ON THE PIG'S BACK

BAGHDAD, IRAQ. August 1991. A few days after he in-itiated the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein decided to display before the television cameras the group of British civilians he was holding hostage in the capital.

While the world looked on, Saddam approached one little boy and began patting his head. "Are we giving you milk?," the tyrant asked. The boy's eyes widened in terror as he nodded yes. "And are we giving you cornflakes?" enquired Saddam. Again, the boy silently illustrated his assent.

Hussein then walked down the line to the next boy. This kid looked a lot tougher than the first, quite ferocious in fact. He was wearing a Batman t-shirt. The Butcher of Baghdad took one look at this boy and then pointedly skipped over him and moved on to a more compliant-looking child.

According to Julie Salamon's book, The Devil's Candy, this incident was viewed with particular glee in Hollywood by a group of executives from Warner Brothers, the corporate owners of the Batman logo and all Batman merchandising. While they applauded themselves on what they saw as an international publicity coup, one exec turned to the other and joked, "The Batman shirt was easy. The tough part was getting Saddam to go into Kuwait."

Of course, had that young boy's shirt been emblazoned with the words Frank Pig Says Hello and had Saddam Hussein been as familiar with this character as he is with the caped crusader, he wouldn't have just skipped on down the line of hostages. He'd have turned on his heels, skedaddled straight back to his bunker and ordered the immediate withdrawal of his troops from Kuwait, faster than you can say captive bolt pistol.

Frank Pig can have that kind of effect on people.

For those of you who have yet to be introduced, Frank Pig is actually Francie Brady, the hero of Pat McCabe's stunning novel, The Butcher Boy, and the equally stunning spin-off play, Frank Pig Says Hello.

Francie's story is set in Clones, Co. Monaghan during the 1960s. He's an only child, the son of an insane mother who eventually commits suicide, and an alcoholic and emotionally wasted father. The family are dismissed by some of the townspeople as nothing but "pigs" so Francie decides to take them at their word, literally.

He wallows in a sty of rejection and loneliness, and creates an alternative world for himself from comics, TV shows and paperback westerns. This world is shared by only one person, his best friend, Joe Purcell. When even that fragile universe caves in, Francie wreaks a violent, gothic revenge.

These, however, are merely the bare bones of both The Butcher Boy and Frank Pig Says Hello. The real power of Francie's story is in the way he tells hit. McCabe has created an exceptionally compelling character with a unique voice that is both ironic and painfully funny, but through which is recounted an horrific and chilling narrative. It's a voice which had been floating around in the author's head for a long time but also one which he was initially reluctant to hear.

"William Faulkner has a line where after one of his novels had been rejected for the nth time, he said that he felt a door slamming between himself and the whole world of publishing," McCabe explains. "He decided then to write only for himself, to write totally and utterly for the pure buzz of writing. That's what happened to me because the first draft of this story was rejected, imperiously, by a whole swarm of publishers.

"The first draft was written in a straight, third person narration style. It was okay, a workmanlike effort but it wasn't enough. I was afraid of it because it was such a dangerous story but you could tell it in a way that was almost twee. But once I felt this Faulkner door slamming I decided, what the hell, if life is worth anything you've got to confront the demons.

"So, I started writing it in Francie's own words. I didn't think anybody would understand it for a start because it was written in this daft, skat style. But I wouldn't have changed a word of it no matter who liked it or disliked it, 'cause at this stage I'd given up hope of having it published at all. And then, the complete opposite of what I expected happened. It got published and people not only understood it, they liked it."

Indeed, they did. The foregoing reference to the idea of Frank Pig catchphrases appearing on mass marketed t-shirts is not as fanciful as you might think (Bogmen With Bony Arses, for example, could well become the defining cultural slogan of the nineties). Since The Butcher Boy was first published last year, Francie Brady from Clones has become a sort of underground cult hero, for both young and old, and not just on this side of the world. In the United States, where McCabe recently completed a highly successful series of public readings, the book has just had its fifth print run and another is likely within months.

