How Belfast Got the Blues: A Cultural History of Popular Music in the 1960s

By Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff

This is not just an important music book; it is an important history book. It captures the moment before Belfast and Northern Ireland became synonymous with the Troubles. It places one of the best-known figures in global popular music, Van Morrison, in his historical and sociocultural context. It also reinstates Ottilie Patterson into her rightful role as a central figure in Ireland’s music. It addresses a significant gap in Ireland’s popular music studies by appraising the contribution of a politically and musically significant female figure.

It makes a major original contribution to the understanding of popular music culture in Northern Ireland, and to the broader popular music culture in Britain in the 1960s. It will remain for many years the definitive study of the subject and a point of reference for further research and controversy.

In light of the re-emergence of Northern Ireland in contemporary British political debate, this book presents a nicely timed intervention, placing Northern Ireland at the forefront of a key moment in British and Irish cultural history, and presenting highly innovative readings of key popular cultural figures. Integrating its account of the popular music culture and local ‘scene’ in Northern Ireland with the broader and highly complex context of the sociopolitical milieu, it offers original and insightful readings of key 1960s figures, including film director Peter Whitehead, The Rolling Stones, Them, Ottilie Patterson and Van Morrison. It includes much new material, obtained in interviews and through meticulous archival research, to challenge the mainstream narrative of the mid-1960s music scene in Belfast.

It is extremely well researched, making use of newspaper and film archives and existing publications, but also an impressive set of personal interviews with veteran musicians and others from that time. The authors challenge much of the received wisdom about the period – for instance, about the decline of the showband – and present their arguments carefully and thoughtfully. While meticulously researched and thoroughly analytic, the writing is uniquely accessible and engaging.

The chapter on the neglected Belfast blue singer Ottilie Patterson represents a paradigm shift in Irish popular music studies, and sets her story and considerable achievements centre stage. This alone makes the book very noteworthy. The chapters on Van Morrison and his band Them place his early career in the context of the local and global music industry. The story of The Rolling Stones film, made by Peter Whitehead, is discussed in the context of the international fervour of the times. The knitting of the music scene with the distinctive social, cultural, political and religious factors is deftly done.

Primary readership will be academic – scholars, researchers and students across a range of areas. Fields of interest include popular music studies, Irish studies, political history, cultural studies, film studies, jazz/blues history, women’s studies, civil rights.

It will also appeal more broadly to fans, writers, journalists and musicians interested in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Blues, rock and roll, jazz and the 1960s, as well as to fans of the individual musicians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Oct 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789382754

Noel McLaughlin

Noel McLaughlin is a popular musician historian and a senior lecturer in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is the coauthor of Rock and Popular Music in Ireland: Before and After U2 and numerous articles and book chapters on rock and popular music culture.

Book preview

How Belfast Got the Blues

How Belfast Got the Blues

A Cultural History of Popular Music in the 1960s

Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff

First published in the UK in 2020 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2020 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Cover image credit: City Week, 9 September 1965.

Copy editor: Newgen Knowledge Works

Production editor: Faith Newcombe

Typesetting: Newgen Knowledge Works

Print ISBN 9781789382747

ePDF ISBN 9781789382761

ePub ISBN 9781789382754

Printed and bound by TJ International, UK.

To find out about all our publications, please visit

www.intellectbooks.com

There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter,

browse or download our current catalogue,

and buy any titles that are in print.

This is a peer-reviewed publication.

This book is dedicated to Dave Laing.

And to our parents,

who were there.

www.howbelfastgottheblues.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Belfast at a Crossroads

1. 1964

2. The Political Power of a Film That Might Have Been

3. ‘We Gotta Get into This Place’

4. ‘Them Are Coming!’

5. ‘A’ Story of Them

6. Irish Lady Sings the Blues

7. 1966: The Summer of Love?

8. Crossroads: Times Have Surely Changed

References

Index

Acknowledgements

A great many people have assisted with this book. We would like to begin by extending our heartfelt thanks to the many interviewees who so generously gave their time and memory, often in interviews that lasted for several hours: John Braniff, Terry Cooper, Ronnie Greer, Billy Harrison, Rosemary Lane, Peter Lloyd, Walter Love, Eamonn McCann, Colin McClelland, Gil McWilliams, Jimmy Page, Oscar Ross, Donald Stewart, Noel Stevenson, Peter Whitehead and the ‘political adviser’ at Stormont.

Thanks also to the staff at the Newspaper Library in Belfast, the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, the National Jazz Archive in Loughton Essex and the British Library in London. To Intellect Books, and particularly to Faith Newcombe and Tim Mitchell, who have been tireless in their attention to detail and in assisting the book in every way. We would also like to thank the five peer-reviewers for their careful reading, helpful suggestions and critical comments.

We would also like to offer our sincere thanks to John Adams, Sean Campbell, Elayne Chaplin, Lawrence Davies, Kevin Donnelly, Lisa Flavelle, Anne Hailes, Russ Hunter, Peter Hutchings, Peter ‘Magic’ Johnson, James Leggott, Edna Longley, Áine Mangaoang, Rob Morrice, Marc Mulholland, Michael Murphy, Lonán Ó’Briain, John O’Flynn, Jamie Sexton, John Sheehan and Gerry Smyth who, in different ways, have helped make what started out as an ambitious project a reality.

A special note of thanks goes out to John Hill and Martin McLoone, both for their pioneering work on Irish film, media and popular culture and for being a continuing source of inspiration and encouragement over the past three decades. We hope that this book honours the spirit and excitement of their writing. Thank you also for your insightful comments on the pre-publication manuscript. Special thanks too to Sarah Gilligan. In addition to her intellectual generosity, Sarah had the critical foresight to introduce us to Intellect. It proved to be a prescient stroke of publisher-writer ‘match-making’ as Intellect has proven to be a more than suitable home for the project. However, a very particular expression of gratitude must be extended to the late, great Dave Laing, who, similarly, has been a consistent source of inspiration and encouragement. As a pivotal figure in the formation of popular music studies, Dave distrusted what might be termed the ‘sweeping universal account’ and was dogged in the belief that a place-based study of a single city across a heavily mythologized decade was a valuable lens for illuminating aspects of the broader story of the cultural politics of popular music in the 1960s. As such, he played a key role in encouraging and nurturing this book. He provided us with the first platform for some of the ideas in the pages that follow in the journal he edited, Popular Music History. This book is dedicated to his memory.

