Zen Overboard

Everything's gone Zen again. It seems like every second Irish musician you speak to is seeking solace in the detachment of the Tao, the teachings of Alan Watts or websites with titles like Zenbitchslap.com. No new thing in western culture. 'Tomorrow Never Knows' channeled the Tibetan Book of the Dead and was exhumed 30 years later by the Chemical Brothers, the RZA propagated Shaolin soul, Ghost Dog had his Hagakure, Tony Soprano his Art of War. And Republic Of Loose singer Mick Pyro has Chuang Tzu.

Mick once cut a Rabelaisian figure around town, but a lot of that was psychic smokescreen: the Bukowski soul-boy growl always belied a formidable intelligence. It's a fit and focused individual we meet in a Dublin bar on a Thursday afternoon in September. For over an hour the singer nurses a soft drink and speaks in an almost uninterrupted monologue on how the precision engineering of modern American dance music freed his band from the commercial expectations that might have inhibited their fourth album Bounce At The Devil.
"There was a lot of stuff on the last two albums (influenced by) expectations of Irish radio," he admits. "It was kind of debilitating in the sense that if you keep chasing that the rest of your life... Is that really what it's all about? I suppose I come from a different perspective. When we got to make our first album I was 27, so my goals were never completely industry or monetary based. I just wanted to create music that I liked, that I hadn't heard. We did want to have success in the sense that we wanted to continue, but I suppose when people start getting their hopes up about success in the industry, sometimes you can write in that direction, which we did after the first album. We'd been hanging around with a few record company types who were pushing us. But we made some great pop songs, and I love those songs.”
And to be fair, one can hardly say singles like 'Break' or 'The Idiots' were compromised in any fashion. The former got briefly banned on South African radio when a DJ proclaimed that it promoted unprotected anal sex. The latter boasted a chorus that went, “Fuck those idiots/They don't know jack about love” and mumbled about being drunk in the middle of a doughnut shop.
“(Laughs). That's true. There were always two instincts in the band. With me, on one level I wanted us to be popular, but on another level I was kind of disgusted with myself for doing pop stuff, maybe because it didn't suit my personality or my persona, so that came out in the lyrics, which were not even nihilistic so much as juvenile. It was almost like I was rebelling. Even with 'The Steady Song', which was kind of this perfect R&B pop song, I had this impulse to subvert it, so I put these crazy lyrics on it.
“But with this album it was more about zoning everything out. I didn't particularly want to make another Republic of Loose album. However, the musicians in the band are at a very high level of artistry, and I thought to capture that would be an exciting thing to do. And also to capture something that was more modern. I was listening to a lot of dance music from the States, especially stuff from Baltimore, and it felt really exciting and... You could call it primal but it's more modern really. I remember (John) Cage said something like, 'Percussion is the future'. The rhythmical aspects of music are so prominent in the culture now. You have to address that more specifically than anything else. And having a drummer like Andre, I wanted to capture that, but put him in a context that was based more on house music, just to see what came out. We took a lot of chances, and I don't know that all of them came off, but it's definitely more adventurous than some of the stuff we've done in the past. Also I wasn't drunk for the process, which was handy.”
So why did he drink in the studio?
“It can be a very stressful thing making an album, especially when everybody in the band is writing and producing. It can be traumatic! So you have to zone out of it sometimes. But on this album I found I wasn't able to zone out. Whereas before I'd go to the pub.”
ROL's scuffed soul music has over the last three years won them a devoted following and some high profile admirers, including Jake Shears, Bono, Irvine Welsh, Sinéad O'Connor and Shane MacGowan. Bounce At The Devil throws a few new curves. Recorded in Baltimore and produced by UNKLE collaborator Steve Wright, it's a complex, almost Cubist artifact. Afro-beats are juxtaposed with Ribot-like anti-guitar solos. Irish whistles sound like bamboo wind instruments. The melodies are at times neo-eastern, the beats tribal, urban and aggressively modernist. As anyone who's been to an AA disco will testify, recovered alcoholics dance with a holy fervour because it's all about the music, not the booze.
