Anthony Toner, live in Belfast

Venue:

The Sunflower Bar

Date: 18/12/2025

Belfast’s Sunflower Folk Club is a bit of an oddity, but a welcome one. It happens every Thursday at the Sunflower Bar in a central Belfast backstreet and is unashamedly a throwback to the 1970s. For a start, it’s an English-style folk club on the 60s/70s model, on an island that has only ever had two or three clubs on those lines – happening in an upstairs room of a licensed premises, two halves with floor singers in the first and a guest artist in the second (or a mix of both in the two halves) plus a raffle.

The club is in part a homage to a Sunflower Folk Club that ran from 1977 into the mid-80s at a different pub that was also called the Sunflower, on an even more desolate thoroughfare of Belfast – a venue that was front-page news twice in the earlier 70s for fatal bombings and shootings by terrorists. I imagine the publican must have bitten the late Geoff Harden’s hand off when he offered to run a weekly folk club in the upper room there in 1977. Barry Moore (the future Luka Bloom) was the first guest and it was immediately successful, with Geoff using his long-established connections with the English and Scottish folk scenes, and with musicians from the Republic of Ireland, to make the Sunflower FC a fabulous outpost of music from the best troubadours and small groups of the era on these islands in a city of ‘Troubles’ and largely off the map for touring artists. It was also a crucial hub for local talent to get their first foot on the ladder of becoming (semi-)professional musicians/artists.

I was delighted to make the best of Geoff’s wonderful recordings of the three nights Dick Gaughan played the club (1979, 1970, 1982) available as an ‘extra’ limited-edition CD release, ‘Untroubled: Live in Belfast 1979-82’, earlier this year within the Kickstarter campaign around the Gaughan box set ‘R/evolution: 1969/83’ – a tribute to Geoff’s vision and industry, and to an embattled era in Belfast, as well as being brilliant performances whatever their origins.

The original Sunflower was burned down in 1991, though it had been derelict for a while before that. In 2012, local publican Pablo Donald – previously known as manager of the popular ‘The John Hewitt’, long a hub for live music and literary types – opened the current Sunflower Bar, in a backstreet off Royal Avenue. It had been a licensed premised under different names before that, as far back as the 19th century, but I think it had been out of action for a few years before Pablo brought it back to life.

The place has maintained (uniquely in central Belfast) the kind of door armour that was a feature of the 70s in these parts. I think Donald intended the vibe of the bar, let alone its forbidding doorway, to be a nod the previous Sunflower, that era and the music associated with it – certainly, he established numerous weekly music sessions in the downstairs bar (Irish trad, gypsy jazz, ukulele get-togethers etc.) and displayed posters and memorabilia of its predecessor on the walls. The upstairs bar was and is used for all sorts of ticketed live music events, available to hire for such. I held a free-in punk revival gig there in the dead zone between Christmas a New Year 2019 that really annoyed the man who is now the post-Pablo proprietor, who was on duty as bar manager and clearly didn’t expect hundreds of people to turn up. To be fair, neither did I.

Pablo retired in 2024 – fed up with local politics and what he saw as a general malaise in Belfast, deciding to go and relax in the Netherlands. I don’t blame him. He sold the Sunflower and his other premises, the American Bar – another terrific music hub and old-school bar in the city – to staff members. His contribution to musical and social life in Belfast in the last 25-odd years was significant – and the new publicans are keeping his vision alive and well. (Indeed, Chris Roddy – legendary publican of the late, lamented music hub the Rotterdam Bar, a street away from the American Bar – runs a fabulous ‘Saturday Afternoon Club’ at the American these days, keeping alive the vision he had for folk, rock, roots and blues for around 20 years in the last century, just round the corner… which was itself a kind of continuation of the legendary rock/blues sessions his dad ran in the 70s as publican during music’s ‘dark ages’ in Belfast at The Pound.)

Anyway… the new iteration of the Sunflower Folk Club also began in 2012, in the new bar’s upper room, and celebrated its own 13th anniversary last Thursday, 18 December. Hats off to club president Fergus Woods and Mary, his musical and familial associate! I’ve only been to the club two or three times, from memory, but each time I’ve been struck by how it gives a platform to people who seem to belong to the 70s – their musical style or repertoire or haircuts, or sometimes all three. That isn’t a criticism, just an observation. I’ve observed something similar at Nine Below Zero gigs in Belfast – groups of people in often extreme versions of mod haircuts and 60s clothing. My thoughts are the same: ‘Where do these people go when they’re not here?’

