Northumbria Research Link
Citation: McLaughlin, Noel and Brani, Joanna (2015) ‘How Belfast got the blues’: Towards
an alternative history. Popular Music History, 10 (3). pp. 207-240. ISSN 1740-7133
Published by: Equinox Publishing Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.35324 <https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.35324>
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‘How Belfast got the blues’:
Towards an alternative history
Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff
Introduction
In popular music terms, Belfast of the early-to-mid 1960s was an important city of the United
Kingdom and Ireland. But the social and cultural optimism of which the period is associated was
cruelly dashed against the sharp edges of the new decade in late 1969 as Northern Ireland (and
particularly its urban centres of Belfast and Derry), infamously, descended into the full-blown
internecine sectarian violence when ‘the Troubles’ began in earnest. The outbreak of a very
peculiar civil war on England’s doorstep would cement the region’s reputation for decades
thereafter, with Northern Ireland offering to the world its own very particular version of the day
the dream, the music, and the decade died. In local lore, this leaves sixties’ Belfast remembered
as something of a halcyon period, marked by a self-confidence and a burgeoning positive
cultural identity, one in which popular music played a vital part.
1
1964 was a pivotal year for Belfast. The Rolling Stones played on 31 July and started a
riot; the band’s set having to be radically curtailed in an over-capacity, ‘pre-health and safety’
Ulster Hall (see McKenzie 1964; News Letter reporter 1964). The event caused such a stir 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 reporter going on to
detail the, by-now customary, scenes of carnage the Stones had become associated with; and also
highlighting a local venue hosting over twice its official capacity in the contemporary legislative
context (Chicago Tribune 1964).
2
Significantly, and to underscore the city’s importance, the following year in November,
the band made the strategic decision to return with cameras - with all the extra expense and
logistical issues this incurred - to make their debut cinema film, Peter Whitehead’s little-seen
Charlie is My Darling (1965).
3
What is interesting is that the Stones and Whitehead decided to
set the film in Ireland (in Dublin and Belfast), with the director’s cinéma vérité style creating
ample space in the narrative for location shots of Belfast as a place eerily familiar, yet
1
For useful discussions on Belfast and Northern Ireland’s music scene in the decade see O’Halloran (2006) and
McLaughlin and McLoone (2012 ch. 2) and Smyth (2005 ch. 1). For an analysis of the politics of 1960s Northern
Ireland, see Bew and Patterson (1985). There are related interesting histories on broadcasting and cinema, which
although not exclusively focused on the 1960s, examine the period in detail, such as Hill (2006) and Cathcart
(1984). For an in-depth focus on the cultural politics of Northern Ireland in the decade see the special section of the
peer-reviewed journal, The Sixties (Bosi and Prince 2009).
2
Note that even by July 1964, the American press perception is that Belfast is an Irish city, not a British one. This is
important not only politically, but also in terms of consumer market territories.
3
Marooned in a complex legal limbo for many years, this film is strangely under-written about in academic
scholarship; a surprising fact given that all the major bands/artists were following the Beatles’ lead and
commissioning films. It was eventually released on DVD in 2012, albeit in a reconstituted form.
2 | Page
unsettlingly different.
4
However, the real star of the film is the audience at Belfast’s ABC
cinema, which is featured in lingering reaction shots in a heady mix of cultural bewilderment and
adoration at the spectacle of the band in live performance.
5
‘We gotta get into this place’
The decision to return to Belfast in 1965 was surely based on what the Stones (and their
management team) had experienced there the year before. While similar scenes of riotous
enthusiasm at the band’s performances had occurred almost everywhere they played (and were
widely reported with the requisite moral outrage), it was the otherness of Belfast, and Northern
Ireland’s residual conservatism (Belfast and Ireland’s apparent ‘primitivism’ to the Stones’
‘modernity’) that may have attracted the group in cinematic terms. Charlie is My Darling, in this
regard, is replete with very specific images: horses and carts in the streets; the presence of a
member of the clergy in the audience; and a young male in the front row, weeping
uncontrollably, in one of Whitehead’s long, unbroken takes, ‘the boy’s preconceptions about
everything’ in Victor Coelho’s words, ‘being systematically dismantled’ (Coelho 2011: 179).
