BELFAST HAS STAYING POWER

We ve all just spent the morning packing boxes and bags and tables and Elvis Live calendars into the back of a removal van, helping a friend up sticks and sling hooks to London. Her brother is already over there. He made the journey just after Christmas and has been getting gradually cosier in his nifty new job.

Judging by the phone calls and e-mails, he doesn t seem to have fallen prey to the kind of Generation X metropolitan trauma much beloved of TV drama producers and style mag features departments. No, he s having a ball. The only trauma being experienced is by whoever is unlucky enough to live in the flat below him.
The Easter holidays also saw the return of a fair few imigris, amongst them notorious undergrad dipsos and previously dreadlocked drug fiends. Their belts may be a bit tighter now, and their hair definitely a lot shorter but all that had really changed was a bubbling air of confidence that surrounded them, in a space that had previously only been taken up by a fuzzy, unformed optimism. I m a big fan of fuzzy, unformed optimism by the way but, I had to admit, the new look definitely suited them.
I was in Dublin a week or so ago and, when I wasn t looking out for Puff Daddy or him from Def Leppard, I found an entire generation of people my age earning the type of money that should really be restricted to gifted centre forwards or shifty politicians (hint: Dub conversations about house prices have the same quick-glance-at-the-watch impact as Nordy Troubles chat. Be polite to your guests. Stop doing it). And slap in the middle, nearly everywhere I went, there was a Northern accent, usually joined to a Northern smirk, and a Northern disbelief at their Northern luck.
There have also been Stateside updates from newly converted New Yorkers and Los Angelinos, and they re all blossoming; merrily swimming in a much bigger tank.
The thing is, during every conversation with the well-scattered tribe, there comes a point that is usually preceded with, if it s on the phone, a pause so pregnant you can hear the water break, and if it s in the flesh, lots of drink. A point where the other person drops the tone of their voice a solemn tad and they say,
Really, why are you wasting your time on that shit-hole?
Well.
I can see the point. Belfast is hardly the type of town you can introduce to your mum. But then, as Oprah would tell us, it has issues. We should be patient.
For decades, or so we ve been told, the town s sense of self stemmed basically from two huge things its twin status as an industrial city and bad-assed troubles town. On a good night it probably went to bed thinking of itself as a provincial Robert Mitchum smoky-eyed, sultry, with big muscles and questionable table manners. On a bad night, though, (and there were lots and lots of those) it was more Chuck Norris ugly with tight-trousered machismo and nasty brutality.
I m not a masochist. If it was still like that, I d have been long gone.
But I can honestly say that for the last six years living in Belfast has been a privilege, for the last two, a joy. The town seems to have come out of the closet.
It s disingenuous to give all the credit to that wonderfully meaningless tag The Peace Process , mainly because that would be granting the political boys club up here a level of seer-like magnanimity they don t deserve. It s probably better to say that the thirty years of violence capped the vibrancy and fizz that any city takes for granted, and that Belfast always had hidden away as a whispered history.
You can think of the folk and R n B scene of the mid-to-late sixties and the wonderful, mad punk splurge at the turn of the decade (Joe Strummer has said that, alongside New York and London, Belfast was the punk capital of the world). The ceasefire was a bottom-up development, a response to a weary populace, hungry for other menus. It threw everything on its head. It had never been in any of the combatant s interests for the city to open itself up. So, the life was squeezed out of it, sometimes, tragically, literally.
But once the coast was clear, you could feel the rush of pent-up social energy.
So, for the last half-decade in Belfast, going for a drink or popping into a new club was a thoughtless act of effortless revolt. We were all taking part in some weird, stupid, gorgeous resuscitation, unfolding little alternatives in the smoke of back bars, quietly discovering new possibilities. And although the initial charm has worn off and a degree of understandable lethargy has crept in, there s still work to be done. You only have to look at how tawdry the opposition are. They re still picketing art galleries and threatening to ban plays, and the narratives they churn out have never sounded as hollow as they do now. In general, our political class is ideologically autistic. Think of all the fun there is to be had upsetting them.
There is little in the way of support from statutory bodies or the general public. There s a small clique that, like any good clique, falls foul of punch-ups, strops and casual resentments. Tax-relief isn t an option. Neither is popular acclaim. Anyone who gets involved creatively up here has to be mad and their motivation spot-on.
So, hopefully, over the next few years what we ll see are thrills, spills, subaltern outrage and seditionary cheek. Which, when you think about it, are just the kind of toys that all our best recent art, from Eureka Street to 1977, from The Star Factory to Troublegum, from The Eliminator to Bow Down To The Exit Sign, have been having lots and lots of fun with.
I ve crossed my fingers because I m getting sick of packing removal vans.
Colin Carberry will report on the Northern Ireland music scene in every issue of Hot Press