In his 2010 TED talk, Photos That Changed the World, co-founder of Getty, Jonathan Klein, maintains that a picture can make the world a better place. With clear-eyed compassion, he proves his point, presenting a series of images many of us know well, images from which we can neither look away nor back.
In her book, The Rise, Sarah Lewis refers to this power, this “aesthetic force” as the thing that will force us into action, perhaps even to justice:
. . . it leaves us changed — stunned, dazzled, knocked out. It can quicken the pulse, make us gape, even gasp with astonishment. Its importance is its animating trait — not what it is, but what it does to those who behold it in all its forms. Its seeming lightness can make us forget that it has weight, force enough to bring about a self-correction, the acknowledgment of failure at the heart of justice — the moment when we reconcile our past with our intended future selves. Few experiences get us to this place more powerfully . . . than the emotive power of aesthetic force.
The images are iconic – Princess Diana holding a baby infected with HIV/AIDS; a little girl, naked and terrified, burned by Napalm in Vietnam; a young woman, arms outstretched and wailing over the body of a slain student at Kent State University. Faced with such pictures, what must we do? We cannot look away. We cannot retreat to the place we knew before seeing that image.
Klein also recognizes that there are images sometimes deemed too upsetting for us to see them, images from the front-line, from natural disasters; images that expose with harrowing candor, man’s inhumanity to man. The image on the front page of The Irish Examiner, The Independent and other newspapers in September 2015 was that of a tiny boy identified as three-year-old Aylan Kurdi. In his little red T-shirt and shorts, he lies face-down on the Mediterranean’s edge at a beach in Turkey. Drowned. Washed up with his mother and brother.
Like human litter.
Desperate to escape the war in their homeland, Syrian refugees fled by the tens of thousands. The little boy was one of 12 refugees who drowned in one of two boats bound for the Greek island of Kos, and one of 2,500 people, according to UNHR who died attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea in 2015. Was that enough dead people to bring us to do the right and humane thing? Was the sight of a dead toddler on the beach enough?
No it was not. It was not enough.
Today, the image that is criss-crossing the globe is that of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23 month old daughter, Valeria, their drowned bodies, washed up in a desperate embrace on the banks of the Rio Grande. Lying face down, the little girl’s body tucked inside her father’s shirt, her arm around his neck. And, less than a hundred miles away, four more bodies strewn on the along the Rio Grande – three little children and a young woman. The toll of migrant deaths has yet to be released for 2019, but last year, 283 migrant deaths were recorded.
What is the point of documenting the death toll if we do nothing about it?
Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off,
~ Paul Brodeur
America and the dream of a better future had seemed within reach just hours before for Ramírez and his little family. They had planned to seek asylum from the dangers of El Salvador that forces so many migrants to flee their homes, to take a spectacular risk. Perhaps he just couldn’t wait one more moment, knowing that there were already a thousand names on the waiting list for an asylum interview at the U.S. Consulate. Perhaps it was because the perilous passage across the Rio Grande seemed safer than home. So he held his little girl close, inside his T-shirt, and entered the river, no match for the fast-moving current that would sweep them away.
From afar, we look at the pictures and read these unimaginable stories of entire families drowning in waters that once represented hope, in the Mediterranean Sea or the Rio Grande. We listen – or tune out – as those in power debate and discuss where people belong or if they belong anywhere. They are unrelenting, quibbling over definitions of words like ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant,’ or where to draw the line that somehow separates “genuine” from its opposite in matters of ‘asylum.’
Amid this noise, they might distance themselves, but will they look away, unchanged, from Julia Le Duc’s photograph of a little girl and her father, dead, face down in the reeds of the Rio Grande? This earth belonged to them as it belongs to us. It is the only home we will ever know, and its possibilities diminish when our hearts harden about our place in it, about the people with whom we share it, and about the mark we leave upon it. We know better, we know, as poet Damian Gorman says, “Life is not always possible where you start out . . . ” It is time to do better.
