Hooleygan

by Terri Hooley

  They did last longer than most of the bands from here though. They took part in TV documentary Cross The Line in 1980 – on the so-called ‘peace’ walls that divide Belfast – and after that split up, getting back together in 1983 to record on London indie label, Kabuki. Their message was so strong that a journalist from New Musical Express labelled them as ‘the most important band in Britain’! They put out two albums, Flowers for All Occasions (1985) and Political Wings (1987), and finally split in 1987.

  But I think that they left an impact on Northern Ireland and, indeed, on me and two things about their career stand out. In 1985, they released a single called ‘Wild Colonial Boy’, which was a savage attack on those tossers in America who donated huge amounts of money for the IRA to buy guns; and later that same year, they held a fundraising concert for Lagan College, Northern Ireland’s first integrated school for Catholic and Protestant children. I have a lot of respect for them for doing that.

  I’ve already mentioned that my music tastes are wide and varied, and that was why, in 1979, we also signed The Tearjerkers to Good Vibes, despite the fact that they were influenced by the likes of the Beach Boys and were not a punk band at all! Drummer Nigel Hamilton and lead guitarist Paul ‘Groover’ McIlwaine wrote the music, while lead singer Paul Maxwell wrote the lyrics. On bass was Howard Ingram, while Brian Rawson played guitar. They made their debut at the Rockin’ Chair in Derry in February 1979. They looked and sounded much different to the other bands coming from Northern Ireland and I suppose that was why I liked them really. Lord knows it wasn’t because of their personalities! They always thought they should have been more famous than they were and so they weren’t really the most popular band around. In fact, the one and only time they played The Harp Bar, a few of them ended up in hospital after the dyed-in-the-wool punk fans took exception to their poppy style, pelted the lads with bottles and cans, and beat them up as they fled the stage. Those were the good old days!

  That didn’t deter them though, and they came to me with a demo tape, which featured their songs ‘Love Affair’ and ‘Bus Stop’. They sounded good and I reckoned they were worth a punt, so in March 1979 they laid down four tracks at Keystone studios in Dublin, and we released ‘Love Affair’ later that year – it turned out to be their only release with us.

  In April that year they became the first Good Vibes band to perform on the telly when they played live on UTV’s Good Evening Ulster. I think they were the only band we had who promised not to swear on air! But their big claim to fame came in mid-1979 when they were given the chance to support Thin Lizzy on tour. U2 – at that time only beginning their own career – was also Thin Lizzy’s support act, and it was even rumoured that Tearjerkers drummer, Nigel Hamilton, was asked if he would be interested in becoming their drummer instead. He reputedly turned them down because he thought The Tearjerkers had a better chance of success – good call Nigel! – but in my opinion it may have been more a case of U2 giving drummer Larry Mullen a boot up the arse, and reminding him he could be replaced.

  Most importantly, it was around this time when The Tearjerkers were signed up by Back Door Records, a subsidiary of Phonogram Records. They did a couple of sessions for the John Peel Show, supported Dexys Midnight Runners on tour, and while they recorded several singles for them, Back Door released only one. The lads began to feel as though the record bosses wanted them to be something they weren’t – to be more of a punk band – but The Tearjerkers had more of a pop feel and so probably suffered by association with the Northern Ireland punk scene.

  Two years after they had formed, The Tearjerkers broke up when Nigel Hamilton decided to leave the group. A few of the lads reappeared in bands Radio City and The Dingo Babies but it was another case of promise unfulfilled. I’ll always believe it was because the record companies weren’t giving new bands like them the chance to show what they could do, nor were they giving them the right advice, so bands were being dumped from their labels and shipped home very quickly.

