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Ulster calling
Hhistory, the Troubles, barbed wire, why God, why? History, bombs, Belfast, why God, why?
These aren’t real lyrics from a song about Belfast. They were automatically assembled from a series of words typed into a “random lyric generator” on the internet. But they aren’t significantly worse than some of the aural atrocities committed in the name of the city — Elton John emoting about how he “never saw a braver place” (from the song Belfast), or the Simple Minds observing that “war is raging in the Emerald Isle” (from Belfast child), or even Boney M’s muddle-headed declaration: “Belfast, it’s a country that’s changing.”
In pop music, Belfast is usually reduced to a series of recurring themes: bombs, guns and suffering; images based on perceptions established by television footage of the Troubles (the Northern Ireland conflict).
“I think a lot of folks use the name for its shock value. It almost has a warped romance about it,” suggests Jake Burns, singer with the city’s seminal punk band, Stiff Little Fingers. This city of the lyrical imagination is the subject of Belfast songs, a new book-and-CD package put together by Factotum, who invited writers, artists, poets and hip academics with Belfast connections to analyze songs by Spandau Ballet, Van Morrison, James Taylor and others who have cooed about or agonized over its streets and history.
In pop music, Belfast is usually reduced to a series of recurring themes: bombs, guns and suffering; images based on perceptions established by television footage of the Troubles
There were a lot to choose from. When they began researching the project, Factotum discovered that of all British cities, only London was name-checked more frequently in song titles than Belfast. In many of them, the city is used as an easy signifier to demonstrate that the singer is socially concerned. Spandau Ballet and Elton John’s hand-wringing anguish about tanks and barricades works in exactly the same way as Kim Wilde’s references to Cambodia or the Cranberries’ musings on Sarajevo’s fate — the mention of an afflicted region adds a touch of pathos to the song and shows that the musicians really, really care. At least they think it does, but most simply come over as naive or imbecilic; witness the Pretty Things’ Belfast cowboys, with its preposterous line about “Celtic children born with stone in hand.”
As Factotum note, the majority of songs about Belfast are written by people who either don’t come from the city or have never even visited it.
Again, Elton John’s Belfast is a prime example. “I try to see through Irish eyes,” he sings, but as Aaron Kelly notes in the book, his fumbling for empathy is actually “a fundamentally stereotyped English pose, an exoticism pandering to notions of the Celtic peoples and an effort to annex their perceived spirituality and emotion.”
But some have managed to escape the platitudes. The punk era provided a few good examples, the best being Stiff Little Fingers’ incendiary Alternative Ulster, in which the alienated young punks described the foul brew of brutality and boredom that characterized their experience of their hometown, and appealed to their peers to “alter your native land.”
“It was a song written in the classic punk mode about having nothing to do,” recalls Stiff Little Finger’s Jake Burns. “Because that was the overriding reality of life in Belfast for a teenager in the mid 70s. Not the fear of riots or bombs or whatever. It was the sheer tedium of having nowhere to go and nothing to do when you got there.”
Local songwriters evade the obvious because they understand the city differently. One distinguished exponent is Van Morrison, whose Astral weeks album detailed his meanderings through Cyprus Avenue, a tree-lined road near his childhood home in east Belfast. The record was released in 1968 as political violence escalated, but Morrison reminisced about a more innocent time, recounting the sights and sounds of a bygone life while escaping into his imagination, an oasis of romantic reverie.
“In many ways this is the ultimate irony of Morrison’s Belfast — he is rooted to its culture and yet he is driven by the desire to escape it,” Martin McLoone writes in the Factotum book. “The escape is sometimes a spiritual moment of transcendence, like those he describes in Cyprus Avenue. Often his escape is imaginative, inspired by the music he hears on the radio. Finally, of course, his escape was physical and most of his music was conceived and recorded in exile.”
Among the few outsiders whose vision of Belfast has chimed with its residents’ mood is techno duo Orbital, who gave the city’s name to a mournful electronic elegy after playing live there in 1990. It’s wordless, but somehow more evocative for that. Electronic music also dominates the CD that accompanies the Belfast songs book.
Overall, it’s an angry set of recordings, a bitter response to those who unconsciously mock the city with the banality of their verses. That’s not a sentiment wholly shared by Factotum themselves, however.
“We didn’t just want to put out a negative message because in some ways it’s a compliment if someone’s writing about the city,” says Richard West.
One side-effect of the Northern Ireland peace process is that pop lyricists seem to have lost interest in Belfast. As the Troubles fade from global television screens, fewer musicians are singing about the city, a trend that concerns West and his colleagues.
“If the city ceases to be represented in songs, it would be left with a stagnant image that was set some time in the 1980s,” he says. Like Stiff Little Fingers 25 years ago, he appeals for a new vision of Belfast: “It only requires people to take the initiative a bit and start imagining the city in a more interesting way to make a strength out of what has been a trap.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
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