Irish Studies Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2004

Punk Music in Northern Ireland: The PoliticalPower of ‘What Might Have Been’

MARTIN McLOONE, University of Ulster

Punk nostalgia has been going on now for a long time. The tenth anniversary years(from 1986 to 1989) established the trend (and the market) for the phenomenon ofpunk nostalgia, and the first wave of CD compilations and band re-releases emerged tofill the need. The summer of 1996 marked the twentieth anniversary of the UK’s‘summer of punk’ and instigated a period of punk nostalgia in Northern Ireland thathas hardly abated since. The Sex Pistols re-formed that year and went on a world tourthat included Belfast. If there was a general feeling that the Pistols were basically in itfor the money (it was called the ‘Filthy Lucre’ tour!), nonetheless, the tendency was toexcuse this in the band that had begun the movement and which had made its namefrom ripping off the record companies so memorably twenty years earlier. The Pistols’gig in Belfast was greeted with a fair amount of nostalgic press coverage and was anexcuse to revisit the local punk scene that, it was argued, was inspired by the originalPistols in the 1970s (especially Johnny Rotten’s dictum that ‘anyone can become a SexPistol’). Thus Northern Ireland’s leading political/cultural magazine Fortnight ran acover feature entitled ‘Did Punk Rock the Troubles?’, and offered a competition to winfree tickets to the Pistols’ Belfast gig with a tie-breaker question: ‘In no more than tenwords explain why The Sex Pistols changed your life’ [1].

A year later the focus of attention was on the twentieth anniversary of the Queen’sSilver Jubilee of June 1977 and The Sex Pistols’ memorable party-pooping ‘God Savethe Queen’ (the biggest selling single in Jubilee week but denied its no. 1 chart positionthrough ‘establishment’ chicanery). However, by 1997, the catalyst for the emergenceof punk in Northern Ireland was regarded to be The Clash rather than The Sex Pistols.According to journalist John Bradbury, the 1977 concert by the band was the maincatalyst for kick-starting the Belfast punk rock scene (Bradbury claims December butit was probably in October of that year) [2]. In fact, the concert was cancelled (theexcuse was a problem with insurance but throughout 1977, throughout the UK, punkrock concerts were cancelled regularly as local councils and nervous promoters reactedto the moral panic that followed the infamous Pistols’ television interview with BillGrundy). The disappointed Belfast punks who turned up for the gig in a sense foundeach other. The evening ended in a riot and the RUC found itself battling a differentkind of ‘white riot’ from those it was used to. On that night, in other words, theindividual punks of Belfast coalesced into ‘a scene’ and many of the bands that wouldemerge in the next few months could trace their genesis back to these events.

By the time of the Queen’s golden jubilee in 2002, punk was itself celebrating its

ISSN 0967-0882 print/ISSN 1469-9303 online/04/010029-10 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/0967088042000192095

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FIG. 1. The Undertones, 1977. Photograph Redferns Music Picture Library Ltd.

silver anniversary and the coincidence was particularly noted by Observer correspondentHenry McDonald. As the ageing aristocracy of British rock music (including PaulMcCartney, Elton John, Rod Stewart and the remnants of Queen) assembled atBuckingham Palace for the Jubilee garden party, McDonald was in ironic mood:

The Irish should be ashamed over our national indifference to the jubilee. Toallow such an auspicious occasion to pass without public celebrations, majordocumentaries on television, concerts, films, reflective newspaper featuresand commemorative souvenirs is a downright disgrace. The failure to im-press upon our young people the historical significance of this importantanniversary is to rob them of the legacy of freedom so hard won, indeed soepitomised by the very institution to which we pay homage to this year.

We are talking here, of course, about punk rock and its silver jubilee. [3]

McDonald need not have worried. By the end of that year there were in fact two filmscelebrating punk in Northern Ireland: Tommy Collins’s Teenage Kicks—The Undertonesand Roy Wallace’s independent video Big Time, which McDonald himself reviewed inglowing terms in a follow-up article on punk [4]. At the very end of the year, the deathof The Clash’s Joe Strummer occasioned another piece by McDonald on the import-ance of punk music to his generation growing up in Belfast in the 1970s at the heightof the Troubles [5]. McDonald endorses Bradbury’s opinion that The Clash were thereal catalysts in the birth of punk music in Northern Ireland. This is not surprising,given the overtly political nature of many of Strummer’s pronouncements back in1976–78. In December 1976, for example, as The Clash set out as support band on the

