50 years ago today: Remembering The Miami Showband Massacre

Originally published in Hot Press in 2023:

Historically, music had been an arena in which people moved freely, most of the time, beyond the dysfunctional, tired, old sectarian fault-lines.

Gary Moore may have come from a so called Protestant or Loyalist background in East Belfast, but that didn’t matter a damn when he arrived in Dublin to join Skid Row, plugged in his Gibson Les Paul and made a glorious noise.

Nor was religious affiliation of the slightest concern when Rory Gallagher moved to Belfast and based himself there, when his band Taste were starting to make real waves.

Rory never lost that particular, non-sectarian rock ‘n’ roll faith. Throughout the 1970s – long after the Troubles had erupted, and violence on the part of the British State and paramilitary groups alike, saw people being butchered, maimed and brutalised on an appallingly regular basis – fans of Rory left any allegiances they might have been assumed to feel behind, as they travelled to the Ulster Hall to see the G-man in action.

Music could be above all forms of sectarianism. Most of the time it was.

It never occurred to me to see Van Morrison and his marvellous lyricism as anything other than Irish. In almost every respect, we felt closer to him; to the Portstewart guitar genius Henry McCullough; and to The Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers, when their time came, than to the country, showband and cabaret crews who still dominated music in much of rural Ireland.

Not that everything had been entirely rosy. Far from it.

In ‘Down At The Border’, the original Eyeless, a three-piece involving me, my brother Dermot, and Garry O Briain had written a song about it. “Down at the border,” it opened, “We met a gunman on the loose/ Followed down by an English convict/ Just out of the calaboose/ Two rustlers, pig smugglers/ And a tourist or two/ And then there was me… and you.”

Later in the song, the gunman shoots the convict “over something that he said.” There really was a surreal aspect to it all, like a magic mushroom trip gone horribly, murderously wrong. And then, for musicians, it got far worse entirely.

Illustration: David Rooney

The brutal massacre of members of the Miami Showband, on July 31st, 1975 involved breaking a kind of sacred taboo, which had guaranteed musicians the freedom to travel across the border without fear of being ambushed.

It poisoned the atmosphere and put an almost complete stop to local musicians from South of the border travelling North to play.

I had a more visceral sense than most of what had happened. Eyeless, now featuring my brother Dermot, Neil Jordan, Pat Courtney and Bryan McCann, in a five-piece line-up, had travelled North in May that year, to support John Martyn in Queen’s University, Belfast.

My partner Mairin, pregnant with our first child at the time, was in the van too, when we set out for home. A wrong turn took us into the vicinity of Keshfield, at 1am, and we experienced a scarifying brush with what can only have been loyalist paramilitaries. We were lucky to get to the benighted town of Portadown, where we stopped in the most open, visible location we could find, scrambling to find our bearings and chart a path back across to Newry.

We made it, but it might have been a prelude to what happened to the Miami – who had been one of the most popular bands on the showband scene for the previous decade and more – a couple of months later.

The van in which they were travelling was stopped on the way back to Dublin from a gig in Banbridge, close to the route we had travelled. Posing as British Army personnel, members of the illegal UVF, some of whom were also in the legal but irredeemably corrupt Ulster Defence Regiment, instructed the musicians to stand in line at the side of the road.

The plan had been to carry out a fake inspection, covertly plant a bomb and send the musicians on their way. Some accounts say that the bomb would have detonated in Newry. Others think the plotters wanted the van to cross the border before it exploded.

Fate – and the incompetence of the UVF – triggered events in an entirely different direction that night.

While it was being installed under the drivers seat, the bomb went off, instantly killing two of the UVF members, Harris Boyle (22) and Wesley Somerville (34), whose bodies were blown to kingdom come, landing in blackened stumps across a wide area. Somerville’s arm was found some 100 yards away from the scene, pathetically emblazoned with a tattoo that said “UVF Portadown”.

The members of the Miami were also blown away, into the adjacent field, but they were alive still, one and all. The UVF thugs panicked, gave chase and shot dead three members of the Miami – lead singer Fran O’Toole, trumpeter Brian McCoy, and guitarist Tony Geraghty. They thought the others were dead too.

The Miami – like most Irish professional bands at the time – were naturally and unselfconsciously anti-sectarian. There were two nominally Protestant musicians in the band, Ray Millar and Brian McCoy, both of whom were from Northern Ireland.

Brian McCoy, in particular, was like a beacon of how music could potentially reach across every divide. From the small village and townland of Caledon in the south-east of Country Tyrone, he was the son of the Grand Master of the Orange Lodge in the county. You couldn’t get more traditionally Norn Iron Protestant.

Brian had close relatives in the RUC. His brother-in-law had been a member of the discredited and ultimately disbanded B-Specials, an organisation of supremacist Protestant army reservists. In a different universe he might have been on the other side of the encounter that night. Except that his devotion to music had liberated him...

However you looked at it, Brian McCoy seemed like an unlikely target. And yet he was the first to die, hit in the back and neck by nine rounds from a Luger automatic pistol as he tried to make his escape.

That was the mid-1970s. Two serving UDR ‘soldiers’, Thomas Crozier and James Roderick Shane McDowell, were found guilty of the murders and received life sentences. A third man, John James Somerville, a former UDA ’soldier’, was later also found guilty of the murders, However, none of the three gave details of who else was involved, or who had planned the attack. It has long been believed that there were elements of collusion, involving the RUC and the British Army.

A series of tit-for-tat killings were carried out by the IRA in response, possibly even including the murder of Eric Smyth, a brother in law of Brian McCoy, in 1994. That was the kind of country we had been living in: a nightmare, twilight zone, in which no level of brutality was deemed impermissible and families could have their own gunned down ruthlessly by either side or both.

The eruption of punk had lifted everyone, at least partially, out of the slough of despond into which the Miami massacre – a gruesome act of sickening butchery – had plunged us. As The Sex Pistols stormed the top of the UK charts in 1977, and The Clash became overtly political, all forms of authority were being questioned.

For Belfast band Stiff Little Fingers, the Troubles became part of the subject matter – the band making it clear that they had no time whatsoever for the bores (their word) that were in charge.

It is no harm to remember the incendiary force of what the song, 'Alternative Ulster', released as a single in October 1978, had to say.

“You got the Army on your street,” lead singer Jake Burns sang, “And the RUC dog of repression/ Is barking at your feet/ Is this the kind of place you wanna live?/ Is this where you wanna be?/ Is this the only life we’re gonna have?/ What we need is/ An alternative Ulster/ Alternative Ulster…”

Read the full 2023 article here.