the crust of newfound Cambrian confidence is still tremulously thin.' The other reviews only concern themselves with the Manic Street Preachers link, sometimes comparing Patrick and Nicky's styles, like Robin Bresnark of the Melody Maker who said, "Everything Must Go makes The Holy Bible look like 'Janet and John.'" And what of the critics who accuse him of being too dark? Patrick shrugs. 'Nobody likes it when you hold a mirror up to society and reflect what's really going on, do they?'

Much more recently, his latest play Sing to Me, commissioned and presented by Gwent Theatre in October 2006 to celebrate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the writing of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, explores Nationalism and identity. 'Nationalism is a subject I'm very interested in,' Patrick says, 'because who decides when it's wrong or it's right? We find the patriotism of Iran offensive, but nobody objects to Scottish people wearing kilts.' The song is analysed by three GCSE students who are writing an essay about it, including Dafydd, a xenophobic Welsh speaker and Rena, an Eastern European immigrant. 'Writing about a National Anthem gave me an opportunity to explore nationalism and make people think about it. Personally, I don't think much of National Anthems. I hope Evan James was being sincere when he said he wrote it for the love of his country not for the hate of another.' It is an example of how Patrick shrewdly uses music to examine longstanding social wrongs.

As for the professional blessing and curse that is being Nicky Wire's brother, Patrick says, 'It's weird. I was interviewing some old age pensioners recently at an old people's home, doing some research for a forthcoming project, and an eighty year old woman said, "So you're one of those Manic Street's, are you?" There really isn't any getting away from it. And I haven't ruled out writing something involving The Manics again. Nicky and I have been trying to write something together for a few years. But we're both very different writers. I think The Manics material should be much more politically charged at the moment. They have an audience and they could do a lot of good with that. But they won't listen to me. I can't write for Nicky. Just like Nicky can't write for me.'

Patrick is currently listening to Elect the Dead, the leftist Iraq war inspired solo album of Serj Tankian, front man of metal band System of A Down.

Posted at 12:56 |

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