Phlegm Were The Days!

I always forget to say Shellshock Rock whenever anyone asks me what my favourite film is. And whenever I hear the praises of Don’t Look Back and Eat The Document being (justifiably) sung, I never seem to mention that there’s a beautiful and barnstorming film from Belfast that is every bit their equal.

The five years between ’77 and ’82 when Northern Ireland took punk, tore it up and stitched it back together in a way that suited it best, has a habit of inducing these kind of blind spots.
It may well have been examined more extensively than any other period in the country’s musical history, but the suspicion lingers that the sensitivity of many of the main protagonists to accusations of conflict opportunism, coupled with the inability of the wider media to deal with it in anything other than the most hackneyed ‘kicking against the pricks’ stereotypes has seen the stock of Northern Irish punk plummet in comparison to scenes with less to say, but much sexier trousers.
Back in the days, both Sean O’Neill and Guy Trelford served in the Pound and Harp Bar trenches. And it was the realisation that this heady, brave, lunatic time had been marginalised in the wider punk narrative that inspired them to redress the balance. So, after calling on the help of some fellow travellers, the pair have produced It Makes You Want To Spit – a splendid, 200-odd-page book on the subject that, one feels, would kick England’s Dreaming’s head in if they were ever to meet down a dark alley.
“To be honest,” says Sean, “we’ve probably only done it because we always wanted to read a book on Northern Irish punk and, because no one else was ever going to write it, we’d no alternative but to do it ourselves.”
It’s an hour before the gig organised to launch the book – where members of Protex, Rudi and The Outcasts will play as Shame Academy, and where Ruefrex will shed clothing and decades to terrify every curious new band in the house – and Sean is claiming that “it’s Christmas Day”. The project which, wouldn’t you know it, started out almost five years ago on a bunch of photocopied pages has, with the help of Reekus Records, mushroomed rapidly into what now resembles a definitive tome. Suggesting that it’s a story that was biding its time to be told.
“I think that’s right,” Sean replies. “I think a lot of people would have seen the documentaries last year about the punk jubilee and all the articles and features in the papers and, like us, would have wondered where we were. It did seem like we had been forgotten. Which is ironic because when you think about the kinds of things The Clash were singing about – we were facing that day in day out over here. Punk came kinda late to Northern Ireland, but I think it meant as much, if not more, to the people here than anywhere else in the world.”
Makes You…dares to look outside of the Stiffs/Tones spotlight, and finds a whole alternative world scuttling in the shadows. So, while ‘Alternative Ulster’ and ‘Teenage Kicks’ get a mention, such unheralded gems as Ruefrex’s coruscating version of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, ‘I Don’t Want To Be No Adult’ by The Outcasts and – the best song ever to come out of Northern Ireland – ‘Big Time’ by Rudi are also bigged up.
Add in a host of personal recollections of the time - from the likes of Terri Hooley, John Peel, Henry McDonald, Barry McIlheny, and (in a piece written just weeks before his death last year) Joe Strummer - and what quickly emerges is a fascinating and, at times, poignant account of a generation demanding the right to be youthful in a society preoccupied with the terminal.
They meant it, man.

It Makes You Want To Spit: The Definitive Guide To Punk In Northern Ireland 1977-1982 can be ordered online from www.reekus.com