Noel would like to thank the Free Trade Inn in Newcastle for informally adopting a writer in residence and providing an environment conducive for developing ideas (and offering an alienated author a ‘third space’ away from the private sphere of the home and the professional domain of the office). Thanks must go to the many people there who engaged with discussions of popular music, city identities and the politics of the 1960s, particularly Alan Dunlop and Bill Speed. To Ysanne Holt and Matthew Potter for invaluable practical and intellectual support. Noel would also like to thank the dear, but sadly departed, figures of Gregory Gray and Roger Pomphrey for years of discussions about popular music and for being a consistent source of inspiration. In the same vein, thank you Rob Alder, Mike Bandoni, Rob Braniff, Mick Clarke, Lindsay Hannon, Ferank Manseed and Don Ramage for your thoughts over the years on how music works, in a technical, experiential, emotional and political way. Last, but by no means least, Noel offers a very particular and huge expression of gratitude to his partner, Paula Breen, for her continuous support, patience and encouragement and for helping overcome the moments when the optimism of the will is overtaken by the pessimism of the intellect. Joanna would also like to thank her husband, Andrew, for his continued help and encouragement throughout the planning and writing of this book.

Introduction

Belfast at a Crossroads

Memphis Slim has been in Belfast; Jesse Fuller; Champion Jack Dupree; John Lee Hooker’s been there. They’ve got folk clubs and rock clubs there, but it’s got nothing to do with the English scene. In fact […] it doesn’t have much to do with the Irish scene either, it’s just Belfast. It’s got its own identity, it’s got its own people […] it’s just a different race, a different breed of people.

Van Morrison¹

It is difficult to think of Belfast as a city of singing and music. It is a bleak, grimy city, windswept and cheerless in the winters and wet and cloudhung in the summers. It is the capitol [sic] of the six northern counties that make up Ulster, the part of Ireland still held by Great Britain, and it has much of the dreary heaviness of the English midlands. The surrounding countryside is a beautiful landscape of small farms and rolling hills, with the coast and the mountains not far away, but Belfast seems apart from the beauty around it to huddle against its riverside tangle of shipyard building cranes. Its buildings are smoke stained granite, its city center without color or excitement.

Sam Charters²

These contrasting quotes establish two very different images of Northern Ireland’s (NI) capital. In the first, Belfast’s particularity is emphasized, with the city a buoyant and cosmopolitan hive of diverse musical activity, its separateness from England and Ireland foregrounded. The second citation, from legendary blues historian Sam Charters, envisages Belfast as akin to any other ‘dreary’, ‘provincial’ city in the United Kingdom, an ‘anywhere’ devoid of distinction. It is not so much that the truth ‘lies somewhere in between’ than the fact Belfast is, and has always been, the subject of different projections. In this sense, the city is a construct: imagined – and continually reimagined – to respond to, and represent, different agendas.

While it is doubtful, even politically suspect, that the citizens of Belfast constitute a separate ‘race’, one can with a little knowledge of local history (and some intellectual generosity) understand what Van Morrison is alluding to with regards to the city of his birth. ‘Race’ is of course a contested term, but designations in, and about, ‘Northern Ireland’– its political status, history and identity – are similarly contentious. ‘Ulster’, ‘the North of Ireland’, the ‘occupied six counties’ – and indeed ‘Northern Ireland’ – have never satisfied all of its inhabitants, all of the time. Yet, the city’s most famous and lauded musical son has a kind of a point, despite the clumsiness of the rhetoric. Belfast is not only different, politically, socially and culturally from the rest of the United Kingdom, but it also possesses distinctive features which similarly mark its separateness from the rest of Ireland, North or South.

It is important to point out from the outset that this distinctiveness is in no way mystical, or ‘essential’, nor indeed racial, but material and historical. The city stands apart from its surrounding ‘regional’ hinterlands, with Greater Belfast the largest urban conglomerate in the ‘province’ by a considerable distance, and after Dublin, the second largest on the island. Its historical association with shipbuilding, heavy industry and manufacturing has given the city a modern and industrial character which is at odds with the general image of the rest of Ireland. The hard, distinctive cadence of its working-class accent also renders Belfast as somewhat different from its Northern environs; a ‘staple argot’ so odd in timbre and metre that it prompted Philip Larkin to describe the proletarian Belfast idiolect as ‘a Glaswegian, after a short stay in the USA, whining for mercy’.³ As Gerald Dawe has put it, in attempting to capture this geographical and cultural ‘apartness’: ‘[u]‌nlike most Irish cities, which give their name to the immediate hinterland – Dublin, Galway, Cork, Sligo, Waterford, Derry, Donegal – Belfast is just itself’.⁴

An aerial view of the city reveals its unusual shape. Hugging the shores of its eponymous lough, the city is insulated by Cave Hill, Divis and Black Mountain stretching across its northern flank, and the Castlereagh Hills to the south. The obstinate pressures of physical geography have forced the conurbation to taper as it spreads in a south-westerly direction along the Lagan Valley towards the neighbouring market town of Lisburn, giving it an outline redolent of a slightly asymmetrical butterfly; with the predominantly working-class west and east as the spread wings and the River Lagan as its scoliotic thorax. This impression of the city as an off-kilter butterfly was certainly the joint sense of the present authors, when, in primary-school daydreams, we were compelled to gaze wistfully at the Ordnance Survey maps of Belfast that were a feature of many of Northern Ireland’s classroom walls in the 1970s. Suffice to say, the irony of this troubled city as a delicate, colourful, short-lived and malformed insect did not escape our young imaginations; nor did the power of maps and their subliminal role in creating a sense of one’s place in the world.

But the brief life of the butterfly – the life cycle of chrysalis and transformation – is pertinent here also: Northern Ireland is a relatively recent creation. As a symptom of this, in the 1960s, it was being presided over by only its third and fourth prime ministers (PMs), and the state (or, more strictly speaking, statelet) was, thus, unusual in western European nationhood. Many political analysts have argued that, with respect to the politics of its formation, the one-party, unionist-controlled Northern Ireland State has more in common with the postcolonial nations formed in the aftermath of the Second World War, or indeed Israel. However, lest we lose sight of popular music this early on, it is important to stress that this large North of Ireland town and/or Northern Ireland capital is an unusual city. It is not only divided – as with Charters invocation of the ‘drearily heaviness’ of the cities of the English midlands – by the usual spatial fault lines of class and income; Belfast has the added cleavage of politico-religious identity and the living out of these differences. Northern Ireland’s capital city can be further mapped according to religious, political and/or ethnic affiliation and a city grid where its working-class areas are either Protestant or Catholic, adding crude blocks of colour, of Orange and Green, to the butterfly wings.

