How Belfast Got the Blues

A Cultural History of Popular Music in the 1960s

Noel McLaughlin, Joanna Braniff

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789382747
• eBook ISBN: 9781789382754
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

This is not just an important music book; it is an important history book. It captures the moment before Belfast and Northern Ireland became synonymous with the Troubles. It places one of the best-known figures in global popular music, Van Morrison, in his historical and sociocultural context. It also reinstates Ottilie Patterson into her rightful role as a central figure in Ireland's music. It addresses a significant gap in Ireland's popular music studies by appraising the contribution of a politically and musically significant female figure.

It makes a major original contribution to the understanding of popular music culture in Northern Ireland, and to the broader popular music culture in Britain in the 1960s. It will remain for many years the definitive study of the subject and a point of reference for further research and controversy.

In light of the re-emergence of Northern Ireland in contemporary British political debate, this book presents a nicely timed intervention, placing Northern Ireland at the forefront of a key moment in British and Irish cultural history, and presenting highly innovative readings of key popular cultural figures. Integrating its account of the popular music culture and local 'scene' in Northern Ireland with the broader and highly complex context of the sociopolitical milieu, it offers original and insightful readings of key 1960s figures, including film director Peter Whitehead, The Rolling Stones, Them, Ottilie Patterson and Van Morrison. It includes much new material, obtained in interviews and through meticulous archival research, to challenge the mainstream narrative of the mid-1960s music scene in Belfast.

It is extremely well researched, making use of newspaper and film archives and existing publications, but also an impressive set of personal interviews with veteran musicians and others from that time. The authors challenge much of the received wisdom about the period – for instance, about the decline of the showband – and present their arguments carefully and thoughtfully. While meticulously researched and thoroughly analytic, the writing is uniquely accessible and engaging.

The chapter on the neglected Belfast blue singer Ottilie Patterson represents a paradigm shift in Irish popular music studies, and sets her story and considerable achievements centre stage. This alone makes the book very noteworthy. The chapters on Van Morrison and his band Them place his early career in the context of the local and global music industry. The story of The Rolling Stones film, made by Peter Whitehead, is discussed in the context of the international fervour of the times. The knitting of the music scene with the distinctive social, cultural, political and religious factors is deftly done.

Primary readership will be academic – scholars, researchers and students across a range of areas. Fields of interest include popular music studies, Irish studies, political history, cultural studies, film studies, jazz/blues history, women's studies, civil rights.

It will also appeal more broadly to fans, writers, journalists and musicians interested in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Blues, rock and roll, jazz and the 1960s, as well as to fans of the individual musicians.

1

1964

If you write a song, you feel, I’m going with this lyric; there’s no hidden things. I mean, maybe there were people who [did] write these mystery things; to me, a lot of that is the Sixties mythology […] a period where everything, no matter what it was, was mythologised.

Van Morrison¹

If one single year in the decade was pivotal in popular-musical terms for Belfast, and in cementing its relationship to the wider world, it was 1964. The Rolling Stones played on the last day of a hot July and started a riot, the group’s set having to be radically curtailed in a jam-packed Ulster Hall. Significantly, press reportage of this eventful 1964 concert was not restricted to the local. The Stones’ first appearance in Belfast caused just such a ‘beating of butterfly wings’ that it was reported internationally across the Atlantic in the Chicago Tribune the following day. ‘Concert stops as teenagers riot in Belfast’, ran the headline, with the article going on to detail the, by now, customary scenes of carnage with which the group had become associated, as well as highlighting a local venue (in the days before modern ‘health and safety’ protocols) hosting in excess of double its official capacity in the contemporary legislative context of 1850 people.²

The Rolling Stones singing group called off a concert after only 12 minutes tonight when they found themselves sharing the stage with a dozen policemen, 20 ambulances, and about 50 local fans. So packed was the Ulster Hall that fainting girls could only be removed from the 5,000 crowd only by passing them over the heads of the audience and onto the stage. Many girls became so excited that ambulance attendants had to strap them to stretchers. The quintet, who wear their hair shoulder-length, had been on stage for only four minutes when pandemonium erupted.³

