Notice Masuch’s reaction, it starts with a sort of sneer as if he could just ignore the irritating insect in front of him but then he gets more and more uncomfortable as Browne presses his point. Its just a shame that not one of the other journalists pushed any member of the Troika over Browne’s claims that we don’t owe need to pay unsecured bond holders and that the reason for paying them back is just to keep other European banks from getting into financial difficulties. Not to mention the fact that we shouldn’t be shoring up a now defunct bank.

The telling point from the past couple of years is the lack of any serious investigative journalism into what happened to our financial institutions and into why we have to accept what the Troika tell us to do. We have been told that we have to pay back a debt, most of which the Irish public did not incur, without any good reason. Our major media organisations have fallen in behind our political leaders in telling us that we have pay back money that we don’t have. Our journalists have been silenced, apart from Browne and Fintan O’Toole, and they have been marginalised as being eccentric or too left-wing to be listened to. There is a major story to be written about the ties that bind journalism with politics in this country, unfortunately that story will not be written by any of our journalists. If it is written at all, it will be written by the historians looking back at this gombeen nation.

“Language is inadequate…”

And yet, and yet there are words.

The sounds we make to remember you

form a cushion to ease the blow,

somewhere soft to rest our heads

as we reconcile ourselves to loss and regret.

The words that you gave;

encouragement, advice, aspiration, engagement

all conspire in an outwelling of emotion,

a rising tide that enables us to float

buoyed by your gentle presence,

infectious laughter and endless stories.

The sounds, the words, the language – all yours.

bleeds down slowly before the moon’s hacked face.

Blue-veined sky, bruised by the evenings assault

the dying light leaches out like a slow-ebbing pulse.

A starprick punctures the membrane of the night

lancing with its laser light; a pinhead sealing

the wound tight as the suture of constellations

stretches wide, stitching the wounds of galaxies.

The nights attack, battering, bruising each blow

leaving a bejewelled imprint tearing

the heart out of the day.

With low grey clouds slowly sinking under a leaden weight

the wan sun wraps itself in its own heat

reluctant to share as each day dims

while it watches the ice build as its rays retreat.

Each night the moon gathers the stars close

and casts a baleful eye on emerging frost

its weak light illuminates winters tread

as it advances further to accost

the land and lay bare rattled trees

chattering in their naked shivering.

Like some child’s long discarded worn-out toy

or a pup unwanted, neglected, left quivering.

The low light, acknowledging the inevitable end,

picks its way tentatively through the woods

not wishing to be extinguished by a cruel wind

ice-blown in hollows where glades once stood.

No creatures stir, no birds sing

claws worn white, feathers an armour against winter’s sting.

Depression is an illness. Its a serious illness. Depression should be taken seriously, deadly seriously. Depression isn’t something that you can snap out of. Depression can’t be cured with a joke. Or a pint. Or by cheering up.

When I’m depressed I can’t talk about it.
When I’m not depressed I don’t want to talk about it.
That’s the invidious nature of depression.
I need to talk about it but I can’t.
I should talk about it but I won’t.
Its a solitary disease. It removes you from your family. It removes you from your friends. Its a disease that eats you from the inside. But its not a disease that shows up on any scan. Its a disease that destroys you from the inside. Yet, it leaves you outwardly intact. Its a disease. A silent killer. It kills with silence.

I have depression. But now I’m talking. I’m talking because of Robert Enke. A young, talented professional goalkeeper. A goalkeeper at one of the top clubs in Europe. One of the top clubs in Europe that didn’t want him. Enke was a solitary man. In a solitary position. And he was ill. Robert Enke took his own life two years ago.

I have depression. But now I’m talking. I’m talking because of Kate Fitzgerald. A young, talented businesswoman. A successful businesswoman. A young successful businesswoman who reinvigorated the Irish branch of Democrats Abroad. A young successful businesswomen who wrote incisively about depression and the stress of being a young successful businesswoman. Kate Fitzgerald took her own life in August this year.

I have depression. But now I’m talking. I’m talking because of Gary Speed. A young, talented football manager. A young talented man, negotiating his first steps in the minefield that is football management. A young talented man who appeared on television on Saturday. Who appeared happy. Gary Speed took his own life on Sunday.

Three lives. Three tragedies; for themselves, for their families, for their friends.

I have depression. But now I’m talking. I’m talking about Stan Collymore. A young man with a talent for talking. A young ex-footballer with a talent for writing. In the early hours of Saturday morning Stan Collymore wrote, coherently and bravely, about his depression. Stan Collymore is alive.

