Declan Lynch interview

Declan Lynch interview,copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2003

          Bricks Melvin and Nadine Dowd are outcasts. Outcasts who drink wine from broken bottles, after sieving it through a tea strainer. Outcasts who douse their cigarettes in brandy and wander around Dublin at four in the morning, looking for a place to go, a place that will treat them kindly when they are “destroyed with the drink”. Most of us have been there, it’s what you do when you are young, it’s called having fun while you still can.
          Declan Lynch invented Nadine and Bricks and Declan Lynch knows all about being destroyed at four in the morning in the name of fun, in the name of glamour, in the name of rock and roll. He knows all about being a teenager because he was one himself once, and in his opinion he stayed a teenager until he gave up the drink, eight years ago.
          Bricks Melvin is a saxophonist and Nadine is a seventeen year old girl and they get together in Declan’s latest novel ‘Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me’ which is set in the fascinating world of Irish show-business. This is a dark, dark novel, sharply observed and beautifully written and it deals with many things, but most especially with the demon drink. All of the characters drink, some more desperately than others. Bricks has just come out of rehab, after failing for the umpteenth time to quit the booze and Nadine has just had her alcoholic mother commit suicide whilst in the same hospital.
Freddie, the central character is Nadine’s father and is struggling with every father’s nightmare, the possibility that his little girl may meet a man like him and inherit all his worst behaviours. Something that Declan himself knows plenty about, having two daughters of his own, one a teenager and one a five year old. But teenagers will be teenagers, and for most teenagers drink goes hand in hand with glamour and sex and excitement. Declan should know this better than most because he was the envy of all of his peers, as a seventeen year old when he landed himself a job with Hot Press, interviewing rock stars. If you can’t get to be in a band, being a rock journalist is far and away the coolest thing you can be, when you are a teenager and the young Declan was fully aware of this. Punk Rock was already rearing it’s magnificently ugly head across the water when he wrote his first piece for Hot Press. And from there it was a helter skelter ride into madness, music and mayhem, working from five in the afternoon until the early hours of the following morning, interviewing the likes of Johnny Rotten and Paul Weller, the coolest of the cool.
And everywhere he went, there was a sea of alcohol and drugs and that’s what everybody did to keep themselves afloat, they immersed themselves in mind altering substances. As a father, Declan doesn’t even want to consider the possibility that his beloved daughters might follow in his footsteps. IT was a chaotic time, he says now, with the benefit of hindsight and the lucidity of sobriety. But he doesn’t regret any of it.
“I wouldn’t for a moment be sitting here saying what a terrible time I had,” he tells me. “But in a lot of ways I feel younger now than I did at that time. I was absolutely omniscient, I knew everything, when I was a teenager and when I was in my twenties I would sit on a bar stool and sort out the problems of the world and I have become increasingly ignorant as my life has gone on.’
By the time you are old, I say, you won’t know anything at all.
“Absolutely. And I had read all these books, that were very impressive. I particularly liked Camus, these books he would write about guys sitting in pubs contemplating suicide.”
Did he think he was really cool?
“There were a lot of really cool people around. Johnny Rotten was an amazingly cool man and John Cooper Clarke was fantastically cool. Being cool is relative. I knew my place in the pecking order!”
          Reading Camus was cool, he says, but he would be terrified if his own daughter read Camus.
“I feel that most fathers live in a state of constant fear of what their daughters might be getting up to. She informed me recently that she’s become a Socialist, which means she’s already on the slippery slope. Bush’s war has politicised her. She instinctively knew that the war was horseshit so she started going to these demos and her mind was stolen by the Socialist Party. I’m trying to persuade her to become a lawyer, so that she can help the protesters to get off their charges.”
But that’s exactly what you didn’t want to do! I protest. He dropped out of law school to write for Hot Press.
‘I know. This is normal. You go against all your best instincts when you become a parent. And if you were to just agree with your children all the time, you would deprive them of a very important thing, which is somebody to rebel against. But it’s weird that all these things that I would have scorned in my youth, I now think are sensible! I suppose it’s me finally growing up.”
There’s a relationship between not having grown up and drinking, he believes.
“I have a theory that from the time you start drinking alcohol, you remain at that mental age, until you stop. It inhibits emotional development and you become pickled at that age. And to some extent that’s great fun.’
You’re very spontaneous at that age. Life is all about having fun. And it’s still seen as a glamorous thing, to be a teenager. Nobody really wants to grow up and be middle aged!”
          I agree, absolutely.
“ But tragically, there’s a thing called life, which passes you by. There comes a time when you just cant handle it anymore.
I felt the need to write this book because I know something about this. You gain a lot of insight from drinking, it’s a great laugh and it takes you to strange places. But you only understand the insights when you stop.”
Declan started drinking when he was a teenager and began to drink very heavily when he became a journalist and found himself having to be sociable all of the time.
“ It was only after I stopped drinking that I realised that I am not a sociable sort of chap. I had been under the impression that I was quite gregarious, but that was only when I was drinking. I have no interest in going to pubs anymore. I couldn’t be arsed standing there talking to some fucking eejit like myself! Not if you paid me loads of money. But you can have this notion of yourself for years which is totally untrue.’
The decision to quit was not a eureka moment, but a gradual process and he doesn’t believe it can be forced. No matter how many other people yell at you and nag at you and try to convince you. For him, he says, there simply came a moment when he just knew that he wanted to quit. And he is delighted with the decision because his life is a thousand times better than it had been. It is, he says, a totally different life.
“I go out more now to the cinema and the theatre and when I go out I do things that I never even thought of doing before. There’s an odd thing that happens when you drink a lot, which is that your world shrinks. First of all there might be two or three pubs that you go to and then it narrows down to two and then finally to one. And eventually, not only do you go to the same pub, but you talk to the same guy every night about the same things and you sit on the same stool and have the same drink! And that continues until you die.’
The fact that he no longer drinks has improved relations with his wife and children, also, he says, because his life no longer revolves around drinking it can revolve around them. And it means more time can be spent writing. There will be another book about drink, he says, and hopefully that will get drink out of his system. Drinking was a good way to forget about your worries, he says. Giving it up doesn’t mean he’s no longer afraid of things, it just means he deals with the worries, instead of trying to pretend they aren’t there. As for the problem of his daughter falling for a man like him, well maybe he needn’t worry. Maybe she could do a whole lot worse.