It’s 40 years since writer, performer and musician Little John Nee settled in Galway, drawn here by the vibrant arts scene of the 1980s. He’s made a remarkable creative contribution in those four decades and the ideas keep on coming, as he tells JUDY MURPHY ahead of his latest production, The Art of Gentle Punk.

“I’m the best darmaphone player in the world,” says Little John Nee, a highly creative, imaginative man, but not one normally known for blowing his own trumpet.

He’s laughing as he makes this extravagant claim, explaining the reason is simple.

It’s because he’s invented this fantastic instrument that will get its debut public outing in his new show, The Art of Gentle Punk, at Druid’s Mick Lally Theatre in the city from next Wednesday to Friday, January 21-23.

The beautiful darmaphone that he’s so happy with has two keyboards, a cello and a trumpet, all neatly housed in a handsome wooden cabinet. Made by luthier Dominic Lyons, it was designed by Little John and is a perfect example of how his imagination never stops working.

That’s also evident in the show itself. Little John outlines the plot, bringing its world and inhabitants to vivid life – and that’s minus the songs and music he’s written for it, or its inventive set, including a painted pastoral backdrop, which was created by his friend, artist and fellow musician Philip Lindley.

The Art of Gentle Punk is set in Donegal in the near future, in a restored famine village that has fallen out of local ownership and into the hands of a wonderfully named English-owned vulture fund.

Like all good futuristic fiction, this show tells us a lot about the present. Little John doesn’t want to reveal too much, but the inhabitants are living against the backdrop of a very unstable wider world.

Different characters live in houses that were previously owned by people who held particular professions, like the local blacksmith or undertaker. In this semi-magic village space, new residents take on traits of the original inhabitants.

The show’s creation involved lots of trips to Bunratty Folk Village in Clare. Little John loves the memories that space evokes, especially in the forge.

Residents in his fictitious famine village include Joe Petrol, a character that first appeared in Letterkenny in the late 1970s. Little John was in a punk band then and Joe Petrol was his stage name.

He’s referenced Joe Petrol in other shows – as Lord Petrol who lived in squats in Islington – but the punk was a sideline character.

Not any more. In this futuristic famine village, Joe Petrol is wondering what he can usefully do in a world that’s become so dark.

And the punk, who views himself as an artist rather than an entertainer, feels he must veer away from populism and ‘give people what they didn’t know they wanted’.

“When people think of punk, they think of guitars being smashed and worse,” says Little John, but adds that when he was in his late teens, at school in Donegal, that wasn’t true.

“It was about people playing music, having fun.”

Likewise when he moved to London, where punk bands were listening to reggae music and being influenced by it.

Music and song have always been intrinsic to Little John’s shows, which fuse vaudeville, punk, folk theatre and magical realism.

And that’s true on this occasion too.

Dapperly dressed in a tweed suit, created for Joe Petrol by costume designer Róisín Lennon, Little John explains that The Art of Gentle Punk is the third in a series, along with its predecessors, Nettle Horse and Zeitgeist Jukebox. They’re connected thematically and aesthetically rather than story-wise, he adds.

Pictured: Little John Nee outside Druid’s Mick Lally Theatre where he will be performing The Art of Gentle Punk next week. PHOTO: MARY McGRAW.