Given the truly appalling state of the modern world and the relentless pace of gadgetry and technology, things that just ‘aren’t important’, in direct disproportion to morals and values worth holding on to, it seems to me that preserving corners of the past – and living as much as one can in spite of modernity – is a noble thing to do. Even if those things are easily lampooned. I’m used to people thinking I’m a dinosaur because I choose not to have a mobile telephone, so I can’t criticise people with haircuts and beards like the Dubliners or repertoires from the days when people sang earnestly on marches against this or that in the 60s. Good for them, say I!

I can, though, criticise Fergus – and I do so in the gentlest and most well-intentioned way – for keeping his door price down to £5 for all 13 years of his club and counting – tickets never available in advance but only on the door. It could hardly be more of a two-fingers to commerce if it tried. Fergus announced this perpetuation-of-the-fiver like a victory at the club last week, and in a way I salute him. I understand the pride in delivering a night out for people across decades for an unchanging and increasingly modest sum. But I’m also aware, from reading myriad editions of ‘Melody Maker’ and ‘Folk Review’ from the early 70s in research for books and box set essays, that the nail in the coffin of the British folk club scene that grew exponentially in the mid-60s was precisely that – a wrong-headed, pervasive belief in keeping door prices ‘the same as they always had been’.

By 1974 it became a crisis for folk music’s professional artists in Britain – trying to make a living in the face of everything else rising in cost while the (amateur) gate-keepers of their touring infrastructure insisted on keeping prices at 1965 levels (12p or whatever it was) for their punters. The decimation of the British folk club scene down to a handful of scattered survivors these days – many still run by elderly committees of people who have been there for 50 years or more – is entirely down to that. Dick Gaughan tried to bang heads together in 1981 with a conference of folk scene stakeholders in London, but inevitably (in my view) it led nowhere. Put simply, if Fergus put it to his regulars that a higher charge would allow professional guests (and this is a small part of what the SFC does – not every week, but periodically) to receive a more meaningful sum and for the club to potentially book the odd pro guest hitherto out of reach, I would be surprised if his regulars fainted in shock or disagreement.

And after that leisurely introduction, let us now progress to the purpose of this piece… and yes, there is one.

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Anthony Toner was the guest at the 13th anniversary SFC gathering last week, playing his third consecutive pre-Christmas gig there – in what must surely now become a tradition! (Although the figure involved in his fee need not become traditional. See above.)
Anthony is from the north coast of Northern Ireland and has huge experience as a musician, beginning as a pro in a besuited cabaret/dance band in the late 80s – a kind of tail end of the showband era – an unglamorous apprenticeship zigzagging around rural hotels and lounge bars in backwoods NI, when the long shadow of the Miami Showband massacre of 1975 was still visceral. It’s an era and a cupboard of memories that he conjures up brilliantly in ‘Good People’, one of the standout songs on his latest album, ‘Long Long Way’ (2025, no comma). After that, Anthony worked as a local newspaper journalist by day, bar musician and emerging songwriter by night, playing with numerous combinations of people in what’s known as ‘the triangle’ area of Coleraine, Portrush and Portstewart – including second guitar in Woodstock rocker Henry McCullough’s band during the 90s.

It’s often said that musos in the Triangle are all about musicianship while those in Mid-Ulster are all about songwriting. Certainly, Henry McCullough was a textbook affirmation of that – a north-coaster playing hugely extended, groove-based country-rock and blues workouts on the slenderest of songs. Anthony is 100% a songs man at heart – indeed, recorded works under his own name rarely feature solos and when they’re there, they punctuate rather than exasperate. But that being said, he is also an *exceptionally* good electric guitar soloist whenever he’s in a context that requires that. I hired him as MD for a one-off stage project a couple of years ago and some of his off-the-cuff rock solos in rehearsals were stunning. The gig itself is a blur – but I’m sure he was great there too! Anthony’s main regular outlet for electric playing these days is as second guitarist and featured vocalist with the Ronnie Greer Blues Band, often acting as MD when Ron – on lead guitar, as the punters expect – pulls together a ‘big band’ unit for his larger bookings. Ron is a veteran local legend in NI (from the 70s Pound Club era), hugely in demand for gigs and always keen to share his audience with as many of his musical pals as the stage or the fee will allow.