LET PEOPLE COME by Damian Gorman If life, decent life, is not possible where you are, you have the right to move anywhere where you might find it – anywhere in the world – including the house attached to my house, in my part of the world. And it’s not even a right. It’s in you, this particular urge. Like the stretch that’s inside bones; like the workings of the heart and lungs. And I know that life should be possible where you start out. Yes it should be, and that’s a big issue that we should speak, and do other things about. But life is not always possible where you start out. And, rather than welcome people fleeing from unbearable want, we erect walls and ask people to stand in the gated gaps of them to say – on our behalf – ‘You have no business here.’ And what is the result? The result is a dreadful soup of humanity in an abandoned truck on the Austro-Hungarian border; an awful stew which might contain 20 people or 50 people. But actually 71 people. The result is bodies littering the waters of the Mediterranean like the discarded wrappings of things. And still the walls go up. And still we employ people to say for us, ‘You have no business here, in this place, among us.’ Well my point – my only point – is this: that there is no clear-cut, no necessarily-big distance between saying to desperate people ‘You have no business here, among us’ and ‘You have no business here, in this world.’ LET PEOPLE COME. Agus ta failte romhaibh, And you are welcome.
It was leukemia that took Nora Ephron from us, a cancer she had kept private in a world that already knew many of the intimate details of her aging neck, her dry skin, the contents of her purse, her small breasts about which she wrote A Few Words, and her weapon of choice against not only the gray hair that grows back with a vengeance every four weeks, but the youth culture in general – hair color. With a quick and daring wit, she regaled us with stories of the indignities visited upon her as she grew older, but she did not tell us about the cancer. Cancer was not up for discussion. For Ephron, cancer was not copy, as her son explains in the HBO documentary about her life:
I think at the end of my mom’s life she believed that everything is not copy,” he says. “That the things you want to keep are not copy. That the people you love are not copy. That what is copy is the stuff you’ve lost, the stuff you’re willing to give away, the things that have been taken from you. She saw everything is copy as a means of controlling the story. Once she became ill, the means to control the story was to make it not exist.
In the middle of my life, it occurs to me that maybe I have always understood the need to control and contain. As much as I have revealed of myself in this virtual space, I know for sure what is not copy. For me, breast cancer was copy. It still is. Some of the business of widowhood is copy too. But I know what is not. I know what to keep and what to discard. I know how to control it and how to control myself – most of the time. I know how to be private. I know how to keep what is precious, private. I know how to – as Meryl Streep says of Ephron – ‘achieve a private act.‘ I also know how to avoid an ending, and I’m very good at the long game. I know what Nora Ephron’s son knows – that closure is over-rated. I can’t consider the concept without recalling the first time I realized how much it mattered to other people, following a school principal’s evaluation of a lesson I’d taught. In her report, she indicated, with some disappointment, that I had provided “no closure” for my students. I didn’t bother arguing with her, because I knew I would be back in my classroom the next day and the next to continue – not to close – with my students. It is the continuing that matters along with what I wore along the way.
Continuance – it has a nice ring to it.
Like each of the five women in Love, Loss, and What I Wore, Nora and Delia Ephron‘s stage-adaptation of Ilene Beckerman’s book by the same name, I can peer into my wardrobe and hang on the clothes and shoes and handbags and boots that bulge from it, some of the most important moments of my life. Especially the boots. For those dwelling in cooler climes, there is perhaps a 20-day window for honest boot-wearing in Phoenix, Arizona. Seriously. The sunshine is relentless, the heat is “dry,” and I can offer no justification for my growing collection of boots other than still wanting to be more like my idea of a young Carly Simon or Linda Ronstadt. My favorite brown leather boots have a beautiful patina, best worn with the attitude I squeezed into them the morning I was fired by a man who might possibly have been great were it not for the misogyny that diminshed him. While it was not the best way to start a day, but how it pleased me to turn on the heel of those well-worn boots and walk away from him. Forever.
