Colin H on Stuart Bailie’s ‘Trouble Songs’
There aren’t many people from Northern Ireland who have made a living in what was the music media, but Stuart Bailie and me – for certain periods of time – have been two such curiosities. Stuart’s heartland is in the punk era he grew up in and in young people thereafter making noisy music; mine is in pre-punk musical history, only occasionally popping in to visit the here and now. Aside from neighbourly greetings and the odd cup of coffee there has never been a Venn diagram within which we have converged. And then Stuart’s long-promised book about ‘the Troubles’, and music’s part in its downfall (or vice versa), started to become a distinct possibility.
I was surprised but touched when Stuart asked me to help him with some of the logistical aspects of bringing his magnum opus to the masses. Knowing very well the lonely path of the musical history author, I hope I’ve been able to give some moral support along the way, too. The offer last year of generous part-funding towards printing costs from the British Council – provided that he delivered finished copies in time for a Troubles anniversary event in mid-April – finally made the oft-talked-about book a real project with a real deadline. The printing button was pressed on March 1 and 2,000 copies arrived last week. For the three or four months prior to that, a great deal of track was thrown down in front of the train. It was exciting stuff.
Knowing that Stuart – self-publishing – had opted to use Kickstarter to help generate sales and word of mouth interest, I offered to do an Afterword interview to help get the word out, beyond his core constituency. Unlike several publishing people who couldn’t see, from his proposals and sample chapters, the potential for the book beyond a purely Northern Ireland audience, I firmly believe it *is* a book that would hold a reader with a general music history interest but maybe otherwise unfamiliar or only casually familiar with the specific context of ‘the Troubles’ and Northern Ireland. I’ve read and enjoyed, for example, lots of books about the Mississippi delta and the birth of the blues – I’m not black, I’ve never been to America, I’ve only a passing interesting in listening to blues music, I’ve no experience of segregation… I rest my case.
In contrast, I *am* from Northern Ireland but I do my best to avoid local news, local politics and people banging on about ‘legacy issues’ and ‘identity’. I despise the Troubles and those who caused and perpetuated them, and I despise the self-indulgent, overpaid so-called public representatives at Stormont who have been sulking in public for over a year now on full pay instead of doing their jobs. So, I generally do my musical archaeology in worlds beyond NI, where the sunny uplands of the imagination and a happier past lie.
That being said, Stuart had both the stomach and the passion to trawl through 40 years of misery and bigotry to see what moments of clarity, redemption or fun that music around here had offered – and he’s done a tremendous job, with many surprises along the way.
The core of ‘Trouble Songs’, though, is the punk era of the late 70s. Belfast has basically only ever, musically, been about two things: the blues and punk, the former kicking off in the 60s, the latter in the 70s. In the 90s, there were still lots of old blues guys playing in Belfast pubs and touring Europe on the back of what they did in the 60s; now, in the 2010s, there’s a load of old punks touring Europe and Japan on the back of what they did in the 70s.
As Afterword regulars will know, I have a fascination with old punks – I’ll gladly check out the YouTube clips and watch the BBC4 documentaries (isn’t it amazing that no one has yet made a retrospective Sham 69 doc?) – though it’s of no musical interest, per se; more anthropological. A bit like Attenborough documentaries on Antarctica – great to watch and read about, but you wouldn’t want to go there… Luckily, Stuart ‘goes there’ for us. And who knows, maybe on the back of his book, I’ll go to a first punk gig. XSLF (a version of Stiff Little Fingers with 70s guys Henry Cluney and Jim Reilly involved) will be playing at the book’s launch night in Belfast in May, smashing the system once again, with Terri Hooley DJing, hectoring and re-staking his claim to being the ‘Godfather of Punk’ in NI against the various other candidates. Perhaps tellingly, but not deliberately, I find myself with a ticket to see an old 60s guy (Michael Chapman) on the same night – so maybe that momentary Venn diagram is already dissolving. Nevertheless, at some point I *do* hope to see Petesy Burns’ Arse. Then again, Petesy – veteran of Stalag 17, the Outcasts and now his Arse – was apparently at the first half of a Newcastle, Co. Down, gig by my favourite all-girl Americana band Wookalily yesterday, and I turned up for the second half. So maybe I am destined to never to actually meet these Belfast punk icons of yore. Hey-ho…
Stuart’s social media crowd have done him proud so far on Kickstarter. The campaign runs for another 13 days, though, so if anything I’ve said – or anything that Stuart says in the interview below – piques your interest, give the fellow your £15 and stick it to The Man.
