IT'S been over two years since Jinx Lennon was last interviewed in these pages and in that time the Dundalk native has been keeping himself busy on a number of fronts. He's played the festival circuit including Electric Picnic and Oxegen, been the subject of an RTE television and radio documentary and even supported Christy Moore at the singers behest, while his life and musical partner Paula Flynn scored a big hit with her Nouvelle Vague-ish cover of David Bowie’s 'Let's Dance'.

He's also completed work on the follow up to 2006s widely lauded Know Your Station Gouger Nation!!!, a chronicle of everyday observations, detailing the grips of modern life, the trivial pursuits, the absurdly banal and the banal absurdities as seen through the eyes of a man torn between the guises of lunatic preacher and factory-line worker and played through the hands of an anti-folk punk rocker with more then a passing interest in hip-hop.

While welcoming of this increased exposure, it has also necessitated a change in Jinx, who, it can be said, has always been something of a divisive character. Eager to address the issues of how he is perceived, Lennon told the Cork Independent, ahead of his upcoming gig at the Crane Lane tonight (Thursday, November 13) how he has become more comfortable in his own stage skin in recent times, the results of which are a more confident and focused live performance.

"I have developed the stage show to a point that I am really confident in the songs myself and Miss Paula Flynn currently perform for the set list onstage as opposed to where it was at even two years ago. Sometimes that has been a problem in the past. I have been perceived in the past as a neo comical entity which was galling to me but understandable to a certain extent so I have been definitely aiming to counter that perception with the newer material and the way we present ourselves onstage."

What Jinx's new record actually sounds like is anyone's guess. Whereby on stage he is the minimalist personified, letting his force-of-nature persona and irrepressible energy boil over in a blur of rapid strumming, elemental casio-keyboard beats and evangelical outbursts, on record his music takes on a more studied approach with frequent contributors, such as Cork's own Stanley (he of the Super 800 fame), bringing their own diverse touches to Jinx's stripped down anti-folk stories. The new record, due out early next year, promises even more radical changes.

"I have been very much trying to take things forward all the time. Its very important to me to try and be an original entity and one of the best ways to do that is to use your own voice or accent. It's no coincidence that anyone I feel an affinity with in this country use their own accents while striving for originality. One of the complaints about the last album was that the music failed to match the lyrics. It took a while to work out how I was going to improve on this because to me the lyrics come first so there was a couple of false starts cos I wasn't happy with the music beneath the words. "I spent two years listening to old rockabilly, stuff I heard on great websites like Honey Where You Been So Long, which specialised in blues and roots music from the 20s and 30s which led me to the great compilations like 'Goodbye Babylon' and stuff recorded by Lomax in the prisons, Howlin Wolf, old Gospel. Also I got back into psychedelic music in a big way, especially the German 70s bands. Also I got into some Fluxus, Musique Concrete stuff, Rhys Chatham, New York No Wave."