Far away from Belfast, Stuart Bailie and I find ourselves in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in Los Gatos, California. A perfect place to ponder politics, protest, and punk rock, it’s where John Steinbeck penned his angriest book, the soundtrack of America’s Great Depression and Tom Joad’s California. By any other name, The Grapes of Wrath is a punk anthem fulfilling the writer’s goal “to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”  It is a call to outrage, to make “good trouble” – the kind that might redeem the very soul of a country, resonant and recognizable in the soundtrack of Northern Ireland since 1968. That soundtrack is Trouble Songs – Music and Conflict in Northern Ireland, a potent compilation of moments where music was “inspired, agitated, or brutalized” by the times. For young people like me who spent their Saturday afternoons seeking refuge in Terri Hooley’s record shop, there is no better man to deliver Northern Ireland’s soundtrack, than Stuart Bailie, self-proclaimed “wizened old geezer” –  a middle-aged punk rocker.

Trouble Songs arrives at a seminal moment for Northern Ireland, the title of its first chapter an imperative from a Stiff Little Fingers song – “if these words hit you at the right moment, they would be life changing” – Take a Look at Where You’re Living. Forcing us to take a closer look, Bailie begins his tour of Northern Ireland in 1968, when they blocked the lower deck of the Craigavon Bridge, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Perhaps the first time it was sung in Northern Ireland, this was the song to sing, ringing out from America, from far away freedom rides and sit-ins, union halls and churches, in the face of snarling dogs and high-pressure fire hoses. With all its promise, this was the song that sustained Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Congressman John Lewis, the last surviving speaker of the march to Washington DC in 1968, also the occasion of the “I Have a Dream,” speech.  Lewis says that “without music, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings. We Shall Overcome are those wing.”  It is the quintessential trouble song.

Bailie’s fresh perspective arrives fifty years since civil rights activists took to the streets in Northern Ireland and twenty years since the Good Friday agreement was signed, the anniversary of the latter a publishing deadline for Bailey, the promise of it indelible and on stage at a rock ‘n’ roll concert at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, when from behind David Trimble and John Hume, the leaders of Northern Ireland’s largest political parties, Bono steps in to hold their arms up like prize fighters. It was their first public handshake, and it was momentous. Choreographed by U2’s front-man, it had also been done before.  Bailie takes us back to a spring evening in 1978 at the National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica. Without warning, during a rendition of “Jammin’,” reggae boss, Bob Marley, invites political opponents, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, to join him on stage, to send out a positive gesture to a country in the grip of its most deadly period of political bloodshed and violence. They have no choice. It is an unscripted moment that will make the international headlines the next day, showing the world that if “we gonna make it right, we gots to unite!” The image is iconic – a singer holding the hands of two political leaders, a show of strength against forces that bring out the very worst in us.

This is good trouble. This is one love.            

While the biggest band in the world may have helped save Northern Ireland from impending uncertainty, two decades later the country is without a functioning government. Circumstances in Belfast have changed significantly, summed up in the late Bap Kennedy’s song “Boomtown.” Kids in the city “don’t know how lucky they are, they never heard a bomb,” property prices are soaring, and there are career opportunities in the rebranded Northern Ireland Police Service. Progress? Like Kennedy, Stuart Bailie is not so sure, commenting on what he calls the Disney-fication of his city “Belfast has whored itself out a bit, which really depresses me. The Cathedral Quarter used to be all anarchy with exciting people trying to really change the fabric of the place, but now, it is all about theme pubs and stag weekends.” Brexit and its implications for the border still loom, and, shaken and saddened by the death of journalist, Lyra McKee, killed by a dissident bullet in Derry on Good Friday this year, the people of Northern Ireland brace themselves for taking two steps back. Again. The distance between politicians and the people expands daily as does the sense of disappointment and division. And while the rainbow flag will fly for the first time on Pride Day from Belfast City hall this summer – a small but mighty step forward – Bailie keeps it real:

this is the only place on our islands where we don’t have marriage equality, and the religious fundamentalists still have too much power.”