Then there are the boots of patchwork leather my mother gave me; they make me feel like Carly Simon in anticipation of a date with Cat Stevens circa 1971. There are the inappropriate patent leather boots I wore the first time we took our daughter to see the snow, to fall with glee into the sparkling powder, creating her first snow-angel; there are six pairs of black boots that vary only in length even though someone, most likely me, pointed out that each is a distinct shade of black and – this is important – timeless. There are the classic Frye boots that I simply could not pass up because they were on sale and at a consignment store; and, the pointy-toed suede knee-high boots purchased from a UK catalog at full over-priced price. They have been reheeled and resoled twice, and they require additional assistance and effort to remove from my tired feet at the end of a long day. I haven’t worn them as much since Ken died, because I know when the time comes to remove them that I will remember exactly how he used to say, “Goddammit baby. Goddammit.” And then I will tell myself there must have been a mistake, that maybe my daughter’s daddy is not really dead.
The collection of coats defies explanation, several of them purchased in Ireland and carried back – in an extra suitcase – to the desert southwest where there is rarely the need for a sweater let alone a coat. I suppose coat-wearing allows me to make a statement about how Phoenix won’t stop me from being my own girl, complete with scarf, coat, and even a turtleneck underneath. I have other “signature” coats, one of which I will never wear in public unless Tom Petty were to return and ask me to be one of his Heartbreakers. It is more art than coat and belongs only on someone on stage in front of 50,000 fans holding up lighters.
During the Christmas holidays, I always wear the long red coat I bought at Marks and Spencers one year in Belfast. I love the lining that nobody can see – white with tiny red hearts. And I don’t care if it is 80 degrees outside; that coat is a stunner. Against the backdrop of a holiday tree made of a triangle of pots of jolly red poinsettias outside Saks Fifth Avenue at the Biltmore Fashion Park in Phoenix, it makes me feel a bit like Santa. Or Red Riding Hood.
Along with the boots, and the Bridge vintage leather Gladstone doctor’s bag – which I bought on Ebay and have not been able to open for several years because the brass clasp is broken – hiding in a corner of the closet, are burgundy leather penny loafers, with a penny in each. I haven’t worn them since 1989. I don’t remember why I bought them and don’t know why they are still in my house, but I think it might be because they are reminiscent of the brogues I once wore to school or the tap shoes I wore for Irish dancing. Or maybe I was influenced by the collegiate style of a fifth-grade American girl wearing khakis from the Gap, white socks, and her grandmother’s loafers.
Given where I am today, with nothing to wear to a thing I don’t want to go to later – having already flung on the bed seven summery skirts that are too snug at the waist because of a diet that has deteriorated in recent months (years) and an exercise regimen postponed (abandoned), I feel a bit like Meryl Streep‘s married character getting ready for a clandestine rendezvous in the city with de Niro’s character, also married (but to someone else) in a favorite movie of mine, Falling in Love. For me, in the end, something blue wins; it always does.Even Meryl settles on a blue print blouse. In my case, it will be the blue dress I am wearing in many of the profile pictures on my online spaces. If I run into any of my social media contacts today, they will think I have nothing else to wear. And, they will be right.
Resurrected in her son’s documentary, Ephron is among us once again. Vibrant, funny, and in control. I imagine her striding across a set not unlike The Strand bookstore in the East Village where all her books were almost sold out the morning after her death. In my mind, she is authoritative – and perhaps perceived as mean – as she provides direction to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, while searching for the glasses that are on top of her head. I prefer to think of her laughing with the darlings of Hollywood, surrounded by books, as in the old Jimmy Stewart movie The Shop Around the Corner, charmingly resurrected and rewritten by Ephron and her sister, as the romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail starring, naturally, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Although by many accounts, a cynic with a sharp tongue, I suspect Nora Ephron was a romantic at heart, so it would have been poetic had real life handed her the happy ending like those she crafted in those fail-proof feel-good “chick flicks.” The happy ending would not have been real, and my guess is that Nora Ephron liked to keep it real.
Her contribution to the movies is but a tiny part of her legacy as a writer, but those films are such a big part of the soundtrack to my American life as a woman who immigrated to this country around the time When Harry met Sallywas released. Granted, it is not the most memorable part of the movie, but there is one scene that always makes me laugh and snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who shows up now and again to remind me just how little time there is to become who I am supposed to be. As I have learned, life happens in the twinkling of an eye, and it is for the living. I have learned that too.