I have depression. But now I’m talking. These four people have encouraged me to talk. It is a coincidence that three of the four people are footballers. I could be talking about musicians, comedians, artists. It doesn’t really matter who I am talking about. It matters that I am talking.

I have depression. But it doesn’t have me.

If you have depression or if you know someone with depression, please talk. There is help out there, please access it – Aware, The Samaritans. Ask for help.
If you know someone with depression support them, be patient, get them help.

Fade to Black

I curl up,

arms around knees

and I wait.

The darkness spins me

like a top and

I revolve around my own axis.

A gyroscope with my eyes shut.

The faster I turn the less pain I feel.

Closed in tight.

Nothing can scar me.

As I twist I don’t feel the claws,

they make no mark.

The black shadow has no

substance and can’t touch me.

In my cocoon

I feel.

Nothing.

The music we swapped in school (on vinyl, with the cassette tape being the napster of the day) ranged from Led Zeppelin to the cult of Jim Morrison. The guy with the most eclectic musical taste was Larry Comerford, or rather Larry and his two older brothers. From the MC5 to The Band, Dylan to Springsteen (especially The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and Darkness on the Edge of Town) the Comerfords had good music bleeding out of their ears. But the one artist that I heard in their house that pulled me up short and made me think about the lyrics was Gil Scott-Heron and his album Pieces of a Man.

Scott-Heron was like no-one I had heard before – genuinely angry, words spitting out of him with venom, a ghetto poet with a jazz back-beat (courtesy of Brian Jackson) trying to find justice in a cruel, uncaring world. Tracks like Home is Where the Hatred Is and Winter in America told of his alienation, his pain and his addiction. Scott-Heron made music for the oppressed, the ignored, the scared and the scarred – his people. But his music crossed boundaries and generations, his words spoke a universal truth. This was poetry in action, long before John Cooper Clarke, Billy Bragg or the manufactured anger of The Sex Pistols or the political fury of The Clash. Scott-Heron’s poetry wasn’t lyrical, it didn’t really capture beauty in any classical sense, rather it encapsulated the banality of living in desolate urban landscapes, the casual swinging of a cop’s nightstick, fathers and mothers abandoning their children, living in shooting alleys, crawling in the gutter. The genius of his words was that no matter how bleak they were they made you empathise, made you angry, sitting in a comfortable middle-class suburban armchair. He made you care and for any writer that has to be the highest accolade.

While the albums had a power, it was as a live performer that Scott-Heron really came into his own. He annexed the stage, towering over the audience yet he had such a low speaking voice for all his harsh words that people hushed (mostly) to hear him as he interwove his songs with anecdotes about his life, his day or just riffed on the months of the year being in the wrong place. I first saw him live in Band on The Wall in Manchester sometime in the mid-1980s, a mainly reggae club on the edgier side of town in those days (now part of the gentrified Northern Quarter, whatever the fuck that is). Walking in the door there was no mistaking the kind of smoking going on. Beer was served strictly in pint bottles and coke only came with Jack Daniels or a rolled up pound note. and through the fog, Gil Scott-Heron strode, totally self-contained and played a set blistering in its political integrity. Even the most blissed out stoner stood up and shook the fog out of their brains that night, it was one of the most enegising performances I’ve had the pleasure of seeing.

I’ve seen Scott-Heron live a few times since then, some good and some not so good. His battles with addiction have been well documented and affected him for a long time in the 1990s and into the new millenium. But he was back to his biting, scathing best with his latest release I’m New Here with an added mellowness befitting his maturity and his gig in the Pod in May was possibly the best I’ve seen him play since that first time in Manchester. Its just a shame he didn’t get a chance to enjoy his renaissance. Go softly Gil, and know that you’ve left behind a righteous anger.

as the dog stretches the boy takes down the rod.

Through the garden, spring green with the sun

glinting from grassy dew, a globe in each drop

reflecting the passing of the boy and the dog.

Over the pitted tarmac, an imprint of every

sheep in Wicklow sheared down the side.

The boy over the gate, the dog jumps through,

onto a track untainted by wheels, dwindling down

to a youthful skittering stream.

Over the small stone bridge, the water under

as transparent as the achingly blue sky,

the gorse reflecting a blinding sun.

The boy treads carefully over soft bog,

light steps onto unsteady clumped reeds.

One false move and its into the cloying muck,

sucking deep, like quicksand on The Virginian.

The dog bounds ahead, stops, waits.

The track ends at the abandoned house

whose caved-in roof is an old person’s mouth.

Another gate to pass before green gives way to blue.

