the Belfast Festival at Queen’s University, I went along to hear Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth talk about their music and play extracts of it. I think it was in the old Music Room, one of the smaller lecture theatres, and there were about twenty people present. That’s what it seems like in memory, at least; I recall my discomfort at being one of a few and not really knowing where to look; but they talked and joked and we had a session, unplugged before unplugged happened. I’ll never forget that. This is what real artists do, I thought; the size of the audience isn’t important.
Looking out the back window, waiting for Match of the Day or The Day of the Triffids to come blinking on to the television set in the gathering dusk of a Saturday night, a young lad born in the early 1950s hears for the first time Sarah Vaughan sing her great love song ‘Lover Man’, and the 1960s break cover in north Belfast.
What stands out in my mind is that house in which we lived in north Belfast throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s. It overlooked the lough and harbour port. My grandmother was a singer, a light-opera singer, and she used to have these soirées in the front room. I used to stand at the top of the stairs listening to this, and it always fascinated me that it was as if there was a little theatre in the front room.
It was always very well organised, it was good fun and the pupils enjoyed themselves; they would always leave happy. What struck me from an early age (I would have been five or six at the time) about the adult soirées she held at night, and at weekends, was their manner. Everything was contained – nothing ever got out of hand, and even though the people enjoyed themselves and you could hear the laughter, there was something reserved about it all. My grandmother would sing the odd time, but mostly she kept her voice to herself, so to speak.
Later on, with the record player in the front room, my sister and I took over that space and I’d play records by people like Lester Young, George Shearing and Ella Fitzgerald. I used to hear Ella on that gramophone: another woman’s voice to join the voices of the women I lived with. And then one night, Ella Fitzgerald played Belfast. I remember my mother coming back from it – she went to that ‘gig’ with our next-door neighbour, an Austrian woman – and she was very excited and told me it had been an extraordinary experience.
The funny little comment that she made, ‘I’m sent’ stuck in my mind – clearly she was rocking and rolling in the aisles, not literally, but almost. Our next-door neighbour was rather austere about such displays. She was a private woman who had endured a lot during the Second World War in Vienna, where she had met her husband, one of the liberating Allied officers. My mother’s enthusiasm for this music was infectious. What I remember most about those days was a feeling of being underground, though I’m sure there were other houses throughout Belfast where this kind of interest in music was being shown in the parlours and living rooms.
There must have been an adult generation who had done something similar a decade before the 1950s, when all the soldiers had returned from the war. There is an obvious parallel. They had been stationed in Germany, listening to American music, and there had been a whole series of army installations in Northern Ireland. Black guys stationed there must have been playing music. They’d go down to the Plaza Ballroom in Belfast; they’d have been dancing down there too.
There were so many different kinds of music at that time, but the one that seemed to have the biggest impact was jazz, in all its subversiveness. By the early 1960s, a group of little clubs springing up around the town were playing R & B, soul and Tamla Motown. A bridge was built between the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Lester Young, whom I was hearing in the late 1950s, and then, ten years later, with the friends I had in my mid-teens, we started to get into R & B and blues.
The one voice, the one name that summed all that up for us was Van Morrison and Them. There were other very good bands around during the mid-sixties, like The Few, The Interns, Sam Mahood and The Just Five. It seemed there were bands playing every night. I remember clearly that we didn’t get into the pop stuff so much as young teenagers. It was mainly R & B and then acts like the Jimi Hendrix Experience that were popular with us.
Belfast was still open then. Everybody lived in the city and there wasn’t a sense that the city was ghettoised or that there were neighbourhoods you couldn’t move in and out of; the city centre was a home for everybody and it had a marvellous energy to it. There would be dances on a Wednesday night, Friday night, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, and even Sunday. Everybody went dancing. Around the side of the City Hall, one afternoon in late spring, the weather was good and somebody had a transistor on. We were lying on the grass and we heard Van Morrison with Them, singing ‘Here Comes the Night’. That song became a theme tune, a hymn.
When I started to go to The Maritime (where Them had played), it had changed its name and was called Club Rado, although we all still knew it by its original name. I never saw Them live on stage, though I did hear Morrison on the tiny stage of Sammy Houston’s Jazz Club performing Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ with Frankie Connolly and the Styx, a rare combination for sure.
What I do recall very clearly is the energy in Van Morrison’s voice, a very Belfast voice. That somebody could get up on stage and sing with the accent you heard in the streets was unimaginable. To think that this was a guy from Belfast who was on Ready Steady Go!, a guy who was in a band that was doing well in Britain, and, despite all this, you’d see him around town the odd time. It was a great source of pride.
In those days there wasn’t the hype or the self-consciousness that there is today. Them with Van Morrison gave voice to a generation. I don’t want to put too much on it, but we did not know a great deal about sectarianism. It just wasn’t part of the psychic landscape. I used to date girls from the top of the Falls Road and we’d walk home together. We used to walk everywhere. Everybody used to meet in the clubs; Van captured that defiance in his voice and, with Them, aggressively declared ‘We’re here’, with a kind of dismissiveness, publicly, about being in ‘the business’– the music business. I know now that they had to fight their corner.
I can imagine some would have been badly treated by ‘the industry’, but Morrison stood for a kind of independence. We wouldn’t have been conscious of this at the time, but there was certainly the sense in which he was doing his thing and then just moving on. It wasn’t as if he was being a ‘pop star’ – that wasn’t there at all. This music was something he could ‘do’, something he was brilliant at. He’d get on stage with the band and then go. In a way, he was an anti-hero. Them were anti-heroes and they fitted the mood. But it wouldn’t have been a conscious thing, a pose. Morrison went on to become more sophisticated.
We tried different things and in Smithfield – which was a market, like a casbah – you could buy and sell just about anything, including records, second-hand records. It was magnificent – coins, clothes, old transistor radios, wardrobes, you name it – and there was one shop, the name of which won’t come to mind now, and the fella who had this shop was very interested in music, soul, R & B and blues.
I will never forget going into that shop. To see this guy, you’d think he should be looking under the bonnet of a car, but when he started to talk about blues and R & B, you were in another world. He knew everything: different versions of the same songs – exactly who was who in the States. We used to go in and talk and I remember one time he put on a track – it was a Chess album track of John Lee Hooker. We were all in the shop (it was just a big counter and the records were stacked behind it), and it was extraordinary to hear this guy.
There was the feeling then that music was the counter-culture. Belfast was very much a city dominated by work – that is what you were there for – work, work, work.
When I think of the 1960s, people’s energies were directed at getting out and about; getting into Belfast. Them, the Belfast band that was doing so well, personified this feeling of being able to express yourself ‘here’. They suggested to those of us who were about six or seven years younger that you could do these things, that you needn’t be afraid to set up your own band. We did; just that and we called our band The Trolls.
We played in different places. We were pretty desperate. I think we lasted about six months and that was it. But it was the kind of confidence