Interview with Patrick Jones from Issue 8 of Welsh Bands Weekly, spring 2000

Gentle, enigmatic and unexpectedly handsome, Patrick Jones is a man who trembles with nervousness when he performs his eloquent rants; a man who breaks regularly into loud, deep laughter, his pierced eyebrow and guerrilla dress scarcely betraying his standing as a dedicated family man.

“Nicky Wire’s brother”.

There was a time – outside his home town of Blackwood, at any rate – that his famous brother was the only recognition granted to Patrick. These days, however, he’s famous in his own right as a playwright and poet of immense lyrical power.

“Understand that coming is only a prelude to going”

My first ever encounter with Patrick – my first ever real knowledge that he actually existed – was when I unexpectedly received from him a copy of his book, Mute Communion, and a letter saying that he’d been meaning to write for a while, as ‘Nick says it’s a good magazine.’

It would be nearly two years until we actually met.


Emma and I met up with Patrick after his hectic and nerve-wracking gig at The Water Rats in London in July. The place was heaving, absolutely heaving, the audience divided into three very definite groups of industry bods, Manics fans and some very, very obvious Patrick Jones fans – the latter swaying at stage front, mouthing every word, eyes closed, feather boas aloft.

The after-gig pandemonium was an amazing sight. The clamour for autographs, a few words with the man himself, was more like a scene from an arena gig than a poetry recital in a tiny North London pub.

An hour’s wait, then, until we were able to drag Patrick away from his adoring followers for long enough to carry out our interrogation.

“And nothing is perfection”

Patrick’s recent CD of music-backed poetry, Commemoration and Amnesia, has been met with mixed reviews. Melody Maker greeted it with open arms, however a couple of weeks previously they’d done a brief interview with Patrick which had given me the impression that its writer was somewhat bemused by it all.

“Yeah,” Patrick agrees, “but I think it came out pretty positive because I think Steven Wells likes a bit of ranting and some of the poetry is quite like that! But the one today did pick up on certain lines, which I liked. After all, it is poetry, it’s not trying to be a song lyric, it’s not trying to be… the words are important, let’s put it like that. I don’t like people saying they’re slogans, because it’s not. ‘Manics 1992’? It’s not! It’s nothing like that!”

It’s been said that poetry is one of the hardest careers to succeed in. Would Patrick say that’s true?

“Definitely, yes. But I don’t think of it as a career, more as a vocation.”

Poetry isn’t the only thing Patrick does – he also does lecturing and teaching.

“Working with young people, sixteen year olds, teaching them how to express themselves”, he says.

Does it work? Does it get people off the streets and give them something to focus on?

“I’ve had some lovely successes with people who’ve found their voices and started writing,” Patrick tells me. “And okay, they’ll still do what they do, going and smashing things up or whatever, but what they write about is stuff like Irvine Welsh, people like that, who make millions out of it, but they’re living it, y’know, so I like to make them see that their life is literature – or it can be literature.”

In her books about wannabe intellectual schoolboy Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend used a character called Barry Kent, a bully with no interest in learning whatsoever who eventually becomes a famous writer. Has Patrick ever come across any real-life Barry Kents?

“Yeah, something similar,” he says. “Although… yeah, especially in the valleys, that macho culture I think, where only homosexual people write, type of thing. So I break down those barriers and once you have… it’s not a proper job, it’s only when work comes in. I don’t sit in my garden waiting for inspiration.”

I know from my own experiences that it tends to be that something’s really getting to you, a personal situation or something in general that you’re really pissed off about, and you’re just driven to write about it. You don’t think: ‘today I’m going to write a poem’ - it’s something that just comes to you.

Patrick: “Exactly, yeah. But there are a lot of career poets out there who do that sort of stuff and there’s no soul in it.”

Is the position of Poet Laureate relevant any more?

“No, I don’t think so. If it was someone quite radical and they could subvert it. But they wouldn’t allow it now, would they?”

I hear that the guy they’ve got now is fairly radical – well, compared to Ted Hughes at any rate.

“Yeah, which is perhaps a step in the right direction. Still, I think that people are put off by it. I don’t think people really care what he writes about.”

“Freedom without responsibility”

What does the future hold for Patrick now?

“I’m working on a new play now for the autumn… I dunno really, just more writing really. Have a little rest. So, a new play in the Sherman and Everything Must Go again in March next year.”

You publish your own books. Will you ever publish books for other people?

“I don’t think I’m in a position to at the moment. I get some lovely stuff from younger people, pretty good stuff, but it could cost a lot of money and there’s the marketing to think about. I just haven’t got the time at the moment. But one day perhaps, yeah.”

This is the first of Patrick’s live shows, backed by a band comprising mostly members of Derrero and Pink Assassin, who also appeared on the album. I tell Patrick that although I don’t want to put him down in any way, I’d like to be honest with him and say that when I found out he was releasing a CD of poetry backed by music I’d thought there was potential there for it to be really dreadful. Not because of his style of poetry, but just because you don’t consider poetry to be something that could be backed by music. There was a chance it could be really dull, so I’d hung onto the CD for a couple of weeks, feeling that I needed to prepare myself. However, when I finally listened to it I was amazed. I never thought Emma had any interest in poetry at all, but when I played it to her she was really into it. If it can touch people that wouldn’t normally read poetry, well, that’s good isn’t it?