There is a poison on the land and

the rabbits, plagued with wide white eyes,

melt away from the dog. Arthritic limbs

carrying them deep into self-dug graves.

A fox watches, keen eyed, not enticed by

rotten food or scared of a small knight armed

with his lance and trusty mastiff.

The fox lollops off, tail erect ready to

brush off death under a hunter’s moon.

The boy and the dog both scent the water,

steps quicken, anticipating.

The boy baits the hook while the dog

watches, ears pricked ready for

the first splash into the river.

The man and the young boy with

careful steps over well-trod ground

The man lifts the boy over the lapsing gate.

No rabbits. No fox. No dog,

but the sheep encroach everywhere.

The young boy runs, each step a wave

over rocks as the stream gallops alongside

in full spate down to the river.

The young boy baits the hook,

casts into the still water at the river’s bend.

The man looks into the water

and sees, reflected back,

a boy and a dog.

Watching.

Waiting.

On Friday 4th November at The Workman’s Club, in front of a small group of obvious aficionados,  the band, along with Amy Boone from The Damnations, played the entire song-novel concept album – dealing with said teenage girl and her desperate attempts to leave both her husband and the remote rural logging community that she lives in. From the get-go this was a spellbinding, engrossing show where the proverbial pin excused itself for being so noisy as it hit the floor. Normally the idea of listening to a concept album live would have me running screaming for the exits with the memories of painful prog-rock abominations from Yes and ELP hot on my heels but The High Country album and this live show told a captivating, heartbreaking story backed by musicians of the highest quality.

The opening song/track/chapter ‘Inventory‘, is an achingly beautiful piece sung by Boon and backed by Willy Vlautin and Dan Eccles on a guitar that he somehow makes sound like a cello playing in a minor-key. The story is about a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a logger who gets his legs crushed by a tree. She goes to work in an autoparts store where all the men hit on her. She is stalked by Claude Murray the owner of The Chainsaw Sea bar where ‘under the concrete the fat man from Mississippi’ is buried. Murray is a speed-freak, out of his head most days, and is in league with Angus King an even more disturbed individual who lives deep in the woods, cooking up meth. The girl falls for a mechanic and they make plans to escape the stultifying, fucked-up small town but even as they meet on the logging road Murray and King arrive and from this encounter two people end up dead and a third would probably be better off dead than enduring what might come next.

The High Country has seventeen sparse, high-quality songs with a couple of instrumentals. The songs range from the melancholic ‘Inventory’ to the equally melancholic but proper rock-out of ‘The Chainsaw Sea’. But the one song that stands out for me is ‘Let Me Dream of The High Country‘, in just over two minutes it contains a whole life-time of regret, missed opportunity and desire to escape the trappings of everyday life. Vlautin manages to distill the themes of his three novels to date – The Motel Life, Northline and Lean on Pete – into this one album and the gig in The Workman’s Club was in thrall to his story-telling mastery.Vlautin has rightly been compared to John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver for his stories of the American underclass, the dispossessed and disenfranchised. Vlautin is rooted in the environment of which he writes and his particular sense of place is prevalent in The High Country, as the remote Oregan logging town where the action takes place is called Clatskenie, which also happens to Carver’s birthplace.

But The High Country is only half the story of the night. Richmond Fontaine have been on the road for many years with an impressive back catalogue and they brought out some crackers to supplement The High Country. From the sublime ‘A Ghost I Became‘ from Thirteen Cities (“I began taking vacation days and driving out as far as I could/The people around me said I drew away that a ghost I became”) to ‘Western Skyline‘ to the superbly named ‘We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River’, the band kept tossing out gems. The only regret? They didn’t play ‘Lost in This World’ but that just gives me an excuse to post it again here:

like those soldiers from a Napoleonic war,

with front doors square on

to the enemy across the street.

And when the factory whistle blew

the doors exploded out

loosening their charges onto cobbled streets.

The sparks from clogs lighting the flints

of a thousand muskets.

And when the air cleared and smoke settled

the houses breathed in

preparing themselves for a repeat volley

when the day shift ended.

Blank

The milky-white page stares at me blankly,

a cataract clouding my sight of the words.

I must strike the right key to find the

rhythm where lines once disturbed,

can find order and see alignment

in the snow blindness of the page.

But my guideless fingers strike tuneless,

discordant notes in their rage.

The same fingers, veins filled with ink

once could write a life in the space of a line,

see connections in dissonant images

that my mind’s eye could mine.

But now, the blind page unsees my work

and random letters fall and scatter

from ink-filled fingers, and, missing the page

fall unsighted to the ground and shatter.