  1979 was a very productive year for Good Vibrations, though admittedly I was a little concerned that losing The Undertones had left a big hole in our list. I needn’t have worried – not long after the ’Tones signed with Sire, a Derry band called The Moondogs came to my attention. I knew very little about them, except that they had formed the year before and had only just given themselves a name! They were regular performers in the famous Derry punk venue The Casbah, so it was really only a matter of time before they would be noticed. I had been told a lot about them – like how they had once played a gig from the back of a lorry in Derry’s Bull Park – but it wasn’t until they recorded a session at Downtown Radio that I heard them properly and I liked them immediately. Like XDreamysts and The Tearjerkers, their music had a slightly poppy edge, which I thought would make them very popular.

  I made contact and in April 1979 Good Vibes released their first double A-side single, ‘She’s 19’/‘Ya Don’t Do Ya’. It was to be their only release on Good Vibrations as John Peel took to it immediately and began playing it on his show. The publicity this generated for them meant that they were able to secure a gig supporting The Undertones on their debut tour of the UK. After that, things moved very quickly and barely three months after they had released their debut single, they signed a deal with Real Records, a subsidiary of Sire.

  From playing to a crowd from the back of a lorry to working in a recording studio with the likes of Pete Waterman and Ray Davies of The Kinks, the boys were riding high. In 1981, they were even given their own teatime TV show, Moondogs Matinee, by Granada TV, rehearsing and filming on the Coronation Street set of all places! So when they were invited to New York to work on their album with the legendary Todd Rundgren – producer of Meat Loaf’s epic Bat Out Of Hell album – it seemed they had the world at their feet.

  But at this stage they were still only a bunch of kids – bassist Jackie Hamilton was only seventeen – and things were happening too quickly for them. A long stint in the Big Apple is a big ask for a bunch of teenagers from Derry, and a mixture of homesickness and incompatibility with Rundgren drove them home where they broke up, declared bankruptcy and signed on the dole. Jackie would go on to become a very successful TV producer, lead singer Gerry McCandless forged a career in computers, and drummer Austin Barrett stayed in the music business playing with blues band, Double Trouble.

  Amazingly Rundgren finished the album with the material the boys had already recorded and in 1981 it was released by Sire … but only in Germany. The boys didn’t know a thing about it until 1985, when a bloke came into my shop and said he had a copy. Jackie tells me he hadn’t ever clapped eyes on his band’s album before that and it took him years to get his own copy – and he had to stump up £85 for a copy someone was selling on eBay!

  Of course, in 1979, we didn’t know about all the record company drama that lay ahead for us. All we were concerned with was the music and wanting to get that music heard by as many people as possible.

  At that time, many people outside the bigger cities had never seen live punk bands before – the most exciting live gigs would have been a night at the local boozer listening to cover versions of Elton John or Simon & Garfunkel songs. The very few concerts that took place in Northern Ireland were put on at the Ulster Hall or King’s Hall in Belfast, so if you lived in the sticks you never got to see an original band. Kids from all over the country would have travelled to Belfast to see live acts, so we decided it was time to return the favour – we were going to tour Northern Ireland.

  In April 1979, packed into a white van, Rudi, The Outcasts and The Tearjerkers took the inaugural Good Vibrations Tour to the highways and by-ways of Northern Ireland. We had one mission: to spread the gospel of punk.

  There were ten dates in all, including one in Dublin. Nigel Hamilton from The Tearjerkers, in a very democratic manner, suggested that the bands would alternate running order, all coming on to jam together briefly at the end. It was supposed to be like one of the old fifties/sixties package
tours and it was all great fun. The bands really tried hard to outdo each other, and the gigs were mostly packed.

  Our first stop was on 9 April 1979, in the tiny village of Glenarm in the stunning Glens of Antrim. Davy Miller – who worked with me in the shop – and I set off in his car, heading for the venue which was just a small pub in the village. The rest of the guys were following behind in a van and, just as we came out of Larne, we spotted a girl hitch-hiking. It was a horrible night so the van stopped to offer her a lift. It turned out she had just arrived on the ferry from Scotland and was heading to Glenarm to see her favourite bands.

