Trouble Songs: Music And Conflict In Northern Ireland
Musicians’ compelling first-person accounts tell a must-read story of an extraordinary era.
There are heaps of rock-related books published each year, the majority little more than trite, fan-directed fluff; heavy on gloss, light on insight. Trouble Songs, however, is a work of real worth. It’s a painstakingly researched history of the importance of music (punk, folk, rave, rock) as a ‘persuader, agitator and peacemaker’ in Northern Ireland across the halfcentury of conflict and reconciliation since the sectarian ‘troubles’ reignited in 1968. It’s a dazzling achievement.
Belfast-based journalist and broadcaster Stuart Bailie is a clear and authoritative chronicler. More than 60 interviewees’ personal accounts are wrangled into a compelling narrative that describes, in unflinching detail, an era in which music and hardline politics were irrevocably entwined against a stark backdrop of bigotry and violence. Concurrent to the Technicolor glam era holding sway on the UK mainland, a campaign of terrorist bombings and sectarian violence, culminating in the Miami Showband Massacre of 1975, left the six counties in a relatively grim monochrome lock-down.
Most big-name artists simply stayed away. And perhaps understandably. After three Miami Showband members were shot dead on their way home from a gig, Horslips’ Barry Devlin remembers: “It was a time of your life when you saw headlights behind you at three in the morning and you never knew who they were.” But Horslips, along with a few brave souls, still chose to tough it out for their besieged fan base in the north. This kind of defiance “terrified the terrorists”, according to surviving Miami Showband bassist Stephen Travers, because sectarianism was left at the dancehall door with fans from both sides of the divide finding common ground. Consequently, Travers concludes, “every musician that ever stood on a stage, north of the border, was a hero”.
Trouble Songs is packed with exclusive first-person insights from The Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, Ash and Bono, who for all his U2 sins stagemanaged a trailblazing public handshake between the SDLP’s John Hume and the Ulster Unionist’s David Trimble at Belfast’s Waterfront in ’98. Elsewhere we’ve got The Clash getting death threats, The Pogues, Kevin Rowland, a little bit of Lennon, a little bit McCartney. It really is an extraordinary and important book. Obviously I can’t force you to read it, but I would if I could.
Ian Fortnam