Latest news with #PatrickMcCabe
Irish Times
30-06-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
Irish roots run deep for James McCabe as he prepares to take Wimbledon stage
Not since Conor Niland, back in 2011, has an Irish player reached the main draw at Wimbledon. While the Limerick man remains the last to play under the Irish tricolour at the famed Grand Slam event, on Tuesday one very proud Irish-Australian player will take to the turf at the All England Club. Twenty-one-year-old James McCabe will face Hungary's Fábián Marozsán in the opening round after coming through last week's qualifiers. Currently 181st in the ATP rankings, his attendance at Wimbledon will go some way towards helping him climb the ladder to the coveted . Quite the achievement, given his unconventional start in the sport. The son of Dubliner Patrick McCabe, who emigrated to Australia from Walkinstown in 1987, and his wife Irene, who is from the Philippines, McCabe's first introduction to tennis was in the complex where the family live in southern Sydney. READ MORE Clay is not his surface. He likes grass and hard courts 'There just happened to be a tennis court there,' Patrick McCabe explains. 'So when he was two-and-a-half I brought him down, and he seemed to have a very good aptitude for it, so I just kept on bringing him down daily.' Patrick himself has never played tennis. 'I didn't know what I was doing. There was a tennis club about a mile away, but we couldn't afford to hire the courts or the lessons because it was really expensive. 'If the tennis court hadn't been in that complex where we rented, then I don't think he ever would have picked up a tennis racket, because he wouldn't have been able to afford it.' But the tennis court wasn't the only sporting facility readily available: there was also a pool, and James took to swimming as naturally as he did to tennis, becoming a national champion in both sports before hitting his teenage years and earning himself a scholarship to a private school. Tennis player James McCabe and his sister Jasmine There, James discovered another aptitude, this time for music, learning the piano and flute before teaching himself to play the guitar. With his swimming and music commitments, tennis took a back seat for much of his school years, bar a stint which ultimately saw him earn a wildcard spot at the 2020 Australian Open junior championships. Unlike many of his tennis contemporaries, McCabe's time on the junior circuit was rather limited, playing in only a handful of tournaments, but it doesn't seem to have hampered his efforts in the senior ranks. In January, he played in the main draw at the Australian Open for a second year running, going one better than 2024 by winning his first-round match against Martin Landaluce, before being defeated by Alex Michelsen in the second. When James was two-and-a-half I brought him down to the courts, and he seemed to have a very good aptitude for it Wimbledon will be his first grand slam event outside of Australia, but the McCabes are confident the Melbourne outings will stand to him in southwest London. 'It's experience, it's just constant experience,' says Patrick. 'He played in the French Open qualifying and he didn't do too well there, but clay is not his surface. He likes grass and hard courts. He does have a very decent serve, so if he serves well and returns well, he's got a good chance.' MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - JANUARY 16: James McCabe of Australia celebrates a point against Alex Michelsen of the United States in the Men's Singles Second Round match during day five of the 2025 Australian Open at Melbourne Park on January 16, 2025 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by) So far in 2025, the ATP 250, Challenger Tour and majors have taken the McCabes around Australia, India, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, South Korea, China, Portugal, France, England and the Netherlands. After Wimbledon, it's more of the same. 'Eight months a year we're on the road,' Patrick says of the rigorous calendar. He does have a very decent serve, so if he serves well and returns well, he's got a good chance 'As soon as he's out of Wimbledon, he heads to America, then to Mexico, then to Canada. Hopefully he'll be in the main draw again for the US Open at the end of August. And then we'll be going to Asia – China, Japan, South Korea – and then looking to head back to Australia.' McCabe is proud of his Irish roots, holds an Irish passport and has visited a number of times, as Patrick has three sisters still living here. Tuesday will be a tough ask for McCabe, with his opponent Marozsán currently 58th in the ATP rankings. But his father says his son will treat this like any other tournament. They'll do a quick 20-minute debrief on the Hungarian tonight, but aside from that McCabe will go out and play his own game. 'It's a dream,' McCabe says. Long may his dream continue. ♦ McCabe is scheduled to be in action on Court 11 at 11am on Tuesday. BBC Two will have live coverage of the morning session.