The transatlantic aspect of the reportage of the Belfast concert – especially its melodramatic invocation of Milton’s Paradise Lost and of pandemonium as, literally, ‘hell unleashed’ – gave both the city and the group ‘who wear their hair shoulder-length’ (of ‘hair and hell’, as it were) a presence in metropolitan America, which was especially important for the Stones as they had yet to fully ‘break’ into the US popular music market with a top twenty single.⁴

Indeed, the early part of this pivotal year was marked by an even more important popular-musical event. This significant occasion was not local but took place several thousand miles away. The Beatles’ arrival in the US five months earlier on 7 February 1964 – with their first American number one ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ secured a week before – was, arguably, to have more profound consequences than their physical appearance in Belfast the previous November. Local media in Belfast, as elsewhere, where quick to pick up on the Fab Four’s American arrival. On 8 February 1964, the city’s main Catholic/nationalist newspaper, the Irish News, reported the event with a headline that anticipates the ‘pandemonium’ of the first Stones concert in Belfast: ‘Bedlam erupts as Beatles hit US’. This was a clear sign that the young people’s ‘new music’ was ‘going global’ and occupying prominent space in mainstream media. It was, on the one hand, an indicator that mediated global events were increasingly influential in shaping local experience, that modern media were lessening the importance of localized appearances; whilst on the other, it was also an index that the Stones, in mid-1964, were cast in the role of having to play catch-up with their rivals, who were much further ahead in this respect. The Beatles’ publicity machine was already embracing this increasingly ‘connected’ mediated world and its demand for dramatic stories – and the keywords and concepts: ‘bedlam’; ‘pandemonium’ and so forth – upon which these institutions depended for commercial success (and which would be widely reproduced with remarkable consistency).

In ‘conquering’ America, the Beatles established the paradigm. They set in motion not just the cultural and commercial importance of popular-musical Britain, but they also firmly turned the spotlight on the United Kingdom’s regions, and their working and lower-middle classes (at least as far as the British music industry was concerned). This created the impetus to form small groups amongst this working class and lower-middle class, and overwhelmingly male, demographic – as well as consolidating their marketability. Early 1964 therefore marked an important shift – a certain ‘ramping-up’ of the creation of hype and its increasingly globalizing reach (and across different media) – as well as foregrounding its novel and highly sell-able ‘provincial’ subtext. ‘Beatlemania’ was already a term widely deployed in contemporary parlance. However, with the group’s ascension to a national phenomenon in the world’s most developed market of affluent consumers, the idea of a more general ‘British Invasion’ was becoming equally ubiquitous; encapsulating the wave of UK groups entering into the American popular-musical firmament. One-third of all US top ten hits in 1964 were by British acts, whereas in the previous year there had not been any; and only two British artists, prior to this, had occupied the number one slot – and both with instrumentals: Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger on the Shore’ and the Tornados’ ‘Telstar’ (both in 1962). Via beat and the Beatles, the British music industry was internationalizing, and the ‘authentically’ local/regional, at least as far as the UK music industry and its press wings were concerned, was hot property at this juncture. It resulted in the national/local/regional requiring a unique selling point, with crude imitation of existing trends – that is, pre-beat – having become an enemy of sorts. As with elsewhere in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Belfast’s bands, promoters, management and audiences had to make sense of, and accommodate to, the new dynamics.

One can get a sense of this transatlantic shift in the balance of popular-musical power in the mainstream US press, and their reportage about – and simultaneous construction of – a ‘British Invasion’ narrative. The American media’s desire to both create and ‘diagnose’ a ‘problem’ resulted in widely utilized headlines which included phrases such as ‘The new madness’ and ‘Beatle bug bites Britain’, with other oft-deployed journalistic forms of wordplay including rhetorical devices such as linking ‘beetle’ with the ‘infestation’ afflicting the United Kingdom. Puns were, as with the Beatles’ name and identity, predictably enough, the linguistic form of the time (and the precise character that this would take in Belfast will be explored in Chapters 4 and 5). All of this was designed to promote and maintain the idea of (a British) invasion, as well as the related terms of plague and disease, and keep them prominent in the public imagination in the Anglo-American world.

