But first a little history...

I first got paid for writing at boarding school when my pals bribed me to write their love letters to their girlfriends. I edited the school magazine until the Principal banned it.

In my mid teens I had a lot of poetry and prose published in magazines like The Gorey Detail - edited by poet James Liddy - and Zit, Ireland's first underground newspaper. The teenage Bob Geldof had something to do with Zit but it was a pretty good paper.

At university I published two radical magazines, Devanelvis and The Digger. When I left university and went to work for the Irish Writers Co Op I met real writers like Anthony Cronin and Leland Bardwell, veterans of an early 60s Dublin literary scene dominated by Brendan Behan and Flann O'Brien. Eamon Carr, whom I worked with for several years, came out of the late 60s poetry-rock scene. His first group, Tara Telephone, were Ireland's answer to the Beat Generation - they published early work by Seamus Heaney.

When I wrote my biography of Dan Breen it was published by Captain Sean Feehan at Mercier Press, then Ireland's pre-eminent paperback house. Man from Nowhere, a study of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin which I co-wrote, was privately printed by a rich patron. Hakim Bey and underground American publishers Autonomedia later foisted a fake limited edition of the book onto the marketplace. Those copies now sell for silly prices on the Web. Hakim later got his come-uppance.

My first novel, Serious Time, came out with Elaine Palmer's Pulp Books. She also did my second novel, Too Much Too Soon, and put out a bunch of my short stories in anthologies. I still work with her on the www.pulp.net site. Chris Charlesworth at Omnibus Press indulged my desire to tell the world what I discovered in moshpits and then he asked me to write a book about Iggy Pop.

<< Please select a title from the menu on the left to read an excerpt.

Chelsea Hotel Manhattan

Extreme living in New York's Chelsea Hotel, from the Beats through Punk, and on into the present day.

I stayed in the Chelsea in 2001 and 2002, and this book is based on diary notes which I kept during my stays. I call this book "extreme travel writing" and, for it, I spoke to Warhol superstar Gerard Malanga, Chelsea Hotel owner Stanley Bard, Brendan Behan biographer Ulick O'Connor, and a host of others. The book contains a lengthy previously unpublished interview with William Burroughs done by my pal Spencer Kansa, essays by Beat Generation legend Herbert Huncke, an interview with Paul Bowles, and my conversations with punk veterans, high class drug smugglers, sexual outlaws, and beat/punk author Victor Bockris. Gene Gregorits, whom I got to know when Islamic Diggers were doing shows with Lydia Lunch, provided a long interview with Rockets Redglare in which the actor gave a detailed account of Sid Vicious' final days. Redglare's version of events differs widely from the accepted myth.

Read an excerpt from Chelsea Hotel

Serious Time

"Inexhaustibly nasty and unputdownable." The Guardian
"Beg, borrow, blag or even buy a copy of this book." Howard Marks , author, Mr. Nice
"Scorching stuff." Patrick McCabe, author, The Butcher Boy
"Ambrose eschews Irish literary allusions for a high octane hybrid of London squatspeak, American rap-metal slang, Beatspeed and present tense amoralism." The Hot Press

Serious Time is my Music Biz roman-a-clef about an Irish band on the cusp of fame. Narrated by Subliminal Kids' manager, Kim, it's a story of being foreign in London, of how losing your sense of belonging can alter your outlook. It is also about squat culture, the London music secene and life in Brixton in the late 80s, with the cracks in the veneer of boomtime beginning to show.

Read an excerpt from Serious Time

Moshpit Culture

The Moshpit: Hub of a live music culture that is high on sex and violence... and no stranger to death. For the hardcore fans of groups like Hole and Slipknot, the music is only part of the experience. At gigs worldwide fans literally hurl themselves into a pit - the mosh pit. The result is a mass of seething bodies where fierce physical contact provides a brief, exhilarating escape from everyday life. The mosh pit means random sexual encounters as well as haphazard violence... and occasionally, I soon found out, it can lead to encounters of unexpected tenderness too. For this book I spoke with members of Slipknot, Sepultura, Soulfly, and Trail of Dead.

Read an excerpt from Moshpit Culture

Too Much Too Soon

"Book of the week. Terrific novel that follows the friendship of Liam and Rory, who meet at school and immmerse themselves in the radical icons of the 70s" Time Out
"A cynical exile's take on how the 'Celtic Tiger' pulled itself into the late-20th century," The Face
"Two teenage glam rock fans are seduced by the potential of the IRA as a means of rebelling against the values of their wealthy conservative parents," The Times
"Refreshing, funny, anarchic. Captures the tune of an Ireland gone wrong." Colum McCann, author of This Side of Brightness
"A groovy 70s-set mix of thriller and satire that aims to shed some light on the men of violence. Ambrose writes brilliantly of skewed motivation and friendship, though the most impressive aspect of the book is its rendering of the secret world of the terrorist." Attitude

Glam rock revolutionaries in the Seventies - other teenagers got into bisexuality or Lou Reed or heroin. Rory and Liam got into the Provos. This is their story.