To return to Morrison’s ‘different race of people’ – and to retain the problematic terminology for effect – it might be more apt to describe Belfast as overwhelmingly composed of two ‘different breeds of people’, with Catholic/nationalists becoming a large ‘engineered’ minority from the state’s formation by partition in 1922 (when the island was formally divided for the first time in its long history); although, in fairness to Morrison, speaking from the vantage point of the artist, it is common to appeal to ‘the people’ in a general way when attempting to overcome division and the attendant rhetorical complexities to which it gives rise. The ‘Belfast people’ invoked by Northern Ireland’s most famous singer, while divided, are in no sense intrinsically separate. Rather, the division is the result of a series of cultural, historical and political ‘accommodations’ that have often fallen short on delivering to the majority of the region’s citizens.

Indeed, as a number of writers have pointed out, the entrenched enmities which underpin the binary of ‘Orange’ and ‘Green’ become problematized when they intersect with class politics, issues of habitus and sex and gender relations. For example, both Catholic and Protestant cultures in Northern Ireland are far from monolithic. The former may be divided into various factions: those who support physical-force agitation to overthrow partition versus the advocacy of political solutions to the issue; from members of that community critical of republican ideology and who identify with socialist, and internationalist, alternatives to liberal pragmatists who accept the status quo but may strive towards a fairer legal and political representation within the existing arrangement.⁵ Similarly, and contrary to its reputation, Northern Protestantism is far from homogenous and was marked throughout the decade by a competing vortex of ideologies and dissenting voices. Against the stereotype, as Connal Parr has argued, many working-class Northern Protestant writers represent a strong, if ‘buried’, tradition of critique from within (although this internal critical voice has not been as prominent as its Catholic/nationalist equivalent). To put it bluntly, Protestantism is not synonymous with loyalism, the Orange Order and even unionist ideology itself. Conversely, dissenting Protestants have challenged and exposed the hypocrisies of the one-party Unionist State and its ancillary institutions and attitudes. Therefore a central tension is between the Protestant/unionist status quo and those radical Protestants concerned with challenging the state and what it represents; between those pressing for an open, fair and inclusive society and a dominant tradition in unionism which was reactionary, insular and segregationist.⁶ Working-class Protestant involvement in the Labour movement and in the left-liberal arts, literature and theatre is especially salient. As we will come to explore, the oft-neglected ‘dissenting, treacherous Prod’ was to become a particularly worrisome figure for orthodox unionism and the one-party state.

In general terms, representations of Northern Ireland can, albeit crudely, be organized into a binary. First, there is a dominant tradition which ignores and/or attempts to explain away politico-ethnic (and class) divisions as an ‘inconvenience’ of sorts that gets in the way of a ‘normal’ society. Central here is the trope of ‘the madness’ of war and sectarian division; that, if it could only be eradicated, would allow the province to flourish as a western, capitalist-consumerist society like any other. This representational seam – which we have named ‘the normalization thesis’ and which will appear later in the discussion – was wilfully produced by the Northern Ireland State itself in an attempt to divert attention away from social injustices, particularly along the axes of religious and national identity. Captain Terence O’Neill, its prime minister throughout most of the decade (1963 to 1969), was acutely aware of the importance of positive representations, and the political capital of a ‘normal society’, and the cultural purchase of the idea (and ideal) of normality, for a state created in such fractious circumstances. As Marc Mulholland has put it, O’Neill realized, on a practical level, ‘that a poor image abroad threatened overseas investment and goodwill from Britain’.⁷

The second representational topos is much less prominent, but – arguably – more historically informed. It accepts that as Northern Ireland was divided from the beginning, with sectarian strife thus ‘hardwired’ into its ‘lived everyday’, these fissures, rather than being ignored, demonized or wished away, should form the basis for exploration, political understanding and critique. In official discourse, ‘the men of violence’ have shouldered much of the blame for this apparent failure to accommodate to the norms commensurate with other western European democracies, which has directed attention away from the state itself and the more entrenched problems of governance it inherited from Ireland’s partition. It will be of no surprise to those familiar with Irish history, in whatever discipline, that the formation of Northern Ireland resulted in a segregated, ghettoized and unjust society.

In this respect, a different kind of normality was being sought by political progressives and those directly affected by an unfair and segregated political system: for all citizens of this contentious state to have the same rights under the law as the rest of the United Kingdom. As Edna Longley has tellingly put it: ‘I spent much of my life wishing that Northern Ireland was like any other post-war western European society’,⁸ pointing to an important distinction, between normalization as an ideological smokescreen promoted by government and normality as a progressive, egalitarian goal, where the latter actively had to push against and call the bluff of the former. But our concern is with the consequences of this for popular music. If, as the historians have it, good soul music of a critical bent emerged from the urban ‘ghettos’ of the United States, we will leave the question hanging as to whether the foment of the 1960s produced the same rich corpus of music for Belfast/Northern Ireland. This, of course, raises questions about popular music and value: about what ‘good’ music should be, what it can do; in short, concerns around how music relates to social forces and how it is interpreted, about whether it can (or should) ‘make a difference’ in a positive political sense.

While this is a book about Belfast’s music scene in the 1960s, it is not – as is becoming apparent – a straightforward history. Rather, it is our ambition to explore the city and its cultural politics throughout the decade via its popular music scene. This necessitates engaging with popular music in a broad sense: as a practice, a business and a cultural form (as well as attending to how these areas interconnect); about how music, in John Hill’s words, ‘both grew out of and responded to the social, economic, and cultural circumstances characteristic of the period’.⁹ As we explore these different, yet interrelated facets of Belfast’s music scene in the 1960s – endeavouring to open up a cultural history through popular music – it becomes clear that Belfast was, and is, a city of specificities and contradictions: of hard edges, of visible (and invisible) divisions, of distinctively modern myths and legends (inviting a self-consciousness about how the story has been told) and of cultural and political possibilities, of influential figures, events and music scenes ignored. These particularities and tensions are too numerous and nuanced to list as a simple inventory at the outset, and it is our aim to articulate some of these fissures and intricacies via the city’s popular-musical history in this most mythologized and revisited of decades.