"It's just gone beyond the beyond," says McCabe. "A novel usually has a limited shelf life. It lasts a year in hardback, a few months in paperback if you're lucky, but this has acquired a momentum of its own. The thing in America is phenomenal. The link they have with it there is Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye and Huckleberry Finn. It seems to have struck a chord across the generations.

"There's a kind of street thing about the anarchic spirit of Francie which appeals to young people and that certainly came over at the reading in the Sin É in New York and places like that. Older people are attracted by the stuff about the parties in the house and the old days stuff, and that aspect of the novel.

"I'd like to think that it's something like the way in which Billy Roche's plays succeeded. There's a kind of a feeling for people. Nobody's to blame for anything, basically, when it comes down to it. Everybody's in it together, battling against mortality. That probably really explains why the book touches a nerve in both young and old, rural and urban. It hits a few targets. But I didn't intend that, now. I suppose if you set out to do it, you'd make a balls of it."

Whatever about Frank Pig's current status, his real impact on global popular consciousness will presumably come with the movie version of The Butcher Boy, which is to be directed by Neil Jordan. No date for the commencement of filming has yet been set but McCabe has just completed the first draft of a screenplay.

During the past few weeks, he has spent a great deal of time discussing the script with Jordan and says he is extremely excited with the way things are going. When I ask if there is any particular film which has the kind of feel he would like the screen adaptation of The Butcher Boy to have, he replies without a moment's hesitation.

"A Clockwork Orange," he says. "In A Clockwork Orange, you've got this deadpan voiceover, yet what Alex is describing is outrageous and violent. To some extent, that's what Francie does. He talks in this daft language and at the same time he may be crapping in somebody's house or attacking someone or whatever. So, if there's a model it would be that one.

"It would be dangerous to go too close to that but insofar as I have a touchstone, A Clockwork Orange would seem to have the right tone of loopiness for Francie."

Anyone hoping for a conversation with Pat McCabe about lidda-ra-chure will be sorely disappointed. McCabe regards writing as hard work, a slow, accretive, often onerous process. He has little time for authors who prattle on about their muse or their ahrt.

"I'm a workhorse," he says. "I just have to keep at it 'till I get it right. I don't know what I'm at half the time."

A long-time Hot Press reader, he'd much rather have a laugh at how annoyed some GAA types get with Declan Lynch's Bogball and Stickfighting jibes. Alternatively, he's quite happy to spend large swathes of interview time indulging his Viz addiction by rehearsing some of his favourite characters' exploits. He's also a big fan of the Irish satirical comic, The Yellow Press, and would himself love to write comic strips at some point, provided he could get someone else to do the drawing.

When he's at home in London, he admits that apart from reading comics he spends far too much of his free time watching Bravo, a satellite channel specialising in black 'n' white TV series and B-movies from the '50s and '60s. "Real TV hell stuff," he grins. Francie Brady obviously didn't lick it off the stones.

Despite his penchant for humour and kitsch, however, The Butcher Boy alone proves that Pat McCabe's worldview is essentially bleak and very, very dark.

"I'm not an especially depressive kind of person," he insists. "They say that a paranoiac is someone who knows a little of what's going on, and I think that's a wee bit true. It's true of me, but far from being depressive I often find my outlet in gregariousness, to hell with it, Dionysian kinda carry on. But I think, ultimately, that the human condition is very bleak. Like, my daughter said to me the other day, 'It's sad that when I'm big, you're gonna be in your old days and you're gonna be dead'. And she's right!

"That kind of thing disturbs me, as does this idea that we're all here battling against mortality but there's very little we can do about it. I suppose really I'm a fatalist."

McCabe and his wife have two daughters, aged six and eight respectively. Isn't having children a very optimistic thing to do?

"Absolutely," he replies. "It's an act of faith in humankind to do it. Anything that promotes contact between human beings and any kind of understanding, I'm behind that. But I do understand people who see no point in bringing children into this world. That's too doomed for me, though. I couldn't survive if that got a hold of me."

Religion or the idea of any post-death salvation holds no solace for Pat McCabe. He's been a devout atheist since he was a very young teenager and now that he's two years away from his fortieth birthday he sees no likelihood of a mid-life reconversion.