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much troubled Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy’ tour of that month, he defined the band’s politicalprinciples in very unambiguous terms: ‘I think people ought to know that we’reanti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-racist and we’re procreative. We’re againstignorance’ [6]. This combination of radical politics and multicultural solidarity wasparticularly attractive in the sectarian political culture of Northern Ireland, especiallyfor the emerging punk sensibility that McDonald and Wallace celebrate. Joe Strummerand The Clash came to represent an ideal that was in marked contrast to the dominantpolitical modes of late 1970s Belfast—be these the establishment politics of the parentgeneration, or the violent and blatantly sectarian politics of the paramilitaries. Strum-mer’s death in 2002, therefore, was not just an occasion to lament the passing of oneold punk; it was also an opportunity once again to celebrate an ideal that never quitebecame a reality—and to lament the lack of this ideal in the present.

McDonald and Wallace are, of course, self-confessed ‘old punks’ themselves andthey constitute part of the formidable old punk presence in the media throughoutBritain and Ireland. In Northern Ireland, this presence also includes (among others)independent writer John Bradbury, rock journalist Stuart Bailey and BBC producersOwen McFadden (ex-drummer with Belfast punk band Protex), Jackie Hamilton(ex-guitarist with The Moondogs) and Michael Bradley (bass player with The Under-tones and the man who has assumed the mantle of ‘keeper of the flame’ for the band’sreputation) [7]. This presence in the media of so many journalists who remember 1977is one reason why punk nostalgia has been so rampant in recent years. However, it isnot the main reason and it is not why this nostalgia is worth considering in more detail.

The question of punk nostalgia is an interesting and contradictory one anyway. AndyMedhurst has pointed out that part of the problem is the very unsentimental nature ofpunk itself:

A central thread in punk’s semiotic and ideological repertoires was itsscorched-earth, year-zero attitude to tradition and the past … whereas nos-talgia often springs from an attempt to seek consolation and security in timesgone by. Getting nostalgic about punk is worse than a contradiction in terms,it’s a betrayal, trading in punk’s forensic nihilism for a rose-coloured cosi-ness. [8]

As Medhurst acknowledges, though, the situation is more complex than this. On onehand there is a musicological consideration. It remains difficult today to fit the raw,angry sound of first-generation punk rock into the contemporary mainstream musicalsoundscape of easy listening radio and golden oldie retrospectives; by the same token,it is difficult to reconcile the anarchic, do-it-yourself values of 1977 with the currentgeneration of formulaic, designer punks. This gives old school punk a continuingresonance beyond the sentimental. More importantly, punk music was itself part of abroader and deeper movement of dissatisfaction with the political and cultural estab-lishment and this is one reason why the contemporary radical sensibility is inclined tolook back at punk music and its attendant culture with something akin to longing. Thecontemporary mood is one of a bland sentimental acceptance mirrored in a popularmusic dominated by TV-manufactured teen idols or retro styles without substance.Quite simply, the young are no longer revolting.

In another way, though, Medhurst considerably overplays punk’s radical impulses.His is the punk of the metropolitan centre rather than of the provinces, and thesituation for punk (and for punks) was very different outside of its art/pop epicentre onthe King’s Road. Paul Cobley has noted the dilemma for the provincial punks, deniedthe protective environment of London’s cosmopolitanism. Punk, he argues, was a

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considerable affront to a host of deep-rooted values, including class, masculinity,‘decent’ behaviour, locality and tradition:

That punk had to negotiate a set of pre-existing national attitudes is well-known; but … the fact that these attitudes were even more formidablyentrenched outside the main urban centres meant that being a provincialpunk represented a considerable leap of faith. The social context of theprovinces therefore made the punk ‘phenomenon’ a much different prop-osition from that which has been so slavishly rehearsed in written accounts.[9]

Cobley was talking about his experiences of being a punk in Wigan but his point is allthe more pertinent for Belfast. In some ways, late 1970s Belfast and punk were madefor one another. If there was an element of ‘the abject’ about punk—gobbing, vomit-ing—there was no more abject place in the Western world than Northern Ireland,specifically Belfast, in 1977. The deep-rooted traditions that Belfast punks had tonegotiate were not only those that punks nationally had to contend with but alsoincluded the IRA, the UDA, the INLA, the UVF, an armed RUC and an unreliableUDR. Johnny Rotten had only to name-check them in his music to gain some streetcredibility but Belfast punks had to deal with them every day.