Read an excerpt from Too Much Too Soon

Man From Nowhere

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin blazed a trail of wild experimentation across the Twentieth Century. Their Cut Up Method changed the course of modern fiction and had a profound effect on film and rock music. Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Keith Richards, Genesis P Orridge, and Patti Smith are just some of their musical disciples. Their obsession with the wild heretical actions of Hassan I Sabbah bear witness to their truly rebellious nature. Their love of the Joujouka panic music was total. They challenged conventional notions of morality and paid no attention to the rules of society.

This is the only study of the artistic collaborations between these two good friends. It was written by me, Frank Rynne, and Terry Wilson. Frank and I met Terry at a Notting Hill Arts Gallery early in 1992 - by the end of the year we were exhibiting Gysin, Hamri, and Burroughs paintings at the Project Arts Gallery in Dublin and holding copies of Man from Nowhere in our hands.

In addition to a text by the three of us, and loads of previously unseen photographs of Burroughs and Gysin, it contains specially written texts by Iggy, Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Marianne Faithfull, John Giorno, Hamri, Bill Laswell, Ira Cohen, and Anne Waldeman,

Burroughs wrote us an Introduction in which he said, "Brion Gysin said that he had asked for not being. Request denied. He was called to play the most difficult of all roles, that which only he could play."

Read an excerpt from Man From Nowhere

Gimme Danger

From the violent shambolic rise of punk prototypes The Stooges to his calculating dalliances with Hollywood, Iggy's constant attempts to justify his actions range from eating humble pie to sucking corporate dick. Probably most fascinating of all, however, is Ambrose's unflinching dissection of the symbiotic relationship betwen Iggy and his self-appointed mentor, David Bowie. Did they or didn't they? You decide." Record Collector

In a career that began in the late Sixties Iggy Pop always set out to shock. But his attention-grabbing tactics, including self-mutilation, always disguised a musician and artist more complex than the image suggested.

For this biography I spoke with, amongst others, Gerard Malanga, Victor Bockris, Danny Fields, Mick Rock, Bob Gruen, Billy Name, Roberta Bayley, and Lee Black Childers.

Read an excerpt from Gimme Danger

Dan Breen and the IRA

Dan Breen started the Irish War of Independence in 1919; he played a major role in that war and the ensuing Civil War. He remains, to this day, one of the most famous and controversial IRA leaders of his generation.

My mother's people, the Norris family, were prosperous tenant farmers in Co. Tipperary, where Breen was the local IRA leader. They lost their farm when their lease came up for renewal, being outbidded by their neighbours. My mother and my Aunt Josie often spoke bitterly of the small bog farm they were forced to live on until, some years later, the lease on the home place came up for renewal all over again. This time Dan Breen and his comrades visited the usurpers and suggested that it'd be a good idea to let Jim Norris have his farm back. My cousins still farm there today. So my family owed him a debt of gratitude .

I'd recently left U.C.D. in 1981 when the idea came to me to write a book about this man whose legend was part of the fabric of my upbringing. My paternal grandfather - who was also in the IRA but who took the opposing side in the Civil War - used to say that Breen's memoir, My Fight For Irish Freedom, was the book in which the word "I" was used the most often in the English language.

Breen certainly didn't win the war single handed, and I wrote about all the men - and women - who won us our freedom in my biography.

In 2006, using a huge amount of previously unseen archival material about Breen and the IRA, I wrote an entirely new book on Dan Breen. Once again I worked with Ireland's Mercier Press. This new book tells the story of Breen and his colleagues in their own words and from their own point of view. The extract featured here concerns a daring rescue, undertaken by Breen and his pal Sean Treacy, of their teenage comrade, Sean Hogan. Hogan was being transported to Cork Prison by the British. He would almost certainly have been executed there.

Read an excerpt from Dan Breen and the IRA

Sean Treacy and the Tan War

The opening shots in Ireland’s War of Independence were fired by an IRA unit led by the charismatic Sean Treacy. Treacy was a gifted guerrilla fighter and an inspirational leader. Joe Ambrose’s book is a major re-evaluation of the personalities and events which kickstarted Ireland’s march towards freedom.

Ambrose’s ground-breaking book brings a refreshingly new perspective to the ambushes, shoot outs, and raids which characterised a war known in Ireland as "The Tan War."

Read an excerpt from Sean Treacy and the Tan War

The Fenian Anthology

Who were the Fenians? Their legend stalked the Victorian imagination in much the way that the legend of Bin Laden stalks the world today. They were everywhere and nowhere, inspiring and terrifying.

In this provocative anthology Joe Ambrose brings together the friends and foes of Fenians and Fenianism such as Karl Marx, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, W. B. Yeats, Michael Collins, Dan Breen, and Tom Morello from agit rock superstars Rage Against the Machine.

The book pursues the Fenian ideal through the generations with ample space being given to those IRA leftists gathered around the charismatic Frank Ryan during the Spanish Civil War, a raw chunk of the Provo’s legendary Green Book, a once-illegal training manual for guerrilla fighters along with Ambrose’s own re-evaluations of enigmatic and controversial IRA icons like Cathal Goulding, Bobby Sands, and Seamus Costello. Socialist James Connolly vigorously conjures up the Manchester Martyrs, De Valera is represented by his legendary “comely maidens” speech.