Belfast was, of course, not isolated from the wider world as globalizing consumerism was increasingly making itself felt in the city’s cultural life on a variety of levels. Like other cities in the developed western world, Belfast had to adjust to the restructuring of the labour market; the decline in traditional heavy industries (which were partisan in their employment practices); and a weakening of the power of trade unions and the concomitant rise of the service sector economy with its emphasis on ‘soft’ goods. Popular music, in its production and consumption, was not disconnected from these broader foundational changes in the political-economic and social spheres. In light of this, a related, but central, concern of this book will be a focus on how, in popular-musical terms, the city negotiated and inhabited the radicalism and the progressive political shifts with which the 1960s is customarily associated: the rise of second-wave feminism; the coming to prominence of the gay rights movement; the influence of neo-Marxism; the different one-world utopianisms of the hippie movement, the counterculture and the Socialist International (and the related suspicion of the politics of nationalism) and the anti-racist coalition. Each of these would differentially have an impact on Northern Irish culture and politics. To understand this further entails mapping popular music to influential cultural trends and considering the often-complex interplay between popular music and these broader political currents (where it is more than the mere ‘soundtrack to an era’ offered by many television retrospectives). While popular music has a ‘relative autonomy’ from sociopolitical forces, this does not mean that musicians and music scenes exist in a vacuum.

What’s in a song?

By focusing on music in this wider sense, we are not exclusively interested in exploring how Belfast’s musicians reflected the times in a direct way via analysis of lyrics, and the ‘messages’ and meanings conveyed in songs by local groups. As many writers have argued, songs are not directly akin to poetry.¹⁰ Hence, the analytical emphasis on lyrics in isolation has the rather odd, default effect of relegating, even discarding, instruments as a simple sonic accompaniment to the authority of the voice, semantics and the word. Interpreting lyrics in isolation not only fails to register the somatic qualities of the voice, but it often pays scant attention to how words, when routinely modulated and bent through song – and the ‘unusual’ act of singing – combine with specifically musical factors such as the ‘tension’ between the personality of the performer and the character in the song, and music’s complex relationship to realism and fantasy; music as everyday versus music as ‘special’. In this way, music, depending on the genre and the context, may be valued for its ability to represent ‘ordinary’ experience as well as being judged in its capacity to generate transcendent moments; or, and excuse the oxymoron, in rendering the quotidian transcendent (as with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks). If, as the countercultural adage has it, ‘it’s the music that matters, man’; it is rather strange that this ‘mattering music’ – as music – receives little attention in mainstream popular music writing.

As Simon Frith eloquently puts it, ‘[a]‌ pop song is ordinary language put to extraordinary use’, where vernacular/colloquial language is heightened when ‘framed by music’.¹¹ Take the music away, and it is doubtful that a song will ‘work’ if it is left to fend for itself with just the words as ‘poetry’ on the page as support.¹² Moreover, if judged as social commentary – and isolated from their necessary musical entwining – many of the songs by Belfast groups would fail the notional test of adequately encapsulating in lyrical form even a snapshot of the context of their emergence. Songs, even sloganeering agitpop, are not always successful as political treatises. They are, as Frith again notes, better understood as ‘examples of personal rhetoric’, than as ‘general statements of sociological or psychological truth’.¹³ Even if certain songs push towards radical sentiments, and have the capacity to move listeners in a way that critical/political writing rarely does, this is not reducible to the power of words alone (however powerfully they are sung), but to words framed within – and undivorceable from – relatively short and time-limited musical settings. Consequently, the very act of singing, alongside the form of the song, plays a foundational role in shaping how music is experienced – especially when one also has to consider the cultural politics involved in the way artists perform, look, dress and move.

It is of little surprise, then, that UK- and Ireland-adapted rhythm and blues in the 1960s tended more towards individuated and ‘universal’ sentiments rather than facilitating a precise, and in-depth, engagement with the very particular local political concerns which would emerge throughout the decade. As Jon Savage has observed, even black American R&B, soul and pop at the height of the momentous push for racial equality in the decade’s early-to-midpoint ‘struggled to make overt political sentiments’. While ‘[t]‌he music and movement were inextricable’, he writes, ‘it’s startling just how few mid-sixties black American R&B and pop records directly addressed civil rights’.¹⁴ Popular music, for Savage, had to walk a sometimes uneasy tightrope between being heard, being successful, of finding and securing a broad audience, on the one hand, and expressing outrage, or offering some form of sociopolitical, or personal, critique, on the other. In fact, to stay with the tension between art and commerce, politics and success, it is especially pertinent in the context of black America in the 1960s that breaking into the white mainstream was, itself, a political act (even if the records and what they ‘meant’ were not overtly ‘political’ in terms of the message offered in the lyrics).

To put it crudely, songs about Northern Ireland, the residue of imperialism and the consequences of partition have hardly offered themselves up as conventional hit material (and during ‘the Troubles’ songs taking any kind of supervening perspective beyond the dominant ‘violence sucks’ paradigm were often the subject of direct, and indirect, censorship).¹⁵ But the problem is also a formal one: as to whether popular music is up to the task of engaging with, and expressing, such complex sociopolitical circumstances. As with the African American context described by Savage, Belfast’s musicians, management and promoters had to find ways of creating a space for a ‘Belfast sound’ to be coined, imagined and heard. In the projected sunlit halcyon days of the mid-1960s, it is easy to understand why record-buying youth would not be hitting the dance floors with gusto to songs expressing sectarian tensions or infused with angry resistance to the residue of empire. It was easier to ignore politics of any sort, or at the very least to express a general frustration with it. This position, which would ossify into a common-sense critique for many musicians, would come under pressure in the decade’s latter half as aspects of popular music began to become associated with, and to express, more radical political sentiments.

Conversely, even though songs, records and performances themselves will be discussed, we are more concerned in the spirit of Savage’s ­example – with the unique way music makes meaning and creates pleasure; in the dynamics between the politics of popular music in both its lowercase and capital letter manifestations. The idea that music simply ‘mirrors’ (or should reflect in lyrical form) societal and political factors is a troublesome one as it creates an expectation, even a burden, that is often too much for popular songs and performers to carry (especially when one adds to the mix that many of the performers, musicians and recording artists were in their late teens and early twenties). Nonetheless, music and music scenes are often extremely political in ways not conventionally acknowledged and voiced in textual analysis, or in approaches derived from literary criticism. Hence, popular music makes meaning across a slippery textual matrix (whereby the ‘text’ for study purposes is not as clearly defined as in other cultural forms). In addition to the ‘song-as-text’, meanings are articulated via the music press in reportage and interview, by iconography and performance, through the mobilization – and subversion – of genre norms and so forth. As we hope will become apparent, music as a cultural practice in particular helped Belfast in the 1960s to foster alternative realities and possibilities: music as something to do, to make, as well as what it might ‘say’, at odds with ‘officialdom’ and the image of a ‘normal’ Northern Ireland which the state was keen to promote – and actively and intensively produced. It is wholly appropriate, on one level, to celebrate Northern Irish popular music in the 1960s (as in popular memory and the heritage discourse which has a privileged role in shaping the former) as the everyday, but exciting, sound of the region at (relative) peace. This imbues the (largely peaceful) 1960s with a particular power when viewed retrospectively post ‘the Troubles’. Accepting this, though, does not mean this is the complete story.