McDonald’s Observer columns and Roy Wallace’s video demonstrate that punknostalgia is not just about fond remembrance of a golden time in the past (though thereis undoubtedly an element of this). Rather, punk nostalgia is about ‘what might havebeen’—nostalgia, in other words, for a sense of a better future and a nostalgia that isgiven added political poignancy by the nature of sectarian politics in contemporaryNorthern Ireland. What is being remembered and what is being longed for is theopportunity that punk music once offered of an imagining beyond the sectarian politicsof Northern Ireland’s older generation. In this regard, punk was not just a revolt intostyle. It was also a revolt into the substance of a new politics. The non-sectarian natureof the original punk ideal is central to Wallace’s video and is at the core of McDonald’sarticles. For example, he remembers the summer of 1978 and being stopped by a policepatrol in Great Victoria Street in Belfast as he walked along in a procession of youngpunks:

When an old cop started taking our names and addresses he lookedflummoxed. There were punks from the Glencairn estate, Divis Flats, Ar-doyne, the Lower Shankill and the Markets. It must have been the first timesince 1969 that he had encountered a large group of youths from working-class republican and loyalist areas that were not trying to kill each other. [10]

McDonald’s ‘old cop’ may be a rhetorical flourish but it is significant. If the punkexplosion in Britain was a revolt against the complacent certainties of the parentalgeneration (the one that most fully enjoyed the consumer boom of the 1960s), inNorthern Ireland it was a rebellion against the complacent certainties of a sectarianpolitical culture that had delivered nothing but social disharmony and communalbreakdown. Twenty-five years later, the situation is no better. The political context, inother words, for McDonald and Wallace’s nostalgia is precise. During 2001–2 inArdoyne, in north Belfast, sectarian divisions amongst the working class were so badthat young Catholic primary school children had to run a gauntlet of abuse to get toschool each morning and elderly Protestant residents were afraid to go to the local postoffice to pick up their pensions for fear of roaming Catholic youths. Judged againstthese horrendous examples of communal breakdown and social disharmony, the punk

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imaginary of the late 1970s now looks positively life enhancing. And therein lies theirony: the original British punks, epitomised by Johnny Rotten’s sneer, may have spittheir venom at the hippies but punk in Northern Ireland offered a confrontational stylethat in the end seemed to endorse the old hippie dream of peace, love and understand-ing [11]. Punk music in Northern Ireland, in other words, was an original ‘communityrelations council’, emerging from the bleakness to offer hope when despair andnegativity was the more usual response.

It is important, though, to emphasise that this reading of punk is not just acontemporary reappraisal of events, tinged with well meaning but naive sentimentality.Wallace’s Big Time video is primarily a homage to the celebrated Belfast entrepreneurand punk facilitator Terri Hooley. However, it also pays homage to an earlier film onpunk music in Northern Ireland, John T. Davis’s celebrated Shellshock Rock (1979),made in the eye of the storm itself and the original progenitor of the thesis.

Shellshock Rock—politics

In its own low-key, almost subterranean way, John T. Davis’s film has been aremarkably influential cultural document. For a start, it introduced the world to anoriginal and significant stylist who has gone on to make some of the most interestingand visually exciting documentaries of the last twenty years. It also introduced a set ofconcerns that were, in many ways, ahead of their time and to which Davis has remainedcommitted throughout his career. In a series of major documentary films down theyears he has explored the significance of popular music to a sense of personal andcommunal identity in Northern Ireland and tracked this against the influence ofAmerican popular culture and its myths. In an influential two-hour documentary,screened at prime time on ITV, he probed the significance of the road myth and itsmusic in America and its influence further afield (Route 66, 1985). He returned to thesubject in 1991 in his celebrated study of itinerant life in the USA in Hobo. In two filmsin particular he explored the relationship between bible-belt USA and NorthernIreland, especially through their fundamentalist religion and their shared love ofcountry music (Power in the Blood, 1989, and Dust on the Bible, 1990). Davis’scelebrated style and musical obsessions are all in evidence in embryonic form inShellshock Rock.