A large part of the Fenian story is told here by the men who participated in the rise, fall, and rise again of that brotherhood. They talk of treacherous priests, wanton peasant women, arguments won at farmyard festivities, fallen women who wouldn’t inform on “the boys”. Their story is also told in batches of songs, some still popular, others obscure and intriguing. Ambrose briskly examines the controversy which often surrounds Ireland’s National Anthem, The Soldier’s Song

Read an excerpt from The Fenian Anthology

Serious Time

It's 2am and I'm in the Coldharbour Lane apartment of DJ Found while his girlfriend Erika - an architecture student - is out working in a Notting Hill nightclub. Even though she knows that I am here, our meeting is in some way secret, as if she doesn't understand what we really get up to. They are a very strange couple and I don't know exactly where their agenda begins or ends.

I walked all the way down here after midnight, via the dole office, via the Barrier Block, illegally picking up a six-pack in Zambezi Cafe, a late-night dive full of rastas and minicab drivers. There was a poster in the window for the roots dub Aba Shanti I Sound System and smoky dub reggae blasting out of an ancient ghetto blaster behind the counter.

Found is an East German boy, child of the non-materialistic world with a funny 19th Century sense of humour, a Romantic in the mode of Goethe and Schiller. Sometimes when he is just too stoned he thinks the world is divided into a man's world and a woman's world. He has a certain point and this evening we are playing a man's game in a "man's world". The flat is Erika's doing with all her warm comfort, sensible German shoes in every room, her architectural drawings everywhere.

He stands with his back to me now, concentrating on his two turntables, his sampler and his reel-to-reel. He says that art begins with two turntables, not an original idea but an obscure one. Found knows so much more about this new music than me that, untypically, all I can do is shut up and listen. Found, who can be childish or cerebral by turn, hands me a heavy-duty essay written in German which I can't read on Faust, Stockhausen, architecture and Kraftwerk.

The music Found makes mixes new dance beats - the rave music they advertise in Soho with beautiful full colour flyers - with TV dialogue, the taped conversations of old girlfriends, Erika talking to him while the two of them are in bed together, Communistic American folk singers, negro prisoners breaking rocks in the Southern penitentiary, awful East German heavy rock groups, the voices coming through the tannoy out at Heathrow, the first TV ads he heard in his first London flat. He is creating an autobiographical aural sculpture chronicling his emergence from the cocoon of East Germany into the light of seeing the Wall come down, and on and on to moving to London, the very heart of the free market. The music he creates, melodic enough in its intellectual way, is totally new to me and I'm impressed.

'Kim you are a very smart man and your friend Jesse is smart too,' Found says, taking a break from music making, his Germanic accent making him sound strident and emphatic, 'but you'll get old if you don't pay attention to what's happened to music and sound since the Seventies. Your whole civilisation is on tape today. President Reagan, Andy Warhol, your Rolling Stones, everything you saw and heard when you were a child was seen and heard by the universe. There is a universal soundtrack. Tape memory is human memory and I believe that tape memory will replace composition.'

Erika phones in just then and they talk in German. I don't understand anything but I hear the exasperation in his voice and I hear my own name mentioned several times.

'Is Erika on her way home?' I ask Found when he eventually gets off the phone.

'No. She wanted to come home but I told her that you were here so she is going back to a friend's place for a while. I told her we were doing important work.' With this he turns back to the tapes and the turntables.

I lie on their big springy double bed reading Vogue, listening to the music he's writing and occasionally glancing at the television where some disgusting TV movie is happening.

At dawn I decide I better go before Erika gets home. I leave him caught up in his own world of composition while hard working people are making their way to work on Coldharbour Lane. I'm slow going back towards Brixton but elated with the music I've seen and heard being written in front of my worried-about-the-future eyes. I know that guitar rock is fundamentally challenged, but I still love it; I also know that logical alternatives like Found might blitzkrieg my world and wipe out my culture.

I forget all that lofty stuff when I reach Zambezi Cafe where I bought the six-pack hours earlier. It's cordoned off and dozens of paranoid looking Pigs, some of them quite senior, are standing everywhere conferring with one another and talking into walkie talkies. The cafe is sealed off by crime scene tape. There's a little blood on the footpath, somebody got murdered, but otherwise everything is the same as when I was in there earlier. In my crotch I'm carrying a little grass that Found gave me as a farewell gift so I move along quick enough.

When I get home I'm so shagged that I want to crash right away but Jesse is watching breakfast TV with his girlfriend and he calls me into the sitting room, where the local news has just reported a fatal stabbing in a Brixton cafe. I tell them that it happened on Coldharbour Lane and that I've just been at the scene of the crime. Jesse's girlfriend doesn't want to hear about it and heads for their bedroom.

'They said it was a drug related killing?' Jesse says.

'I was in the fucking place late last night, man. I went in there to get a six pack and there were just a few dudes sitting around.'

'Where were you going?' Jesse asks drily.

'I was on my way down to see Found.'

'That asshole.'

'Well, you don't have to like him...'

'I don't.' Jesse turns off the TV with the remote control and leaves the room.