The response of the Belfast audience in 1965, therefore, did not break the trend, and
resulted in front-page ‘public order’ news (Nixon 1965). This was, after all, a time when popular
music - beat, R’n’B and blues - were little covered in the mainstream press. As with the Beatles
earlier appearance in 1963, the Stones’ debut concert played a pivotal role in folding Belfast into
the broader burgeoning beat scene narrative. Indeed, these two visits by the group in 1964 and
1965 were to be, if anything, more important to the city’s scene than their Merseyside rivals;
with the Stones’ appropriation of the blues forming the most influential template for local bands.
To set the scene for what follows, it marks the fact that this contentious capital and trade
port was both a vibrant rhythm and blues city and a place apart with a distinctive identity. It was
also one with an audience that evidently ‘got’ the blues, was increasingly ‘plugged-into’ a
rapidly-internationalizing British-led ‘beat’ culture and possessed, an albeit small, yet
enthusiastic beat group scene. The majority of these groups, like Whitehead’s rarely-screened
film, are barely known outside of their locale, having been eclipsed by the ‘big bang’ moment,
and our second, and more important reason, for claiming 1964 as the pivotal year. This is the
moment when the city bequeathed Them and Van Morrison to national and international renown,
and furnished Belfast (and Northern Ireland) with a prominent presence - performing
representatives, as it were - in the broader ‘British Invasion’ movement (as well as inaugurating
Morrison’s long-standing international career). Thus, the spring and summer of 1964 is
celebrated in the current context, over five decades later, as the city’s seminal popular musical
event.
4
For a discussion of Charlie is My Darling and its production history, see Coelho (2011).
5
Dublin out-does Belfast in terms of audience reaction, offering the perverse spectacle of the Stones being beaten-
up by stage-invading male fans, evidently uncertain about how to deal with their idols and what they signified. It is,
therefore, a very particular instance of the local and the global/periphery and centre meeting, and perhaps, an early
example of a specifically Irish rock ’n’ roll ‘crisis in masculinity’.
3 | Page
In recent years, one significant aspect of academic approaches to popular music history
has been the focus on exploring city-based scenes and questioning the role of heritage initiatives
in both appropriating, and shaping, popular musical narratives. Analysing the formation, and
ideological implications, of these dominant discourses - and their capacity to organize experience
- has been a key aspect of much of this work, which is often driven by an attendant desire to
uncover counter-histories and/or to understand the dynamic between the city (local) and the
broader socio-political and economic forces within which local scenes exist. As Lashua, Cohen
and Schofield have argued: ‘such constructions of both the “character” and “sound” of a city are
most successful when they remain largely invisible, acting to shape common knowledge by
focusing attention on some histories, places and musical styles while overlooking others’
(Lashua, Cohen and Schofield 2010: 142).
In a similar vein, this article seeks to do two things. Firstly, it considers what often stands
as the foundational moment in the city’s popular music history, and Irish rock more broadly: the
‘big bang’ moment of 1964 we have just referred to - the emergence of Van Morrison and Them
and the accompanying ‘legend’ of the group’s residency at the Maritime Hotel. It is our
contention that the existing history of this period is in no sense neutral and we seek to revisit the
dominant narrative, open-up its ideological implications and extend aspects of the discussion.
Secondly, after revisiting this ‘well-known’ story, we consider a little-documented aspect of
Belfast’s popular music history, one which may both inform and problematize the existing
account, thus challenging the established canon, and the accepted chronology, in significant
ways. As Roberta Freund Schwartz has argued, echoing Lashua et al., often missing from
discussions of how UK cities like Belfast got the blues, ‘is how the music was received, and
how, by 1963, it had filtered down to a small but significant segment of the 16–25 age group’
(Schwartz 2007: x).
The birth of Belfast beat: ‘A’ story of Them?
From the perspective of a broader rock narrative, Belfast in early 1964 is the story of Them, Van
Morrison, and the Maritime. This is the momentous occasion when the city (and then the rest of
Ireland) ‘got the blues’ and achieved international popular musical recognition and rock
credibility. It also marks the period, when symbolically at least, the Irish showband was
dethroned, and its first music-based youth subculture was born.
6
As a result, it is arguably, the
most mythologized point in the region’s music history (with Belfast punk – due to its articulation
to the troubles - a close runner-up). For example, regarding heritage initiatives in the
contemporary context: the interior walls of the ‘Oh Yeah!’ Centre, Belfast’s dedicated music
history/performance space in the ‘bohemian’ Cathedral Quarter, are covered in large
photographic information panels. These have a canonical function, illustrating significant
6
The showband was a specifically Irish phenomenon. They dominated the Irish popular music scene and were
regarded as derivative and parochial by the ‘authentic’ blues-based rock culture that followed. In attitude, beat
groups were often vehemently anti-showband. While the beat scene of 1964 was to symbolically overthrow the
showband, the form and the culture in no sense died-out and continued for several years. For illuminating
discussions of the showband, see Smyth (2005: 9-30) and McLaughlin and McLoone (2012: 20-41).
4 | Page
moments in the city and Northern Ireland’s popular music history and are, unsurprisingly,
dominated by Them and Morrison in this period. Furthermore, adjacent to the site where the,
now-demolished, Maritime once stood, a wall is emblazoned with an, albeit unusual, example of
the customary blue plaque; as it commemorates a building, not an individual, and a building
which no longer exists.
7
As Belfast and Ireland’s most revered and enduring popular music artist, Morrison has
been the subject of several high-profile biographies (Collis 1996; Hage 2009; Heylin 2004;
Hinton 1997; Marcus 2010; Rogan 1984, 2005; Turner 1993; Yorke 1975).
8
These accounts are
often forensic in documenting the minutiae of the events surrounding this formative moment in
his career – both Clinton Heylin and Johnny Rogan (in his second biography) devote a number of
chapters to 1964 alone - and as a result they simultaneously yield significant insights and
construct an orthodox narrative. These writings do, however, have the virtue of the inclusion of
original interviews with key protagonists and of providing texture, if at times controversially so;
opening-up the local scene to a broader readership and, paradoxically, creating discourse about it
that otherwise wouldn’t exist. In a vital sense, it took an internationally successful ‘product’ of
Belfast’s beat culture to turn a forensic spotlight onto the city and the period, with the inevitable
disputes over ownership of the story, ideas and songs that have accompanied it. However, the
individualistic impulse inherent in the form – making its subject the centre of the story -
displaces and renders irrelevant other, more collective, ways of approaching the Belfast of the
period.
Thus, the spring and summer of that year is the most officially-documented part of the
story of Belfast’s music scene in the decade. This is the brief period when Them formed, decided
upon and perfected a distinctive repertoire, and took up residency in the Maritime. After this, as
is widely known, they decamped to London after signing to the Belfast-born, but internationally
powerful, music entrepreneur Phil Solomon and his management company, Hyde Park Music.
Solomon, significantly, owned the group’s recordings, which he licensed to Decca, the major
label which - just as importantly - his family had a longstanding financial investment in (at one
point they were reported to be majority stake-holders) (Rogan 2005: 92; see also Murphy 2015).
Regarding this hallowed moment in Belfast’s popular musical folklore, the first point of
interest is just how short the timeframe was. Them’s ‘legendary’ residency at the club could have
resulted in no more than seventeen appearances; bookended by their Friday 17 April debut and
by the first Friday in August. On the first weekend in July, the band was in London for their first
Decca recording session, and their residency at the blues club that helped forge their reputation
was over (with original promoters, ‘the three Js’, literally, locked out).
9
While the group would
7
The Maritime was demolished before its heritage capital was recognized.
8
As Marcus has bluntly put it, ‘Van Morrison is as intense and imaginative a performer as any to have emerged in
the wake of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones’ (Marcus 2010: 4).
9
As Gerry McKervey (one of the ‘Three Js’) has recalled, Them ‘were whisked off away to London. The rhythm &
blues club ran one more night. We turned up the next night and there were two policemen on the door and the
manager of the hotel who said, “I’m sorry. I’ve got a booking”…. That was us out of the Maritime as well’ (Heylin
2004: 86).