Across the Atlantic, the same might be said. Following the results of the 2018 mid-term elections the nation is still deeply divided, Dr. King’s legacy perhaps on the line. From cell-phone footage of an incident on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona where just this week several police officers yelled obscenities and threatened to shoot an African-American family after their four-year-old daughter accidentally took a Barbie doll from a store to the Netflix mini-series, When They See Us,  which fictionalizes the very real and massive miscarriage of justice in the 1989 case of the Central Park 5, we are in crisis mode all across the globe.

What’s going on?

And, it leads Bailie to conclude that we are poised for another great era of trouble songs, adding Kendrick Lamar and Eminem to the soundtrack that began with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Marvin Gaye, every song an opportunity to envision a better future.

Bailie does not editorialize. Trouble Songs is about music and about how people related to it; it is about how someone like Stephen Travers, survivor of the Miami Showband massacre, can articulate the importance of music during the worst of times. Travers is quoted on the back cover of the book: “People often say that music was harmless fun. It wasn’t. It must have terrified the terrorists. When people came to see us, sectarianism was left outside the door of the dancehall. That’s the power of music and I think that every musician that ever stood on a stage, north of the border during those decades, every one of them was a hero.” On the front cover, Bailie knew what he did not want. Wary of “Troubles porn, it would not feature men with tanks or bombs and guns; there would be no children at play in a black and white wasteland with sectarian graffiti on the walls and no British Army patrolling the streets. When a friend shared a picture of the Bogside in 1969, Bailie knew he had found his cover.  Taken by the late French photographer Gilles Caron, the photograph captures a then 18-year old Ann Kelly in the aftermath of a riot.  “I thought she looked so composed – she was her own person.”  With permission to use the picture from Caron’s estate, Bailie’s director for cover designer, Stu Bell, was simple – “make it feel like Dexy’s Midnight Runners first album with a wee bit of the first Clash LP.”

Score.  

Aware of the weight of words in Northern Ireland, Bailie handles with circumspection the identity crisis that still defines his tiny country. He takes care to avoid words like “terrorism,” to ensure that Trouble Songs  is not perceived as “a prod thing or a Republican thing,” but a thing that belongs to everyone in Northern Ireland, and anyone with an interest – personal or political –  in the role music plays where they live and beyond. While Trouble Songs never patronizes the reader, it addresses music that sometimes patronized the people affected. Reflecting on political statements about Northern Ireland from the big stadium bands of the 1980s – Simple Minds, Sting, The Police, U2 –  Bailie points out that some of us “got a wee bit fed up with what felt like tourism. We were the subject of virtue signaling before we even knew what it was.”

All over the world, bands were playing to sold-out stadiums with “something to say about Northern Ireland, recording grainy black and white videos depicting West Belfast as a cultural wasteland with slogans on the wall and children running in slow motion, but the band shots were actually filmed in Los Angeles.”

With a reality check, he verbalizes what’s in my head, “they didn’t have the fucking courtesy to shoot their video in Northern Ireland,” but he refrains from lecturing on this topic in his book, opting for empathy as the path to take towards redemption for the soul of Northern Ireland, digging in to recount the story that has to be told without wagging his finger. He looks right at me and asks “Was Christy Moore “more right” than Paul Brady?” The answer hovers.

From his back-seat, Bailie allows his readers to draw their own conclusions.  

 A fan of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and ‘the new journalism,” Bailie draws from the influence of England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage. Obsessed with music and the details that work to create a strong sense of place, Bailie is interested in what people were wearing or what the weather was like. He wants to know “What’s the yarn here? What’s the story? How did this guy arrive in the story and how did he end up writing these lyrics?” Thus, each chapter could stand alone, thematic and episodic, reminiscent of the notes on music and culture on his blog, an online space where he relates “big stories in context and the rich significance of little moments.” Regarding the title of his blog – “Dig with It,” from Heaney’s “Digging,” he explains he wanted “something a bit funky, a bit groovy, a wee bit literate.” With a nod to the Heaney poem, he figured “it’s bit jazz, a bit Irish literature –  that’ll do.”