Chelsea Hotel

JULIAN SCHNABEL
Julian Schnabel is sitting in the lobby, flanked by a flunky, talking to some obnoxious looking satiated stoat in his early twenties who might be interviewing him for some lesser print organ or who might be willing to suck his cock. Same difference. Schnabel looks impressive and manly, what my cock-mad cousin Sara would call "a fine figure of a man," whatever the fuck that means, and he is issuing forth a few reasonable enough aphorisms. "When somebody says "reputable art dealer" think "reputable drug dealer."" is a good one that gets a cracken awakes-like caw or laugh from the asshole who's been granted the painterly audience. Then the conversation drifts off into other painterly directions so I'm drifting towards the gig ads in the Village Voice. Just then another ambitious young man in his early twenties, this one thin and reasonably well presented, approaches the satiated stoat to say hello and how're ya doin? Genuinely unaware that his fat pal is in the company of greatness. But the stoat won't let anybody step on his blue suede shoes.

"Hey Jim, long time no see." says the walking thin one. "Oh Hi, George," says Jim the stoat doing his best imitation of a Bret Easton Ellis-style asshole, turning away from his old chum in the direction of the painterly amusement emanating from Schnabel, who must see something of his younger self in George because he is beaming with a painterly, fatherly, smile.

"I just got my first work in three months. I think it's a good part. Things have been really slow." says George laconically, about to move on. "Look! What do you want?" asks the irritated stoat, blowing his gig. Schnabel almost bursts into a giggle. Thin George heads towards the lift, a Chelsea permanent resident.

JOHNNY THUNDER'S APARTMENT / BATTLE FOR BEIRUT
This story goes back a few years. A track from the vaults. Previously unreleased material. Six newly discovered tracks plus a whole CD of live material. Three thin but strong brown lines chopped out on its cover.

I was once in the apartment of Johnny Thunders in the company of that other great needlepoint maestro Phil Lynnot. It was the time of that great atrocity, the Battle for Beirut. I was always seeing on my color TV fresh news of the bombed out basements and the torn apart habitations of the onetime Beirut bourgeoisie.

I'd bumped into Lynnot earlier that afternoon in a small soul food place on Chicken Street that I used to frequent in those days, called Chicken Little. I was arguing with my girlfriend so Lynnot couldn't help but pick up on my accent. Turned out we had mutual pals like members of Irish rock bands, midget junkie music biz publicists, and seven or eight of the more enterprising drug dealers in Dublin. He had to go, that very day, to hang out with Thunders who was, temporarily, billeted at the Chelsea in the apartment of a former girlfriend who'd split for Europe for a year, leaving Johnny to protect her home!! And did I wanna meet Johnny Thunders? Yes. So see you in front of the Chelsea at 2.30.

Lynnot was very much a stylish customer and considerably further up the food chain, with all Thin Lizzy's European hit albums and sold out stadiums under his belt, than poor old Thunders who was more or less at the end of his "career." Lynnot, despite the bangles and beads of his Top of the Pops triumphs, was a good person and a notable songwriter not to mention being a worthwhile noisesmith with his bass. He assured me that Thunders was an interesting dude and pleasant too.

We met in the Chelsea lobby, took the elevator to Johnny's floor, fobbed off two Chinese junkies who were panhandling on Johnny's corridor. The place was really run down then, as dangerous as Alphabet City. A lot of people were paying very low rent and some of them were paying no rent atall. We shared the lift going up with a transvestite who, it subsequently turned out, made home deliveries of heroin to some of the more infamous residents.

Philo was anxious to get indoors because he had a fat baggie of smack on him that he'd just scored and needed to party with. Despite frantic Dublin knocking and shouting, there was no response from Thunders' room. We were knocking on Johnny's door for a good ten minutes, getting nowhere. Lynnot was all set to go downstairs and flash his platinum card to get us a suite of rooms of our own, right there right then, when these sorta spider-like scratchings emanated from around the area of Mr Thunders' door lock.

Moshpit Culture

On a hot summer night in '99 Hole, the punk rock band lead by film star and Kurt Cobain widow Courtney Love touched down in the Brixton Academy.

The Academy is a rock'n'roll barn holding 5,000 people, a great place to catch a punk rock band or to mosh, pivotal to the emergence of a new music which has a spirit of change at its core. The sound of Brixton is the low end rumble of cultures in collision, and the Academy is at the core of that rumble.

Once a cinema, it's a perfect gladiatorial moshing arena because, within the hall, an old-fashioned cinema-style decline leads remorselessly down to the stage and mosh pit. Almost despite yourself, you pick up speed as you approach the pit with a feeling that nothing can stop you now. You're walking through a venerable old pleasure palace with the sense that, like Mad Max, you're leaving polite society far behind you as you approach the post-apocalypse.

The cinema decline encourages a deeply significant aspect of moshing. The younger, fitter, braver crowd go on down the front, compressed in on top of one another, while up behind them the cautious, older, and more spread-out crowd can see everything - the band onstage and the mosh pit erupting. For every brave soul down the front there are two fence-sitters taking it all in from a safe distance. The attraction is mutual. A bizarre spectator sport exists for those too old to rock'n'roll but too young to die while the kids have an audience for their audacious, weird, extremist behavior. Kids are seldom terribly weird or extreme without an audience.

