I spent New Year鈥檚 Day 2013 with a pile-up of Ulster punk rock. Archive cuttings and books, transcripts, documentaries, fanzines and so many wonderful records. That was how I also spent my January 2 and many extra hours across the month.
I had been commissioned by Mojo magazine in London to write a 3,000 word overview of the era, to coincide with the UK launch of the Good Vibrations film. Myself and the editor Phil Alexander had been talking about this for three years or more. He realized that the magazine had never dealt with the story in full and so the release of the film gave us the ideal peg to hang it on.
It was also the chance to speak again with the likes of Terri Hooley, founder of Good Vibrations and to Brian Young from Rudi. To my delight, Feargal Sharkey agreed to talk over the phone about the Derry scene and the birth of The Undertones. And while I feared that the mine of information had been completely exhausted, different parts of the narrative started to appear. Like the horrendous back story of the Harp Bar in Hill Street and the gun and bomb attack there on 30 August 1975 that left two dead. The chicken wire fence and security cameras outside weren鈥檛 mere decoration. This was a killing ground.
The raw copy was sent to Mojo, and a few versions were discussed. The feature grew to 4,000 words and then bits were taken out. This is always the painful part, and you need a steady constitution to see parts your precious story being amputated. In this case, it made for a more compact read, accessible to those outside Northern Ireland. At the same time, the photo research and the fact-checking were active, before things went quiet again.
The March issue of Mojo reached Belfast on Tuesday. I came out of the shop on Royal Avenue and read it on a bench in the cold. Six pages in total, some great images, a feeling of relief and then the chance to look again objectively, like someone else had written it. Not bad. An overview of my teenage days, when the notion of an Alternative Ulster was fresh out of the Xerox machine and there was, actually, time to be proud. I like to think that much of that is still in the fibre of my soul.