It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that the film should have caused the controversythat it did at 1979’s Cork Film Festival. Originally chosen and scheduled for ascreening on the penultimate day of the festival, the film was mysteriously droppedduring the festival week itself. The only explanation that Davis was given at the timewas that the film was withdrawn because it was ‘technically not up to standard’. Davisorganised press screenings of the film off the main festival programme and the responsewas very positive. Subsequently, the festival director and the selection committee whichhad rejected the film came in for some trenchant press criticism. (The festival directorlater retracted the comment that the film was technically not up to standard.) Theidiocy of the Cork Film Festival decision was confirmed later in the year when the filmwon a silver award at the International Film and Television Festival in New York [12].

Davis felt at the time that the film was banned for political reasons. The film doesindeed have a particular political message but it is more likely that it was banned formoral and aesthetic reasons. There is a certain racy vernacular in the songs and in thecomments made to camera (also there is one incidence of ‘mooning’) and this wasalways going to annoy a conservative and complacent middle-class jury. The film’s

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energetic style—rapid editing cut to capture the breakneck speed of the music, a moving,hand-held camera caught in the swirl of youthful energy—was equally challenging. In itsown way, Shellshock Rock showed up the huge gap that by then existed between theSouthern cultural establishment and the culture of the streets. Looking back at the wholecontroversy now, especially through the prism of the Celtic Tiger economy, it seems likean incident from another planet and not just another time. With hindsight, we can seethat it brought into focus a deeper set of contradictions that ran through a Southern Irishsociety on the cusp of significant social and cultural change. It is hardly surprising thata few years after this controversy, public funding for the Cork Film Festival waswithdrawn and the festival was suspended pending a complete overhaul of its structureand staffing. It re-emerged in the mid-1980s under a younger and more clued-inmanagement team and in 1989 it finally repaid its debt to John T. Davis by organisinga retrospective of his work a full ten years after the controversy over Shellshock Rock.

By this time, Davis had established his reputation as an accomplished documentaryfilmmaker, renowned for a visual style and a body of work that was wholly original,eccentric and challenging. His central obsession was to explore popular music in itssocio-cultural context. To achieve this, he developed a particular style that became hisvisual signature. This involved an exploration of the relationship between sound andvision on film, often deliberately disengaging one from the other to set up a puzzle inthe viewer’s mind, drawing attention to the context in which the music is played orheard simply by laying it out as an enigma. This is mirrored in his choice of shot,ranging from the aerial or panoramic long shot to disorientating big close-ups. Thisstyle reaches its most developed form in his disturbing and challenging exploration ofUlster’s fundamentalist Protestantism in 1990’s Dust on the Bible but the style is therein embryonic form in Shellshock Rock. It proved too much of a challenge for theaesthetic conservatives of the Cork selection jury.

The style, of course, is at the service of the politics of the film. The constantly movinghand-held cameras catch the immediacy and vitality of the music scene at the turn ofthe year 1978–79. By this stage, punk music in Northern Ireland had already begun tobreak out into a wider audience. Stiff Little Fingers’ first two singles, ‘Suspect Device’and especially ‘Alternative Ulster’ (both 1978) attracted wide attention, and TheUndertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’ got the band onto television for the first time in October1978 (the single eventually reached no. 31 in the British charts). Shellshock Rockexplores the breadth and depth of the punk scene, especially in Belfast and Derry, andcaptures on film a number of bands who were destined not to make it (including Rudi,whose single ‘Big Time’ was the first to be recorded on Terri Hooley’s Good Vibrationslabel, and which provides the title track for Roy Wallace’s video twenty-five years later).In many ways, Rudi—the band that didn’t make it—are presented in the film andcertainly in the video Big Time as the heroes of Belfast’s punk and, in contrast to StiffLittle Fingers, represent a sense of authenticity and anti-commercialism that wascentral to the punk ethos overall. This brings to mind Jon Savage’s analysis of punk’scentral paradox:

Built into Punk from the beginning was not only a tendency to self-destruction but a short shelf-life. Despite what many of the groups professed,the movement enshrined failure: to succeed in conventional terms meant youhad failed on your own terms; to fail meant you had succeeded. [13]

The utopian moment of punk—the moment when the young working-class people ofNorthern Ireland crossed the sectarian divide in the name of a shared new imagining—

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resides with the bands such as Rudi, The Outcasts, Protex and The Idiots who did notmake it. The paradox now is that the challenge they posed back in the late 1970s is stillthe challenge that contemporary Northern Irish political culture is faced with.