Not too long ago a Baptist congregation almost bought the Academy with a view to converting it into a church. The loss of a venue of this exact size and elegance - with a progressive booking policy - would have been a body blow for the emergent hardcore punk and nu-metal scenes. The holy deal fell through, Thank God. Saved from God, the Academy is now firmly back in the hands of Satan, never more so than on the night of the Hole gig.

Hole did a soulful gig in front of 5,000 people who wanted to take home a little bit of Courtney Love, according to herself a walking study in demonology. She brought a lot of agenda and baggage with her. Dowager Empress of Rock'n'Roll, authentic sex symbol, queen bitch, film star. The ultimate punk rock girl right up there with Debbie Harry and Anita Pallenberg. For her young audience she was a heady mix. A platinum selling husband who'd shot himself through the head. Touched a hundred times by the hand of heroin. Many fine influential albums under her belt, the latest being Celebrity Skin, a controversially radio-friendly dolly mixture. Above all, in this context, an icon for smart young middle class girls who are probably giving their nice parents loads to worry about.

Love was extreme, way out there on a psychic limb. Her skin tight skirt stopped just south of her knickers and the slightest move of her leg, the merest low slung guitar pose, deliberately revealed those knickers. She was everything an icon should be, a flaming beacon of art and sex. The people who saw her that night will always remember her feisty sexuality and the band's phenomenal music. But those near the stage will have other memories.

She stood right at the very edge of the stage inviting the entire audience to join her onstage. She sang of aching personal loss, all too explicitly mourning the loss of Cobain with tunes about boys on the radio who crash and burn but who fade so slow. Hole in Brixton developed into the most dangerous mosh pit I've ever been in.

Love is famous for her stage diving, pit baiting, and crowd surfing. R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe once said of her that she liked to dip into the population. She came to the discipline relatively late in life. In '91 she saw Mudhoney's Mark Arm stage dive almost every night on tour, casting his tall thin body into the welcoming arms of fans. At London's Astoria she decided to take the plunge herself. Hundreds of hands reached out to grab her but, while they were welcoming, it was not terribly friendly. They groped her, tore off her clothes, and shoved their fingers up her various orifices.

When she finally got back onto the stage she was virtually naked and crying. She delivered a torrent of abuse at the crowd and then, crazed by her experience, smashed her guitar. "It broke into a million pieces," she subsequently told Siren magazine. "Like, the full rock thing. I destroyed it. I wasn't thinking. I can be primal. I can do it and not intellectualise breaking my guitar in front of sixteen hundred people - fuck you! So many things went wrong, and I was just so mad. I probably did about five thousand dollars worth of damage that night."

The experience haunted her for the longest time and, years later, she posted a recollection of her feelings: "I was returned to the stage basically naked, dirty hands had been all over me... etc... WHAT IS ETC? well it just was etc. I saw a photo of that moment, I was smiling, pretending everything was OK, I guess, it started to dawn on me that this had been my own fault - for bleaching and makeupping and wearing a 'little' dress."

TOO MUCH TOO SOON

I'm lying alone on the double bed in a Belfast hotel room, checking out MTV, which is full of propaganda for the awards I attended two days ago. The Corrs and Boyzone and a blast from the past called the Rolling Stones and news that Gary Glitter has been given four months for keeping kiddie porn on his computer and Bob Marley being tortured by Lauren Hill. My hotel is in the only part of Belfast that hasn't been maimed by thirty years of war. The phone rings, so I pick it up. This is it. It's the real thing. Just do it.

'Mr Crowe? Your car is here for you.'

'Oh? They're early!' Half an hour early. 'Tell the driver I'll be down in ten minutes.' I'm dressed and standing in the lobby waiting when my driver, a good looking teenager with dreadlocked skate kid hair, strides laconically through the hotel's revolving door. An athletic looking boy in torn combat trousers, Rancid teeshirt, and Vans trainers.

'Sorry to be early.' He smiles casually. 'I had to drop my girlfriend off at the airport and this was on my route back.'

Which is complete bullshit.

Outside the hotel we walk in friendly silence to a pricey new Jeep Wrangler whose driver\another skate kid\gives me a high five. Punk haircut, moonwalker trainers, an ancient Iggy teeshirt that must have belonged to his older brother.

Dreadlocks tells me in a prosperous Southern accent that his name is Kevin and that he's from Kilkenny; he seems to know I'm from there too. Moonwalker is called Cathal, has a harsh Belfast gurrier accent, and doesn't have much to say. Both boys have dark intense eyes which speak of a great seriousness.

As soon as we pull away from the curb we travel at speed until we reach a motorway which takes us south and away from the city. Kevin reaches for the stereo and inserts a mix tape of Aaron Copeland, Miles Davis and Tortoise.

'Liam,' he says to me, 'we're delighted that you want to do this interview with us. Things are getting very dangerous for us. We've been visited in our homes by our former Provo comrades and told individually that if we don't lay down our arms we'll be shot. In the last six months two of our most important men have died in car crashes. Each and every one of us fears execution at the hands of British intelligence or the Provos.'

