Patrick McCabe review: Monaghan author provides a Howl of a night at UCC

Irish Examiner

24-06-2025

Patrick McCabe with David Murphy and Michael Lightborne, Howl On, The Hub, UCC, for Cork Midsummer Festival, ★★★★☆
If Patrick McCabe did not invent the genre of Bog Gothic, he certainly perfected it in his 1992 novel, The Butcher Boy, surely the most sympathetic portrait of a murderer that has ever been committed to the page. As is evidenced in his most recent, and eleventh, novel, Poguemahone, McCabe's anarchic spirit remains very much intact, and we are all the better for it.
McCabe's performance of Howl On is soundtracked by the pedal steel guitarist David Murphy and the electronic artist Michael Lightborne. The mood is set by an arrangement of grasses amongst the performers and on the windowsills above their heads.
McCabe begins with a meditation on the idea of going 'up the Town' in his native Clones, Co Monaghan. He wonders what that might even mean today. One should, he suggests, address the question to Lidl or Aldi, or maybe Woody's, as the town centre of his youth – a place of endless adventure – has been supplanted by such convenience superstores.
From there, McCabe heads off on various flights of the imagination. Reflecting on the mishmash of local and international influences those growing up in rural Ireland were exposed to in the 1960s and '70s, he imagines Pink Floyd performing Big Tom McBride's Gentle Mother, or Big Tom paying tribute to the 'lost' Pink Floyd genius Syd Barrett.
Harking back to a previous decade, he reads the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg's epic poem Howl, and one can all too easily imagine how 'the best minds' of his generation that Ginsberg saw 'destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked' in San Francisco had their counterparts in Co Monaghan in the 1950s. Similarly, McCabe's reading of Patrick Kavanagh's Epic, an account of neighbours battling over a boundary wall, reminds us again of the universality of such divisions.
McCabe mentions the 'sin-birds' in another poem of Kavanagh's, Father Mat. In his own experience, these included see-through t-shirts, Jimi Hendrix, and the individual members of the Monkees.
One might quibble that McCabe's musings might benefit from a more coherent narrative structure, but that, one suspects, would be to defeat the very purpose of his performance, which allows space for a recollection of how the late author Dermot Healy once proposed that hens have ghosts. McCabe is more inclined to believe that cabbage butterflies do.
Murphy and Lightborne's musical soundscape is just as eclectic, including as it does snatches of the Beatles' Love is All You Need, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown's Fire, and Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Howl On indeed.
The verdict? The surreal deal.