  We didn’t tell her she was actually being driven to the gig by her heroes, just that we were heading that way. When we arrived she got out and thanked us, it was only then we declared our hand. You’d have thought she’d won the lottery, and her reward was to help the lads haul the gear into the venue! For the first time, I realised we were making a mark beyond our own shores. I don’t remember a hell of a lot about the gig itself, except that there was no trouble and everybody went home happy.

  I’d had a few drinks by the end of the night and once the van was packed up, I nipped down a laneway to have a pee, but being a little unsteady on my feet I ended up falling into a river. I spent the journey home completely naked, except for a rather smelly blanket from the back of the car. To make matters worse, on the way home we were stopped by a UDR patrol and asked to show our ID. I didn’t have mine so I was told to get out of the car while it was searched. There I was, naked and freezing by the side of the road, surrounded by armed men – not an experience I’d care to repeat!

  The night we took the tour to Armagh was, thankfully, a lot less eventful. The audience there was full of heavy metal fans – an endless sea of denim – but I got on-stage to warm them up, and after a while they seemed to accept us. They even took a real shine to The Tearjerkers.

  We did, of course, include The Harp and The Pound on the Good Vibrations Tour – well every good tour has to have a homecoming gig!

  But it was touch and go as to whether or not I was even going to be allowed into The Pound, as I had been barred the previous year for punching some bloke after an Undertones gig. It was like something out of a John Wayne movie actually, this guy had been a bit of stalker and at every opportunity would turn up at the shop, or accost me in the pub, to slag off the bands. On this particular night though, I’d had enough and chinned him. The bouncers descended, but before they could lay their hands on me the kids in the audience lifted their beer bottles and made it clear nobody was going to touch me. The bouncers were no match for them!

  But that’s how it was back then, at least in Northern Ireland. We were family, and we looked out for each other. Every band, and at times it seemed every fan, would do whatever they could to help another band out, even if they hated each other! Whether that meant lending them some gear, or folding their record sleeves, there was a real sense of solidarity that we just didn’t seem to get from visiting bands.

  XTC, for example, came over to play a gig at Queen’s the day after the last date of the Good Vibrations tour, and RUDI and The Outcasts played support. But, in contrast to the experience we had on our own tour dates, which were hectic but fun, and with everyone doing their part, XTC turned out to be incredibly pretentious, acting as though they were big boys who were lowering themselves by visiting the regions. As Brian Young of RUDI pointed out, a pattern was emerging in that, almost without exception, the bands visiting from England or further abroad acted like spoilt pampered rock stars, treating the local support acts with contempt. Belfast people are not too impressed by celebrity so when some band tries to act big then we don’t take kindly to it.

  But our guys knew that they had as much talent, if not more, than those posers. The likes of Rudi, The Outcasts, Protex and The Undertones weren’t concerned about how they would sound on-stage, they had complete faith in their own ability and their fans believed in them. They had raw, unrefined talent and there is no doubt in my mind that this set the Northern Ireland punk bands apart from all the others – there were no boundaries, just unlimited enthusiasm and determination.

  Anybody who was at any one of their gigs back then will remember nights of barely contained exuberance – it was like sex! Well maybe not quite, but it was exciting all the same and the only way to come down from a climactic evening like that was to roll a joint, lie back and slowly relive it. Because it was clear that touring and performing for their fans was what all the Good Vibes bands cared about most. A recording contract would be great, of course, but I think if you ask any of the bands they would say that they were never in it for the money – which was just as well really! – they weren’t even in it for the fame – they were just hooked on music.

  So, having successfully taken our music to the people of Northern Ireland, we decided to turn our attention to Dublin, which eventually became an incredibly important market for us. In the early days there were very few outlets for punk bands in the south so it was very difficult for new bands to get their music heard. The only real vehicle was Dave Fanning’s Rock Show on RTÉ. Dave was a fantastic supporter of our bands and often spoke about how important Good Vibes was for the wider music scene in Ireland. He was a regular visitor to Belfast and bands like Ruefrex, The Outcasts and The Tearjerkers all recorded sessions for his show.