Our journey takes fifty minutes and eventually we're in the pitch black bandit country of South Armagh. There is no need to blindfold me because I'd never find my way back here. We pull into a laneway leading to a one storey farmhouse with a large concrete farmyard out front. Parked in the farmyard, I note, are seven cars and three motorbikes. Our jeep grinds to a halt at the front door, where me and Kevin alight. I can hear dogs barking in the distance but I can see no dogs. Cathal doesn't join us but drives away in the jeep; I assume there are lookouts lurking somewhere in the darkness of the fields and that Cathal is going to join them. But this is not really a high security operation.

'Please follow me now, Liam,' Kevin says very gently. He walks through an ajar front door. I follow into an old fashioned country kitchen. A cold chicken rests in a Pyrex dish on a work surface. Three loaves of white soda bread, some onions, a saucepan full of washed and quartered potatoes. On the wallpapered wall a modern framed print of The Shepherdess by Millet, a young girl saying her Angelus. Beyond the kitchen an open door leads into a sitting room where Johnny Cash is playing on a stereo. The subdued murmur of conversation can be heard along with the music as Kevin turns to me, smiles, and beckons me to follow him into this gathering of the Real IRA.

Man From Nowhere

Short quotes from Man from Nowhere

William Burroughs on The Here To Go Show: I have seen the Dublin videos and they look great. I am sure that the real performances must have been a knock out.

Timothy Leary on Hamri the Painter of Morocco: Hamri was a Napoleon painting.

Keith Haring on Brion Gysin: I feel honoured to have known Brion and to have shared a brief but timeless moment of our lives. He was my teacher.

Iggy Pop on Brion Gysin: Brion Gysin. What a beautiful guy. I met him in Paris, he had red apple eyes like Maurice Chevalier, a head of white hair and a cool blue blazer and eyes too,

John Giorno on The Master Musicians of Joujouka: The Master Musicians are a secret society or spiritual brotherhood. They play for themselves, seldom allowing in outsiders, and almost never white people.

Marianne Faithfull on Brion Gysin: He was my only friend and I love him.

Hamri on Burroughs and Gysin: I was the one who brought William Burroughs and Brion Gysin together because after noticing William around Tangier with all his magic and ability to become invisible he seemed to be the perfect complement to Brion.

William Burroughs on Hamri: The djnounn spirits of Morocco ripple and frolic through Hamri's paintings, scattering light over fruit trees, sunflowers, walls and fields, pelting the streets of Tangier with winter rain.

Gimme Danger - The Iggy Pop Story

Patti Smith came up with the equation "art + electricity = rock'n'roll." When I was a student in Dublin in the late Seventies it was generally perceived, in student circles, that Iggy Pop fitted into that equation perfectly. In the damp impoverished provincial city of those times he seemed an outstanding presence, right up there with the Lou Reeds and Bob Dylans of this world. Only that, while art made them rich and famous, Iggy was one of our own. We imagined that his bank account didn't run into four figures, that his stance was somehow more extreme or brave than others. We guzzled the bottomless pit of pro-Iggy propaganda that the NME, then the most important style bible in rock, spewed out. We imagined ourselves to be playing some part in a heroic anti-adventure. Or else Iggy seemed to be playing that part for us.

This was just so much wishful thinking, a wishful thinking that helped Pop survive, and which eventually facilitated his emergence as punk's Tina Turner. The spin is much the same. A sexy past. Great achievements back in the days. Tough times and tragedy. The world's forgotten boy. Never got a fair shake. And isn't it great that he's still around to show us how things once were? So what if he's past his sell-by date? So what if he appeared in Crocodile Dundee 2 and endorses Reebok? He deserves everything he gets, good luck to him, says a compliant media which is happy to go along with the notion that he was done out of his crown back in the Seventies.

There is something to this argument. Except that Iggy has been getting a fair shake all his life. Some of the most powerful (and richest) people in music and art bent over backwards to help him. Some of the most beautiful and intelligent women (many of them rich too) put themselves entirely at his disposal. He was an abuser of other people, a dedicated user as he once described himself. His fans would be horrified by his political views. And the sort of people who checked out junk rock and fag rock, the territories where once he ruled supreme, never had anything to do with the sexual politics which informed both his private life and his music.

An important critique of misogyny in rock music, The Sex Revolts by Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, (which looks at rock clicheLs like the born-to-run syndrome, the rock singer as soldier or warrior, and "self-aggrandizing fantasies of man machine omnipotence") attributes a sexual fascism to Pop, claiming that his work portrays a kind of rapist without victim, burning for total connection with reality.

"Iggy's whole aesthetic," say Reynolds and Press, "was based around the quest for black-out and bloody miasma. Though he often hurled himself into combat with the audience, the main target of his aggression was his own body."

Pop is an old school sexist and misogynist. Leee Black Childers, who shared a house with him, can quite distinctly remember Pop saying that he hated women. Pop told Nick Kent, "Well, I hate women. I mean, why do I even have to have a reason for that? It's like, why are people repelled by insects? I use 'em because they are lying, dirty, treacherous and their ambitions all too often involve using me!" This anti-women stance is not merely confined to long-ago doped-out interviews and extravagant rock lyrics. His treatment of women in real life has been lamentable too. He still encourages girls to get naked on his stage for the delight of the crowd.