Here’s the link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1539271725/trouble-songs-a-book-about-music-and-conflict-in-n
In a spirit of camaraderie, I wore a Henry Cluney ‘two fingers’ badge at the interview (gleaned from the vicinity of one of his comebacks, though obviously I wasn’t at the gig…) though I’d prepared some questions to the soundtrack of Jethro Tull’s ‘Stand Up’. Nevertheless, I’ve written this intro blurb to the sound of The Motors’ ‘Peel Sessions’, dancing the night away, so maybe the equilibrium is restored…
The interview follows in the comments.
CH: So, Stuart: finished copies of the book arrived yesterday – did you think you’d get to this point?
Not really, no. I thought it was going to be one of the great unwritten books that people talk about in pubs. It felt very unloved for a long time. I wrote three chapters [initially]. I kind of thought, like a band that does demos, ‘I’ll write three chapters’ – and it went round the houses to agents and book publishers and then it became just embarrassing, meeting your friends: ‘How’s it going?’ ‘It’s not going…’ And then the British Council said, ‘We’ve got this conference in April next year – can you get it done in time?’ And I thought, ‘Actually, I should. I owe it to myself.’ It’s a story I feel has to be told. So, it’s done – and it’s actually amazing to have it out.
CH: Was it percolating in your head for a number of years?
Yeah. In 2007 the Arts Council came to me and said they were doing a ‘Troubles Archive’ series of essays, and could I do one on popular music. So, I did it and it came out in 2008. That was 5,000 words and when I’d done it I thought, ‘Oh… there’s so much that I haven’t done here’. In my bones then, I knew it was substantial. Subsequently, like a lot of old-school journalists, I’ve had the filing cabinets and manila folders full of crap cut out of Sunday papers, and when I was doing this book I got everything out. I spent about a month getting it all out and I thought, ‘Subconsciously, you’ve been getting ready for this book for about 30 years!’ So, it’s decades of thought, really, all suddenly gelling at the right time.
CH: Was this book part of your thinking when you left Oh Yeah?
Erm… The lightbulb moment at Oh Yeah was December 29th 2005 and that was the pub crawl with Snow Patrol that birthed the thought that became Oh Yeah. And as it went on there was less and less time to do other things. I think 2007 around Paddy’s Day was the ‘So Hard To Beat’ television documentary, and that was my big TV moment telling the story of music from Northern Ireland. Near the end [of my time as CEO at Oh Yeah] I had a wee bit of time and the book came into my mind and then I became an Industry Fellow at Queen’s [University]. There was a short-lived thing called the Collaborative Institute of Research in the Humanities…
CH: Hard to fit on a T-shirt…
Yes! It was a blue-sky idea and I think they did something on ‘Charlie Hebdo’ and disappeared shortly afterwards! But that was a feeling, again, of people wanting me to do stuff. Around that time, I wrote those three chapters – about the Miami Showband [massacre], about the anniversary of it, which was 2015; about the Clash gig that never happened; and about the Bono/Trimble/Hume thing.
CH: I recall you going to some kind of academic conference about the Clash and coming back very excited about that non-gig in Belfast affair…
Yeah, there was a symposium on the Clash gig that didn’t happen, in 2015 I think. I recorded all of the discussion panels and interviewed Paul Burgess from Ruefrex and a couple of other people, including the guy who drove the Clash around, called Peter Aiken, who I met subsequently. So, every so often I would talk to someone and a whole world full of ideas and thoughts came out. Certainly, at NME [when I was a staffer there] there were a lot of people still into the idea of ‘new journalism’ – Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and that whole idea of background and story and context, and there’s a wee bit of that in how I approach things. Here’s the story, but how did this guy arrive in the story, why did this guy end up writing lyrics for Stiff Little Fingers, and so on.
CH: There’s a school of thought that the NME was all about the likes of Paul Morley talking about themselves…
I arrived in London in ’85, tried to get work at the NME but they wouldn’t tolerate me and I ended up at Record Mirror. I got into NME in ’88. At that stage the Paul Morley/Ian Penman era had probably passed – Nietzsche, postmodernism, Roland Barthes, all of that.
CH: A load of self-indulgent crap…
Yeah. As a reader, I’d got into the NME before that when it would have been Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray and Tony Parsons, but when Paul Morley and Ian Penman arrived I sort of stopped buying it or would read other people’s copies. But I think there were always people who came from other places and tried to write different kinds of features. For me, discovering that anthology ‘The New Journalism’ by Tom Wolfe – I thought it was amazing, how people wrote magazine features in the 40s, 50s and 60s in America.