Importantly – although much less countenanced – the reverse position needs also to be considered: that the Northern Ireland State in the 1960s may have taken more than a passing interest in popular music, even if this simply meant monitoring its economic and/or political impact. As will be explored later, the Northern Ireland government would, for a variety of reasons, become attuned to the power of popular music and its cultural importance, especially when concerns about ‘youth’ and youth (sub)cultures were on the agenda. Even so, the Northern Ireland State’s reasons to be nervous were not a neat fit with the situation in England at the time. This, one must stress, was not reducible to the more widespread coordinates of the time: moral panics; public order issues; censorship; legislating and controlling the spaces where music was performed and broader anxieties around what the young were up to. Indeed, the uncritical idea (and one implied in heritage discourse about popular music in Northern Ireland at the time) of ‘the state against the kids ’ has little historical purchase when it comes to explaining officialdom’s relationship to the Belfast beat and R&B scenes for instance. Rather, what is revealed in the pages that follow is that while the Northern Ireland State was, of course, concerned with popular music in the ways we have just outlined, it was every bit as interested in what popular music could do for it; of how these new scenes, sounds and groups could be pressed into the governmental dictates of the time: promoting and servicing a new and emerging ‘brand’ Northern Ireland, one imagined as leaving behind the shackles of the past (whether colonial or sectarian) to face the ‘realpolitik’ of a new consumerist post-industrial world. Significantly, local popular music – especially if it was nationally and internationally successful – could play a role in both versions of normalization. It could be a politically valuable index of youthful vitality, embodying changing modes and mores, even challenging the unionist hegemony and its emphasis on ‘godliness’. However, the very same energy could be utilized to promote a normality that was, literally, in the original French meaning, simply mise en scène, glossing over Northern Ireland’s tardiness in the area of social reform and its (continuing) commitment to social conservatism and structured inequality.

Such a view, first, cuts sharply against the widely circulating idea that the ‘squares’ and ‘oldies’ of conventional politics were either too aloof to care about popular music and ‘youth’ or were puritan ‘rabbits in the headlights’ in the face of this apparent ‘revolt into style’, and thus set about trying to control it. As will become increasingly clear, the Northern Ireland government regarded popular music culture as both and more. Yes, music and youth were a source of anxiety, but it was also a phenomenon that could be harnessed to suit its broader agenda. But the illuminating aspects of this become apparent in relation to specific historical-cultural circumstances; in the manner in which government and local music business collaborated for mutual benefit.

Second, if the Northern Ireland State was prepared to endorse and support aspects of the beat scene – especially locally produced music for export that might chime with a positive image of the province – it raises the related issue of how far this could be pushed before it ran into ‘representational trouble’, when this sense of normality might become precarious, as, for example, when the sex, ‘race’ and music connection raised its head. For musicians, wittingly or unwittingly, endorsing state-sponsored ‘normality’, in a statelet that was patently anything but, generated problems. One need only recall the harsh invective dealt to musicians who indirectly endorsed the regime during apartheid in South Africa by playing there.¹⁶ And while the situation in Northern Ireland is not a direct equivalent, this does not mean that there are not parallels with regards to cover-ups, ethical quandaries on the part of successful touring musicians and questions about whether to play in the region on the basis of its political arrangements. There is also the issue as to whether local musicians, especially in genres where ‘keeping it real’ was a core aspect of expectation, were indeed responding to, and/or reporting the political zeitgeist.

The book (in Chapters 4 and 5) revisits the story of Them, (Northern) Ireland’s premier rhythm and blues group and the attendant legend of their residency at the city’s Maritime Hotel in 1964. This story serves in the present as a foundational myth for the city, both in a broader rock discourse and in contemporary heritage initiatives, and, as such, has the capacity to organize the experience and interpretation of key events. The so-called heritage industry emerged in the 1980s as part of the new enterprise culture. It not only became a significant plank in economic redevelopment, and actively encouraged and supported by the British State to compensate for the decline in the industrial sector, it importantly also had an ideological component: organizing a highly selective view of the past for consumption in the present. As a result, cities in the United Kingdom were compelled to actively compete with one another for tourism and investment revenue, with the popular-musical past often occupying a central part of this process. Not unsurprisingly, artists and bands that had been commercially successful were prioritized, inviting criticisms that such a focus resulted in the widespread promotion of popular-musical nostalgia and a concomitant endorsement of ‘the great and the good’. Sara Cohen has noted the conservative consequences of such initiatives. The ‘social production of musical memory’, she writes, is ‘a highly mediated process’. It is dependent ‘on collaboration between individuals, groups and organisations with different interests in the musical past’ and thereby ‘configured for contemporary and future benefit’.¹⁷ As Cohen goes to on to argue, capital and officialdom have, not unsurprisingly, been the governing players in this vortex of competing ‘interests’. It is an area we will return to throughout.

In addition to considering how Belfast’s popular-musical 1960s has been socially produced (and its consequences), we are also concerned with how the state in Northern Ireland made sense of and adapted to the ‘new’ youth culture, and how the city and its music scene were perceived by the metropolitan centre. It is not our ambition in the pages that follow however to document, and catalogue, all of the musicians, groups and scenes active in the city at the time. There is other work that adopts this approach;¹⁸ but there will be an emphasis on exploring significant absences in the story as told in more conventional histories (especially in Chapters 2 and 6).

What’s in a decade?

Periodizing the past via the framework of the decade is, undoubtedly, problematic. History rarely conforms to the neatness of the shorthand it provides, with social and political processes rarely cognizant with the tidy rubric of ten-year cycles. It is, of course, a lexicon preferred by advertisers, fashion retrospectives and music nostalgia nights. Indeed, the editors of the inaugural issue of the journal The Sixties regard the 1960s ‘as a historical period and not simply a decade. […] No attempt to set other temporal boundaries is perfect, and no periodization works equally well in all contexts’, with the authors ‘favouring the idea of the long sixties, roughly the years 1954 to 1975’.¹⁹ As will be explored in Chapter 6, the concept of the ‘long sixties’ informs our understanding of the development of Belfast’s celebrated rhythm and blues scene of the early-to-midpoint of the decade. By widening the aperture, it becomes apparent that largely forgotten cultural currents in the early-to-mid-1950s in the interface of jazz and blues were laying the seed-bed for this later, and more famous, R&B scene.