No rapper would get away with the kind of bitch-hating which characterizes Pop's life and work. The white middle class liberal media never misses an opportunity to point the racist finger at smart alec black kids who are often being entirely ironic. But when Pop shows up in town, telling journalists what books he's reading and how much he likes fine wines, he is rarely challenged on his past right-wing politics or attitudes towards women . In code, he is one of us. White, bookish, and comfortably off.

When I was a student advocate of Pop my knowledge of his music was just about as sketchy as the next guy's. I knew him from hearing the Bowie/Berlin stuff and the Raw Power albums at parties and in other people's bedsitters. I didn't own any of his records. I first heard Metallic KO while walking through a flea market in Dublin in 1993. His image on the cover of Raw Power was the bulk of what I knew about him. This image tied in with my taste for sleazy drug-addled outsider rock'n'roll.

Later his Arista albums showed up in Dublin remainder bins for next to nothing so I picked them up and brought them home. Two of these - Soldier and New Values - were accurate insights into the real Iggy. He was the Ugly American, standing up for blue collar values while not believing in fairies anymore. I liked those records very much despite, and because of, their stance.

Ten years ago I met Iggy. I was involved in writing a book about Brion Gysin, the important William Burroughs collaborator. I was told that Gysin had had a relationship of some sort with Pop so I went hunting for that story. Pop's manager was contacted, and he persuaded Iggy to fax through a freshly written text on Gysin which made it's way into the book.

When the book came out Iggy was doing his Instinct World Tour and I met up with him after one of those shows. He gamely sang the tune Gysin had written for him back in lost time, Blue Baboon. He looked old at the aftershow party where every lowlife on the local music scene was vying for his attention. He was extraordinarily courteous, like most Americans are, but he was obviously a burnt out shell of a man. Uptight, sick of this showbiz shit, working his music biz crowd. Working.

I last saw him live in Brixton a while back. The crowd was mainly thirtysomething shaved-head suburban fat boys and frat boys who, clearly, were not familiar with his back catalogue. There was nothing romantic or glamorous about it. The fat boys were there to see the freak show. The guy who did the tune from Trainspotting and had a hit with Real Wild Child. Success has stranded him in the middle of a Frankenstein of his own creation.

But he has a great story to tell. One of the greatest in rock history. Bob Dylan and Lou Reed may have passed their years making better albums and being more consistent. But Iggy went out and lived the life. Read here about degradation, cruelty, sex beyond one's wildest imaginings, Scarface-style quantities of drugs, life lived beyond the edge and beyond the law. Why is Iggy Pop important? Because he is rock'n'roll made flesh.

Dan Breen and the IRA

Sean Hogan sat in a compartment, handcuffed and seated between Sergeant Wallace and Constable Enright. Both men carried revolvers. Opposite Hogan there were two other Constables, Ring and Reilly, bearing shotguns. Sergeant Wallace was an important political officer, his pre-eminence shown by the fact that he was in charge of a key prisoner like Hogan.

Treacy and Eamonn O'Brien walked down to Knocklong station, while Breen and Robinson entered the town on bikes. Breen and Robinson were to linger around the station entrance, acting as lookouts, while O'Brien and Treacy went in to free Hogan.

When the train pulled into the station, two of the Galbally men jumped out before it ground to a halt. One of them pointed to the compartment where Hogan sat under guard. Treacy and O'Brien strode onto the train, revolvers drawn.

They made their way to Hogan's compartment, thrust open its sliding door, and shouted, 'Hands up! Come on Sean, out!' Constable Enright placed a revolver against Hogan's neck and crouched in behind him for cover. Treacy and O'Brien opened fire, killing Enright. 'We certainly would never have fired if Enright had not made a move to attack Hogan.' O'Brien later maintained.

Hogan jumped up and crashed his handcuffed hands right into the face Constable Ring, seated opposite him. Treacy and Wallace wrestled viciously with one another, while Eamonn O'Brien and Constable Reilly fell into a similar struggle. Then the Galbally contingent stormed onto the train virtually unarmed and wrenched Reilly's rifle away from him. One of them smashed him across the head with his own weapon and he collapsed onto the floor, apparently knocked out. Constable Ring either jumped out a window or was thrown out through it. This was the last that was seen or heard of him for some time.

Treacy, still wrestling with Wallace, told Hogan to leave the train. The teenager withdrew, with difficulty, as far as the corridor. There were now so many people in the small compartment that chaos reined. While the tenacious Wallace and the resolute Treacy remained locked in combat, Treacy repeatedly appealed to the powerfully built Sergeant to give it up but one man was as stubborn as the other.

Wallace was now getting the upper hand in his struggle with Treacy. The two were grappling desperately for control of Wallace's Webley revolver, whose barrel was remorselessly turning in the direction of Treacy's head. Eamonn O'Brien fired at Wallace just as the policeman put a bullet through Treacy's neck.

Wallace fell back, mortally wounded. The rescue party was in a position to get off the train. Treacy had little fight left in him - he later told a friend, "I thought I was a dead man. I had to hold my head up with both hands, but I knew I could walk."