“It is,” Patrick agrees, grinning. “It’s about, I think, maybe making poetry not poetry in a way.”

He’s got a point. It’s like rap but with more passion, and you can understand the words.

“It was all written first then sent off to the bands, so I never had the music in my ear. So I read it as I read my poetry, not with a beat to it at all.”

Would you normally recite your poetry with that amount of passion and shoutiness?

“Yeah, although not as much shouting because with the guitars and everything you’ve got to compete sometimes. But I’m careful not to become Henry Rollins! But passionate, yeah.”

There’s a lot of feeling in there. I was watching you on stage, and on the one hand there’s a girl in the corner heckling like fuck and you’re nervous, there’s a slight tremor to your hand and you’ve got this look on your face which suggests you’re struggling to remember some of the words, but within that there’s an obvious feeling of how into it you are, how you really believe in what you’re saying.

“Yeah. But I did find it hard turning the pages! I find it hard to memorise whole poems – for some reason I just can’t do it!”

How did you choose the bands that you used on the album?

“I think because of Greg Havers [co-owner of Big Noise Recorders, who released the CD]. He said he had contacts with Catatonia, the Furries, stuff like that. Originally it was just going to be James and a lot of drum machines. I was very naïve – I thought I could do it on my own budget, things like that – so I went to Greg and he said he’d mentioned the idea to people and they’d said that it sounded interesting, and that’s how it grew. So it was totally a bit of luck. I think the only band who were too busy were Stereophonics, but apart from that everyone said they’d give it a go. We did send something to Anthony Hopkins, we wanted him to read a poem, but he was too busy.”

The music perfectly fits the mood of the poetry, doesn’t it?

“Well, I think so, yes. But Select Magazine didn’t really see that, they were sort of criticising it.”

You don’t hear the music in one ear and the poetry in the other – you hear it as a whole.

“It’s a thing, I think, which is a bit different, yeah. It’s an exciting process!”

Were you pleased with the way it came out?

“Oh definitely, yeah. Overawed by it really, in that you’ve got your own CD in your hand and people want to listen to it.”

“Desperation to react from the societally induced mind isolation”

How successful was Patrick’s play, Everything Must Go?

“It sold out about eight times out of twenty, so yeah, it was really good.”

Will it travel around?

“We’re opening it again in the Sherman next March, then the Lyric in Hammersmith, hopefully – that’ll be good.”

Of course, everyone knows that the Manics’ fourth album ‘borrowed’ its title from Patrick’s play, and that Patrick’s brother is Nicky Wire. Does anyone accuse Patrick of riding on his brother’s back?

“Oh yeah, everyone!” he laughs. “Yeah, I think the majority of people do!”

And you, of course, just tell them to fuck off?

“Yeah, exactly! I’ve been writing since I was 17 or 18, that’s seventeen years ago! So it’s a long bandwagon if I was going to be on a bandwagon! They [the Manics] are just friends and people who inspire me. Nick and James, Sean, Richey when he was around, so it’s just an albatross. It helps in some ways, like getting into the NME perhaps because of it, but after that it’s gone on its own merit, and if you don’t like it that’s fine.”

“Wanna catch a sunrise/wanna verse a scream”

Have you a favourite word?

Patrick laughs loudly. “I do like ‘fucking’, but only as an adjective! Ha ha! When I go into school I say, ‘you can use fucking but only as an adjective!’ And you can see them thinking, ‘Eh?’ And I like ‘beautiful’. I do like ‘beautiful’.”

“I am asleep, my child awakens me”

Emma injects her little touch of surrealism into the interview. She asks Patrick what he thinks about before he dreams.

“Usually turmoil!” he laughs. “My dreams are usually full of violence and turmoil. I never have nice dreams! I always have this recurring dream that there’s someone in the room who’s asking me to do something and I’ve got to do it – it’s a weird psychological thing, you know? So there’s always that one. I don’t know what it means – and they’re really in the room – it’s very surreal.”

It must have been freaky tonight with all those people, autograph hunters, interviewers and so on. You’ve obviously done quite a lot of interviews recently – is there something you wish you’d been asked?

“No, not really. I do sometimes wish people would concentrate more on what the poems are about, or what does that bear to literature? Or what does it say about the world? People seem to miss out that sometimes, yeah. Like when you read a good book or a good set of poems, you think, now that’s telling me about the world, about my life, things like that, whereas I think sometimes people think it’s not. Arthur Miller the playwright said that he wrote plays to make people feel less alone. I love that and I feel that poetry can do that. So if it’s ranting about the world of the lottery, if it makes us feel like someone else is writing about that… sometimes it’s a very spiritual quest. But I see some people who don’t see it like that.”

You do feel a certain… it does communicate to you, poetry. I must admit one of my favourite poets is Spike Milligan. You read all the stuff he wrote during his nervous breakdown, the stuff about ecology – about being six feet tall and cutting down a hundred foot tree to make a chair that will make him four feet tall when he sits on it – and you can identify with it. It’s amazing to have these heavy thoughts and be able to get people on your wavelength.

“Exactly. That’s the nicest moment of it, when people come up to you and say, ‘that poem moved me’. It’s the human side of it. I’m a bit of a loner and it’s a distance in a way but it’s a distance where I feel close, if that makes sense.”

Commemoration and Amnesia is out now on Big Noise Recordings