  I loved taking the bands down to Dublin to play. The Belfast music scene seemed to be years ahead of what was going on down there, so the audiences were appreciative of what we were trying to do. The bands loved playing there too, as they had built up a good following. So, in May 1979, we all headed to Dublin for the twenty-four-hour Dark Space Festival at the Project Arts Centre, where U2, the Boomtown Rats, Virgin Prunes and a whole lot of Dublin bands were playing.

  John Peel was with us, having visited The Harp the night before, as were Protex, RUDI and The Outcasts who, at one stage, formed the Good Vibrations All Stars, with yours truly on mic. To this day I can’t understand how U2 hit the big time and the All Stars missed out! But we saw a reggae band called Zebra that night, and Peel recommended that we sign them.

  Zebra had the privilege of being Ireland’s only homegrown reggae band and we put out a 12” single called ‘Repression’ on the Good Vibes label, which did surprisingly well. We pressed 1,200 copies and for a while it was very popular on the Irish indie scene. I hear that copies of this are worth about £300 these days, so I’m delighted to say that I was given a copy one Christmas! If I’m honest, I’d have to say I didn’t think that much of them – I had only signed them on John Peel’s recommendation – and I have no idea what happened to them, but it goes to show that Peely didn’t always get it right!

  As other new bands emerged in Dublin we often invited them to play The Harp, but none of them ever came. I guess they were scared shitless of coming to Belfast. I knew that they would have been safe, but I suppose I don’t really blame them for their reluctance as the memory of the Miami Showband Massacre on 31 July 1975 – when three members of the band were shot dead by the UVF – would have still been very fresh in the minds of many Irish performers. How could anyone expect bands from the south to cross the border after that?

  That was part of the battle for Good Vibrations; we had only ourselves to rely on when it came to making music. The Troubles discouraged not only bands from across the border from playing here, but also bands from across the water. We were so isolated musically that a group of friends and myself, under the name The Tribe, had launched the Music For Belfast Campaign in an attempt to convince English bands and artists not to leave Northern Ireland off their tours. The campaign succeeded in winning us some attention across the water and, in the late seventies, we were invited to bring some bands over to play a festival at Action Space in London. We took RUDI, The Moondogs and The Outcasts over, but received a threat from the IRA warning us not to take to the stage. We ignored it of course and the resulting press conference caused a bit of a stir. It seemed that the paramilitaries didn�
��t want the outside world to see that there was something relatively normal going on in Belfast, that it was not a total war zone. But we wanted to show that most young people were not involved in the paramilitaries, preferring to carry guitars instead of chucking stones at the cops.

  It was this desire to show what our music scene really was that had inspired John T. Davis to put together the 1979 punk documentary Shellshock Rock which was, in my opinion, one of the most important pieces of work to come out of Northern Ireland for a generation. It was produced on a really low budget – made more with enthusiasm than money really – but it succeeded in accurately reflecting the attitudes of the punks in Northern Ireland at that time. It contained interviews with bands and fans alike, alongside live performances by the likes of Stiff Little Fingers, The Outcasts, RUDI and Protex.

  It was due to premiere at the 1979 Cork Film Festival, so a group of us decided to make the journey down to show our support. I was also due to appear on Dave Fanning’s Rock Show to talk about the film. But the night before we were due to set off, John T. rang me with news that the festival had made a decision not to show the film, saying that it was ‘technically not up to standard’. It’s my personal opinion, but I maintain that this was not the case at all, that actually there was a snobbery about the ‘black north’ and about punk – they didn’t want to acknowledge what was going on up here. John was gutted of course, and asked me not to mention it on the radio, but I knew that we needed to make people aware of what had happened so I said, ‘John, fuck off, of course I’m going to mention it.’

  We drummed up as much media attention as we could and word began to spread. A few weeks later it even took a silver medal at the New York Film Festival. Banned in Cork, feted in New York – I know what I’d rather have on my CV!