Irish Examiner
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Patrick McCabe review: Monaghan author provides a Howl of a night at UCC
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.
Irish Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Patrick McCabe: ‘This whole idea of making money out of novels started in the 1980s with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan'
Patrick McCabe, the author born in Clones, Co Monaghan , made his name in the premillennial years as the poet laureate of the unreliable narrative. Now, 33 years after his second novel, The Butcher Boy , blasted a bomb-crater in Irish literature, the publishing industry itself has become the unreliable narrator. Things are not what they were, and all previous certainties have been revoked. McCabe, adrift in the corporate culture of the 21st-century book business, went rogue a couple of years ago, forsaking traditional distribution models for the literary crowdfunding platform Unbound. It made sense. McCabe was always too untidy, too wilful, to be a career novelist. His body of work is less a succession of stand-alone titles than a half-century long radio broadcast from a Border town of the mind. Sometimes the signal is fuzzy and crackles with static, sometimes it's in sync with the culture. 'I wish it was approached like that,' he considers, on a video call, 'because it gets ... I wouldn't say annoying, because people can make what they can of it, but when you're operating in the commercial world, it's like, you know, this is a novel ... ' The Naked Lunch moment for any young writer: the realisation that your agent's or editor's allegiances are to the industry that pays their bills, not the author they speak to every two or three years. I remember a remark McCabe made some 15 years ago, about advising a young writer to go the indie route rather than growing old and bitter because some trust-fund baby editor didn't like his book. READ MORE 'Well, to be perfectly honest I was very lucky, because even getting on to that track is very, very difficult,' he says. 'Because of the commercial nature of publishing there's a backlog of authors who want to get on that, and there's only so much a small publisher can do, so you've got a whole sort of supermarket build-up, and they may not be able to give it the attention that maybe, say, a '70s rock label would have. But nonetheless the principle holds good that you will be an awful lot bloody happier. 'This whole idea of making money out of novels is a relatively new thing. It started in the '80s with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan . That hadn't happened before. A book was published by an eminent author, sold 2,000 or 3,000 copies, was reviewed in the New Statesman and the Guardian, and that pretty much was that. But in the '80s this kind of new pop star [emerged], late night review programmes, Martin Amis's teeth, all that kind of stuff became news. 'And as we know, this is all cyclical. So that came to an end in the mid-'90s and something else took over, the career novelist. But someone at my age, it would be very difficult to say the words 'career' and 'novelist' in the same breath and not be embarrassed.' The irony is, McCabe is in the top .0005 percentile of writers who've actually been published and had significant cultural impact. 'Well, maybe for a while, but that didn't necessarily last. I mean, if you were to look at the sales figures of a lot of those books, you wouldn't be inclined to say that.' Patrick McCabe: 'I didn't get into this to make myself feel miserable.' Photograph: Barry Cronin It's like the Velvet Underground: everybody thinks they sold a lot more than they did. 'I think that's probably the truth, and far be it from us to disabuse them! But anyway, when I met John Mitchinson, when he was setting up Unbound, I said, 'I've got this book ( Poguemahone , 2022), I'm afraid to even send it to anyone, because I know it'll be lying on the desk, people will probably actually get hostile towards it, and it's kind of a fusion of James Clarence Mangan and Val Doonican.' And he said, 'Send it to me.' 'To be honest it was the first time almost in years that I'd had a response from an editor that was what you would call human and enthusiastic, not that awful phone call that we are all familiar with, that dread kind of, 'What were you trying to do?' as a precursor to letting you down and saying they can't do anything with it. 