Culture
01 Apr 08

Hooley, madly, deeply

The man who nurtured the Northern Ireland punk scene is about to get a long overdue birthday party.

Terri Hooley tends to turn up in the footnotes of important books.

Take England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage’s peerless account of the airborne punk epidemic of the mid to late ’70s; look closely and you’ll find Terri mentioned alongside Tony Wilson and Geoff Travis as one of the great enablers of independent talent.
Or Johnny Rogan’s No Surrender, a brilliantly vivid history of Belfast disguised as a biography of Van Morrison – lo and behold, in the middle of a chapter showing the teeming (but doomed) optimism of the city on the cusp of the Troubles – up he pops again, leading a CND march on the city centre.
Then there’s The Telling Year: Belfast 1972, where Malachi O’Doherty, in attempting to illustrate just how topsy-turvy the place had become in the midst of the conflict’s most violent year, writes about coming across an anxious young hippy, living under a death threat, issued, not by the usual paramilitary suspects, but from a branch of other hippies called, I kid you not, Freaks For Ulster.
“I didn’t know if Terri lived in a fantasy world or the real one,” says O’Doherty, “but then I wasn’t sure which one I was living in myself.”
A sentiment that, no doubt, many who spent that decade in both Terri and his hometown’s orbit would recognise.
And one which perhaps also goes someway towards explaining why (Sean O’Neill and Guy Trelford’s magnificent It Makes You Want To Spit! excepted) the world of Hooley, and by extension, Good Vibrations Records, and Ulster punk remains so criminally under-reported. If you weren’t there, it may spin you dizzy.
Hooley’s story can only be told with words and terms that, in our post-Victoria Square wonderland of designer handbags, The Chuckle Brothers and 100% mortgages, may appear as alien as Sanskrit.
But it’s a yarn well worth translating.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the legacy of Ulster punk is so vital and necessary it should be taught at school.
After all, somewhere in the middle of this strange, uplifting story about a one-eyed hippy, his record shop, and the generation of young people who gravitated towards both, there’s an unmistakably heroic subtext of crucial battles being fought against sectarianism, bitterness, and the old animosities and hatreds.
Across Britain in the late ’70s, hysterical commentators were claiming punk posed as great a threat to civilisation as the Nazis. It’s with delicious irony then, that we can look back and see that in Northern Ireland, by braving the shutdown city centre to hang out in groups that held the murderous Prod/Taig divisions in contempt; our punks were actually playing a crucial role in maintaining real civic and humane values.
On April 25 at The Mandela Hall in Belfast, a gig will take place to mark the 30th Anniversary of Good Vibrations Records. It’s subtitled: Celebrating A Light In The Darkness. An oddly sentimental phrase for a punk gig, you might think. But in this case, one that’s entirely appropriate.
Headlining the night will be The Undertones – a wonderfully inevitable choice, given how they were (and remain) the label’s most identifiable success story. But as their time on Good Vibes didn’t extend much beyond the release of ‘Teenage Kicks’, it’s also fitting that Shame Academy – Brian Young and Greg Cowan’s current band - will be joining them on the bill. Young, wrote ‘Big Time’, the song that during a famous epiphany at the Pound converted Hooley to the cause. Just as importantly, as a founding member of Rudi, he played a crucial role in introducing punk to Belfast – promoting gigs in out of the way social clubs and town halls, and while fronting down the inevitable spide onslaught, offerrf an eloquent example of grace under fire. He still looks (and sounds) like the greatest pop star the city never produced.
Cowan, meanwhile, scared the horses as frontman with The Outcasts – the scene’s most notorious rabble rousers - and as the proud author of “You’re a disease, babe”, is also responsible for D.A. Pennebaker’s favourite rock and roll lyric.
Before hand, Hooley will lead a bus tour around his city, which will end up at the QFT for a showing of the ever-brilliant Shellshock Rock.
There are few aspects of Northern Ireland’s recent past that justify celebration. The Hooley/Good Vibrations story is one. April 25 will see it move nosily, gloriously out of the margins.