Nevertheless, as with the first Beatles concert in Belfast in late 1963, the debut Stones concert was also a potent sign that the dominant localized forms of popular-musical entertainment – namely the showbands – were becoming increasingly inadequate at capturing the imaginations and desires of a substantial portion of the city’s youthful music lovers. This specifically Irish phenomenon consisted, in essence, of large ensembles in matching suits with a brass section, which sat somewhere in the hinterland of the sit-down orchestras of an earlier generation and the pop end of 1950s’ rock’n’roll. They provided a mixture of big band standards, country songs and cover versions of contemporary pop hits – as well as gimmicks, jokes and comedy sketches – which provided the titular ‘show’. Such was the dominance of the showband economy that many of Northern Ireland’s most celebrated rock musicians were playing on the showband circuit prior to, and throughout, the popularization of the small groups of the beat scene. And even though our pivotal year, 1964, came to symbolize a moment of transition – from showband to the more modern beat and rhythm and blues culture celebrated in the governing histories of the period – hundreds of showbands continued to dominate the Irish popular music scene in both business and cultural terms, north and south of the border (as well as catering to the urban Irish diaspora across the Irish Sea). The showbands came to be regarded as the notional enemy by the more urban blues-based beat culture that followed in their wake; and who, as the dominant narrative has it, would eventually displace them, ushering in their redundancy. Moreover, the beat and R&B scene’s concern with authenticity and ‘keeping it real’ dismissed the showbands as derivative and parochial, as an ersatz music culture, a premodern (or botched modern) and embarrassing (Northern) Ireland to be left behind. Niall Stokes, the long-standing editor of Ireland’s premier music magazine Hot Press typifies the position, dismissing the showbands as ‘aesthetically poverty-stricken and crass’, and hence solidifying their role in embodying a sleepy, backward Ireland where not much of consequence happened musically before the ‘true’ youth revolution of the beat scene took hold.⁵

Given these local circumstances – a dominating showband economy and culture as well as an emerging beat and R&B subculture – 1964 is once again a landmark year. For young local aficionados of this nascent beat scene (taken alongside the Beatles invasion of America and the recurrent headlines this generated), the debut appearance of the Stones represented the arrival in their city of the popular music avant-garde: of the freedoms enabled by ‘outsider’ forms from the centre who were taken to fill an expressive void that local music culture was for whatever reason not addressing. The Stones’ striking white-adapted rhythm and blues sound, provocative iconography and performance style both articulated and acted as the focal point for this emerging set of cultural codes, practices and possibilities. In mid-1964, this demonstrated that music could be more than ‘mere entertainment’ and make a physical and affective difference (of which starting a riot was ample evidence). As a powerful, if less dramatic, index of this, local television ran a short vox-pop feature on young devotees who, having saved their pocket money, literally camped-out overnight to get concert tickets, taking shifts to secure their place in the queue; a sign that this ‘modern’ music was having exciting consequences for culture and identity in a city which had its own, very particular, challenges in negotiating the conundrum of the traditional and the modern; the old and the new.⁶