'But he was quite the opposite. He said he'd be proud to publish it. We both knew that it wouldn't particularly sell. As it turned out, it acquitted itself pretty all right. But the point we're trying to make is that it was very enjoyable to do. You didn't wake up with that awful sickly feeling in the morning that I used to get when I was teaching double maths, you know? I didn't get into this to make myself feel miserable. And he took on Tim O'Grady at the same time, a friend of mine. So I would hold with what I said to the young writer.' So, in this spirit of following the bliss, McCabe is performing at the behest of Danny Denton at the Cork Midsummer Festival , with accompaniment from pedal-steel guitarist David Murphy and multimedia artist Michael Lightborne. Howl On will be 'part soundtrack, part poetic memoir, a fever dream in which Patrick Kavanagh flirts with psychedelia, communes with John Lennon and ponders notions of town and place'. 'It's a voices thing with music and so on,' he says. 'It's very free-form. It doesn't even have to be current or popular music or anything, it could be any kind of music, but it just happens to be, in this case, roots or contemporary country American, mixing Kavanagh with that. But sometimes it changes ... Sure you know all this, you do a lot of performance yourself.' Left-wingers … were terribly boring f**king people, not a laugh to be found anywhere — McCabe on Dublin in the 1970s Mainly because if I'd restricted myself to writing only novels, I'd have gone mad – and bankrupt – years ago. 'And you might be unfulfilled, you know? There's definitely an argument to be made for that. Say you have a successful book, or you have something that looks like it might be going to go somewhere, you're then almost shackled to a kind of career that you never intended. Particularly if you've got young children. You might have had the impulse to do all sorts of creative things, but now suddenly you're called a novelist, and there are all sorts of expectations then with, 'Well, can you do it again?' And they might let you do it once or twice again, and then they might say, 'No, you can't do it again.' 'But if you never wanted to do that in the first place, that becomes a problem. You know, I'm not trying to wriggle out of anything here, or second-guess anything, but when you said that thing about a frequency, I mean, it's like fresh air to me. It's this thing of nobody is putting obstacles in your way, which has become so much my experience. 'Convince me, convince me.' It's kind of like it unshackled me.' Which leads us to McCabe's new novel, Goldengrove, narrated by one Chenevix Meredith, an undercover British government operative recounting his days spent masquerading as a theatrical agent while attempting to identify Irish terrorist networks. It's a pungent journey into the underbelly of 1970s Dublin , an homage to the post-Baggotonia era, a landscape of fleapit cinemas showing soft porn and 'continental movies', of crime jazz and Brit noir nostalgia, a time when gossip columnists and Celtic playboys rubbed up against left-wing agitprop and confrontational theatre practitioners. 'In the early '70s Dublin was just getting the tail end of that Royal Court explosion that began with [John] Osborne and David Storey and other people,' says McCabe. 'We had our own politics, because there was a lot of unfinished business here obviously, but the left-wing thing meant subsidised theatre, you know, soup and a roll, that kind of thing. I didn't really go for the agitprop because I found the discourse and the dialectic among left-wingers ... they were terribly boring f**king people, not a laugh to be found anywhere. 'You see it even more extreme these days. You know, you really want to lighten up, folks, because you're not having as big an impact on the world as you think you are. A lot of the stuff that I have in the book about the Matchbox Theatre and all that, the fact that it was being done was exciting, that was enough for me. But the people I hung around with, we weren't responsible enough. We were just 17, 18, years of age, really not ready for this revolutionary stuff in that sense. Artistically it was Dedelus, a bit of Bukowski maybe.' Goldengrove, like most of McCabe's books, exists in the queasy space between horror and comedy. How does he maintain the tonal balance? 'For me, all my life really, there has been a kind of an interplay between, 'Would you rather not be born at all?' or 'What a brilliant place this beautiful world is.' And I can never make up my mind, that's the God's honest truth!' Goldengrove is published by Unbound. Patrick McCabe, David Murphy and Michael Lightborne perform Howl On as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival on June 22nd, at 7pm at UCC
