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Coming of age, Dispatch from the Diaspora, La Mon House Hotel Bombing, Paris Attack, Rory Gallagher, Stiff Little Fingers, Terrorism, The Miami Showband, The Troubles, The Ulster Hall Belfast, Themes of childhood
Vive La Musique! No “No Go Area” for Stiff Little Fingers
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband were heading home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. Their drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family members. On a narrow country road outside Newry, the band was flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) checkpoint. Such an incident was “normal” in the seventies in Northern Ireland, and they wouldn’t have been overly alarmed. But then the men in uniform ordered them to get out of their vehicle and stand by the roadside while the soldiers conducted a check of the back…
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9/11, Anything can Happen, Being young, Belfast, bombing, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Heartbreak Beat, Northern Ireland, Paris Attack, Sectarianism, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Psychedelic Furs, The Troubles, War
Paris – Heartbreak Beat.
“They stopped France when its guard was down,” announces the BBC reporter from a TV in the corner of my house so far away from Paris. Of course they did. I should know by now that a popular concert venue in Paris on a Friday night is not an unexpected place, that there are some for whom Paris is “a legitimate target.” I should know by now not to be shocked that a gunman would fire indiscriminately into one restaurant at the intersection of Rue de Charonne and Rue Faidherbe. And then another. Learning that two explosions were heard outside the Stade de France during the friendly football match between France and Germany, I am reminded of…
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Breast Cancer Awareness, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Enniskillen, Remembrance Sunday 2015, Wilfred Owen
For Granda on Remembrance Day
My grandfather died on June 22, 1977, a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive, he would have been wearing his suit, with medals and poppy attached to the lapels, not unlike those pensioners gathered respectfully at the Cenotaph where at 10:43am, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and wounding 68. Granda never forgot the wars. He made sure I remembered too. Because of Granda, I have always known that “the war to end all wars” ended in 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. He told me so many times on our walks down the Moss Road. At just…
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After death of a spouse, Being a Widow, Dirty Boulevard, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Lou Reed, magic and loss
Lou Reed and My Rock ‘n’ Roll Heart.
For as long as I can remember, I have known that Holly came from Miami, FLA and hitch-hiked her way across the USA; that little Joe never gave it away; and, that Jackie thought she was James Dean for a day. As young as I was when I first heard Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” I cannot possibly have known what the hustle here and the hustle there was all about. Had I known, I probably wouldn’t have been singing it within earshot of my parents – after all, this was the early 1970s in provincial Northern Ireland. Remembering Lou Reed reminds me of a story Neil Gaiman tells about how he…
