We expect many things of US alternative rock bands these days – a New Order poster on their tour bus, a less timid approach than their predecessors towards facial hair, a lucrative acquaintance with The OC – but we do not expect them to write songs called ‘The Shankill Butchers’.
There are those amongst us who over the years have taken great delight in the kitsch pleasures afforded by Troubles Trash (‘Through The Barricades’ by Spandau Ballet and Boney M’s ‘Belfast’ reach a sublime pitch of awfulness that only Give My Head Peace ever threatens), but even the most hardcore devotee (yes, you with the ‘Zombie’ 12" inch) would surely blanch at the prospect of a pop song concerning itself with the horrific series of crimes committed by Lenny Murphy’s sectarian psychopaths.
Colin Meloy – frontman and main songwriter with Portland five-piece The Decemberists – is the man responsible. But the bookish 32-year-old won’t allow himself to be cast as a glib Troubles’ profiteer without putting up a fight.
“I've some knowledge of the subject,” he proffers. “I’ve read a lot of books about the North – about the H-Blocks and the Blanket Men but I never came across a mention of the Butchers. Last year when we were touring the UK, I was reading Johnny Rogan’s book on Van Morrison (No Surrender) and there’s a part in it where he describes the murders and goes on to say that they were so gruesome and so extreme, and that humanity had reached such a low, that they almost took on the feel of a fairytale. Mothers would tell their children that if they didn’t go to sleep, the Shankill Butchers would come and get them. So, I came at it from that angle, not from a political one.”
Survivors of the gang are still alive, as, of course, are many relatives of the victims. Did you consider how they would react to two thousand people singing along to: “Everybody moan, everybody shake/The Shankill Butchers want to catch you awake”?
“I did. I really gave it a lot of thought,” he says. “But I don’t want to think that there are subjects that are off-limits in my songs. I’ve written in the past about The Holocaust. I don’t think we can afford to ignore subjects of that extremity. It’s important not to be sensationalist, or to exploit it, but I don’t think we should turn away and pretend it hasn’t happened.”
In fact, Meloy’s eerily unreal take on the subject has firm precedents in regard to these notorious crimes. There's an entire generation of Catholic males, educated in Belfast in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, familiar with the ritual intra-class swapping of Martin Dillon’s horrific tome on the gang – approaching it as a rites-of-passage; much like their parents did early showings of The Exorcist. Eoin McNamee’s novel Resurrection Man, likewise, made great play on the fact that the Butchers roamed through a psychological space as well as a geographical one – that it was in people’s nightmares – every bit as much as the Springfield or Antrim Roads – where they found their natural stalking-ground. Melvoy’s spooky lullaby casts them as archetypal bogeymen, and strikes a chilling and unsettling note.
Which means that it is perfectly in keeping with the tone of the most impressive songs on the band’s new album, The Crane Wife – where fantasy, history and violence mix in a way that betrays the influence of both Fables-era R.E.M, and the blood and guts murder ballads of the Appalachian hills.
Ghosts wander through Civil War battlefields in Melvoy’s songs (“You are in the ground with the wolves and the weevils/All a-chew your bones so dry” sings guest vocalist Laura Veirs to her spectral soldier lover in ‘Yankee Bayonet’), cut-throats and bandits emerge from the shadows, and old folk tales are brought to sinister life.
“I think I’m just trying to stay true to the form that influences my songs,” he avers. “The folk tradition. You listen to some of these real old songs and they don’t shy away from the dark side of existence. They’re real racy, real gruesome. I’ve always been interested in gruesome dark things.
"It’s an interesting juxtaposition – the marrying of an upbeat melody and dark subject matter. It sometimes forces you to approach subjects in a whole new way.”
So enjoy, but maybe keep the lights on while you listen.
The Crane Wife is out now on Rough Trade