Numbskull - the latest story from Brum's seanchai Paul Murphy

Paul Murphy with David Squire in Numbskull

The tradition of storytelling in Ireland has a long and colourful history. It is embedded in ancient Celtic culture, where the traditional Irish storyteller was known as a seanchai, translated as ‘the bearer of old lore’. Even today the art of the seanchai is thriving in Ireland and there are regional competitions every summer to find out which county has the best local storyteller.

Scratch beneath the surface in Ireland and seanchaithe are to be found in every family and every town in the land, often in bars where they enthral and entertain both visitors and locals with their stories, myths, poems and histories (especially when the dark stuff begins to flow). Some seanchaithe are poets, some are musicians or bards, but all share both a passion and a wild imagination when it comes to transmitting the wisdom, legend and folk-lore through story which is known as glefisa or ‘the bright knowledge’.

A citizen of Birmingham who I believe is a contender for our local title of seanchai is Paul Murphy of Cotteridge. I first met Paul in the early 1980s, shortly after he had given up his teaching job at Holy Trinity school in Small Heath and was carving out a new role as a community educator working for NAME, the National Anti-Racist Movement in Education.

Paul had been living in England since the 1960s and his journey from Belfast and early life in the UK is captured in the verses of one of his own songs where he describes his beatnik lifestyle in the midst of the British hippy movement with nostalgic wit. Paul also has the distinction of being mentioned in the autobiography of heavy metal icon Lemmy from the band Motorhead, with whom he shared digs around that period.

Very often Irish people who lived in Britain during the 1970s will speak of how the community “kept their heads down”, especially in cities like Birmingham which experienced some of the darkest events of the so-called ‘Troubles’. On first meeting Paul one is immediately struck by his gentle and pacifist character, but in front of an audience he is certainly not a man to keep his head down for very long. Paul’s performances are known for his driving energy, he is by no means a rebel rouser but I have witnessed him lift the roof off many a back-street Digbeth public house with just a guitar and the human voice.

In the true bardic style all of Paul’s poems, plays, stories and songs are self-penned and his songs range in style from the roguish stomping megafolk for which he was known when fronting the 12 piece Birmingham band The Destroyers to more tender and haunting acoustic melodies about Dark Rosaleen, The Glen and the Lagan.

Paul’s latest piece of work is not a song but a collaborative feature movie made with David Squire and Birmingham based film director John Humphries. Rather aptly perhaps for our Brummie seanchai, the movie Numbskull is about the skull of the region’s greatest story teller William Shakespeare. Based around the murky legend of how Shakespeare’s skull was stolen from his Stratford grave in the late 1700s and reputedly ended up in a crypt at Beoley, the movie tells the story of two men searching for the skull with the unsettling assistance of a talking beetle.

Shot in locations around Birmingham and surrounding areas, the movie uses powerful imagery and minimal dialogue to tell this strange story exploring local mythology in a contemporary setting. The movie is a beautifully shot, art house production which has used, to quote Paul “a punk methodology to create something of appeal to anyone who loves off-kilter films”.

Paul told me how their small production crew, Compact Cinema, set out with minimal resources to make a feature movie. Having worked on various film based projects with John Humphries over the last couple of decades, Paul was acutely aware of John’s huge technical and artistic talent both behind a camera and sat in the editing seat. Fed up with the customary process of traipsing around grant making bodies to try and get funding for such a venture, the team decided to quite literally ‘do it themselves’ (hence the use of “a punk methodology”) and Compact Cinema and Numbskull were thus born.

Numbskull was premiered in March this year at the Electric Cinema in Station Street, Birmingham as part of the Flat Pack Film Festival. From beginning to end it is an engaging and entertaining piece of cinema, an intriguing study of a very odd relationship powerfully told with moments of comedy, pathos and beautiful locational photography. The two main parts played by Paul and David Squire were quite brilliant and their unfolding relationship was captivating as the psychological power of Shakespeare’s gravestone curse took hold in the most interesting ways. In the style of a Roald Dahl short story, this tale has more than one unexpected twist.

I am hoping that Compact Cinema will get the movie screened at more local film festivals in the future as this is one movie I would like to watch again. I am also pleased to affirm that the art of the seanchai is alive and well in the urban West Midlands!