Hit The North: Pulling a Belfast one

The Belfast Festival at Queen’s looms, which is good – because while you don’t have to buy into the rhetorical flannel surrounding it (the European City of Culture fiasco has not, it seems, warned everyone off Greeks bearing ‘municipal regeneration through culture’ gifts), there are still plenty of reasons to get intrigued.

Self-confessed ‘middle-class hero’ that he is, I’m sure Neil Hannon will be delighted to get his hands on The Ulster Orchestra, in order to, with some help from Liam O’Flynn, launch the festival with a grandiose flourish. The Waterfront Hall hosts this opening concert on Friday October 22.
Hannon has never needed much of an excuse to adopt the kitchen sink approach to orchestration. One can therefore expect a woodwind section that, on this occasion, goes up to eleven. How creatively progressive this kind of event proves for the Divine Comedy we will have to wait and see, but, providing he leaves his teacher’s pet head at home, it should be an entertaining spectacle.
Over the course of the last decade, one of the few compensatory joys offered by the desolate wasteland of Northern Irish light entertainment (rubbernecking Give My Head Peace and anything involving Stephen Nolan doesn’t count) has been the strange and recurrent spectacle of the manifold Judith Hearnes in our local press tip-toeing in terror around the issue of Brian Kennedy’s sexuality. The popular image of the honey-voiced balladeer – woollen sweater, hedgerow, arms open and warbling through ‘Carrickfergus’- has always struck me as a brilliantly inoffensive construct for someone who, remember, grew up in Beechmount in the early 70s, hung around on the flinty margins of the Belfast punk scene, and managed to sustain a working (and, by all accounts, mutually respectful) relationship with Van Morrison. His penchant for asinine MOR may have grated, but the common assumption that Kennedy himself was as banal as his choice of material always seemed pretty casual and lazy.
And so it’s proved. With the publication of his first novel The Arrival Of Fergal Flynn, our Brian has confronted the good folk of Ulster with depictions of gay couplings between priests and their parishioners and, during a series of interviews, has finally come out – making thoughtful points regarding the oppressive machismo of Northern life throughout the years. He will read from the book at The Elmwood Hall on 25th October. Granta subscribers should probably avoid, but anyone with an interest in an unlikely figure traversing a curious faultline in our culture might want to pop along. No requests for ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, please.
Elsewhere, the fortnight provides quite a few rich musical pickings. Jim White makes his first trip to town, playing the Empire on November 1st. Dizzee Rascal and The Polyphonic Spree both appear at The Mandela Hall, while Rufus Wainwright, Kate Rusby and Ibrahim Ferrer are all due to show their faces. Take some time, if you can, to check out Shot By Both Sides: Ulster Rock Photography, 1977 – 2004 – an exhibition running at The Old Museum Arts Centre. Productions of Endgame, The Seagull and Caryl Churchill’s A Number, meanwhile, provide some of the dramatic highlights.
For this pleb, however, the most welcome aspect of this year’s festival is that it provides an appropriately grand occasion during which to welcome back the revamped, renovated but hopefully still haunted QFT. The rebuilding work to the University St cinema will no doubt prove hugely beneficial for many years to come, but the year-long closure it necessitated has meant that 2004 has been a pretty grim time for anyone fed up with Cineplex fare. A partial move to a lecture hall in the Ashby Building was never going to be that much fun (although it proved a spookily apt location for the run of Elephant), so, with a mixture of elation and relief, comes the news that, once the festival gets under way, we can settle down with The Cremaster Cycle, The Straight Story and John Carpenter’s The Thing amongst many, many others and gradually get ourselves reacquainted with the joint.
‘Journeys and Migration’ is the theme linking this year’s events. With QFT back, I’d be tempted to stay where I am.

The Belfast Festival at Queen’s runs from 22 October – 7 November. Checkout www.belfastfestival.com for full listings.