"I went to a boarding school in Monaghan and you'd be blitzkrieged with this religion stuff night, noon and morning," he recalls. "I parted company with it when I was around fourteen. I thought it was garbage, a complete waste of time. I still had to go through the motions. So I'd find myself serving a Latin mas or something and I'd be supposed to go, 'Et clamormeus ad te veniat'. Of course, I'd be just standing there saying, 'Et fucky wucky ticky tocky'. It was an odd way of keeping yourself sane. And Francie does that kind of thing in the book too.

"I think a lot of kids do it, adults too. If priests stopped and listened to what people actually say during prayers, they'd be surprised."

Irish writers are a diverse lot, with all sorts of different lineages, but few can claim to have cut their creative teeth by playing pianette with a country 'n' western showband. For about three years during the mid-seventies, Pat McCabe did just that as a member of the estimable combo, Paddy Hanrahan and the Oklahoma Showband.

"I played with a few smaller groups too, like The Copelanders, but Paddy Hanrahan was my big break," he laughs. "I'd gotten a job teaching at the time, in Longford, but at night I'd be off playin' in Portmagee or somewhere like that. We did mostly country 'n' western stuff but we used to do some rock 'n' roll as well. Whenever the main man was off taking a leak or something, we'd slip in the odd bit of Hendrix. It was wild."

A rocker at heart, McCabe's performing style was often a little more, eh, robust than your average c 'n' w organ grinder.

"Me piano fell off the stage one night," he recalls. "We were playing a gig over in the Holloway Road in London in a place that had a revolving stage. The cream of the sixties' showbands used to do residencies there so it was all these lads in Hawaiian shirts and the whole lot, blasting out 'Zambese Dam' and stuff like that. Anyway, this night we were to come on doin' 'She's A Good Hearted Woman'. But I was drunk and the revolving stage must've been making me a bit dizzy 'cause the next thing I heard this discordant crack.

"One leg of the piano went off first, then another, then another and I was left hanging on to it by the last leg. The rest of the lads were doing their best to play on but there was no music coming out of me. Eventually, she went over altogether and I was left sitting on me piano stool, staring into space. Jaysus, the bossman of the dancehall was furious. This was a place with a high reputation to live up to, you see."

What about showband groupies? Did Pat McCabe sample this particular delight of the ballroom circuit?

"There was probably groupies alright but they didn't pay much attention to me," he insists. "Paddy himself was a very clean living man. Some of the showbands had groupies but the thing was that we came in on the tail end of the showband era. This was about '76 and by then a lot of the showbands had shaved off their brass sections and become lounge bar cabaret groups. I'd say if it had been about five years before that we might have seen the odd groupie alright but it was fizzlin' out big time by the time we started.

"Some of the great showband traditions were still going strong though. You still had the promoters coming up to you with the wad of cash with the elastic band around it and one hundred pounds being mysteriously docked for this, that or the other. Rows at the back of the marquee tent between the band and the promoter or the parish priest or whoever was organising the gig, I've seen plenty of them."

Like many another child of the '60s and '70s, Pat McCabe went into a bit of a sulk during the punk years. "Aye, I went sullen for a while," he says. "The old gatefold sleeves had to be hidden away 'cause all the young Turks would be gobbin' at you. I'm sorta chuffed now to see that it's become trendy again. You can bring out Tarka and Tales Of Topographic Oceans and the youngsters are asking you questions about them. But I wasn't a complete dinosaur. I eventually came 'round to like punk in the end."

These days, McCabe's big musical passion is psychobilly, especially bands like The Cramps and Jason and the Scorchers. In fact, he hopes to be the catalyst for something of a psychobilly revival with his next play which is actually called Psychobilly.

"The play has lots of Irish country 'n' western songs in it but done in a psychobilly style," he explains. "It has psychobilly versions of 'Gentle Mother' and 'A Bunch Of Violets' and stuff like that. It's wild, I tell ya. The central character is a crazy young punk who's let out of borstal and comes back to wreak revenge. Real Cape Fear stuff. I've written a song in it too called 'The Mad Cow Rap'."

Psychobilly probably won't be performed until sometime next year but don't say you haven't been warned.