Nonetheless, there is a coherence for exploring Belfast via the 1960s. At a political level, this is attributable to the city being at (relative) peace throughout most of the decade’s duration. This was heralded by key events, such as the ending of the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) failed ‘border campaign’, codenamed Operation Harvest,²⁰ in 1962 and the start of the North-South dialogue in the talks between O’Neill and the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, Sean Lemass at the decade’s midpoint in January 1965; an event described by RTÉ as a watershed in modern Irish history. Both were taken as prominent markers, and practical demonstrations of the demise, and the seeming impracticality, of ‘physical-force republicanism’ (and an acceptance of the Northern Ireland State by many nationalists). One could also organize understanding of Belfast in the 1960s around O’Neill’s premiership and the (attempts at) liberalization with which it is associated. Whatever the limitations of ‘O’Neillism’ (which we will consider throughout), he became synonymous with an openly promoted youthful and meritocratic ‘positive unionism’, explicitly pitched against its inferred other – the ‘negative unionism’ of the past (which was not prepared to recognize discrimination or extend equal rights to the Catholic minority). As Mulholland aptly sums it up, whatever the Northern Ireland’s PM’s failings, ‘few other unionists were prepared to join O’Neill even in his rhetorical bridge-building’.²¹ This index of O’Neill’s liberalism, again, reverberates in the contemporary context. After the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland, legislatively, has an Assembly with voter-approved Catholic/nationalist representation. Nevertheless, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the largest party in the Assembly, have rarely, if ever, demonstrated O’Neill’s desire – and pertinently, one borne of the more politically conservative times of the 1960s before democracy in Northern Ireland was formalized in statute – to push forward the spirit of the law and make some overtures to the Catholic minority. Nonetheless, whether it was not enough, or a case of ‘too little too late’, when it comes to popular music, such significant moments and figures, as McLaughlin and McLoone have argued, ‘seemed to underscore the fact that a new era had dawned, much in line with the general optimistic mood elsewhere in the early 1960s’.²²

Following on from this, Belfast’s interconnectedness to elsewhere – to Britain and the United States in economic, cultural and popular-musical terms – will be a recurrent focus, with the city’s localized specifics shaped by increasingly globalizing forces. Out of this local/global dynamic, Belfast – despite its ‘unusual’ politics – emerges as an important city of the United Kingdom and Ireland in popular music terms, especially at this early-to-mid-part of the decade, and a much more significant one than orthodox histories have allowed for. Indeed, Belfast’s place in the broader story may provoke reconsideration of, and reflection on, aspects of the British blues and R&B revival recounted in a number of conventional, but prominent, histories.

Furthermore, the book is not organized in a simple chronological fashion. While it seeks to map the popular-musical, cultural and political changes throughout the decade, it does not simply begin in early 1960 and end in late 1969. We begin instead in 1964 which we argue was a pivotal year both for the city and for popular music and its relationship to politics, more broadly. In this vein, significant events are an important organizing principle, both in terms of their impact at the time and in their ability to shape the experience of collective, even selective, remembering in the present. Exploring the connections – the correspondence between popular music, history and politics – is not always a simple task. At times such a connection may be oblique, with key events merely ‘in the air’, setting a tone or establishing a broad ‘structure of feeling’. As will become clear, on other occasions the link may be much more explicit. It also necessitates a judgement about how deeply the complexity of context should be investigated, with the accompanying risk that music itself is lost sight of altogether; while at the same time we are concerned throughout with how the specificities of production shape consumption and representation.

In his eloquent survey, 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, Jon Savage captures some of the power and majesty – the centrality – of popular music to the more general politics of the period: ‘It was a time of enormous ambition and serious engagement […] music no longer commenting on life but had become indivisible from life’. Venturing further into this line of argument, and echoing the celebrated art historian John Berger, Savage notes how the popular music of the time had become ‘the focus not just of youth consumerism but a way of seeing, the prism through which the world was interpreted […]. Success wasn’t the be-all and end-all’.²³ Belfast, as will become apparent, was to contribute to this cauldron of creativity and invention, art and commerce, in ways not often voiced (and in ways that even a writer as insightful and thorough as Savage neglects to explore). While Northern Ireland and its capital had its own commercial, critical and ‘visionary’ success story, bequeathing Van Morrison to the world, this, similarly, is not the summation – the ‘be-all and end-all’ – of the city’s popular-musical story in the 1960s. Going against the logic of popular music heritage initiatives and their power to shape how the past is remembered, Belfast’s music scene, and its broader significance, is not reducible to its high-profile commercial, aesthetic and/or critical achievements. This does not, on the other hand, mean we are going to hector the reader with lists of market failures who were so good, so culturally and politically prescient, if they had only found a broader audience. Indeed, one doesn’t have to retreat to market failures to uncover counter-perspectives and unrequited voices/discourses. Many market successes from Northern Ireland in the decade for whatever reason have been occluded from the governing narrative. Moreover, local heritage discourse is extremely fond of the routine and casual deployment of the term ‘legend’, and we subject the term and its (over)usage to a degree of critical scrutiny.

However, the social and cultural optimism to which Savage refers was cruelly dashed against the sharp edges of the new decade, as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s – when in 1969 Northern Ireland (and particularly its urban centres of Belfast and Derry), infamously, descended into the full-blown internecine sectarian violence when ‘the Troubles’ are taken to have begun in earnest. The outbreak of a very peculiar civil war on England’s doorstep would cement the region’s negative reputation for decades thereafter, with Northern Ireland offering to the world its own very particular, and potent, version of the day the dream, the music and the decade died. Or to return to our earlier childhood image of the city outline on a map: Belfast in the early 1970s became, in the spirit of William Rees-Mogg’s famous Times editorial on the Rolling Stones following the Redlands drug bust of February 1967, a very peculiar patchwork butterfly, broken on the most grinding and complex of wheels. With regard to the rhetoric of retrospectives, Northern Ireland had its own more socially widespread and long-standing version of Altamont, that fateful concert of 6 December 1969 which is taken to signal the end of this abiding spirit of countercultural possibility and collective optimism; often encapsulated in the phrase ‘the day the music died’.²⁴

At the conclusion of this ‘most revisited and mythologized of decades’, the conditions that might have allowed the city an alternative future had been dramatically denied in the convulsion of violence. Belfast, therefore, experienced an extreme pendulum-swing: from a fragile and contingent utopianism too brief and slight to register historically in the broader narrative, to an abject and obsessively documented dystopia of sectarian atrocities and a residual British military presence. In local lore, this leaves 1960s Belfast remembered – by those few who have managed to create a small institutional space for critical reflection (as well as in popular memory) – as a l’age d’or, marked by the more general liberalism, and a burgeoning atmosphere of political and cultural possibility in which popular music played an important role.²⁵ However, what has been missing, is consideration of how Belfast’s 1960s story contributed to, and informed, the wider story of the decade. What is more, there is a material basis for Belfast being imagined as enjoying its own mini ‘swinging ’60s’. After the outbreak of violence in the late 1960s, the nightlife of the central business district effectively shut down, with pubs and clubs closing early. The effect on the city centre’s night-time economy was catastrophic, and these early closures would force the city’s working classes into socializing in their respective community social clubs and pubs, thereby intensifying ghettoization.