CH: It seems to me that many of your chapters in ‘Trouble Songs’ are closer in feel – without the wisecracks – to Charles Shaar Murray, like substantial pieces of reportage from the popular music front…
Yeah, I think Charlie Murray was probably influenced a bit by that era as well. A lot of the things that I wrote in the 80s and 90s weren’t that substantial – you’re throwing it out to the reading public two days after you’d met the person [you’re writing about]. So, when I started this I thought, ‘Well, I want to interview quite a lot of people, read quite a bit of background, think about it for a while and weave together a bigger story of conflict’. Jon Savage’s ‘England’s Dreaming’ [for instance] is also a story of slummy London, which punk came out of…
CH: Although there’s a school of thought that punk came out of the hairdressing scene in Bangor…
(laughs) Yes, and Dee Wilson – who I was briefly in a band with, and who was in the Idiots – is apparently writing a book about that, about the Trident and the Viking in Bangor, and I touched on that lightly [in ‘Trouble Songs’], so as not to tread on his toes. But yeah, the idea that punk in Northern Ireland started at a T Rex gig on the Isle of Man in 1975 and about five of the key players were all on the Isle of Man for that weekend [is in the book]. Creating a bit of a fable around a movement is always a bit of fun.
CH: Isle of Man: home of the Bee Gees and Ulster punk…
(laughs) Yeah, exactly.
CH: Most of the chapters of ‘Trouble Songs’ are quite episodic, and the stories your telling seem to lend themselves that that approach – allowing you to write each chapter as if it were a 4,000/5,000-word magazine piece…
Fairly early on I identified about 23 themes or stories and the idea was I was going to write 23 cover stories for the NME – it was almost like I was to spend a couple of weeks thinking about each, interview three or four people, and then spend four or five days on focused writing and then move on to the next bit. That was a very early decision, to do it that way.
CH: It was a good way to stop you getting bogged down in trying to find a ‘through narrative’ that probably wasn’t there – really, what you’re writing about actually was a series of scenes and episodes, with the exception of some of the 80s and 90s material, which was a case of referencing various bits and pieces – this record, that record…
Yeah. Early on I spoke to an agent who said, ‘Don’t be writing lists – this happened, this happened, this happened… – because it gets really boring’. So, it was, ‘What’s the yarn here, what’s the story?’ It was a case of trying to make it interesting to read, maybe at the expense of not mentioning three or four acts whose noses will be out of joint! But it was really to tell a better story.
CH: It’s a patchwork narrative…
Yeah. Having written those early three chapters, I then went back to the beginning and wrote it chronologically. The 60s bit, I dimly remember stuff on TV, on the news, and then you get up to ’73, ’74 and I relived every chapter from my own perspective. So, you’re kind of reliving the Troubles week by week, and that was quite… well, it was very emotional. I think one of the early things in the book [process for me] was to try not to judge people…
CH: I think one of the remarkable aspects of ‘Trouble Songs’ is that your own views are kept very much out of it. You very rarely express opinions, it’s mostly reportage. There are one or two people who possibly hang themselves by their own petards, or you allow interviewees to express views… Whether it be Free Presbyterians or the National Front, you don’t put your own views on the page. That must have been quite tricky to do – or was it in fact the easy option?
It was maybe easy, in a weird sense, because I could have moralised over certain parts of the book but other bits you go, ‘How do I manage this?’ Writing about H Block and Christy Moore and stuff… You think, ‘If I start to moralise over this it’s going to get difficult, and also it’s going to exclude potential readers’. So, I just thought I’d sit back a little bit, try and empathise when I can, try not to wag my finger too much, and every reader then can pick out their own moral response, really. I didn’t want to make it a ‘liberal left-wing thing’ or a ‘Prod thing’ or a ‘Republican thing’, because I think the whole saving of Northern Ireland through music has been people who have been encouraged to empathise or to look at each other’s issues. Politicians don’t do that anymore. When I came back from England in the late ‘90s there was that frisson of hope and trust that was around. So, there’s a bit of the spirit of that in it.
CH: There’s a ‘received wisdom’ that Ulster punk was one big ecumenical scene, yet you quote Brian Young [of Rudi] saying this whole happy-clappy idea is a myth. You were there – was it?
Well, ‘Good Vibrations’ was a good film, a little bit sentimental and a little bit Disneyfied in that everyone was together. The Harp Bar was a brutal, vicious place and the dancefloor was ruled by a rota of psychopaths. What you thought punk was about was all-welcoming and all-embracing, and to a degree it was, but also it was incredibly elitist.
CH: Three chords and several truths?
Yeah, and if you weren’t part of that early scene, if you hadn’t seen Rudi at the Glenmachan you were a newcomer, a poseur…
CH: There was a hierarchy?