In Shellshock Rock, Davis intercuts a number of live performances of these bands(including Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones performing their two most famoussongs) with interviews of the punk musicians and their supporters. Through the livemusic and the interviews a picture emerges of this new space—mental as well asphysical, musical as well as social, economic as well as political—that has been openedup in an otherwise claustrophobic world.

The film opens to the ethereal, heavily echoed sound of The Idiots singing the chorusfrom the film’s title track: ‘For I am so afraid … For I am so afraid … ’ (a refrain thatis repeated later in the film and gives an eerily appropriate sound for the tracking shotsof Belfast’s darkened streets that occur throughout). This refrain is heard over veryrough footage of a punk rock gig, shot in a grainy, smoky blue and strobe-lit to achievea disorienting and maybe even alienating combination of sound and image. The filmthen cuts to the first interviews, three young punks who begin to put some substanceto the slightly otherworldly feel of the opening sequence. They articulate what is thepolitical message of the film and five points in particular emerge.

First, like punk elsewhere, indeed like all post-war youth subcultures, the Belfastpunks articulate a general anti-establishment philosophy—a rebellion against confor-mity in general and against their parents in particular. Second, however, it is thesectarian nature of their parents’ culture that is seen to be the main problem, thedesignation by society of religious labels and the consequent division of young peopleinto opposing religious camps. The third point emerges logically from this rejection:punk music and the punk scene in general is all about giving an identity to the youngthat would allow them to come together with a shared set of cultural beliefs and tastesthat are beyond religious and political norms. This is the key political message of thepunks and it underpins the whole film. It is emphasised later in the film when, invoiceover, a young punk notes that after 2,000 deaths nothing has been achieved: ‘Whowants a united Ireland? Who wants to be in the United Kingdom or anything?’

The fourth point that emerges from the interviews is one that is also emphasisedmany years later by the former punks interviewed in Wallace’s video. The space thatwas created for this coming together was Belfast city centre itself, at this time aban-doned and deserted at night by everyone else except the security forces. The darkenedand empty city centre provided a meeting place where the overwhelmingly working-class punks could get together outside the sectarian pressures of their home housingestates. The venues for live music were seedy pubs—the Harp Bar and the Pound—andthe meeting place was Terri Hooley’s record store on Great Victoria Street. As Hooleyhimself says in Big Time, after years of bombing and sectarian murder in the mid-1970s,when the nightly carnage of assassination and sectarian murder reduced Belfast topariah status, it was the punks who began the revival of the city centre in 1978.

The final point that emerges from the interviews is perhaps the most utopian. Thepunks in Belfast are anxious to differentiate themselves from the London punk scene oftwo years earlier. This is dismissed as a passing phase, a fashion and a mere empty stylethat lacked the social and political edge of its Belfast counterpart. The English punkscene was essentially a negative style while punk in Northern Ireland was a positivesocial and cultural force. It was, according to the punks themselves, destined to lastbecause it was engaged in a process of establishing an alternative to both the parentculture and the culture of dissent that was represented by republican and loyalist

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paramilitaries. It did not last, of course. The dirty protests and the republican hungerstrikes of 1980–81 raised the sense of the abject beyond that of a mere subcultural style.The political temperature was raised and as the music and the styles elsewheretransmuted from new wave to new romantic, the punk scene in Belfast collapsed backinto sectarianism. This ‘dissent from dissent’ is important, nonetheless, for understand-ing the nature of the punk moment in Northern Ireland and for understanding the kindof nostalgia that it generates twenty-five years later.

Shellshock Rock—the music

If the interviews and voiceovers in Davis’s film carry the political narrative of the film,then the music provides the central focus. Appropriately, Davis cuts from the first setof interviews to footage of Stiff Little Fingers performing ‘Alternative Ulster’ live at theNew University of Ulster. The sequence has all the energy and excitement that weassociate with the live punk scene, shot in close-up and edited rapidly to match theband’s breakneck delivery. ‘Alternative Ulster’ was Northern Ireland’s first punk hit inthe UK and has come to symbolise the attempt to forge an alternative politics by theprovince’s severely bored, annoyed and disaffected youth. The film cuts from the liveperformance to an interview with the band in the dressing room after the show. Leadsinger and guitarist Jake Burns talks about the threats the band has faced and thepolitical danger that is inherent in championing an alternative cultural space beyond theclutches of both the political mainstream and the political opposition represented byrepublicanism and loyalism. Again, the message is clear: it is easy to be oppositionaland alternative in cosmopolitan Britain but more difficult in Ulster where one’skneecaps (or even one’s life) are at risk. Jake Burns articulates a viewpoint that valoriseshis band as heroes and pioneers, pushing a message of hope and a new beginningagainst formidable paramilitary odds.