The Belfast Telegraph, Northern Ireland’s most widely read paper, further provided a sense of this on the eve of the concert through a series of short interviews with local female fans queuing outside the venue (on a front page, significantly, dominated by a photograph of the Stones exiting the plane from London). The comments by these young fans provide a sense not only of the semiotic shock, but of the related gender-confusion. ‘They’re ugly but they’re handsome’, one female interviewee avers. ‘Parents think the Stones are a lot of long-haired ruffians. But we wish every boy was like them’, proffers another. Remarks such as ‘I can’t imagine the Stones being presented to the Queen’ signal their difference from the Beatles and the group’s distance from established propriety (as well as expressing a hint of rebellion against the fervent royalism of unionist Belfast). Special emphasis is, however, reserved in the feature for the cultural novelty of the ‘long-haired boys who passed by’ who were the recipients of ‘appreciative yells from the queueing girls’, thereby signalling an important shift in spatial gender politics as to who has the right to publicly look – and at whom – and to openly comment accordingly.⁷ In fact two points of significance arise from this seemingly ‘quaint’ expression of changing gender roles from the perspective of the present. First, this was occurring in a provincial city before London has been constructed as the famously ‘swinging’ UK capital, and second, it was a sign that ‘women’s liberation’, a term which had entered into common parlance in that year, had filtered into behaviour on the streets, and amongst young women.

While latterly the Stones have faced accusations of misogyny both in their lyrics and general semiotic, it is often forgotten that the group, as with the British New Wave films that predate their success, began to place a novel emphasis on sexual/personal relationships among the working and lower-middle classes. While, patently, there is sexism in the mix, and a privileging of a masculine perspective, given the context of the time this is hardly surprising. But such criticisms, while wholly justified in a broader sense, miss considering how the group – and their very particular sound and style – had an impact on gender politics at the time among ‘the lower orders’; let alone how they were felt and interpreted in sexually conservative jurisdictions such as Belfast and Northern Ireland. The more general critique that the sexual revolution benefited men more than woman had yet to crystalize into a vital part of the decade’s counter-political fabric with the rise of second wave feminism. But dismissing the Stones as crudely sexist, or the Beatles as merely ‘showbiz’, risks obscuring both of these hugely influential groups’ relationship to history and the complex ways in which they intersect with the more general politics, sexual and otherwise, of the period.

As with the Beatles’ historic earlier appearance in Belfast the previous November, the Stones played a pivotal role in folding the city into the broader – and increasingly globalizing – beat and rhythm and blues scene narrative. And they were to be, for specific reasons such as these, more important to the Northern Ireland capital’s groups than their Merseyside rivals. Some of this is general. The Stones’ ‘dirty’ appropriation of the blues was a more influential template for local bands, due to the mix of accessibility, authenticity, the ‘revolutionary’ undertones and the sense of danger they were taken to represent. Unlike the Beatles, the Stones were not bedecked in matching suits and haircuts. Despite the Beatles’ modernity, their ‘uniformed’ attire, to Belfast’s emerging tribe of devotees more directly affiliated to R&B, carried a residue of the necessarily be-suited showband, and thus connotations of conformity. By contrast, the more overtly ‘feral’ Stones, who had ditched matching attire early in their career, notoriously sported long hair in different styles, alongside showcasing a novel and distinctive lithe, ‘wasted’ English rock’n’roll look that both drew on, and offered out, an ‘in-between’ mix of the aristocratic/bohemian and the proletarian. In essence, it was shocking in itself that the band did not look ‘healthy’ in conventional terms; and they were certainly far from the ruddy-cheeked, puppy-fatted normative ‘vitality’ of the majority of Irish showbands.

Alongside this emergent fetish for ‘wastedness’, the Stones’ individuated dress code was more easily mimicked by both the beat scene musicians and their audiences than the group’s Merseyside rivals, allowing fans and musicians alike to assemble their own versions of the style in the city’s few emerging boutiques (such as Dukes on Royal Avenue), which undoubtedly assisted in fostering close identification with the group. This individualized and more ‘democratic’ look would further...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Belfast at a Crossroads
• 1 1964
• 2 The Political Power of a Film That Might Have Been
• 3 ‘We Gotta Get into This Place’
• 4 ‘Them Are Coming!’
• 5 ‘A’ Story of Them
• 6 Irish Lady Sings the Blues
• 7 1966: The Summer of Love?
• 8 Crossroads: Times Have Surely Changed
• References
• Index