Yeah, very much so. To my eternal shame I didn’t go to those early gigs, even though I was 15/16 at the time. My kids were a lot more adventurous at that age than I was. But Belfast was an odd place [then] – your parents were alarmed to see you go out. But it was great that Brian Young, and I think a few other people, alluded to it, that it wasn’t happy-clappy, that there was actually unpleasant people there as well as open-minded great people there, and it’s nice to be able to correct the record a bit – to say that, for what it was, there were musicians who also moonlighted in flute bands and, on the other side, there was clearly stuff going on as well.
CH: You make it clear that by the 80s anarcho-punk scene there were people involved who were, or became, terrorists…
Yes, obviously the Johnny Adair story has sort of been told, but to put it into the bigger story…
CH: Not a ‘significant’ musician?
No. I was aware of him at the time he was going to gigs but I didn’t see [his band] Offensive Weapon – I don’t think many people did, they didn’t do that many gigs in the city centre. With the Oi! thing that came along, with Garry Bushell and so on, there was an aggression and an unpleasantness – feed that into the Northern Ireland experience of sectarianism and violence and it became twice as unpleasant.
CH: It gave already unpleasant people a license to be unpleasant on a public platform?
Yeah, and to sing songs like… I think it’s in the footnotes of the book that Offensive Weapon had a song called ‘I Killed Your Kid with a Plastic Bullet’. Well, that’s not particularly pleasant. But then there was a yin and yang [at that time] because on the other side of the coin you had [Petesy Burns’] Stalag 17, who were very left-wing and the whole thing with Crass [an event documented in the book] was probably a level of sophistication that wasn’t there on the Harp Bar scene – where people became hunt saboteurs and had a vision on how to eat ethically and all of that.
CH: Well, Petesy looks like he eats pretty well…
(laughs) Well, he’s a lapsed vegetarian! But there’s a certain nobility about those sorts of people. A lot of the old punks have carried it into their 60s now.
CH: Interestingly, you quote Greg Cowan from the Outcasts in the book saying that these days there’s barely a weekend where they’re not travelling off somewhere to play at punk revival shows – and that seems to be true of a lot of old punks in Belfast:
(laughs) I think it’s happened on a global level. A lot of the punks, they’ve had their years where they’ve had kids and marriages and mortgages and everything else and now they’re having their last lark in the park. The Rebellion festival [in Blackpool] is part of that and I think the ‘Good Vibrations’ story brought people into the narrative, with interest in bizarre places like Italy and Japan where there are avid punk collectors. And Belfast is increasingly being perceived as a place where it was pure and amazing.
CH: Did it feel like that at the time?
No, nobody knew anything – they were making it up as they went along! Terri Hooley was ignored mostly and ridiculed when anybody did notice him. Nobody was sitting around thinking, ‘This is a brave and noble thing’…
CH: Or that in 40 years’ time people would be running symposiums about it…
Yeah. One of the few people who saw the merit was John T. Davis, the ‘Shellshock Rock’ [documentary] guy. He literally went, ‘I need to document this – this is amazing’. And all of the punk histories inevitably use his footage of that era.
CH: The caricature of Belfast musically in the 70s is that over in the Pound there were a load of 60s blues guys playing Steely Dan covers and in the Harp Bar there were a load of teenage three-chord merchants ‘smashing the system’. Is that more or less the case?
Well, in my black and white view that’s exactly how it was! (laughs)
CH: You are very much a ‘Year Zero’ man, aren’t you?
There was always the cheesecloth test – if you were wearing cheesecloth you weren’t worth mentioning.
CH: And yet you set aside your own interests in the book and, I think, write very sensitively about the Abercorn cabaret scene and the Miami Showband tragedy, and you look at all these tribal (Loyalist and Republican) folky records that were being released on Outlet and other funny little labels in the early 70s – stuff that hasn’t really been documented before, not being at the ‘cool’ end of music history. Was that a voyage of discovery for you?
