Meryl Streek: Looking For Justice
Protests don’t find their success in metaphors, the change they seek doesn’t come from reading between the lines or dissecting a puzzle, they’re terribly obvious and loud, demanding to be heard for all of their struggle. The same goes for MERYL STREEK. Upon arrival he made sure to make a statement with his debut single Death To The Landlord, one that rallied people around him and aimed to put an expiration date on abusive private ownership. Fast forward a couple of years and Laurant Barnard is on the cusp of releasing his second album under the MERYL STREEK moniker: Songs For The Deceased, a name to be taken literally.
Songs For The Deceased comes from a place of frustration, after an incredibly powerful and stand out debut record in 796 there’s some catharsis to be expected, maybe even an impact on the topics like classism that 796 covers. However, Songs For The Deceased is here simply because nothing has changed. On the contrary, since 2022 globally the shifts that we’ve seen have descended governments further into bigotry and fascism.
Barnard admits to being, as he says “a huge true crime fan” and says that there’s a lot of cases that have happened in Ireland “that they don’t really want to get to the UK. I was just like, ‘fuck it. Let’s make a record about these stories’.” You can listen to the new record passively, feel generally empowered by Barnard’s striving Irish accent and it will turn your steps into stomps, but if you absorb his surreal approach to lyricism – during If This Is Life he delivers “I want to live a life over 50, like so many failed to do.”
In June 2005, Terrence Wheelock was arrested by the Gardaí in relation to a stolen car, he was taken to the police station, and hours later found unconscious in his cell, fell into a coma and died three months later. This is just one of the few cases that Barnard finds himself obsessed with, and has looked into with great detail. “He had nothing to do with this case whatsoever. It’s because the police had a personal vendetta against his family and older brother that did have dealings with the police over the years, and I think a couple of weeks before Terrence went into the cell, [Gardaí] shouted out saying ‘we’re gonna get you’.”
There’s a lot of injustice that Barnard has witnessed in Ireland, apart from the Terrence Wheelock case, he talks about the Stardust Disaster that happened on Valentine’s Day 1981 where 48 lives were claimed due to a fire. Somehow, the decision was made to award the owners of Stardust over €700,000 in damages, The Irish Times reported that a mother of two daughters in the fire, Mary and Martina Keegan, only received £7,500 as compensation for their deaths.
A track that differs from the broader topics on the new record is Paddy, an ode to Barnard’s late uncle, it’s interesting because he’s painted as someone who lives the defiant life just because he wanted to, seeking knowledge and living what interested him. “In the last 12 years; I’ve had my dad, my stepdad, my uncle, my two grandparents, and someone else that I probably can’t think of, die. When my stepdad died I just quit drinking, and he didn’t die because of drink or anything, but I just quit drinking. And I remember saying to myself, ‘we are all gonna die at any given moment in time, and no matter what we do in life, it’s gonna be forgotten about’.” But in this case, Barnard chose to immortalise not only his uncle but the admiration for how he lived his life, it’s a sweet gesture that sticks out amongst the avalanche delivery of the rest of the album.
Collectively, those deaths became a catalyst for what MERYL STREEK would go on to be, a visceral, teeth baring, dismantling act operating on the larger machine at work. “I just snapped, and I went, ‘fuck this I just going to do [MERYL STREEK] and not give a shit’ you know?” A defining moment feels almost romantic, but without dramatising it, it was just a turning point for him. Still, even with that, Barnard describes his life as “a tiny box bedroom in my ma’s house. You know what I mean? And I’ve worked my whole life, you know. I’ve got fuck all to show for it apart from this music.”
All of these little details make MERYL STREEK what it is, and they’re all sobering, Barnard could be your favourite artist and you could put him on a pedestal – although he probably wouldn’t want you to – and he’d still be a guy, very much like a lot of people of his age, still living with their parents because that’s the only choice they’ve despite trying as hard as possible. The reality is you can only do so much with the cards that you’re dealt, whether you fold or gamble them doesn’t really matter when the game is so heavily rigged.
You’ve got to be crafty, one thing that Barnard is, growing up and hearing the likes of BLACK FLAG, and realising the best chance at getting his ilk of punk played on the radio now would be to back it up with a dance track. What separates Barnard from many is that he recognises the inequality that the working class face when looking for justice, so like in this case, he makes sure to have cards up his sleeve.
If there’s one thing to take from Songs For The Deceased, and MERYL STREEK as a whole, it would be: get angry. For those who wrongfully died, for not getting the chance you should’ve gotten, for the fact that there’s generations that are being pushed and pushed into immobility. It rolls back round to the line from If This Is Life “If this is life, then I don’t want it”.
Songs For The Deceased is out now via Venn Records.
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