Sean Treacy and the Tan War

Members of the Squad and of the Dublin Brigade attacked eight addresses in Dublin, killing eleven men and wounding five more, one of whom died later. "Most of the dead and wounded were army officers." wrote David Leeson, "Some of them were Secret Service agents, but others were just ordinary soldiers. One victim had recently been demobilized, had come to Dublin to purchase horses and was shot by mistake."

The innocence of this supposed horse trader is disputed but James Doyle, manager of the Gresham Hotel at the time, was one of many who thought that he was a pointless casualty. "At about nine o'clock on the morning of Bloody Sunday," Doyle said, "I was in bed in my room and awakened by noise. It was a muffled kind of thing like the beating of a carpet. The porter called up to my room afterwards and I asked him what the noise I had heard was. He said that Captain McCormack, who was occupying a room quite close to me, had been shot dead. I got out of bed and entered Captain McCormack's room and I saw that he was then dead. The worker also told me that another man had been shot dead in a room on the next floor over Captain McCormack's. I went to this room also and saw the dead man. His surname was Wilde. I was totally ignorant of what took place or why these men were shot at the time. I questioned the porter and he told me that a number of armed men had entered the hotel and asked to be shown to the rooms occupied by these two men."

The Gresham's manager said that McCormack had been staying in the hotel since September and had been buying race horses: "He had booked his passage back to Egypt for December on the Holt Line. Although he had been a veterinary surgeon with the British Army there would appear to have been grave doubt as to his being associated with British intelligence. While he was here I never saw him receiving any guests. He slept well into the afternoon and only got up early when a race meeting was on. When I found him shot in his room, the Irish Field was lying beside him." Doyle seemed confident that the suspiciously-named Wilde was indeed a spy, having being told that Wilde was thrown out of Spain because he was well known there to be a British agent.

South of the Liffey, at 22 Lower Mount Street, Michael Collin's assassins found Lieutenant Angliss, the man who'd organised the Dublin Intelligence Section, and killed him as he lay in bed. Another officer sleeping across the corridor from Angliss heard the commotion and began to barricade himself into his bedroom, piling furniture up against the door. He then leaned out of his bedroom window and called for help.

A party of Auxiliaries in plain clothes drove past the beleaguered house at that moment. Noticing the huge commotion that was going on, they sent two of their number back to Beggars Bush barracks for reinforcements before surrounding the building. The IRA men were still trying to break down the barricaded door when they heard the Auxiliaries shooting at them from the street. Two assassins managed to escape but a third, Frank Teeling, was wounded and captured. The fugitives shot their way out through the front of the building, ran down Grattan Street and, according to Leeson, "escaped across the Liffey on a commandeered ferryboat."

The Fenian Anthology

The Republican Congress, founded in 1934, came about when left wing republican intellectuals like Peadar O’Donnell and George Gilmore left the IRA which, with the emergence of Fianna Fail, was being consigned to the fringes of political life. The IRA was also, like many Thirties organisations, divided along left/right lines. The principal right-wing IRA leader, the divisive Sean Russell, steered the organisation into political irrelevance in the face of Fianna Fail’s remorseless rise and hegemony of the conservative republican high ground.

The Congress, a reaction against IRA intellectual inertia and a bleak economic environment, believed that a united Ireland could only be achieved through a struggle which uprooted capitalism. At the IRA’s 1934 Bodenstown rally, clashes occurred between Congress supporters and the IRA. Protestant Congress members from West Belfast, carrying a banner which proclaimed, "Unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter to break the connection with Capitalism", were attacked by certain IRA factions.

The Congress split at its first annual conference held in Rathmines Town Hall on Sept 8 and 9 1934. One group felt that a united front of leftist republicans could challenge the dominance of the mainstream political parties. Their Congress opponents believed that they should form a conventional political party which would seek a worker’s republic. This stance was supported by Peadar O'Donnell and the Communist Party of Ireland. The Republican Congress soon petered out, with its leading lights making their way to Spain where, as part of the Connolly Column, they fought against Franco’s fascist-supported Nationalist forces.

Patrick Byrne was, along with IRA left winger Frank Ryan and Frank Edwards (a Waterford-based Communist who rose to prominence during the Spanish Civil War), joint secretary of the Republican Congress.

Frank Ryan joined the East Limerick Brigade of the IRA in 1922. He fought on the Republican side in the Irish Civil War, and was wounded and interned. A UCD graduate, he became editor of An Phoblacht in 1929 and was appointed to the IRA Army Council.

In 1936 Ryan went to Spain to fight with the International Brigades. He was eventually captured and, in mysterious circumstances, fell into the hands of the Nazi government in Berlin. He died in the German capital. The circumstances surrounding his final years have lead to ongoing, and somewhat outlandish, efforts to portray Ryan as a fascist sympathiser. Given his consistent public and private opposition to fascism, his central role in the development of Irish socialism, his progressive position within Irish republicanism, and the recollections of comrades, claims that he had fascist inclinations have the whiff of blackguardism and fanatical revisionism about them.

He is immortalised in one of Shane McGowan’s best songs, The Sickbed of Cuchullin:

When you pissed yourself in Frankfurt and got syph down in Cologne,
And you heard the rattling death trains as you lay there all alone,
Frank Ryan brought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid,
And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids.