For Belfast teenagers, punk meant far more than just mohicans and safety pins

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jul/27/mohicans-zipped-trousers-zimmer-frames-punk-keeps-rocking

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Inside Blackpool’s Winter Gardens I saw my mum and dad enjoy an impromptu dance in 1977 just after we’d watched a film called Star Wars in a nearby cinema. I also kissed a girl called Olivia there that night – my first teenage clinch. At the same venue 19 years later I witnessed Tony Blair’s speech to New Labour while covering my first national party conference, the year before his election triumph.

But I have never been to the UK’s most important punk event, held annually in the seaside town – the punk Rebellion Festival. This is odd, given I was among the first wave of younger punks to emerge in Belfast in the 1970s during the Troubles. But this week I will be joining up to 10,000 punks, young and old – including many veterans of the 1970s Belfast scene – in Lancashire for the four-day extravaganza, which includes sets from the Damned, the Stranglers and UK Subs.

As I plan my trip, I reminisce about that first family holiday to Blackpool and how I moped around the resort grumbling about “morons” and “idiots” with my spiky hair and torn-up school blazer with chains, razor blades and Johnny Rotten button badge. Just another teenage rebel with nowhere to go.

Except that in Belfast at the time adopting punk was a far more radical statement than for fans in the rest of the UK. A couple of years after that Blackpool holiday I found myself invading the stage at the end of the 1980 Belfast Punk Festival when Terri Hooley, the “godfather” of the alternative music scene in Northern Ireland and discoverer of bands such as the Undertones, made a declaration that has stayed with me all my life.

As the concert ended, with DJ John Peel looking on as an esteemed guest, Hooley grabbed the mic, mobbed by all the young punks, including me, and boomed: “New York has the bands, London has the clothes but Belfast has the reason.”

What Hooley – founder of the Good Vibrations record store and independent music label – meant was punk in Northern Ireland had more depth, social reach and impact compared with what was now a dying fad in Britain and America.

Organically, without any state or official sanction, this music “movement” brought together youth from all sections of society, and most notably either end of the Ulster sectarian divide. For a brief few years this scene united young people like never before in a society constantly on the edge of outright civil war. Some of the most memorable songs produced reflected the war weariness, disgust and boredom about a conflict still barely a decade old. Tunes such as Stiff Little Fingers’ Wasted Life expressed a plague-on-all-your-houses frustration even with the paramilitary forces that were meant either to liberate or defend us from the other side. It didn’t last as disruptive events such as the 1980-81 hunger strikes inexorably drove many back across neutral no-man’s land into their tribal trenches again. Yet that experience did produce lifelong friendships among people who would never have met otherwise. Some of them will be reunited in Blackpool later this week.

“Reunion” and “family” are the two words you hear most when you talk to anyone planning to attend Rebellion, one of the largest and most enduring punk festivals anywhere in the world.

Thomas Ian Murdock of Belfast punk veterans the Defects has been at Rebellion for 10 years. “It’s like meeting up with one big family every year,” he says. His friend Jennie Russell-Smith founded the festival in 1996 with her partner Darren. She sums it up with one word: “Family”.

“Rebellion,” she contends, “brings people together. You leave your politics and your problems at the door. It also cuts across the generations.”

The Hartlepool-born punk veteran says three generations of punks now come to Rebellion each year. “I know grandfathers of punks who will attend with their grandchildren. It is a true, trouble-free family event.”

One of the acts that regularly play are UK Subs who shot to fame in the late 70s after the demise of the Sex Pistols. Their lead singer, Charlie Harper, is now 75 but still touring, including dates in Japan and China in the autumn.

“The festival is a chance to meet some of your old mates from the old punk scene – some of the best people in the world. I’ve even taken my 21-year-old grandkid to one of the Rebellions and he played his guitar at it. That’s what so great about the festival. All the old mates and the new generation that are still interested in punk music,” Harper says.

He recalls with fondness one of our mutual friends, the late Bill Guiney, who came from a loyalist part of inner south Belfast but commanded respect and love from punks from every part of the city and beyond. After his death the Belfast punks held a memorial service for him in a city centre subway where they drank carry-outs and played classic punk tracks from a beat box amid the graffiti.

“Don’t get me wrong – I love playing in Ireland and I always found the Dublin scene to be very chilled and really friendly, but Belfast was the best. There was something amazingly energetic about the place that was unique,” Harper remembers.

Praise indeed for my native town from Harper, who laughs when I suggest that there might be as many Zimmer frames as zipped trousers on display when Rebellion opens on Thursday.

But they will all be taking part in one of the most trouble-free, peaceful and family-orientated music festivals in the world. And in the case of the Northern Irish punks, remember they discovered punk when it was important for a reason, not just for the music and the clothes.