“It was a nice thing to have said about you,” acknowledges McCabe. “But I don’t really know if it’s true, because sometimes the books are actually apprehended as kind of sparky rock ‘n’ roll impertinent - and I really never intended them that way, you know?”

”But it’s nice. I appreciate the positive review of anything that I do. The Rolling Stones/ Beatles thing is fine by me, but I wouldn’t see them that way – Irvine’s books are more like that than mine.”

As a major music fan, McCabe has read Hot Press since his teens. “I discovered it long before it was called Hot Press,” he recalls. “I remember Scene magazine, it was edited by Niall Stokes at that time. “I used to read that. It was like an NME kind of format and then it became more stylised. Hot Press was the beginning of something worthwhile, something valuable.”

Pat seems to have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of Hot Press. At one point in the interview, he recalls a major HP interview from over a decade ago with former Sinn Fein leader, Tomas Mac Giolla.

TOMAS MAC GIOLLA
On the subject of what has been dubbed the ‘Troubles’, Pat confesses that, as a teenager, he did contemplate taking up arms to fight the Brits.

“Back then, at 17, everybody considered joining the IRA,” he reveals. “First of all, because the kind of anti-establishment aspect of the freedom fighters was very attractive as a concept.

“It was also only ten years after what used to be called the Border Campaign, in 1958. I was around five or six when that happened. The feeling around that time of the Border Campaign - it was why the IRA split in two afterwards - was that the Border Campaign people thought they were going to ignite a revolution and drive the British into the sea, because the Irish Catholic Northerners would rise up. But they didn’t. In fact, it was a complete disaster.

“So, when the Official IRA split with the Provisionals they realised - and their thinking was correct - that you were only going to cause a sectarian bloodbath. Politically they wouldn’t have been sophisticated enough perhaps in ‘72 to realise, but I think it was kind of inevitable - that there was going to be an awful lot of bodies in the ground for very little return.

”So, while I had a lot of Republican friends - and still have - I didn’t think that it made any sense to fight in a war that you couldn’t win. But I thought about it.”

ADOLESCENT ENTERTAINMENT
As a self-confessed hippy back then, Pat probably was the type of character that Irvine Welsh would’ve loved to have put under the microscope. Was he dropping acid?

“Ah, I was doing all that stuff, yeah.”

Did he experiment with drugs as a way to help shape him as a writer, or is that a nonsensical idea?

“It’s the air you breathe when you’re a particular age,” he reflects. “I think that it’s as important as knowing about football or knowing about your neighbour. Psychedelia was just another aspect to it. It was around, it’s gone now. And you kind of place it in the canvass of your work wherever you will - it might be foreground or it might be background, but at least you experienced it and you know what it is. But it’s no more important than walking the dog, as far as I’m concerned.”

What about non-psychedelic drugs?

“What are they?”

Cocaine, I suppose.

“No, I have no interest in that at all,” he says. “Because the interesting thing about psychedelia was that it altered your state spiritually - there was something interesting in that.

”But anything else, even hash, or anything like that, used to bore the fucking arse off me! I used to love drinking because at least people loosened up when they were drinking. I never heard such bullshit talked as when I was hanging out in Rathmines, when people were rolling up numbers - I just used to fucking hate it. And I still hate it.

”But, by and large, I think these were just adolescent entertainments: I wouldn’t have any interest in them beyond adolescence.”

A story appeared in certain newspapers that Pat was a teacher when he met his future wife - when she was actually doing her Leaving Cert. It is a myth that Pat debunks.

“People are always saying these things,” he says. “It’s just wrong. She was not, indeed, a student. You’ll get me arrested! She was not. She lived in the same town alright, but that was it. It’s ridiculous.”

QUINTESSENCE OF TRASH
Originally published in 1992, The Butcher Boy is rightly hailed one of the most important pieces of fiction to emerge from this island in the last 50 years. The book was made into a critically acclaimed movie by Neil Jordan, and is now running as a double bill in Dublin this October. The play Frank Pig Says Hello was adapted from The Butcher Boy, for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1992. Now, Pat has written a companion piece The Leaves of Hell, which will run alongside Frank Pig.