Very much so. I probably spent longer in the early 70s and late 60s than I should have, in terms of the writing of the book, but it was fascinating. In my quest at the start, with Gary Lightbody and various other people to find [what would become] the Oh Yeah music centre, we found the [old Outlet] building on Gordon Street. The estate agent was asking had we any money – we were idiots with no money – but then it was, ‘Well, let’s meet the landlord’. And it was Billy McBurney and his daughters. I didn’t really know who he was, but others were going, ‘Oh, he’s that guy…’
CH: ‘King of the market traders’…
We gave him the sell, told him we were into music, that we wanted to keep the place going as a music place. He had a twinkle in his eye and, bless him, he trusted us, you know? I probably met him three or four times. I didn’t know too much about him but had an idea about [his former label/distribution business] Outlet that was a little bit… well, it wasn’t super-credible. I was probably a bit snooty about it but then writing the book you think, ‘Well, he did all those Sean McGuire [traditional Irish fiddle] albums, albums with pipers, other beautiful things – as well as doing all those Linfield supporters albums and the like. So, he was kind of weirdly democratic. But I remember he did size us up. We were saying, ‘We want a music centre, we want a venue…’ and he’s saying, ‘Well, as long as it’s not a knocking shop, it’s alright with me’. (laughs) So it was nice to find out his story and not be as snooty as I was when I met him.
And also the showband thing – again, you’d have your perceptions of them. But Stephen Travers [of the Miami] is a man who’s had a dum-dum bullet blow up part of his insides, and was party to hearing Fran O’Toole, with 22 bullets to his head, begging for mercy. I’ve been to several of his talks now and he’s a strangely beautiful, noble man, trying to transcend a truly horrible thing. And every year he learns a little bit more about collusion, about the Glenanne gang and he now, I think, is convinced there was two British officers there when the shooting happened. … There’s still not a single conclusion about why the Miami Showband killings [in 1975] happened. There’s all sorts of rabbit holes you can disappear into looking at that stuff but at the end of the day I had to keep telling myself, ‘This is about music, about how people related to it…’ when I could have spent, say, another 14 hours reading about state collusion. It’s not my job, really. But the fact that it impacted on blokes playing guitars made me very angry.
CH: It really was the Bataclan of its day…
It was brutal, horrible. And that was the first time, in the book, that Bono has acknowledged [that] – because he made a big deal about the Bataclan event and the Miami Showband [veterans] were on social media going, ‘Mate…’ So, he almost made a sort of back-door apology to the Miami Showband through my book, which was interesting.
CH: The showbands occupy a curious place in history, a phenomenon unique to Ireland in the 60s and into the 70s – a clean-cut Catholic-church approved version of pop music that provided mass social entertainment for a decade or so in no-alcohol venues…
Yeah, I think Eric Bell regarded it as the ultimate sell-out, which is why he got so unhappy with Thin Lizzy when they started to glam up at the behest of Chas Chandler – ‘I’ve been in a showband, I don’t want to wear a glitter waistcoat!’ But, you know, there’s a quote from Stephen Travers saying that everyone who stood on a stage north of the border was a hero, and I think that’s an incredible thing to say. It’s maybe being over-generous to some of them, but it took either a bit of recklessness or valour – you had to be tough enough to keep at the music in the north in the mid-70s, certainly.
CH: It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Northern Ireland was largely immune from most of the trends going on elsewhere in the UK in the 70s. Aside from the anomaly of Fruupp, there seems to have been no progressive rock in Northern Ireland, no glam rock – just this yawning chasm between the 60s blues people and the late 70s punks. It seems to have been isolated from the rest of the UK in that sense…
Yes, and the great blues expression of the conflict was a bloke from Texas, Juke Boy Bonner, who came in as an outsider [in 1969] and wrote this song ‘Belfast Blues’, a fantastic tune…
CH: Curiously, as far as I’m aware, none of the homegrown bluesmen down at the Pound in the 70s were really commenting on the times in their music, were they?
I don’t know. ‘Hey Joe’ was one of [ex-Them member] Jim Armstrong’s big moments, wasn’t it? He would do a big long version of it…
CH: I just recall [albeit in the mid-80s] him doing very long versions of ‘Summertime’ – none of which has very much to do with the times you’re living in…
No. Certainly, coming into the music scene as a punk, any encounters I had with the 60s generation was them telling me, ‘Oh, we had a great time – you missed it all, sonny boy’! It was a nostalgia thing, it was all over; whereas the punks were going, ‘We’re in the here and now, we’re going to talk about it’. So, there was quite a generational movement. To hear ‘Suspect Device’ on the ‘John Peel Show’ was mind-blowing, it really was. It wasn’t parochial – John Peel stopped it being parochial, it was like, ‘We should *all* think about this’.
CH: I’m aware that publishers have told you that this is basically a Northern Ireland book, with no prospects for sales beyond that region, but to my mind it’s eminently readable for anyone interested in music history. Is that your view?
I don’t know. I don’t have enough distance from it. I think I wrote it for ‘my people’; I wrote it for the parish of Northern Ireland, for the music community, I think. And I wrote it for myself, from having been a very mediocre musician. We lived through this thing – which was my youth – and then coming back in the 90s where music was part of the glue that was bringing us out of conflict was incredibly exciting. It’ll be interesting to see what political observers make of the book. Hopefully, some of them will make the effort. Will people from outside Northern Ireland care about it? I don’t know.