Objectively, of course, this is true and it is the one characteristic of the punk scenein Northern Ireland that was not replicated anywhere else in Britain or Ireland. Itrequires no great courage in cosmopolitan London to wear a tee shirt showing the faceof the Queen defaced by a pin; it is quite another matter to do so in loyalist Belfast.Equally, it requires an act of substantial bravery in the republican areas of the city toreject the platitudes of the parental culture when these are invested with so muchpatriotic sacrifice, oppositional rhetoric, and carry a substantial physical threat aboutcollaborating with the enemy.

However, in some of the other interviews in the film, Shellshock Rock suggests thatthere was less than universal approval of Stiff Little Fingers’ approach to the situationin Northern Ireland amongst the punks themselves. To some extent, this was the resultof ‘local knowledge’. The band had been well known in the city as a heavy metal coversband until a visiting English journalist, Gordon Ogilvie, turned them into a punk bandand helped to write the kinds of songs that he knew would go down well in Britain. Theband’s first two singles, ‘Suspect Device’ and ‘Alternative Ulster’ and their first albumInflammable Material (1979) left no doubt as to their subject matter. However, thefeeling persisted at the time that this was a ‘Johnny-come-lately’ band that exploited thesituation in Northern Ireland for commercial gain and spoke more to the disaffectedBritish audience than it did to, or for, the Northern Ireland punks.

If Stiff Little Fingers preached about an alternative Ulster, then The Undertoneslived the alternative and wrote about it by ignoring the political situation completely. InShellshock Rock, the band performs the hit single ‘Teenage Kicks’ live, and the contrast

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here with the Fingers could hardly be greater. The Undertones played a form ofpower-pop driven by a superb twin-guitar ‘wall of sound’ in support of singer FeargalSharkey’s choirboy warble and the melodic wit of John O’Neill’s lyrics. The sound andthe performance is every bit as frantic and as energetic as the Fingers’ raw agit-prop butthe content is very different (the film later features The Undertones playing ‘HereComes the Summer’). The Undertones made a particular point about their subjectmatter. The opening track on their second album Hypnotised (1980) is a song called‘More Songs about Chocolates and Girls’. This makes an ironic nod towards the titleof Talking Heads’ 1978 second album, More Songs about Buildings and Food (itself aquirky, ironic comment on the po-faced seriousness of the times). However, it isprimarily a statement of intent and it is difficult not to see in the title and in the band’swhole stance an implied criticism of Stiff Little Fingers (and perhaps even of TheClash, with whom they toured in the USA in 1979).

Jon Savage noted the contrast between the two bands—Stiff Little Fingers’ ‘Belfastsocial realism’ as opposed to The Undertones’ ‘incandescent pop/Punk flash’. Moreproblematically, he describes The Undertones as the ‘missing link between the 13th

Floor Elevators, the Stooges, and Irish traditional music’, a remark which exudes morethan a trace of Irish essentialism. But the musical and lyrical contrast between NorthernIreland’s two most ‘successful’ punk bands is clear enough. Savage quotes a 1990comment by Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey that reinforces the point: ‘People usedto ask early on why we didn’t write songs about the troubles: we were doing our bestto escape from it’ [14].

It is ironic that twenty-five years later some of the band members seem to haveregrets now about their decidedly apolitical or anti-political stance of the time. InTommy Collins’s affectionate portrait of The Undertones, guitarist Damian O’Neilldiscusses this point. What is interesting is his revelation that the band’s resolutelyapolitical attitude had already begun to crack by the time of the hunger strikes of 1981.O’Neill claims that the band were on Top of the Pops doing their single ‘It’s Going toHappen!’ on the night that hunger striker Bobby Sands died. He wore a black armbandfor the occasion. The song’s chorus, he reveals (‘It’s gonna happen, happen/ happensall the time/ It’s gonna happen, happen/ ’til you change your mind’), was a vague butnonetheless heart-felt reference to the impasse over the hunger strikes and an appeal toMargaret Thatcher to change her mind.