Though it's never actually mentioned by name, one of the most imposing characters in The Butcher Boy is the town of Clones, Co. Monaghan. It could, of course, be Anywheresville, Ireland, but the physical description of the place, complete with Diamond "Square", bears an uncanny resemblance to the town where Pat McCabe himself grew up. Apart from anything else, Clones boasts an endless supply of the novel's central characters, to wit pigs.

"The pigs idea is not new by any means," says McCabe. "Pigs do look vaguely human, with their pink skin and scrunched up noses. Clones is a very meat orientated town and I used to pass a slaughter house on the way to school every day, like a lot of young country fellas. You'd see the pigs being slaughtered and all. It was part of my upbringing and it stuck with me.

"It'd be a beautiful sunny day and the next thing you'd hear this captive bolt pistol going bonk and you'd realise this is what life is. The sun's shining but someone's dying. You feel for animals more when you're a kid, they're part of your world, and that was probably when the bleakness of life started to come home to me. Blame it on the pigs."

Despite a depiction in his novel of the people of Clones and its surrounding locales that is far from flattering, and is often even scathing, McCabe insists that he has personally encountered no negative reaction or animosity from his former neighbours.

"Ach, no," he asserts. "People know that it's fiction. They're not naïve. They know that it's a comment on the human state and condition rather than just on Clones or Monaghan. In fact, in many ways, it's a celebration of the place. There are undertones of an understanding of small town living which I think people do get. They know that I've no intention of going out to castigate where I grew up. That's kind of old hat anyway."

When Pat McCabe decided to emigrate with his family to London during the mid-eighties, it was not out of any sense of grand exile. His wife had gotten a place at an art college there, so that sort of made up their minds for them. Pat himself found work in his specialist area as a teacher of autistic children and children with behavioural difficulties. Has his involvement in this particular area of education been an influence in the creation of a character as clearly disturbed as Francie Brady is?

"I suppose it has," he states, "but without me being aware of it. I'd hate to think I was going around saying, 'There's a boy, I'll write a book about him'. That's the sort of thing Francie would despise. The social worker case history approach to him. He'd kill someone like that. Understandably."

Just before the summer, Pat McCabe decided to take a sabbatical from teaching and to concentrate full-time on his writing. During work on The Butcher Boy, he often found himself getting up at 5 or 6am. in order to snatch a few hours at his writing desk before he went to school. This inevitably took its toll and he started to become tetchy and cranky with his family. Now, with only one career to worry about, he hopes that there'll be much more time in the day for his wife and daughters, not to mention his comics and Bravo channel.

However, already it looks as if this plan may be going awry. If anything, McCabe's workload has increased dramatically in recent months. At present, he's working on a script for a television play with the cheery title of Die Screamin' Mama and he's also "hacking away" at a number of prose pieces including another novel. All the indications so far are that we're in for more tales from the darkside, however illuminated by absurdity and black humour they may be.

"I don't want to get a reputation as this bleak, black writer but somehow by confronting the darkness you can also uplift," he argues. "If you look into the abyss or the eye of the demon, you have some power over it. That's my attitude. There's no point in just painting beautiful little flowers. That doesn't convince. Everybody knows there's other things there. There's a wasp in the flowers. There's always a wasp."

Or a pig. Frank's voice is still floating around in Pat McCabe's head, popping up when he least expects it, especially when he's trying to write. McCabe expects him to stick around at least until the film is completed. Though only a rookie in the movie business, the author is collaborating extremely closely with Neil Jordan and will have a say in a number of key areas, including the all-important one of casting Francie himself. (Personally speaking, however, I'd imagine it would be damn hard to find anyone who could do as impressive a job with the part as Co-Motion Theatre's David Gorry has done in the production of Frank Pig Says Hello, which is currently winding up at The Gate).

"The only thing I'm nervous about is getting it wrong," he confides.

Finally, what about the long-term future? Where does Pat McCabe see himself in ten years time?

"I hope I'm still writing, that's all," he says. "It's really the only thing I can do. Whether I'm successful or not is another matter altogether. Maybe people will get fed up with the sight of me. They'll get fed up looking at this fucking beard. I get fed up looking at the fucking thing myself."

Frank Pig couldn't have put it better himself.