Belfast has had a troubled history, and music is an important part of the city's history. There are several pieces of street art commemorating some key local bands.
The Undertones were formed in the city. Here's one of their classics:
Sandra said that:
"The music scent in Belfast and unique history has created a stunning sound. Stiff Little Fingers are a specific example. Barbed wire love is about love across the peace line. Alternative Ulster is an anthem for hope in the City.
Every August they play Custom House Square in the city and it is unmissable for any Punk fan."
She also shared an album cover.
Greenday - "Saviors".
"The photo at front is taken in Belfast. It shows a young boy with a stone. The album cover is an altered version of the photo as the boy is smiling, he was not in the original.
The photo was taken in 1978, before I was born. It makes me think about just how bad it was here and how important it is that young people are integrated today. "
U2 were also linked with the city.
The lead singer of the Undertones: Feargal Sharkey now has a very geographical campaign going to try to clean up the UK's rivers which have been polluted by water companies.
I've mentioned Karl Whitney's 'Hit Factories' before and in the chapter on Belfast he references several bands who were linked with the city.
The year 2000 saw some good albums released as the new millennium began.
Ian Anderson's solo album "The Secret Language of Birds" was the latest of his solo albums, featuring Andy Giddings on keyboards who also joined the live touring band for some years.
1987 saw the release of more music that is still being played by me today.
Islands was a release by Mike Oldfield.
This was a time when Mike was trying to cater for two different audiences: those who liked his side-long instrumental pieces, and the shorter songs which could be released as singles, such as 'Moonlight Shadow'.
The Wind Chimes was the long piece... get ready for every 1980s video effect in the book being thrown at this one....
1987 was also the year that 'Hold your Fire' was released. This as featured earlier in the month - when Aimee Mann joined Rush on stage to sing 'Hold your Fire' - remains one of my favourite Rush albums.
The album is very 'glossy' in its production.
The tour for the album was excellent - I saw that several times, including once with my sister.
Meanwhile U2 released 'The Joshua Tree' which was also a very popular album at the time.
An album I have listened to a great many times is Jethro Tull's 'Crest of a Knave'. In the1989 entry, I will post another story about this album.
It included the excellent track 'Budapest'. I have posted previously about this track and the time I met the band. There had been a gap of several years since their last album as a throat infection had affected Ian Anderson's voice, and over the years since it has declined further...
Here's 'The Waking Edge' from the album.
At this time, Anderson was living on the Isle of Skye as the Laird of Strathaird - in a large house near Dun Ringill and fish farming.
This documentary was shown around this time on Channel 4.
What are your favourite albums and pieces of music from this year?
City of Blinding Lights - U2 - not a named city... but based on New York...
There is a connection here with New York, which was explained on this Wikipedia post:
The chorus was inspired by U2's first concert in New York City following the September 11 attacks during their 2001 Elevation Tour. When the lights illuminated the audience during a performance of "Where the Streets Have No Name", the band saw tears streaming down the faces of many fans. Upon seeing this raw release of emotion, Bono shouted, "Oh you look so beautiful tonight"; later, the band integrated the line into the chorus. The fans' passion, along with the resolve of the city following the attack, were the primary inspirations for many of the song's other lyrics.
The latest in a series of guest posts from Carl Lee.
“Maybe Romance Is A Place”: That Wet Island out West
You could probably have a month of blogs eulogising the breath and depth of Ireland’s musical heritage. Where would you begin beyond the obvious contenders such as the Boomtown Rats and U2? Should the focus be on traditional Irish music and how far should you trawl, into the 19th century or even further back in time, into the years of British colonial push and shove, bloodshed and dispossession.
I was well versed in such matters from a young age with one Dublin born, Scottish descended, grandparent. His death certificate states ‘labourer’.
For me the first Irish artist I ever saw live was that fellow Irish labourer but of the Fender Stratocaster, Rory Gallagher. This was back in the late 1970s at Friars, the rock venue located in Aylesbury Civic Hall. He’d learnt his chops in The Fontana Showband, a band who from 1961 to 1965 played the hits of the day in ballrooms, civic halls and pubs across Ireland, sometimes everyday bar Sunday. They were grafters. However, music moved on and so did Rory, eventually he formed the band Taste, and then he set off solo with a touring schedule that is probably unheard of these days. It is estimated that he probably played over 2000 gigs, so if you hadn’t seen him in the 1970s you probably didn’t go out much.
