Creative Jape performs at The Kino for Cork Jazz Festival

When your writer tracks down Richie Egan, founder member of Dublin post-rockers The Redneck Manifesto and the nucleus for indietronica project Jape, he’s hunkered down for our Zoom call in studio in Sweden, where we wax lyrical for a bit about the recent Leeside return of the former (‘a real sausagefest, wasn’t it?’) – between that, and his upcoming Guinness Cork Jazz Festival excursion, revisiting his early solo work including albums ‘The Monkeys at the Zoo Have More Fun Than Me’ and ‘Ritual’, the passage of time has seemingly been on Egan’s mind.

“Yeah, it’s a weird one, because I kind of was always looking at these kinds of gigs and thinking to myself, ‘God, I’d never do one of those gigs’, y’know. But like everything in life, I guess time’s softened it a bit. And when I got asked to do it for the National Concert Hall [in Dublin], I went back and listened to those albums, which I genuinely hadn’t listened to in like, 15 or 20 years, and I was like, ‘okay, let’s see if they’re any use’. And I was surprised, actually, that some of it really still stands up – y’know, you can see, like, a searching for truth in the songs.

“And I think ‘Monkeys in the Zoo…’ is a beautiful capsule of that. I think ‘Ritual’ maybe suffers a bit from the production of the time, but some of the songs underneath, I think, still stand up and still feel true to me, which is what I always look for in any kind of music, I’d like to find if it’s true or not. And so for that reason, I thought, ‘yeah, why not give it a go?’ It was really beautiful, the one we’ve just done, the one gig in the National Concert Hall. It was just very emotional, and very beautiful – and we’re lucky enough now to get to do it a second and probably last time at the Jazz.”

It is getting very close to home for a person of your writer’s age that not only are the 2000s, the decade in which Jape sprung forth, vanishingly smaller in life’s rear-view mirror, but now apparently fair game for the ouroburos of seemingly unending nostalgia that’s surely-to-Jaysus nearly caught up on its own head by now.

The internet had just arrived at scale to peoples’ homes; the old music industry would begin quivering before the convulsions that took its old model properly set in; the Celtic Tiger filled the adult generation of the time to the brim with soon-unwarranted hubris, and for those laboured with the vocation of making and propagating interesting music, a joyful slog was beginning in earnest.

“I think that around that time, when I got into music, it was all to do with punk and DIY, y’know. So we started off in punk bands and in places like Limerick, you had the AMC [Aspersion Music Collective, including one Albert Twomey], all of that stuff. The bizarre thing is that nowadays, the ‘industry’ is f**ked, but creativity still finds a way. There’s a well of creativity in Ireland that’s always been there. People are asking me about bands nowadays and bands then, there’s always been amazing stuff happening, and there still is amazing stuff happening, if you look for it. What happens is, when the industry per se is f**ked, then I think only the really good shit happens. The mad folks are the ones that are doing stuff, and doing it because it’s a vocation and they have to do it, rather than, y’know, doing it for some financial kind of gain. The two times, like, they do echo in different ways.

“The old music industry was dying back in the 2000s but there was still a wellspring of beautifully creative stuff; like, with the Rednecks, we were lucky enough to tour the world on a DIY basis, a few times over. We did Japan, we did America. You go to these little places that are the equivalent of Cork or the equivalent of Galway in y’know, Birmingham, Alabama. I remember being really worried that with our name, The Redneck Manifesto, we would get beaten up in Birmingham, Alabama or whatever. But the promoters are super cool people who are basically have kind of similar record collections to what you’re into, are doing it for the same reasons, and that creative network that exists on a DIY level that was really attractive to me at the time, and I feel like it’s even more important for young bands now.

“A song is so important, y’know,” expounds Egan further, on the opportunities for new and emerging artists, “a piece of music can be so important because it opens the door for so many connections between people who make music, write about music, facilitate music, all of this kind of stuff. That, I think, is always going to be important. I don’t see that changing no matter what happens. There’s loads of changes, but there’s always been loads of changes, like, constant change is here to stay, as they say. From my point of view, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve always tried to use music… I know it sounds a bit cliché, but just tried to find some kind of truth about existence, y’know. And like, I feel like I did that then, and I’m still doing it now, in a different way.”

For each of us, whether in the muck of making music, or finding purpose in being part of its propagation, there’s certainly something to be said for that certainty, community and common cause in the chaos of modern life. Egan’s had ample opportunity in recent times to reflect on the parallels between youthful soul-searching and that sense of arrival that comes midlife for some of us, whether onstage with his Redneck co-conspirators, or revisiting his solo compositions with the aid of a big auld band.

“Well, one thing I know, that I didn’t know then, is that you will never know anything, y’know what I mean? Basically, when I was looking back then for the truth and the meaning of existence, when I was writing those songs back in the day, I felt like there’d be some endpoint when I might understand everything, because I was young and confident and, y’know, forming these independent relationships with people. It was fantastic. Now, I still look for the truth, but I’m kind of hyperaware of the fact that I will never find a truth that stays in the one place. Basically, you’re always finding versions of truth that are basically like quicksilver – you have it one day and then the next day it’s gone. What’s different for me now, when I play the songs, is that I’m very aware that the transient moment that we’re playing them in is very beautiful, but it will just be gone.

“There’s a bittersweet beauty to it that, at the time, maybe was more of a youthful confidence, in that, ‘I will solve the world’s problems with my songs’. But the funny thing is, to look back at those musicians that were there twenty years ago and see what they’re doing now is kind-of noble, and it’s funny to think it’s the same person that’s you, because it feels like a different human being. Like there were times when I was re-learning the songs, listening to the lyrics, when I literally didn’t know what the next line was going to be, and going, ‘oh yeah, that’s pretty good’.

Jape plays The Kino on Washington Street on Thursday, October 23, at 7.30pm. Tickets €27.15 available online at eventbrite.ie.

Stream and download select Jape albums at https://jape.bandcamp.com; and check out The Redneck Manifesto’s new record ‘Grushy’ at https://theredneckmanifesto.bandcamp.com.