Acknowledging the power of popular music in fostering progressive possibilities does not, and should not, mean a focus on high-profile artistic and commercial successes: the customary 1960s’ Irish rock canon of Them, Van Morrison, Taste and Rory Gallagher. Such a focus on the great and the good is a rather limited lens through which to view popular music’s relationship to social experience. Savage’s ‘prism’ allows one to consider popular music in the broader fashion we have referred to: a lived culture in all of its complexities – one that existed within, and grew out of, very specific circumstances. Of course, there is the issue not just of what Belfast was producing, but also what it was consuming, and the impact of the importation of British and American popular music on local listeners. In the same vein, we are also interested in the dynamic between production and consumption, about how, for example, record shops, as well as radio and television, shaped production trends and modes of interpretation and pleasure. This also raises the uncomfortable possibility that ‘outsider’ engagements with Belfast and Northern Ireland may on occasion produce richer results with reference to late 1960s rock culture’s key terms of evaluation: of ‘saying something meaningful’, ‘telling it like it is’ or upsetting the status quo in the right way (and to a broader audience) in a fashion that ‘home-grown’ artists in the decade might not always have done. This is the subject of Chapters 2, 7 and 8.

Our argument notwithstanding, one might be forgiven for asking, ‘why Belfast?’ and for scant interest in Northern Ireland’s capital city’s little-known (and relatively brief) dream; especially when – with sad irony – the death of the dream, and its strife-torn aftermath, is so much better known internationally than its short life. Charles Dickens’s epic tale about the contradictions of the modern metropolis, A Tale of Two Cities, and its ‘best and worst of times’ adage, encapsulates some of the broad character of this local version of the end of the progressive politics the decade embodied: Belfast thought it had everything in front of it, but could not know the nothing that lay ahead. This, however, begs the question as to whether popular music culture was in fact ‘ringin’ the changes’, and, in its oft-noted ability to be ahead of the existing social order, was doing its job in chiming-in-song alongside those politicians and activists (especially in the decade’s latter half) endeavouring to send out as vocal a warning as they could about the very real possibility that the political situation could descend into violence.

We hope, in this spirit, that this ‘odd’ city, and the specifics of its music scene in the period, will have a relevance to a wider readership interested in the areas that dominant myths and the usual 1960s retrospectives rarely venture. And here, we are challenging the assumption that the periphery has nothing to tell the centre. To invoke the image of the butterfly again: the city, both via its politics and its music scene (and how these animate and inform each other), may be regarded as having a ‘butterfly effect’, where the localized ‘beating of wings’ may become the catalyst for changes elsewhere (especially when this fluttering has a powerful ‘ripple-effect’ on the metropolitan centre). If the question of how Northern Ireland has been shaped by, and fits into, the broader established global narratives of the 1960s has received scant attention, then the inverse – how 1960s Belfast and Northern Ireland may have reciprocally shaped these wider narratives in vital respects – is thoroughly marginal to the discourse. As Bosi and Prince put it in their introduction to a special issue of the journal The Sixties, devoted to Northern Ireland, Belfast ‘has echoes of other experiences without being a mere echo of any of them’.²⁶

All just a little bit of history repeating…

The decade more broadly is, and has been, subject to memory wars; its meanings struggled over. On the one hand it has embodied for both Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s respective regimes in the 1980s a permissiveness – a ‘freeloading’ culture, shot through with a dangerous sexual and political liberalism, and, as such, one that required disciplinary reforms and ‘correction’ to ‘stop the rot’ which the 1960s wrought. On the other, against this desire to return to a place for everyone and everyone in their place, the 1960s stands as a significant ‘counter-moment’ for many ‘oppositional’ groups. This ranges from organized environmentalists, through single issue political groupings to the broad ‘anti-austerity’ coalition. In this context, for the latter, the decade represents a heroic, if not always consistent, riposte to the ‘illiberalism’ of neo-liberalist late capitalism and the stultifying (after)effects of the tyranny of the marketplace.

Northern Ireland of the 1960’s has also been subject to memory wars. Here the rubric of the anniversary has an especially powerful role in shaping how the decade is remembered in the present, with 2018 and 2019 in particular marking the half-century anniversaries of the civil rights marches, the official start of ‘the Troubles’, and the recording and release of Astral Weeks (Belfast, Ireland and Northern Ireland’s most critically celebrated album). As with broader struggles over memory and meaning to establish a governing narrative, anniversaries have the effect – albeit temporary – of not only placing these events in the media spotlight, but of exposing the very tussle itself to establish a dominant discourse (and the right to claim it just happened, and happened that way). We will consider the issue of competing constructions of popular memory throughout, but in regard to anniversaries, the ‘preferred reading’ of the origins of the conflict will be explored in Chapter 7; and popular music heritage initiatives and their privileged role in shaping a dominant reading will be introduced in Chapter 3.

Belfast’s popular-musical story of the 1960s is therefore informed by, and informs in turn, the struggles over what the decade means (and has been made to mean). Here, the relatively small body of historical work on Northern Ireland in the 1960s has been an invaluable resource; and we hope that this book builds upon this material to contribute to an understanding of how this ‘halcyon’ period may have, in many ways, set the conditions for the onset of the so-called Troubles.

The city’s overlooked popular music story may, then, prompt reconsideration of some of the received wisdom about the decade. We believe a focus on a particular city provides a different, yet illuminating, lens through which to explore popular music and its relationship to politics in a decade whose remembrance hovers heavily over the present. While the butterflies released by the Stones at Hyde Park in July 1969 are a widely known part of the decade’s mythology (in a way that our invocation of Belfast’s butterfly, and its ‘effect’ is not), it is ironic, given the centre’s displacement of the periphery in the global story, that it is hardly common knowledge that the ‘beating of the butterfly wings’ of both the Rolling Stones and Belfast synchronized at the decade’s midpoint; with interesting – if little explored – consequences. The book, by necessity, is interdisciplinary in its approach, drawing respectively on film studies, cultural theory and sociopolitical history, discourse analysis, as well as approaches to performance. In so doing, it seeks to explore – and open up – the often-hidden connections among different media in order to convey a richer sense of how popular music relates to history, contributes to the broader ‘structure of feeling’ in the way that it creates meaning and pleasure for audiences.