When The Undertones broke up, the O’Neill brothers were to assuage any residualguilt they felt about the band’s lack of politics by forming the much more politicallycharged That Petrol Emotion in 1985. However, as Shellshock Rock shows, in 1978–79The Undertones captured the mood of the times and the aspirations of the punks betterthan most other bands through their aggressive concerns with adolescence and sex. Ina way, ‘Teenage Kicks’, by being about the ordinary, was an extremely politicalstatement in the highly charged, extraordinary atmosphere of Northern Ireland at thetime.

In Collins’s film, BBC DJ John Peel, the man who championed The Undertonesback in 1978, is being shown around the Bogside area of Derry by the remainingmembers of the band. He makes reference to the famous line in The Sex Pistols’‘Holidays in the Sun’ about ‘taking a cheap holiday in other people’s misery’ toarticulate his queasiness about being in Derry and living off the memory of that misery.The accusation, however, is more appropriate to the agit-prop lyrics of Stiff LittleFingers (aimed primarily at the non-Ulster punks) or to The Clash’s posed photo-opportunities at the barricades in Belfast in 1977 (one of which later became a

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notorious and much criticised tee shirt). What punk nostalgia today shows was thatback in 1978–80, in Northern Ireland’s briefly flourishing punk scene, the aggression ofthe music and the anti-establishment culture of punk in general was utilised to expressan ironic political position. For Northern Irish punks, the establishment then meanttheir slightly older siblings as well as their parents. Their opposition was to the statusquo as well to those aggressive and violent opponents of the status quo who hadreduced daily life to the abject. Punk was a third space beyond the fixed binaries ofthese opposing forces; it gave a sense that, pace Rotten, there could be a future, if notin England’s dreaming, then certainly in Northern Ireland’s re-imagining.

Shellshock Rock remains an important document of a moment in recent history whenmusic and a subcultural street style coalesced to challenge dominant political ortho-doxies. That these orthodoxies were themselves often ‘oppositional’ only adds to thesocial significance of that moment. As contemporary politics in Northern Irelandwrestles with the polarised sectarianism of working-class communities, the sense of thatfuture, the ‘future perfect’ of punk, looks increasingly attractive.

NOTES

[1] ‘Did Punk Rock the Troubles?’, Fortnight, July/August 1996, pp. 28–31.[2] John Bradbury, ‘Big Time, You Ain’t No Friend of Mine’, Causeway, September 1997, pp. 40–45.[3] Henry McDonald, ‘Safety Pins Will Be Worn. Why the Deafening Silence over this Year’s other

Significant Jubilee?’, Observer, 2 June 2002.[4] Henry McDonald, ‘Punk Remembered: Big Time Celebrates Music that Kept the Spirit of

Individual Freedom Alive’, Observer, 1 December 2002.[5] Henry McDonald, ‘No Ordinary Joe: The Death of The Clash’s Lead Singer Robs Us of a

Remarkable Man’, Observer, 29 December 2002.[6] ‘Star Quote: Joe Strummer’, NME Rock ’n’ Roll Years (BCA, 1992), p. 295.[7] See, for example, Bradley’s interesting notes on the songs on 1999’s compilation True Confessions

(Singles � A’s � B’s), and his four-part history of the band (the transcript of a radio series he wrotein 1999) to be found on The Undertones’ official website: � www.theundertones.com � .

[8] Andy Medhurst, ‘What Did I Get?: Punk, Memory and Autobiography’, in Punk Rock: So What?The Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin (Routledge, 1999), pp. 219–231.

[9] Paul Cobley, ‘Leave the Capitol’, in Sabin, Punk Rock: So What?, pp. 170–185.[10] McDonald, ‘Safety Pins Will Be Worn’.[11] A further irony, of course, is that ‘Rotten’ was the alter-ego of a second-generation Irishman

named John Lydon—a fact which in retrospect considerably complicates both the political and thecultural dimensions of metropolitan punk.

[12] ‘Punk Film Lifts Silver Award’, Spectator, 23 November 1979.[13] Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 140.[14] Savage, England’s Dreaming, pp. 596–597.