At close quarters

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of spending an hour or so in the company of Bill Drummond, discussing the rationale and motivation behind his decision to spend the guts of a fortnight cooking for the good people of Ulster.

Our chat was originally meant to take place at the John Hewitt Bar in Donegall St – a fine, thriving, rambunctious boozer that, on this occasion, proved a little too fine, thriving and rambunctious for my prehistoric Dictaphone to cope. Deciding that it might be a good idea to head off somewhere a little bit quieter, Sarah Hughes, Audience Development Officer for the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, suggested we make use of their offices in North Street Arcade, and handed Bill her set of keys.
The arcade was looking well as we made our way through it – a tarot-card reading was taking place, the tattoo parlour seemed busy, Terri Hooley was standing in the doorway of his record shop, justifiably mocking my beard as we passed.
I’d like to say that I looked up and delighted in the famous Art-Deco ceiling, or popped into the nearby pet shop for a quick squint at the budgies, but I was too busy trying to keep pace with Bill. He may well be justified and ancient but the man has the stride of a mountain bear.
The office, when we got there, looked just how you would imagine the hub of any heroically inventive and resourceful festival would look less than a month before kick off – post-its were stuck on VDUs, double digit numbers flashed on answer phones, scrawled-on notepads were strewn over desks.
Turning on the lights, Bill pointed to a large painting reading Make Soup that dominated the wall beside the door. It was a present he said proudly. Later on Amberlea took some photos of him standing alongside it. You would be forgiven for thinking he was jutting his jaw out.
As I write this the festival is drawing to a close and highlights have been legion.
On Thursday, Leontia Flynn, a young poet from Newcastle, recently benighted by Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson and Tom Paulin, launched her first collection, These Days, in front of family, friends and burgeoning fanclub in the newly revamped (for that read: cushy sofas, and a welcome spit and sawdust ambience) White’s Tavern. Event host Sinéad Morrissey claimed that in years to come people would look back on this as a Beatles in The Cavern type experience. She was only half joking.
A few days previously in the same venue, former classmates Glenn Patterson and Andy White presented an evening of prose and song – reminiscing about long-gone bookshops and spinning connections between the old Belfast and the new. If splitting yourself in half had been an option that night, you could also have gone to see Andrew Loog Oldham at The Northern Whig. He was in town to chat about his life with the Stones, Spector et al and introduce an exclusive showing of Charlie Is My Darlin, an edible document of the band’s Irish tour of ’65.
Multiplicity would also have been handy in getting to grips with the deluge of local music available. The so-called Cheap Date nights (all for under a fiver) saw the likes of Tracer AMC, Tom McShane, Robyn G. Shiels, Contraband and many others take to the stage, while a rammed Belfast-centric tribute to Elliot Smith proved both a befitting tribute to the tragic songwriter and a lucrative occasion for the charitable fund established in his name.
You want to know about Dylan Moran, Jerry Sadowitz, Robert Welch’s Protestants or Circo Rumbaba? Well, you’ll just have to ask one of the other Mes.
In any normal year, I’d sing the praises of The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. But this year I feel like using a megaphone.
Two weeks before the festival was due to start, in highly suspicious circumstances, North Street Arcade was gutted by the biggest fire seen in Belfast City Centre in years. The entire CQAF archive – built up over five years and including Bill’s Make Soup image – was destroyed. In the wider shopping area, Cathedral Records, and therefore the original artwork to Teenage Kicks and much precious Good Vibrations memorabilia, was lost. The fire also ripped through, amongst others, the office of Vacuum Magazine – a funny and provocative freesheet that has been creating some welcome waves of late – the tattooist’s, the tarot reader’s and, most depressingly, the local pet shop. Small businesses and creative ventures that for years had struggled to maintain a presence in the city centre had, over the course of one Saturday evening, literally gone up in smoke.
Given the dire financial circumstances many of the shop owners now face, it would be unwise to discuss this year’s Festival in happy-ever-after terms. However, that shouldn’t stop us from praising the heroic effort of all involved in making it the CQAF’s best year yet.