Anthony’s first album, ‘Eventually’ (2002), as its name suggests, gathered together the songs he’d been performing as a moonlighting bar player for the previous few years – its standout being ‘Cousins At Funerals’, which still features in his live shows. In this decade, he moved from the local newspaper world to being manager of Flowerfield Arts Centre – one of a dozen or so borough council-run venues around NI providing community-focused arts/crafts offerings and monthly gigs featuring touring artists. After a few years of this, still honing his craft as a night-time working musician, Anthony released ‘A Sky for Every Day’ (2008), his second album, which included ‘Sailortown’ – his breakthrough local radio hit. This was more or less the start of Anthony’s career as a full-time professional musician. I’m hazy about the chronology but around this time he moved to Belfast and gave up the Flowerfield managing (and instead becoming a regular performer there and a regular on the NI arts centre circuit, offering more or less annual gigs to those who can guarantee a crowd – as both Anthony solo and the Ronnie Greer band can).

Since that breakthrough 2008 album, Anthony has self-released 13 more – I suppose eight ‘albums proper’ plus one best-of featuring fresh interpretations of fan favourites (‘Emperor’, 2022 – a great place for a newcomer to start), one album in collaboration with poet Frank Ormsby (‘The Kiss of Light’, 2018), two albums of covers (‘Ghost Notes’ Vols. 1 and 2) and one splendid mini-album of guitar instrumentals (‘Earlyriser’, 2024), mostly from the Irish tradition and a nice flat-picked contrast/addition to his usual American fingerstyle influences.

But getting back to the gig…

I’ve seen Anthony performing three shows in the past three months or so – and each time has been a fantastic experience. For me, each one was a truly life-affirming, heart-warming and soulful performance; a respite from the ghastliness of the world. On the previous two occasions – one an arts centre in Antrim with tiered seating, the other a music club in Rathfriland run by indefatigable promotional personality Andy Peters in a historical building, with cabaret-style seating – Anthony performed for 90 minutes or more. At the Sunflower, his compressed set of an hour-or-so (following an hour of floor singers) served to highlight just how many songs he has from a multi-album career that are now ‘classics’ – ‘East of Louise’, ‘The Road to Fivemiletown’, ‘Cousins at Funerals’ and more.

He resurrected a relatively obscure song from his 2013 album at the show, ‘Most People are a Pain in the Ass’ – in the manner of Randy Newman or Loudon Wainwright (both influences on his writing) – and sure enough, it’s another classic. In a way, it was hiding in plain sight, and yet in being performed at slower tempo than the album version and minus the soft-rock/country backing of drums, fiddle, bass and piano, it is immediately so much more meaningful and impactful.

I’m not as wild about his breakthrough hit ‘Sailortown’ as everyone else is – perhaps overfamiliarity (it is to Anthony what ‘Streets of London’ is to Ralph McTell and Ralph’s audience’s expectations) – but it seems to me that ever since then (in terms of the sort of songwriting that appeals to me), Anthony’s work has got better and better. His artistry is at a truly international level these days.

His most recent albums are revealing that artistry consistently. They have, I think, more grit than before, as with the stripped-down version of ‘Most People…’, but they are still clothed in melody and ease on the ear. An iron fist of razor-sharp observation and experience in a velvet glove. Songs like ‘Good People’ from ‘Long Long Way’ (2025) are amazing distillations of aspects of ‘the Northern Ireland experience’ without any message or moralising rammed home, a bit like the “Fermanagh Gothic” of ‘The Road to Fivemiletown’ from 2013’s ‘Sing Under Bridges’, although that is more a work of craftsmanship – storytelling not from personal experience. Anthony is a devotee of poetry and literary fiction and he has the rare ability to draw from those worlds imagery, style and techniques in service to songwriting that somehow still manages to be popular, to appeal to a lot of people who wouldn’t have his level of interest in the literary world. (I speak as one myself – I’m a reader, but rarely of poetry or literary fiction.)

‘Exit Wounds’ (from ‘Ink’, 2017) is another masterpiece, also performed at the Sunflower, which draws from personal experience. Using an approach redolent of Guy Clark’s ‘Randall Knife’, a sort of talking blues narrative that contains layers, it combines wit and profundity, personal reminiscence and nostalgia for lost innocence with a kind of warning from history – two children being shown a handgun in a bedroom by a swaggering adult in small-town Ulster at the height of the Troubles.