In the scene, Meg Ryan’s Sally has just found out that her ex-boyfriend is getting married. In tears, she tells Harry that she is going to be left on the shelf, a spinster, all alone at forty. Mind you, she is barely thirty, with a very cute hair cut that, at the time, I was convinced would work with naturally curly hair like mine. It didn’t. In fact, I carried in my wallet, for several years – maybe a decade – a page from a magazine featuring the many cute haircuts of Meg Ryan. I really did. And, for countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page, as though it were the Shroud of Turin, to politely asked them to give me a Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50 and found Topher at the aptly named Altered Ego salon, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before. Too many times, perhaps.
And I’m gonna be 40 . . . someday
Just yesterday I felt the same way. Forty was a lifetime away from eighteen, and by all accounts the deadline for “letting oneself go” and, I suppose, Eileen Fisher. Fifty was sensible and dowdy. Sixty heralded blue rinses for hair – not jeans. Seventy was out of the question, and definitely not a new fifty. Having passed the half-century mark, I’m wondering about what I’ve done and what’s next. With my thirties behind me, my forties too, I am accepting a couple of truths about myself. Some are minor – I do not have sensible hair, and I talk too much. Others are more painful. I should be kinder and more patient. Too, I should stay far away from insecure men in positions of power and recognize earlier those folks who are nice to me only because they need something from me. Like my hair, they perform poorly when the pressure rises.
I’m gonna be 60 someday (in four years) and it is a bit like being in IKEA, one of my least favorite places on the planet. A planet itself, IKEA is too big, with all its “rooms” requiring instructions and assembly and Scandinavian words I find just as intimidating had they fallen from the lips of an errant Viking. At 56, I’m worried that I might run out of time to do the things I need to do, not necessarily the kinds of things that might turn up on a “bucket list” but definitely those that will bring me closer to those I love the most. These days, Iknowwho loves me and who loves me not.
Still, none of this self-awareness in any way diminishes how much I resent the aging process in general and the way it just sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. One minute, I am reading the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle, the next I’m desperately seeking one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the carwash or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in the same predicament. My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at very loud concerts over the past forty years than on something as wholly graceless as aging.
About six months before he died, my husband and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Phoenix. Other than the fact that it was the last concert he saw on this earth and the last time he and I would stay for an encore, I hold on to the moment I caught a white-haired Mick Fleetwood bow out and off stage in his bright red hat, pointed red shoes, and the dangling wooden balls, and Stevie Nicks still spinning in black. Mesmerizing. Just like the white winged dove sings a song. Stevie, at almost seventy. Rock on gold dust woman.
So many beginnings and endings, with more to go . . .
Since Sophie was little, I have saved every drawing, handprint, book report, birthday card, report card, certificate, and, apparently, every receipt from Target. Not in one place, of course. Stuffed in vases and between the pages of books are random letters from the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and her grandparents. There are even pieces of notebook paper that bear only her name in the top right corner. In the spirit of those ever-so-organized professional organizers on documentaries on The Learning Channel, the folks who would direct me to place everything I own on the front yard before organizing it into piles of things that should be stored, displayed, or dumped, I have realized that it is time – theoretically – to tame the paper tiger.
Full of good intentions one day – and for about an hour – I began “organizing.” I made a few folders for my daughter’s school work and special photographs, I threw away those greeting cards that were made not by her but some stranger at Hallmark, I filled a box with books to donate to the local bookstore. While flipping through the pages of a school composition book, I came upon something she had written when she was in elementary school:
I don’t know what or who inspired it. I love the leggy and winking 29 year old, hand on her hip, but I am almost afraid to ask what happened to her. I wonder what Nora Ephron would think of my little girl’s “mountain of life.” I can almost see a wry smile creep across her face as she tells that 50 year old to straighten up for Act Two, to cause some trouble, just as she urged a bunch of Wellesley graduates in her 1996 Commencement Speech – to continue.
No closure.
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your life . . .