“Definitely,” Mick says. “I'm always partial to music that is danceable, hip hop or blues or whatever, but I've been listening to a lot of music in a less emotional way and a more spiritual way I suppose. The kind of dance music that is impeccable as art. If you put it on in a club it makes people move, but listening at home by yourself it's unbelievable. Even mainstream dance music is designed now so it can be listened to at home, pushing the frequencies into vicious levels. And it isn't overloaded with emotional content, which I wanted to veer away from.”
Why?
“I was listening to so much hip hop all my life, and I'm such a suggestible person I was all wrapped up in the cult of the individual against everything, defining himself by his own values. Mixed with the alcohol and feeling like I was in a band that a lot of people would hate. I had this oppositional sense. But I didn't have any flesh on that philosophy, I hadn't really thought it out in a very rational way, it was just me-me-me, looking for attention. Hip hop is very powerful for that, but if you meet a lot of those guys, like Styles P... He's known as one of the most hardcore gangsta rappers, but what I took off him was a Zen vibe, a real disgust at the histrionics that surround violence and a huge, deep intelligence. Most people who've been through extreme violence don't think it's glamorous. It's kind of terrifying the level of artistry he has, but to me the wisdom was what was most profound about him. So over the last two years I was trying to find some sort of wisdom, less stuff based on the individual, trying to detach myself from ideas of the ego, or thinking about the individual in a more abstract way. I was less interested in the poetics of the individual.”
A central tenet of Zen: until you cancel the self, you won't be content.
“That's what I found actually. Out first album was all weird Christian shit, Jesus this and Jesus that. There's a sort of narrative going through those first albums. The first one was a sort of spiritual entropy, constantly talking about Jesus and being very sad, then the second album was more carnal, the realm of the physical in a celebratory way, and then the third album was about the decadence that comes along with it, the horror of it, The Dance Of Evil. 'The Steady Song' was almost a pop song written by Satan.
“And this album is jettisoning all that, notions of the self, a lot of the ideas that I had before, coming to something more beautiful. Dance music in a way is more beautiful because it's not about the individual, in a similar way to Chuang Tzu. The Book of Chuang Tzu is the only book I've really read over the past year. The self is complete horseshit, humans are fairly bogus constructs, completely unimportant in the grand scheme. The problem with Western culture is that it always anthropomorphises everything. Everything is based around the figure of the man, the father, the individual. Even going back to the Greeks, it's the individual against the gods.
“Whereas I think in Chinese culture, for whatever reason, they were able to see the idiocy of those type of adventures, trying to defeat the gods or have Paradise on earth or trying to solve all the world's problems. The Daoists knew that was impossible, before Christ even arrived on the scene, and a lot of that stuff that's in Daoist texts is very applicable to modern Western society, maybe a lot more than Christianity. The kind of Christianity that I had was always about guilt, empathy, the Catholic vibe.
“But you know, if you empathise too much with other people you end up not empathising with them at all because you've fucked yourself up too much with anxiety, you can't help them. With Chuang Tzu, virtue is a symptom of the Dao, a symptom of detachment, of realising that you're not important, nobody's important. Virtue is a symptom of something more beautiful, of letting yourself float through events. I'm not over-lionising the Eastern ideal, I know terrible stuff goes on, but if you see their art, it's got tiny figures against huge waves, chaos all around them, but the chaos doesn't look terrifying, it looks peaceful.
“I know that's all a bit high falutin', but for me I wanted to impose some slightly more political philosophies on the album, which are vaguely libertarian. People don't need governments. It's a deep spiritual malaise that forces us towards nations and government and societies. They're a function of our weaknesses rather than our strengths. Obviously if my gaff was robbed I'd call the police, and society does help people out sometimes at the bottom end of the ladder – I just wish we lived on a planet where we didn't need to offload all our responsibilities for our fellow human beings. I think it's something to aspire to, to have people's ethics more internalised rather than being shoved on them by Joe Duffy or whoever happens to be forming the ethics of society at the time.”