CH: I think it’s a good story. For sake of argument, it’s not that different to someone writing about 40 years of music in New Orleans, or 40 years of music in Austin, Texas. You can think of lots of little self-contained regions that have their own peculiar history in music and this one has that musical history but also this very unusual socio-political situation going on. I see no reason why it couldn’t be enjoyed by anybody who’s interested in music history.
Yeah… Certainly, I think there are people out there who would look at NI as a model of conflict resolution [who might find it interesting]. I think less so now, cos the model’s broken! Or at least a bump in the road. Pre-NI, people used South Africa as a model. Colette at the British Council kept telling me there were these anniversaries coming up, but at the time I was so deep into writing the book that I didn’t see the perspective. So, with this deadline to get the book out – it will be dropping into a really interesting time of reflection: 40 years from punk, 20 years from the Good Friday Agreement, 50 years from the Civil Rights marches…
CH: 50 years from the first Jethro Tull record…
(laughs) Well, I missed that one!
CH: You mentioned the scramble at the end to finish the book. Do you think you managed to capture more grit or immediacy in your writing because there was less time to ponder and rewrite?
The first three bits that I wrote took a lot of rewriting at the end to make them feel fresh again. But yes, if nobody gives you a deadline you’re just going to gild the lily forever. At the end, there was no time to do that – it was a case of bang it out, old-school… Some of the NME features I’m fondest of were written overnight – you had an afternoon interview on the Thursday, by Friday it was on the subs desk…
CH: People *really* needed to know about that Sham 69 comeback or whatever, didn’t they?
(laughs) Yeah, or the ska revival – or the revival of the ska revival!
CH: A heavy deadline focuses the mind, doesn’t it?
Yes. I think as soon as the button was pressed and it was off to the printer’s you think of seven or eight ideas and go, ‘Ah well…’ And also, the mindset near the end was that there might well be a second edition so don’t overly fret, tell it as best you can… I definitely think the dance section is worth a fuller chapter…
CH: I’ve a feeling the local folk music community from the 70s might have something to say, worth adding into a second edition, and who knows, maybe even the blues people… But getting back to the current edition, you must have felt very lucky to have had such ‘big characters’ popping up throughout such as Eamon McCann, Terri Hooley, George Jones, Petesy Burns, Joby Fox – I mean, you can’t really go wrong with people giving you that kind of content…
Well, most of the people who gave some of the bigger interviews were people I’d previously known and had a bit of trust with. Every now and again you’d get a flicker of eye contact where they’re thinking, ‘Will I tell him this or not?’ And then they’d go, ‘Okay, I’ll tell him the story…’ and you’d get maybe a bit more than was normally told, so that was great. With Eamon McCann – that whole era of Civil Rights in the 60s, those people were barely out of their teens and they became these volatile leaders of society, which was incredible. To a degree, it was partly about baby-boomers and their culture, which was fearless in a way. So that was interesting. Probably looking back on it, and I think this is a bigger NI story, there wasn’t a lot of females [involved].
CH: And you can’t invent them, for the sake of a PC 21st Century narrative…
No, but I was glad that I got a chance to speak to Anne Devlin, because she was very good about the 60s, and Ruth Carr and people like that.
CH: And you quote Maureen Lawrence about the handful of women involved in local punk bands:
Yes. I think there probably were more females in the [later] anarcho-punk thing. And my next project, a short-term project, is working with Oh Yeah and the Women’s Work Festival to identify the females who were in punk and anarcho-punk and get them to tell their stories. So, I’m not quite out of the woods yet! Like a dog with a bone, I can’t leave it alone; so, there will be other stories to tell.
CH: Nobody could accuse you of not being interested in punk!
No, no! In the end, that whole wrapping-up thing where you put the books back on the shelves and the little index cards back in their boxes and there’s a couple of crates with folders full of stuff… It’s all quite neatly set in, like ‘We’ll be back there’! So maybe a radio or a TV doc to follow up on the book. So, assuming there’d be a bit of interest, it’d be nice to take it a bit further.
CH: It seems to me now that with the information age and people’s access to technology, the collapse of the record industry and the vast, flat horizon, everything is democratised but there isn’t a geographically specific ‘scene’ as such as there would have been in Belfast or Derry at various times during the Troubles, which provided such coherent episodes in your book. So, the book captures an era and particular places in that sense, as well as a peculiar political era, without any need to extend it towards the present in future editions…
Yeah, and written at a time when music, music writing, music journalism – no one cares anymore! So, to me it felt like my last stand! The wagons are circled and I’m firing at the hostiles…
CH: The very fact that you did it by self-publishing, and with a Kickstarter campaign – there’s a bit of punk ethos in that, isn’t there? It’s Stuarty B with his Gatling Gun at the end of ‘The Wild Bunch’!