Pat got the idea of staging the two plays together from watching movie double-bills. He remembers going to the long-defunct Cameo Cinema on Abbey Street in Dublin.

“It was a good kind of dive cinema,” he recalls. “The Cameo had a disinfectant, disreputable quality to it that I liked. It was very common, where you got an arty movie, you get a Bergman mixed up with The Attack Of The Giant Spiders.

”It was a kind of a grindhouse culture that, it’s very common in America for the Fellinis and the Bergmans - they used to be known as continental cinema, and a bit risque, so you’d have them mixed in with, as you say, Police Academy 6.

”It’s kind of in that spirit. Frank Pig Says Hello, which was first seen about 25 years ago, and the other one The Leaves Of Heaven, is a kind of companion piece to it.
“The two plays are very cinematic. Frank Pig Says Hello is very influenced by Fellini. The Leaves of Heaven is a mixture of Fellini and Hammer (Horror) movies, which are the quintessence of trash, really bad taste, or disreputable kitsch. They are very influenced by cinema. Joe O’Byrne is a very cinematic director as well, and he’s very informed.”

Has Pat ever been tempted to write a sequel to The Butcher Boy? ”I couldnÕt actually write a sequel because I don’t really know if I could spend that amount of time inside a mental hospital really! I’d have to do it some other way,” he laughs.

UNRECONSTRUCTED HIPPY
While there’s a lot of black humour in Pat’s books, there is also a darkness at its core. ”Ireland’s a dark place,” he says. “Let’s not mince words. Ireland, you know, has a very troubled history and it was very poor for an awful long time. And it’s all very well now with the high-kicking Riverdance optimism, and everything else, to forget that when you went abroad and you opened your mouth, you brought a whole load of history with you that you didn’t necessarily want to carry but you hadn’t much choice.

”I’m glad that that’s all gone and it’s very European now. And that’s good, but it wasn’t always the case. So, there were a lot of emotions that you had to work through and I often worked through them through the characters. I would say that they’re very Irish books, in the sense that there’s a lot of hilarity and a lot of melancholy. That’s a very Irish thing.”

There’s a lot of oddball characters in Pat’s books. Do people think he is one himself?

”Well, you probably would these days because we’re living in very conservative times,” he says.
"When I grew up the place was full of oddballs. People who didn’t know what the rules were. Kind of hillbillies, psycho, Jerry Lee Lewis types. And you don’t really have those people now, or if they do they’re kind of subsumed by X Factor or Celebrity Bake-Off, or something. I don’t know, but the machine gets them very early.

“Whereas in my time, there wasn’t any structure like that, there was just a kind of rockabilly, I suppose, anarchy in a way, the rural kind of thing - people who don’t like being boxed-in by rules that suit the corporate ethos.”

What type of music is Pat listening to these days? ”I would be out of touch now. I am a grandfather,” he says self-effacingly. “I’m really fond of Lisa O’Neill. And I like The Strypes. I loved U2’s last album. I don’t know what everybody’s complaining about something being fucking free for! But the songs are magnificent on that album. It’s so well constructed. It’s really amazing, I think, at this stage of the game to make songs like that.

”I see that Prog Rock is getting kind of rehabilitated now. I went out of fashion. I’d suggest that that was always my favourite kind of music. I would’ve been a unreconstructed hippy, a sort of a culchie hippy, I suppose you would call it.”

Pat has signed a new book deal with New Island and aims to have two novels out, the first next spring and the other next April.

“A very musical book this one,” he promises. “I’d describe it as a redneck opera! I’m serious!”

Co-Motion present a double bill of Pat McCabe’s Frank Pig Says Hello and The Leaves Of Heaven as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, at Draoicht (October 4-7) and Axis, Ballymun (11-13).