Far away from Belfast, Stuart Bailie and I find ourselves in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in Los Gatos, California. A perfect place to ponder politics, protest, and punk rock, it’s where John Steinbeck penned his angriest book, the soundtrack of America’s Great Depression and Tom Joad’s California. By any other name, The Grapes of Wrath is a punk anthem fulfilling the writer’s goal “to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.” It is a call to outrage, to make “good trouble” – the kind that might redeem the very soul of a country, resonant and recognizable in the soundtrack of Northern Ireland since 1968. That soundtrack is Trouble Songs – Music and Conflict in Northern Ireland, a potent compilation of moments where music was “inspired, agitated, or brutalized” by the times. For young people like me who spent their Saturday afternoons seeking refuge in Terri Hooley’s record shop, there is no better man to deliver Northern Ireland’s soundtrack, than Stuart Bailie, self-proclaimed “wizened old geezer” – a middle-aged punk rocker.
Trouble Songs arrives at a seminal moment for Northern Ireland, the title of its first chapter an imperative from a Stiff Little Fingers song – “if these words hit you at the right moment, they would be life changing” – Take a Look at Where You’re Living. Forcing us to take a closer look, Bailie begins his tour of Northern Ireland in 1968, when they blocked the lower deck of the Craigavon Bridge, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Perhaps the first time it was sung in Northern Ireland, this was the song to sing, ringing out from America, from far away freedom rides and sit-ins, union halls and churches, in the face of snarling dogs and high-pressure fire hoses. With all its promise, this was the song that sustained Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Congressman John Lewis, the last surviving speaker of the march to Washington DC in 1968, also the occasion of the “I Have a Dream,” speech. Lewis says that “without music, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings. We Shall Overcome are those wing.” It is the quintessential trouble song.
Bailie’s fresh perspective arrives fifty years since civil rights activists took to the streets in Northern Ireland and twenty years since the Good Friday agreement was signed, the anniversary of the latter a publishing deadline for Bailey, the promise of it indelible and on stage at a rock ‘n’ roll concert at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, when from behind David Trimble and John Hume, the leaders of Northern Ireland’s largest political parties, Bono steps in to hold their arms up like prize fighters. It was their first public handshake, and it was momentous. Choreographed by U2’s front-man, it had also been done before. Bailie takes us back to a spring evening in 1978 at the National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica. Without warning, during a rendition of “Jammin’,” reggae boss, Bob Marley, invites political opponents, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, to join him on stage, to send out a positive gesture to a country in the grip of its most deadly period of political bloodshed and violence. They have no choice. It is an unscripted moment that will make the international headlines the next day, showing the world that if “we gonna make it right, we gots to unite!” The image is iconic – a singer holding the hands of two political leaders, a show of strength against forces that bring out the very worst in us.
This is good trouble. This is one love.
While the biggest band in the world may have helped save Northern Ireland from impending uncertainty, two decades later the country is without a functioning government. Circumstances in Belfast have changed significantly, summed up in the late Bap Kennedy’s song “Boomtown.” Kids in the city “don’t know how lucky they are, they never heard a bomb,” property prices are soaring, and there are career opportunities in the rebranded Northern Ireland Police Service. Progress? Like Kennedy, Stuart Bailie is not so sure, commenting on what he calls the Disney-fication of his city “Belfast has whored itself out a bit, which really depresses me. The Cathedral Quarter used to be all anarchy with exciting people trying to really change the fabric of the place, but now, it is all about theme pubs and stag weekends.” Brexit and its implications for the border still loom, and, shaken and saddened by the death of journalist, Lyra McKee, killed by a dissident bullet in Derry on Good Friday this year, the people of Northern Ireland brace themselves for taking two steps back. Again. The distance between politicians and the people expands daily as does the sense of disappointment and division. And while the rainbow flag will fly for the first time on Pride Day from Belfast City hall this summer – a small but mighty step forward – Bailie keeps it real:
this is the only place on our islands where we don’t have marriage equality, and the religious fundamentalists still have too much power.”