If I could risk a very general summary about Anthony’s music, I would say that, for me, the works that draw on experience are more powerful and appealing than the ones that are constructed from other materials. ‘East of Louise’ is a brilliant piece of wordplay and craftsmanship and a catchy tune but things like ‘Address Book’ or ‘Good People’ from ‘Long Long Way’ (2025) or ‘An Alphabet’ from ‘Ink’ (2017) or indeed ‘Paperbacks and Ashtrays’ from ‘The Book of Absolution’ (2022), a stunning work that I don’t think he’s ever performed live, are on a different level.

Anthony told me after the show that his public has effectively decided what songs from the recent ‘Long Long Way’ have made it into his stage repertoire – people asking for ‘Address Book’ and ‘Good People’ (my own two standout picks from the album) plus ‘The Simpler the Song’, which attests to his ethos of keeping his music lean and accessible to the listener; which, in some cases, of course, disguises a lightly-worn expertise in crafting such outward simplicity. He had reckoned that people would go for another song on the album, the breeziest toe-tapper thereupon, but no – ‘no one’s mentioned it!’ he said.

The remarkable thing about Anthony’s career in music is that he has ALL of these facets – the humorous, fun, crafted stuff and the ostensibly ‘heavy’ artistry (plus deft instrumentals) – and he has managed to meld them into an onstage offering that appeals to a sizeable audience of gig-goers at arts centre/theatre level, and has been able to translate that offering (including those ‘Northern Ireland experience’ songs) to folk club audiences in Scotland and England. The past few years, Barbara Dickson has chosen Anthony to be her regular support artist on tours in Great Britain and I’m glad to see that he’s been able to build on this and get bookings thereabouts under his own steam. The Irish Sea is 12 miles between Scotland and Ireland at its narrowest but the barrier that the Irish Sea represents economically and psychologically to musicians (going both ways) and to tour agents can’t be overstated.

As an aside, in a text that is, I concede, not short of such things, I find it intriguing that so much of Anthony’s music – especially from ‘Ink’ (2017) onwards – connects with me because my own tastes in music, including acoustic music, are very much for the British/Irish ‘sound’ and for artists from these islands, whereas Anthony draws unapologetically from American influences (indeed, his last number at the Sunflower was a cover of Randy Newman’s ‘Rollin’’). I think the authentic voice must be the clincher – a resolute avoidance of mid-Atlantic accents and vernacular: like Van Morrison intoning about pasty suppers and Fusco’s ice cream over James Taylor’s guitar playing. But not that ridiculous…

The audience:

At a fiver in, for an act like Anthony Toner, the place was packed – standing room only. Indeed, watching Anthony trying to ‘hold’ a table before the show for some pals he was expecting was amusing. Punters circled like cashmere-coated vultures. The unspoken pressure to give up the table was almost palpable! I wonder if those pals arrived? I lost track of it after a while. In general, the demographic was 50s/60s with a few younger people, including my pal Fyoga (a decade below that) and at least one twenty-something girl from Chicago who did a turn and wished everyone ‘happy holidays’ (a US term for Christmas that I find strangely annoying, but it’s not her fault).

It made me think..

That in these times not only of geopolitical misery and despair but all sorts of other threats to life and well-being, including the diminishing viability of small music venues and music artists at small to medium level, we must grasp hold of these opportunities to enjoy music performances at this pub / club level. I know there are some on the Afterword whose gig-going seems to revolve solely around stadiums and arenas and the people who play them, but my music-loving life has always revolved around seeing it in small venues – the logistics and ambience suit me as a night out experience, and the music I want to hear almost entirely happens at the pub to theatre / small hall level. And almost every musician of note will have started at this level. Personally, for a number of reasons, I think the era of the touring artist is coming to an end. Live music will, I think, increasingly become a local and non-professional or semi-professional thing. I’m glad there are still places in NI – often run by labour-of-love merchants like Fergus Woods or Andy Peters or Chris Roddy (all mentioned above) – where I can see and hear music of the quality provided on this occasion by Anthony. And I’m glad there are just about enough performing opportunities to sustain, for a while yet, cottage-industry artists like Anthony. But I don’t foresee things improving in the landscape of music-making and performing. Let’s support and enjoy our musical friends and heroes while we can!

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