If the narrative of Mick Pyro's evolution goes from collapsed Catholic through satyr-ical bacchanalia and Satanic majesty into Eastern mysticism, the first track on the new album, 'The Lamp', with its refrain of “Why am I supposed to feel so sorry-sorry?” represents a discharging of inherited guilt. Any belief system that pits itself against nature, we suggest, is inherently dysfunctional.
“The western thing is almost a history of neurosis.”
And psychotherapy sometimes encourages that neurosis.
“It's all about themselves, yeah. We can't objectively observe ourselves as an evolving species, so we don't really know what the fate of humans is, or if the people who tried to master nature will be punished by those who didn't, but the thing that seems obvious is we haven't been able to master it. I don't know if the culture that survives will be the one with a tradition of not trusting technology, I don't think you can go backwards, but... I don't know if preserving the species is even a worthy goal! These books that talk about western dominance, guns and steel... Dominance in what sense? From whose set of values? Human values? The values of a Martian? Who's more dominant, us or spiders? The western language of science is not able to step outside the human frame of reference. The only language that can really see outside of the human ego is mystical language.”
Presumably he considers music as a means of channeling that mystical language?
“It enables people to break out of the subject-object relationship. Especially now that there's been a huge African influence, it's been incredibly good for Western culture, that cyclical notion of time, repeating patterns. To me that's the beauty of hip hop.”
Well, it's only apocalyptics who believe in linear time, a beginning and an end. Everything in nature contradicts that notion.
“And it's a terrifying concept really, this idea of linear time, this big explosion.”
There's a native American eco-philosophy which holds that humans who dwell in too close a proximity to their own kind, divorced from other species, suffer a sort of psychic inbreeding.
“Ireland is so complex I don't think I can analyse it, I don't have the objective factors,” Mick considers. “There's so much stuff going on, the Colonialist issue, the Pagan stuff, but I think people should try and attempt to unravel it a bit more, because you hear people on the radio and they're not discussing what kind of society we want to live in, they're just throwing back and forth truisms. 'But of course good decent people do this...' Nobody knows why we've come across these ethics. At least in France they had to go through revolutions. I know we shed blood here, but it was basic tribalism: 'Get the Brits out.' That debate never seeped into the culture: do we want to live in a society where the individual is free or do we want to live in a culture where society is sacrosanct and everything has to take second place to that? And if so, why do we want to live in a society like that? None of those questions has ever been asked. Fianna Gael and Fianna Fail are more or less the same, a hodge-podge of social democracy and laissez faire capitalism that nobody really questions. Get on with it, shut up, nobody cause a fuss. It's not a society that interrogates itself because it's so small.”
Maybe so, but it can also be endlessly narcissistic. Ireland's media apparatus continually bangs on about itself. We're doing it right now.
“Yeah, it's like the alcoholic thing, delusions of grandeur. There's a huge element to that in this country. We're not a big time country, we don't own any power, we've gotten most of our culture off the Brits and changed it and Catholicised it a bit, but the vast amount of our values is the same as Britain, maybe less enlightened, a bit more tribalistic. At least in Britain there's been a huge culture of dialogue between left wing and right wing people, there's been huge political exchanges. I don't want to bang on about Ireland being terrible, I love it, but one of the limits of a small country is that it's difficult for the people who want to interrogate the culture.
“I suppose a lot of the lyrics on the album, there's a bit of political stuff in there, but I also wanted to redress a lot of the misogynistic type of shit on previous albums that was kind of juvenile. 'She's So Evil' is trying to turn that concept back on its head. To be honest, at this stage... I love this record, I'm proud we made it and I love playing live, but I've always been disillusioned with music as a business, from my experience years ago. But I'm happy if it means I don't have to have a job. I love the freedom of my life, I don't really have a boss and stuff like that, but we're scraping by, so we'll see what happens.”

Bounce At the Devil is released on Fish Don't Fear Nets on October 8. Republic of Loose play The Academy, Dublin on October 15 and the Clarence Festival Club, Sligo on October 24 as part of the Sligo Live festival.