Across the Atlantic, the same might be said. Following the results of the 2018 mid-term elections the nation is still deeply divided, Dr. King’s legacy perhaps on the line. From cell-phone footage of an incident on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona where just this week several police officers yelled obscenities and threatened to shoot an African-American family after their four-year-old daughter accidentally took a Barbie doll from a store to the Netflix mini-series, When They See Us, which fictionalizes the very real and massive miscarriage of justice in the 1989 case of the Central Park 5, we are in crisis mode all across the globe.
What’s going on?
And, it leads Bailie to conclude that we are poised for another great era of trouble songs, adding Kendrick Lamar and Eminem to the soundtrack that began with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Marvin Gaye, every song an opportunity to envision a better future.
Bailie does not editorialize. Trouble Songs is about music and about how people related to it; it is about how someone like Stephen Travers, survivor of the Miami Showband massacre, can articulate the importance of music during the worst of times. Travers is quoted on the back cover of the book: “People often say that music was harmless fun. It wasn’t. It must have terrified the terrorists. When people came to see us, sectarianism was left outside the door of the dancehall. That’s the power of music and I think that every musician that ever stood on a stage, north of the border during those decades, every one of them was a hero.” On the front cover, Bailie knew what he did not want. Wary of “Troubles porn, it would not feature men with tanks or bombs and guns; there would be no children at play in a black and white wasteland with sectarian graffiti on the walls and no British Army patrolling the streets. When a friend shared a picture of the Bogside in 1969, Bailie knew he had found his cover. Taken by the late French photographer Gilles Caron, the photograph captures a then 18-year old Ann Kelly in the aftermath of a riot. “I thought she looked so composed – she was her own person.” With permission to use the picture from Caron’s estate, Bailie’s director for cover designer, Stu Bell, was simple – “make it feel like Dexy’s Midnight Runners first album with a wee bit of the first Clash LP.”
Score.
Aware of the weight of words in Northern Ireland, Bailie handles with circumspection the identity crisis that still defines his tiny country. He takes care to avoid words like “terrorism,” to ensure that Trouble Songs is not perceived as “a prod thing or a Republican thing,” but a thing that belongs to everyone in Northern Ireland, and anyone with an interest – personal or political – in the role music plays where they live and beyond. While Trouble Songs never patronizes the reader, it addresses music that sometimes patronized the people affected. Reflecting on political statements about Northern Ireland from the big stadium bands of the 1980s – Simple Minds, Sting, The Police, U2 – Bailie points out that some of us “got a wee bit fed up with what felt like tourism. We were the subject of virtue signaling before we even knew what it was.”
All over the world, bands were playing to sold-out stadiums with “something to say about Northern Ireland, recording grainy black and white videos depicting West Belfast as a cultural wasteland with slogans on the wall and children running in slow motion, but the band shots were actually filmed in Los Angeles.”
With a reality check, he verbalizes what’s in my head, “they didn’t have the fucking courtesy to shoot their video in Northern Ireland,” but he refrains from lecturing on this topic in his book, opting for empathy as the path to take towards redemption for the soul of Northern Ireland, digging in to recount the story that has to be told without wagging his finger. He looks right at me and asks “Was Christy Moore “more right” than Paul Brady?” The answer hovers.
From his back-seat, Bailie allows his readers to draw their own conclusions.
A fan of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and ‘the new journalism,” Bailie draws from the influence of England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage. Obsessed with music and the details that work to create a strong sense of place, Bailie is interested in what people were wearing or what the weather was like. He wants to know “What’s the yarn here? What’s the story? How did this guy arrive in the story and how did he end up writing these lyrics?” Thus, each chapter could stand alone, thematic and episodic, reminiscent of the notes on music and culture on his blog, an online space where he relates “big stories in context and the rich significance of little moments.” Regarding the title of his blog – “Dig with It,” from Heaney’s “Digging,” he explains he wanted “something a bit funky, a bit groovy, a wee bit literate.” With a nod to the Heaney poem, he figured “it’s bit jazz, a bit Irish literature – that’ll do.”
