£3.5k write up your street for music hacks...

iThey’re always doing good things in that Oh Yeah Music Centre – I suppose that’s the whole point of a music charity.

This time they’ve teamed up with Dig With It, the classy magazine published by Oh Yeah’s founder Stuart Bailie, to celebrate the life of another great Belfast music journalist, Carol Clerk. Carol was a bit of an outlier for Northern Ireland women in her field.

She wrote her first piece for Melody Maker in 1974, while still at school here, and would later become News Editor at that much missed organ before writing respected books about The Pogues, The Damned, Madonna and Ozzy Osbourne and won PPA Journalist of the Year for her coverage of Live Aid in 1985.

Carol died of cancer in 2010 aged just 55 but her legacy lives on in her work and in the work of the many women she inspired to write. This year, she is to be honoured with the Carol Clerk Bursary, a £3,500 award that goes towards professional equipment and resources for an upcoming music journalist (female or non-binary with a connection to Northern Ireland).

There will be mentoring, feedback and training, with paid, printed commissions. Contenders will be asked to submit two pieces of music journalism for consideration.

Stuart said: “Carol Clerk was a great journalist and a wonderful, kind-hearted person. I met her often during my time as a music writer in London and she was always encouraging and lit up by her work. It will be an honour to help celebrate Carol’s work by supporting a new generation of writing talent.”

And Oh Yeah boss Charlotte Dryden added: “It is a crucial element of our work to support people with ambitions of working in music through development and mentoring but also to help seek out opportunities, find pathways and signpost them in directions like this.”

The Carol Clerk Bursary will be launched during the Womens

Work Festival in Belfast.