Of course the DIY ethic of bloggers appeals to Bailie – it’s very punk.  Resentful of writing for pennies for local newspapers, having grown up in an era when writers were paid well for their words, he approached Trouble Songs the way most bloggers approach their writing – “you write for yourself on your own terms.” He knew there would be some fairly substantial spade work involved in the project and that while writing about music is perhaps a dying trade, it is also what he does best and that Trouble Songs was a story he could uniquely tell. He has been writing it in his head for decades. Back in 2007, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland approached him for an essay on popular music for their “Troubles Archive” series.  Combing through the contents of plastic bags stuck under tables, boxes, newspaper cuttings that have yet to make it either of two filing cabinets, each bulging with random information and transcripts of 30 year old interviews from his time as musical journalist and Assistant Editor at NME. This was in the days before Wikipeida when knowledge was power. Unpacking the boxes, he was constantly delighted with his younger self – “a wee bit of a bad boy, a minor hooligan” who had been shown a new way by a London act, The Clash, who sang about urban desolation and riots in Notting Hill and the impact of Northern Ireland in England in a song called “Career Opportunities.” He credits the Clash with opening his mind, encouraging him to think carefully about his social context: “I hate the civil servant rules, I won’t open no letter bombs for you.” Simple and spare, there was a moral code in the musical statements of The Clash, and it paved the way for a band like Stiff Little Fingers to sing about an “Alternative Ulster.”

Punk rock might just have saved Stuart Bailie’s life. But Trouble Songs isn’t just about Stuart Bailie. It’s about everyone else in Northern Ireland too, and how music can transcend the differences that divide them. It’s a matter of life and death. Really. And, yes, you should be surprised that none of the big publishers were interested when Stu Bailie first approached them with the Trouble Songs idea and three chapters focusing on that unforgettable night in the Waterfront in 1998, the massacre of the Miami Showband , and The Clash in Belfast.  A music industry insider, he had expected it to be easier, that he would just knock on doors like a new band with a demo tape.  But Bailie was rejected repeatedly, agents and publishers alike telling him there was simply no market for the project. Then the British Council asked if there was any way he could get it done in time for the Peace and Beyond conference in Belfast to mark the 20^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Fired up, he pressed on, his punk rock ethos leading him to complete it as a solo project with help from the British Council, Bloomfield Press, and EastSide Arts, Belfast.  He turned to crowdfunding with a Kickstarter campaign appeal, telling potential funders that this was “a call to my community to help carry a vital story,” which ultimately involved over 60 interviews and conversations with the likes of Bono, Christy Moore, the Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, Orbital, Kevin Rowland, Terri Hooley, the Rubberbandits, Dolores O’Riordan and the survivors of the Miami Showband. His community responded and he sold almost 300 books before Trouble Songs was published – punk at its finest.  Chuckling, he describes one of the greatest rewards, an unexpected phone call from Waterstones book store advising him that they needed 50 more books because of Father’s Day sales.  A week later, he was hearing from fathers who wanted to buy the book for their kids. “Don’t read a history book about the Troubles, read what Stu has to say instead.” What of all those defeatist conversations with publishers who made him feel “a wee bit unloved” for such a long time? Any words for them?

“Up yours.” Naturally.

            The son of working-class parents who pushed him to do well in school, Stuart Bailie attended the prestigious Royal Belfast Academical Institution. Simply Inst to the locals, it is one of the city’s oldest schools, the porticoed institution is a handsome example of late Georgian architecture, a posh school where the headmaster shows up to morning assembly in gown and mortar board. In 1970s Belfast, Bailie remembers it was also ‘semi-derelict,’ its windows criss-crossed with tape to catch the shrapnel from a bomb blast in the city center, its classrooms violent and ‘hard men’ beating up first year students in the quadrangle. Too, it was “rock and roll high school,” producing within a very short space of time, punk bands like The Zips, The Tinopers, Acme, Rudi, Victim, and Protex who got a record deal with Polydor around the same time as they were doing their A-level exams. Bailie’s English teacher, was Frank Ormsby, a guy with a fringe and a Fermanagh accent that was out of place in Belfast. Occasionally, Ormsby tossed the prescribed curriculum and instead shares with his pupils something from The Honest Ulsterman, a publication he had edited since 1969.  While such detours did little for Bailie’s exam results, several years later, he realized what Ormsby had given him, “an abiding joy for words. That’s the gift of “a proper teacher –  to love writing. Ormsby taught me not to pass an exam, but to love the words.” 