It really is, yeah. It felt like the bottom’s fallen out of the book business and some of the messages coming back were so derisory so, yes, it is sort of a ‘**** you’ to a lot of those people, to the people who don’t see the value in it. Throwing it on to Kickstarter – suddenly you think, ‘I’m not alone, there’s people who care!’ It might be that when they read it they’ll revise their opinion but, certainly, the tone, when I threw it out to the public, was, ‘Well done, fellow’ and that’s quite reassuring after being in a lonely furrow.
CH: Can you contemplate writing more books or do you need to lie in a darkened room for a while?
I think I need to think about it for a while. I have a giant whiteboard in the room at the top of my house where random thoughts are put, writing them down before I forget them. So, there’s probably seven or eight silly projects that may or may not happen, and even if one of those does… I don’t know. It was gruelling doing [‘Trouble Songs’] – a few beautiful moments, a few epiphanies. But it’s hard. So, I don’t know if I’ll go back [to writing a book] or not.
CH: Maybe on a smaller scale…
Maybe. I really want to write about Betsy Grey, 1798, the Battle of Ballynahinch – but that could just be a very small thing, an article not a book.
CH: As I’ve suggested before, there’s always a collection of magazine pieces:
An anthology would be nice. I’m not remotely close to the Charles Shaar Murray / Nick Kent [level] where people all over the world would treasure those anthologies, but I think if I did it I would need to interest local people, I would need a few more chapters of my life so people could say, ‘That’s Stuarty Bailie!’ But if I did an anthology it would have about six big Manic Street Preachers features, various gallivanting episodes with U2, early interviews with Radiohead, lunch with Tom Waits, hanging out with John Lee Hooker at his house when he’s feeling grumpy…
CH: It already feels like a sellable book to me, Stuart!
(laughs) I think there’s sort of enough, and I could turn it into a semi-autobiography with links in between…
CH: I think people are fascinated by that sort of thing. Given that print music journalism is essentially a thing of the past, I think people can only increasingly be fascinated in stories from the trenches back in the day, how it was done let alone what was done…
Yes. I think part of that future thing is the experiential thing. In our day, it would be, ‘I’ve got this obscure B-side that no one’s heard, therefore I can write about it’, whereas these days it’s all on YouTube…
CH: My whole career has been based on those B-sides…
(laughs) The content of your record collection is probably less valuable now whereas, ‘What did you get up to, who did you meet’ is possibly of more interest.
CH: Terri Hooley is a classic example of a man who can entertain the masses with stories from back in the day…
(laughs) He actually got very paranoid when I was writing my book, going ‘You’re destroying all my great stories!’ But when you go through them and reassemble them sometimes they’re better, because you’re going, ‘That’s all fluff and circumstance – but this other thing that you don’t really talk about is much more interesting…’ The Juke Boy Bonner story, once we untangled it, was fascinating.
CH: Favourite chapter?
(long pause) I don’t know.
CH: From my experience, when you’ve had to turn over a lot of stones and really dig to get the content for a chapter, to deal with a lot of primary history, it can be very satisfying. But then given you were a Harp Bar guy yourself, maybe writing up your version of that era is more meaningful?
I don’t know. It was quite interesting to talk to people on that Clash day, but a lot of the punk stuff has been covered [before]. I think the first chapter in the book, about ‘We Shall Overcome’, at the start I was thinking, ‘How do I get into this book?’ And then you find people who say, ‘I think I know the first time ‘We Shall Overcome’ was sung in protest [in NI]…’, and you get Eamon McCann to talk about it – and then you find *the guy* who conducted the singing, and then into the road to Burntollet, and then they’re singing ‘The Internationale’… and none of that I knew. I was too young to remember so I was reconstructing a whole era I didn’t know about, and that was very stimulating. I really enjoyed that.
CH: Is there any possibility of a book with a title similar to ‘Stuart Bailie: An Appreciation of Progressive Rock’?
(laughs) No!
CH: And finally, have you anything to say about Petesy Burns’ Arse?
(laughs) Well, I’ve seen Petesy Burns’ Arse… and it is indeed a spectacular thing!
Cheers for that – a good read it was too.
I shared the Kickstarter link on the SLF Facebook page – this may be purely coincidental, but Pledger numbers did steadily increase.