It was the third version of his touring band that I saw, with drummer Ted McKenna and bassist Gerry McAvoy, and they had honed a harder edged rock sound by then (I guess they could afford a bigger soundsystem) with his trade mark battered Fender Stratocaster leading the charge in a high octane stage performance. His relentless touring led to a complete burn out and he died after a liver transplant in June 1995 aged 47. A very talented Irish musician. He really put the hard graft in and in that he reminds me of my Irish grand father
I sincerely hope that my current favourite band, who also just also happen to be Irish, learn the lesson from Rory and don’t burn themselves out. This is the Dublin band Fontaines DC, who are four albums into a run of carving out contemporary classics from all sorts of musical directions.
I first stumbled across Fontaines DC during the first Covid lock down in June 2020 on Later with Jools Holland with their isolation filmed ‘A Hero’s Death’. It jumped out lyrically and musically. A breath of optimistic cheer in a dark time.
“And don’t give up too quick
You only get one line, you better make it stick
If we give ourselves to every breath
Then we’re all in the running for a hero’s death”.
Now generally speaking I’m quite fluid in what I listen to but for 12 months I absolutely battered the discography of Fontaines DC, from their first single, the retro punk of ‘Liberty Belle’, to the stadium rock blast of the most recent “It’s Amazing To Be Young”. I may have over-done it. I even bought one of their Bohemians FC third strip sponsored football shirts. Yet, I’ve never caught them live even though they played Sheffield at least three times since a 2018 gig at the Leadmill.
And now I probably won’t, as they are a festival and stadium band now, two types of venues I’ve never particularly warmed to and now I am hesitant at the cost of such endeavours.
But never say never.
Fontaines DC are of course unquestionably Irish, singing on occasion in Gaelic, calling an album ‘Skinty Fia’ and waxing lyrical about the ‘Dublin City Sky’. There is also an attitude that shouts out ‘Irish’; an insouciance, and ease meshed into existential whimsy, and sharp social observation. They’ve got attitude.
Irish musicians have never been short of attitude from Sinead O’Connor, Shane McGowan, Bono and of course the great Thin Lizzy front man Phil Lynott who was in a constant state of rock n’ roll cool; shades, leather trousers, upper-lip snarling, and all the ‘fuck you attitude’ that only a black-man raised in working class Dublin could muster after being asked to cover “Whiskey in the Jar’ to initially break the charts in 1972.
By 1978 Lynott had his revenge with one of the best live albums of the 1970’s, ‘Live and Dangerous’.
<My friend Simon says that Thin Lizzy were probably the loudest band he ever heard in his concert-going life... Alan>
Listening back to 'Live and Dangerous' brings to mind something the literate, crafted Irish nu-country artist CMAT sings. “I feel so rock n’ roll but I look like a secondary geography teacher.”
I can’t help but imagine who it was who taught her geography at secondary school in County Meath just north-west of Dublin and deserved this scathing put down from Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson as it would have said on the school register?
Still, at least another of CMAT’s acid tonged victims, the chef Jamie Oliver, managed to get a foothold in the humour when he stars in the official video of CMAT’s 2026 hit ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ playing the drums almost in a manner as frenzied as CMAT’s dancing.
No country is so tightly inter-twined with Britain’s musical heritage whilst still retaining its own identity and diversity as Ireland and this has been sustained over generations stretching back to Victorian times, when Irish labourers dug and built much of Britain’s infrastructure.
So many British families have Irish lurking around their DNA, myself included, a healthy dose that could capture me an Irish passport if I was so inclined; I’m not.
And I will admit it, I have never been!
China yes, Australia even. But not yet a short hop over the Irish Sea to the wet island way out west. A lifetime's oversight that really needs sorting.
But no matter. Plenty of Ireland: its history, culture, and importantly its music, has made it into my life already.
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
An A-Z of bands from Spotify, based on the algorithm which suggests the best match to each letter of the alphabet.
I've listened to U2's music since 1983-ish. This goes back to their live album at Red Rocks.
My first U2 experiences were back in the 1980s with albums like Boy. I remember bringing in the New Year in a holiday cottage in Wales in the late 1980s with 'New Year's Day'.
There are a few favourite songs of mine, including a live version of 'City of Blinding Lights'.
U2 at Wembley on Friday 12th June 1987, the day after the general election result. U2 were at the peak of their powers. Support included The Pretenders, Spear of Destiny and World Party. We’d tried to get tickets but it was sold out so we thought we’d go and listen to it from outside. We then realise that there was a hole in a wall above a fire escape so we managed to shin up and climb through the hole where it opened up on the roof of toilet block, which wasn’t very promising. However, we jumped down without injury and just ran before anyone could catch us and dived down one of the stairwasy onto the pitch just as everything was starting. For ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’, Bono changed the lyrics for the spoken section at the end of the song, saying ‘and they run and run, into the arms of…Margaret Thatcher’. The place erupted.
Bono has been involved in a great many political campaigns to some degree, and their shows are also very political.