Showing up to a school above his social league every day, 16 year old Bailie was in the company of aspiring lawyers and dentists. Meanwhile, he tells me, “I had no fucking clue what I was going to do. I wanted to be in a band.” Already a scholar of music, his weekly routine was to buy two albums for 50 pence from Dougie Knights record shop and go home and tape them.  First, he loved Mott the Hoople, then  Bowie, The Faces, Lou Reed. By the time punk arrived,Bailie had found his tribe.

Punk wasn’t that weird – I’d already experienced Lou Reed.

            Somewhat bemused, his parents watched their son transition from model student to a “wee bit of a delinquent” – a punk.  Every weekend, he would make new friends at Caroline Music or Terri Hooleys’s record shop, Good Vibrations, which his friend, Hooley, describes as “a real meeting place . . . it was like an oasis in the middle of this cultural wasteland. We hadn’t a clue what we were doing really; I was just this mad, ex hippy. But the energy of punk gave me the chance to relive my youth again. It was an exciting alternative for all of them.” 

It was also at the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and punk rock was fermenting all over the city.  Asked about his impressions of Belfast in 1977, the late Joe Strummer of The Clash was emphatic, “When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to LIVE for one glorious burning moment. Let it provide inspiration.”

At the time, of course, the likes of Stuart Bailie and Terri Hooley had no idea that what they were doing was particularly noble or inspired or that it would thirty years later become the stuff of conferences on the role of music in peacemaking.  During that period, it was just about the music. Every Saturday afternoon, Bailie would walk up and down between the two record shops, making five new friends along the way, each of them “lifted out of this sectarian thing around us. It was magic.”  By 1978, he realized he was part of a tribe, a community committed to a more adventurous alternative. “You just knew if someone’s got an Outcast or Rudi badge on their coat, you could talk to them.” Punks stood out.  They knew their rights and they didn’t wear flares or long hair. To cultivate his own style, Bailie had even learned how to use a sewing machine. His first order of business was to take in the legs of every pair of trousers. Next, a shopping trip to his dad’s wardrobe, where he repurposed old suits, accessorizing the lapels with punk band badges. Ready to take on the world, Bailie sauntered into his parent’s kitchen one morning, dressed in one of his father’s old jackets. “I got married in that!” the old man said, remembering, I suppose, who he used to be.

Like the rest of us, Bailie has experienced the realization that once upon a time his dad was cool, “a bit of a boy,” with an impressive record collection that included old 78s by Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Hank Williams. Bailie is full of similar surprises himself, and as our conversation draws to a close, he takes me back to summer drives with his parents around Millisle and Ballywalter, Clougy and Comber and a song that is indelible in his memory. He closes his eyes and starts to sing, “When I was young and went to school they taught me how to write/To take the chalk and make a mark and hope it turns out right.”

The journeys seemed endless and very often the windscreen wipers would keep time as they bleated out these fatalistic lyrics. Just play me a bit of Hank Thompson and I’m back there in the back seat, wondering just how many tears it took to clean that slate. 

From an old Hank Thompson song, “Blackboard of my Heart” is a honky tonk tune about getting over the girl. “You gotta hear it,” he tells me. “It’s just gorgeous.”

He’s right of course, as he is about all the songs you gotta hear – the Trouble Songs. And, you gotta see it too. The book, celebrated as one of 2018’s best by Hot Press and Uncut magazine,  is being brought to the big screen as a documentary and will include interviews with young artists like Touts, Susie Blue, and Wood Burning Savages who have something to say about the things that continue to divide and oppress us. In talking to them, Bailie has no doubt that “the era of Trouble Songs is far from over.”

¡Viva la Revolución!

A version of this post originally appeared in Reading Ireland

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