Of course the DIY ethic of bloggers appeals to Bailie – it’s very punk. Resentful of writing for pennies for local newspapers, having grown up in an era when writers were paid well for their words, he approached Trouble Songs the way most bloggers approach their writing – “you write for yourself on your own terms.” He knew there would be some fairly substantial spade work involved in the project and that while writing about music is perhaps a dying trade, it is also what he does best and that Trouble Songs was a story he could uniquely tell. He has been writing it in his head for decades. Back in 2007, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland approached him for an essay on popular music for their “Troubles Archive” series. Combing through the contents of plastic bags stuck under tables, boxes, newspaper cuttings that have yet to make it either of two filing cabinets, each bulging with random information and transcripts of 30 year old interviews from his time as musical journalist and Assistant Editor at NME. This was in the days before Wikipeida when knowledge was power. Unpacking the boxes, he was constantly delighted with his younger self – “a wee bit of a bad boy, a minor hooligan” who had been shown a new way by a London act, The Clash, who sang about urban desolation and riots in Notting Hill and the impact of Northern Ireland in England in a song called “Career Opportunities.” He credits the Clash with opening his mind, encouraging him to think carefully about his social context: “I hate the civil servant rules, I won’t open no letter bombs for you.” Simple and spare, there was a moral code in the musical statements of The Clash, and it paved the way for a band like Stiff Little Fingers to sing about an “Alternative Ulster.”
Punk rock might just have saved Stuart Bailie’s life. But Trouble Songs isn’t just about Stuart Bailie. It’s about everyone else in Northern Ireland too, and how music can transcend the differences that divide them. It’s a matter of life and death. Really. And, yes, you should be surprised that none of the big publishers were interested when Stu Bailie first approached them with the Trouble Songs idea and three chapters focusing on that unforgettable night in the Waterfront in 1998, the massacre of the Miami Showband , and The Clash in Belfast. A music industry insider, he had expected it to be easier, that he would just knock on doors like a new band with a demo tape. But Bailie was rejected repeatedly, agents and publishers alike telling him there was simply no market for the project. Then the British Council asked if there was any way he could get it done in time for the Peace and Beyond conference in Belfast to mark the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Fired up, he pressed on, his punk rock ethos leading him to complete it as a solo project with help from the British Council, Bloomfield Press, and EastSide Arts, Belfast. He turned to crowdfunding with a Kickstarter campaign appeal, telling potential funders that this was “a call to my community to help carry a vital story,” which ultimately involved over 60 interviews and conversations with the likes of Bono, Christy Moore, the Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, Orbital, Kevin Rowland, Terri Hooley, the Rubberbandits, Dolores O’Riordan and the survivors of the Miami Showband. His community responded and he sold almost 300 books before Trouble Songs was published – punk at its finest. Chuckling, he describes one of the greatest rewards, an unexpected phone call from Waterstones book store advising him that they needed 50 more books because of Father’s Day sales. A week later, he was hearing from fathers who wanted to buy the book for their kids. “Don’t read a history book about the Troubles, read what Stu has to say instead.” What of all those defeatist conversations with publishers who made him feel “a wee bit unloved” for such a long time? Any words for them?
“Up yours.” Naturally.
The son of working-class parents who pushed him to do well in school, Stuart Bailie attended the prestigious Royal Belfast Academical Institution. Simply Inst to the locals, it is one of the city’s oldest schools, the porticoed institution is a handsome example of late Georgian architecture, a posh school where the headmaster shows up to morning assembly in gown and mortar board. In 1970s Belfast, Bailie remembers it was also ‘semi-derelict,’ its windows criss-crossed with tape to catch the shrapnel from a bomb blast in the city center, its classrooms violent and ‘hard men’ beating up first year students in the quadrangle. Too, it was “rock and roll high school,” producing within a very short space of time, punk bands like The Zips, The Tinopers, Acme, Rudi, Victim, and Protex who got a record deal with Polydor around the same time as they were doing their A-level exams. Bailie’s English teacher, was Frank Ormsby, a guy with a fringe and a Fermanagh accent that was out of place in Belfast. Occasionally, Ormsby tossed the prescribed curriculum and instead shares with his pupils something from The Honest Ulsterman, a publication he had edited since 1969. While such detours did little for Bailie’s exam results, several years later, he realized what Ormsby had given him, “an abiding joy for words. That’s the gift of “a proper teacher – to love writing. Ormsby taught me not to pass an exam, but to love the words.”