Thanks Rij… Didn’t the Fingers have a number called ‘At The Pledge’?
When they funded their last album through PledgeMusic, the exclusive T-Shirts did indeed bear the legend “At The Pledge”
You’re kidding! For a moment there my mind unwittingly aligned with the marketing strategy of a load of old punks! 🙂
Interesting read. For what its worth my sister-in-law is one of Billy McBurney’s daughters. Billy sadly passed away a couple of years ago after a long battle with dementia, but when I first met him he had some great stories to tell. One thing that chimes with me from the interview is the “twinkle in his eye” as that’s what I remember about him as well as his love for Music.
I’m sorry to hear that about Billy, Salty. I knew he had gone, but not the dementia. His late 60s adventures – writing an Irish No.1 about Lord Nelson! – get a fair amount of coverage in Stuart’s book.
I’ve only been in Belfast since 2000 and I didn’t really appreciate Billy’s role in the Musical history of the city for some time. He’d more or less retired when I first met him, but I can remember reading an interview with Van Morrison where Billy was name checked and then the next time I met him at a family get together I got chatting and he told some lovely anecdotes. The loss of the business was a tough time, but I’m sure he would be glad to see the Oh Yeah centre doing so much to keep Music alive in the city.
A good interesting read, Colin. Cheers.
Hope he does well with the book.
Some footage of Petesy Burns’ Arse – accept no substitute!
I had meant to order this, but it slipped my mind, so thanks Colin, one signed copy to be collected at the launch party for me.
I’m one of those who was there at (almost) the very start in Belfast, but dropped out pretty quickly (basically once mohicans made an appearance I was away). I remember, before we had The Harp us punks used to congregate in the Roost Bar in town on a Saturday afternoon as refuge from the marauding football supporters as they made their way to (and from) the games.
I saw The Outcasts in The Pound on a Saturday afternoon, supporting (I believe) Light with Jim Armstrong. Talk about a culture clash! I was there at the ‘riot’ outside the Ulster Hall when the Clash gig was cancelled & lots of punks were lifted by the RUC.
The Oh Yeah launch party should be a good night; pity it looks like you probably won’t make it.
Splendid – sounds like you’ll be welcomed to the launch night like a prodigal son! I imagine the Outcasts could have done their whole set in the time it took Jim to do one of his ‘Summertime’ guitar solos… 🙂
Count me in!
Counted!
Just found this fantastic clip of Petesy Burns’ Arse playing 999’s immortal ‘Homicide’ – better believe it!
A fine old racket!
Indeed! Here’s a 2010 reunion of Petesy’s punk-era band Stalag 17 with their song ‘Smash The Front’ – named such, as Petesy explains in Stuart’s book, in case of any ambiguity.
Is that you with the beard, Colin?
Don’t be daft, Retro – it’s Petesy Burns. You obviously don’t know his Arse from your elbow…
Petesy’s been in touch to say the idea for the band name came from the drummer – an idea he was sitting on for a while, one might suggest. Either that or, from his vantage point, all he could see every night was…
Father Jack Hackett plays the drums? Who knew!
Thankfully, Father Jack’s other two options for a band name were rejected…
Of course he first found fame in the prog supergroup That Would Be An Ecunemical Matter.
And he taught Emerson, Lake & Palmer everything he knew.
Unfortunately this was Middlesbrough and Brazil midfielder, Paul Lake of Man City and (Graham Taylors favourite) Carlton “Shortarse” Palmer
An interesting bit of synchronicity.
Today was Daylight Music’s “piano day” concert, curated by Russian exile pianist/teacher Xenia Pestova. One of the pieces she performed was a composition by Bangor, County Down composer Ed Bennett and he was there operating a laptop as she played and messed around with the strings and woodwork of a specially-hired baby grand piano to interesting effect.
One of his ensemble CDs (Togetherness – Ed Bennett/Decibel) was for sale on the Merch table and I took a punt on it. It opens with a composition called Suspect Device, which has some interesting relevance to Stuart’s book, as these notes by Laurence Crane © 2018 reveal:
“Suspect Device, which is a re-scored version of a work originally composed for the ensemble Icebreaker… Suspect Device takes as it’s starting point the song of the same name by the Northern Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers, lead singer Jake Burns’s stuttering “sus-sus-sus” refrain providing the basis for the opening repeated phrase on alto saxophone, trombone, keyboard and guitars.”
I haven’t played it yet and as it’s now past midnight it will have to wait till after I’ve had a kip.
Two hours to go on Stu’s Kickstarter, if any latecomers fancy it:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1539271725/trouble-songs-a-book-about-music-and-conflict-in-n