Chapter 1, ‘1964’, explores key events, both local and global – popular-musical and political. The chapter deliberately defers engaging with the supervening myth of Them and the Maritime in favour of a focus on broader events in the popular music sphere and their impact in the city. The international reach of British popular music is of particular importance, especially the altered political-economic and cultural landscape set in motion by the international success of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (and particularly the former’s penetration of the US popular music market and their impact on mainstream political culture). To this end, the dynamic between the globalization of British popular music and local specificities is a central concern, as is the correspondence between popular-musical and political events.

The second chapter, ‘The Political Power of a Film that Might Have Been’, is the first encounter with significant absences in the discourse of (Northern) Irish popular music. It explores the Rolling Stones’ debut cinema film which is set in Dublin and Belfast in 1965. The chapter seeks to do two things. It, firstly, engages with the circumstances of the film’s production and the reasons for its near half-century disappearance; and secondly, it offers a reading of the film in relation to the historic-political context of its production. In short, it assesses the Stones’ influence on local popular music and politics, and reciprocally, it explores how Belfast and (Northern) Ireland had an impact on the Stones’ legacy/history (of how the periphery may affect the centre, altering the shape of the international popular music narrative in ways not countenanced).

In Chapter 3, ‘We Gotta Get into This Place’, the discussion widens the aperture to consider the popular music landscape in the city prior to apparent R&B explosion ushered in by Them and Van Morrison at the Maritime Hotel. The chapter, moreover, explores how official histories come to be assembled, considers their ideological ramifications and analyses the representations offered in post-ceasefire heritage initiatives. Comparative work exploring other city-based scenes are an essential reference point here in building a picture of how Belfast’s popular-musical past has been constructed and curated. It concludes by engaging with the role of the music industry, particularly music management, and their part in shaping the city’s scene in the decade, connecting it to the broader Anglo-American market.

Chapter 4, ‘Them Are Coming!’, is the first of two exploring (Northern) Ireland’s premier rhythm and blues group. It places particular emphasis on the group’s emergence in early-to-mid-1964. The several Van Morrison biographies are a vital resource, which, predictably enough, place a heavy emphasis on the city of his birth and the circumstances that led to international recognition and critical renown. If the biography constructs a narrative about origins and ‘creativity’ that cannot be neutral , we are interested in revisiting the story as told in a self-conscious and analytical fashion. The second of these two chapters, maintains the critical self-consciousness and revisionism of the preceding one. However, Chapter 5 – ‘A Story of Them’ – is more firmly focused on the significance of the group’s achievement and in considering industry machinations, music, iconography and reportage, as well as mapping musical events to broader sociopolitical developments.

The sixth chapter, ‘Irish Lady Sings the Blues’, forwards the theme of important absences introduced in Chapter 2. It unearths an earlier Belfast jazz scene of which the blues as well as rhythm and blues were a valuable part, which produced – in Ottilie Patterson – one influential, but largely forgotten, figure, who went on to play a foundational role in the broader story of British blues and R&B. Her story is our chief example of the way in which absences can often be more significant than presences.

The penultimate chapter, ‘1966: A Summer of Love?’, explores the most widely celebrated year of the decade. As the question mark in the title suggests, Belfast was to veer away from the general thrust of how 1966 is remembered. It too was a pivotal year for Belfast, but this importance is less to do with achievements in popular music than more overtly political events, and the chapter considers the pop-politics relationship in the light of these changes. October of that year was announced by the debut Stones film’s last official screening and the discussion returns to the film in relation to the altered sociopolitical landscape.

Our final chapter, ‘Crossroads: Times Have Surely Changed’, begins in 1967 and explores the relationship between popular music and politics, the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, in the concluding years of the decade, mapping key changes in both the musical and political landscapes, as well as considering their interconnectedness and their consequences. The metaphor/theme of the crossroads is central here – as in the blues myth of selling one’s soul – but it also has a local resonance. At the decade’s conclusion, Terence O’Neill made his famous televised speech where he invoked Northern Ireland at a crossroads, asking the viewing Northern Ireland populace – in a direct address to the camera – ‘what kind of Ulster’ it wanted. Accordingly, the metaphor of the ‘crossroads’ entwines with the political-local and the popular-musical global. As junction points, crossroads suggest options and ‘roads or pathways not taken’: the routes to different kinds of society and distinct forms of political accommodations. Crossroads, though, can also imply pathways where the critical engagement with popular music, and its relationship to politics, have not ventured. In this spirit, we assess locally produced music against broader currents, exploring whether Belfast’s rock scene – in the context of the form’s increased politicization via its relationship to the counterculture – was taking sides in an argument. In short, the concluding chapter engages with the issue of ‘what kind of Ulster’ was being desired, and how it was being imagined and/or represented in popular-musical terms in the decade’s closing years.

The book overall is concerned with a dialectic: about how Belfast has been imagined through popular music and the ways in which popular music has represented and given texture to the city. It is also attentive to how orthodox accounts in the present frame the past and set an interpretive agenda for the contemporary context: about what is important, and what is not. In our opening chapter, we will examine how this occurs in specific circumstances.

NOTES

1. Morrison (1970). This is the long version of a Morrison quotation from a 1970 interview in Rolling Stone . It also appears in truncated form in Heylin ( 2004 : 3).

2. Charters ( 1966 ).

3. Philip Larkin in Longley ( 2007 : 147).

4. Dawe ( 2017 : 16).

5. See Bew et al. ( 2002 ).

6. Parr ( 2017 : 1–5).

7. Mulholland ( 2000 : 61).

8. Longley ( 2018 ).

9. Hill ( 1999 : xi).

10. See, for example, chapter titled ‘Why do songs have words?’ in Frith ( 1987 ).

11. Frith ( 1996 : 168).

12. Frith ( 1996 : ­chapter 8).

13. Frith ( 1996 : 163).

14. Savage ( 2015 : 268, emphasis added). The obvious exceptions Savage goes on to note are Sam Cooke’s top 40 hit, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ (1965); the Impressions’, ‘Keep on Pushing’ and ‘People Get Ready’ (both 1964); and, most explicitly, Nina Simone’s ‘Mississippi Goddam’ (1963). The latter’s more direct address was, for the author, ‘controversial in the extreme […] banned in four states and subjected to national TV censorship’ (pp. 268–69).

15. Cloonan ( 1996 ).

16. Hamm ( 1995 :