Showing up to a school above his social league every day, 16 year old Bailie was in the company of aspiring lawyers and dentists. Meanwhile, he tells me, “I had no fucking clue what I was going to do. I wanted to be in a band.” Already a scholar of music, his weekly routine was to buy two albums for 50 pence from Dougie Knights record shop and go home and tape them. First, he loved Mott the Hoople, then Bowie, The Faces, Lou Reed. By the time punk arrived,Bailie had found his tribe.
Punk wasn’t that weird – I’d already experienced Lou Reed.
Somewhat bemused, his parents watched their son transition from model student to a “wee bit of a delinquent” – a punk. Every weekend, he would make new friends at Caroline Music or Terri Hooleys’s record shop, Good Vibrations, which his friend, Hooley, describes as “a real meeting place . . . it was like an oasis in the middle of this cultural wasteland. We hadn’t a clue what we were doing really; I was just this mad, ex hippy. But the energy of punk gave me the chance to relive my youth again. It was an exciting alternative for all of them.”
It was also at the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and punk rock was fermenting all over the city. Asked about his impressions of Belfast in 1977, the late Joe Strummer of The Clash was emphatic, “When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to LIVE for one glorious burning moment. Let it provide inspiration.”
At the time, of course, the likes of Stuart Bailie and Terri Hooley had no idea that what they were doing was particularly noble or inspired or that it would thirty years later become the stuff of conferences on the role of music in peacemaking. During that period, it was just about the music. Every Saturday afternoon, Bailie would walk up and down between the two record shops, making five new friends along the way, each of them “lifted out of this sectarian thing around us. It was magic.” By 1978, he realized he was part of a tribe, a community committed to a more adventurous alternative. “You just knew if someone’s got an Outcast or Rudi badge on their coat, you could talk to them.” Punks stood out. They knew their rights and they didn’t wear flares or long hair. To cultivate his own style, Bailie had even learned how to use a sewing machine. His first order of business was to take in the legs of every pair of trousers. Next, a shopping trip to his dad’s wardrobe, where he repurposed old suits, accessorizing the lapels with punk band badges. Ready to take on the world, Bailie sauntered into his parent’s kitchen one morning, dressed in one of his father’s old jackets. “I got married in that!” the old man said, remembering, I suppose, who he used to be.
Like the rest of us, Bailie has experienced the realization that once upon a time his dad was cool, “a bit of a boy,” with an impressive record collection that included old 78s by Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Hank Williams. Bailie is full of similar surprises himself, and as our conversation draws to a close, he takes me back to summer drives with his parents around Millisle and Ballywalter, Clougy and Comber and a song that is indelible in his memory. He closes his eyes and starts to sing, “When I was young and went to school they taught me how to write/To take the chalk and make a mark and hope it turns out right.”
The journeys seemed endless and very often the windscreen wipers would keep time as they bleated out these fatalistic lyrics. Just play me a bit of Hank Thompson and I’m back there in the back seat, wondering just how many tears it took to clean that slate.
From an old Hank Thompson song, “Blackboard of my Heart” is a honky tonk tune about getting over the girl. “You gotta hear it,” he tells me. “It’s just gorgeous.”
He’s right of course, as he is about all the songs you gotta hear – the Trouble Songs. And, you gotta see it too. The book, celebrated as one of 2018’s best by Hot Press and Uncut magazine, is being brought to the big screen as a documentary and will include interviews with young artists like Touts, Susie Blue, and Wood Burning Savages who have something to say about the things that continue to divide and oppress us. In talking to them, Bailie has no doubt that “the era of Trouble Songs is far from over.”
¡Viva la Revolución!
A version of this post originally appeared in Reading Ireland
There are the inappropriate patent leather boots I wore the first time we took our daughter
am today, with nothing to wear to a thing I don’t want to go to later – having already flung on the bed seven summery skirts that are too snug at the waist because of a diet that has deteriorated in recent months (years) and an exercise regimen postponed (abandoned), I feel a bit like 
