John Fleming earns his crust as an editor, a trade (‘once-proud’ might be the cliché he would embrace/abhor) which in the view of the present writer is likely to have offered diminishing psychic satisfaction to most of its practitioners over recent years – or even decades – as freshness of thought and accuracy of expression have come to be valued less than visual presentation and, more destructively, the tyranny of the algorithm (‘we know what they like; give them excess of it’). A man fixated on words, wordplay, thoughtplay might have to find most of his satisfactions elsewhere.
We always knew there was ‘the writing’, a number of broadcast radio plays, short stories. A novel for a long time ‘in progress’, perhaps more than one; a film documentary about London life,
Guests of Another Nation, shown on RTÉ. This year, however, has seen a quite dramatic breaking of the surface and blossoming of long subterranean stirrings as Fleming has impressively combined his musical and writerly interests in the publication of the novel
The Now Now Express and the transformation into a living, breathing, pounding thing of the Prongs, a fictional postpunk band which features in its pages. The hero of
The Now Now Express, Patrick, leads a somewhat squalid existence in the not so glamorous east London suburb of Walthamstow in the 1980s with his generically Irish mates Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary, collectively known as ‘the Mocking Boys’, their names recalling various Dublin pubs. The boys survive on a diet of toast and honey, Red Stripe beer, mushroom-poor stirfry, crap London Guinness and French New Wave films, the expense of their prolonged and occasionally wild drinking bouts covered by ambitious schemes of benefit fraud. Early on, we get a socio-psychological summary of the Mocking Boy condition:
… we were a cheery gaggle of leering slouch adults bound together by some overdue date and linked in our avoidance of the inevitable. Content to linger too long in the interzone of caustic youth, we sneered and laughed our way out of responsibility’s call to arms. We were half-on-the-run, half-truant and half-hearted: we did things by halves and never went the whole hog. There was no focus, just the reassurance we all disliked the same things.
Leering and sneering these boys certainly are. But cheery? I don’t think so.
This generation of 1980s Irish emigrants to Britain, at least in its Mocking Boy manifestation, is different from its 1950s or ’60s predecessors, urban, educated and with the potential to forge ‘a career’ yet deeply resistant to that path, sharing some of the self-destructive urge of its older counterparts, forced out of Ireland by poverty and maimed by the hardship of their new English lives.
The Mocking Boy handbook was based on IPC comics and multichannel TV, on gaudy sitcoms and the angry young men, on an adolescence lit up by The Fall, Joy Division and our homemade version in The Prongs. We’d formed a vanguard of late-teen resistance, and conspired into our twenties in our stereotype attack. But on St Patrick’s Day, I walked away.
On St Patrick’s Day, our hero’s twenty-fourth birthday, the Boys go on a pub crawl across Irish north London: the Samuel Pepys, the Railway Tavern, even into ‘the rotting heart of Kilburn itself’. A huge cultural divide – generational but more essentially the deep Dublin/Rest of the Country gulf – separates the young middle class, suburban city smartasses from their older compatriots from rural and small-town Clare, Kerry, Galway, Mayo and Roscommon. And yet there is a residual sympathy and affection at play in spite of the differences.
The Railway Tavern was next. It was done up with green tinsel and rosettes. “Happy St Patrick’s Day, lads,” said an unfamiliar barman as he took our order. Through the large crowd, a curly-haired man forced his way. He stuck a coin in the jukebox and sat back down, proud of his selection. The song’s maudlin lyrics bemoaned how London had lured away its listeners. A tin whistle conversed with a set of uilleann pipes and pressed all the correct buttons in the hearts of these vulnerable men poured into adult Confirmation suits. The smell of carbolic soap was everywhere and shaving cuts were common.
The hackneyed concepts in the song meant nothing to us. We had not yet done anything irreversible and our lives were free of the regret in its refrain. The song was wasted on a bunch of little pricks certain we were edging towards a future of infinity.
Patrick must eventually choose between continuing to live a life as a London-Irish Mocker and returning home, not having achieved anything except having lived off a social welfare scam, to a city and country still stuck in recession – though not for too long more – but whose streets and pubs still exert a certain attraction for him in spite of the general absence of hope and optimism. He makes what seems to be the better choice … a story, perhaps, to be continued.
The Prongs – a band mentioned several times in
The Now Now Express in the same breath as The Fall and Joy Division – took flesh on stage at a gig at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin on July 8th this year. The Prongs are John Fleming on words and Niall Toner jnr (Strand, Those Handsome Devils, Dixons etc) on musical arrangement and instrumentation. At the Project they were backed by a seven-piece band comprising members of The Lee Harveys, Ultramontaines, Mighty Avon Jr and Republic of Loose. The gig attracted a full house and the reception was highly enthusiastic.
The novel
The Now Now Express is officially being launched with a further Prongs gig this week (Thursday, November 16th) upstairs in Whelan’s:
https://www.whelanslive.com/event/the-prongs/
The book is available to buy at Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street, Dublin, and the book and the CD
Theme from The Now Now Express at Spindizzy.
A number of stylish videos featuring individual compositions and directed by Dave Clifford can be seen on YouTube: MiddleMarch17, Fake Samuel Pepys, Kango Hammer, Map of a City etc. The Prongs page on Bandcamp (for streaming and merchandise and info) is
https://theprongs.bandcamp.com/album/theme-from-the-now-now-express
Check out the book, the videos or drop along to Whelan’s on Thursday evening.
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