Hooleygan Read online

  Imprint Information

  First published in 2010

  This edition published in 2013 by

  Blackstaff Press

  4c Heron Wharf, Sydenham Business Park

  Belfast BT3 9LE

  with the assistance of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland

  © Terri Hooley, Richard Sullivan and the contributors, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

  Cover designed by Lisa Dynan, Belfast

  Produced by Blackstaff Press

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EPUB ISBN 978-0-85640-153-4

  MOBI ISBN 978-0-85640-154-1

  www.blackstaffpress.com

  About the Authors

  Terri Hooley was born and brought up in Belfast. In 1978 he opened a record shop, and later founded the music label, Good Vibrations. The shop quickly became the hub of the music revolution sweeping Northern Ireland and soon the label had an impressive portfolio of bands. In spite of bankruptcy, arson and other setbacks, the label, the shop and Terri survived.

  Richard Sullivan is Deputy Editor with the Sunday World in Belfast. He spent eight years on the staff of the News Letter where he became News Editor, and has worked on a freelance and full-time basis for a number of other newspapers, including the Sunday News, Irish Times, Sunday Tribune and News of the World. As a teenager, he hung out in Good Vibrations record store and has been an avid follower of Hooley’s chequered fortunes ever since.

  Dedications

  Terri

  To my children

  Anna and Michael

  Richard

  To Val, Niamh,

  Jacob and Roly

  ‘The art of storytelling with Terri Hooley’ – Glenn Patterson

  To tell a story you must have a story.

  If you are blessed with many stories tell one at a time.

  If you must tell the many, hold one fixed point in mind. Range where you will, but try always to come back to it.

  Try harder next time … the time after that.

  The ambition one day to come back to the point will do to be going on with.

  The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth only applies in a court of law.

  The unlikely, the improbable, the frankly incredible, are acceptable if the punch line is good enough.

  Punch line in this instance will always include a bona fide punch.

  Revision is positively to be encouraged, even five hours after the story has been told; even five hours after midnight. Even by phone.

  Revisionism, conversely, is never to be countenanced; revisionists are always to be denounced. History is not safe in their hands.

  Brandy is the begetter of intimacy.

  Brandy is the enemy of chronology.

  Swings. Roundabouts.

  Twin sisters go a long, long way.

  But that is a whole other story.

  Please Be Upstanding …

  I cried the night John Peel played ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones on his late-night show on Radio 1, and that was before he uttered the words I will never forget: ‘Isn’t that the most wonderful record you’ve ever heard in the world? In fact I’m going to play it again.’

  I cried because, until that point, I thought the music industry had beaten me. I had just returned from London doing the rounds flogging ‘Teenage Kicks’ to the record companies and none of them had wanted to know. I couldn’t understand it, this was a great song from a great band. Recorded in a back-street studio in Belfast for only two hundred pounds over a few cans of beer, several bags of crisps and some stale sandwiches, it was two minutes and thirty-two seconds of immaculate guitar and great vocals, but those arseholes in the Big Smoke just didn’t get it. I cried because I thought I’d let the band down; this was our chance to put Northern Ireland back on the music map and it had gone down the tubes.

  But John Peel got it. He got it straight away, got what the Good Vibrations record label was all about. He could hear the energy in the record and he knew it was going to become one of the greatest songs of all time. ‘Teenage Kicks’ was the first record in the history of BBC radio to be played twice in a row and it would remain Peel’s all-time favourite.

  In the late seventies Northern Ireland was a no-go area, bombs were going off left, right and centre. It was a very grim time for everybody, but for our young people in particular. By playing The Undertones and other Good Vibrations artists, John Peel proved to people that there was more to Northern Ireland than bombs and bullets.

  Thirty years after ‘Kicks’ was released I was doing a gig in a Belfast pub and at the end of the night I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for the National Anthem.’ The bar manager nearly shit himself, ‘You can’t do that in Belfast, what national anthem are you going to play?’

  I played ‘Teenage Kicks’ and the place erupted! That’s a legacy.

  One in the Eye

  I suppose I have always been heavily influenced by music; many of the really important events of my life even seem to have come with their own soundtrack. Perhaps the most significant of these came on a summer’s day in 1954 when an accident with a toy bow and arrow resulted in the loss of my left eye.

  I was six years old and we were living in a small bungalow in Garnerville, a residential area on the outskirts of east Belfast. We were right on the edge of the city and had a nice big garden. At the back there was also a huge field that provided us with a natural playground, which we exploited to the full. I spent my days building forts and playing soldiers in the wide-open space. We didn’t have much money but they were happy times and I look back on them with great fondness.

  My dad, George, was an active trade unionist and member of the Labour Party, and it was before the elections of that year – which saw my dad run for office – that the accident happened. One of our neighbours had been trying to shoot a biscuit tin off a wall with a bow and arrow but, when he finally managed it, the arrow hit the tin, rebounded … and shot straight into my left eye.

  My mum, Mavis, was hysterical as we waited for the ambulance to arrive but I don’t really remember being in much pain. It was a nice sunny day and I can recall thinking how daft it was for the ambulance men to bandage both my eyes, I’d only hurt one of them! I felt a bit stupid as they helped me into the vehicle because I could see perfectly well; the sunlight was shining through my bandages, and all I could think of was the Hank Williams song, ‘I Saw the Light’. It came from nowhere, from deep within the recesses of my memory, but it was very appropriate in the circumstances.

  I remember that moment very clearly, and I am convinced that my love of Hank Williams came from listening to programmes like Forces Favourites on a Sunday morning at home with Mum and Dad. But almost fifty years later I would discover that this was not the case at all.

  For me, Hank Williams will always be the undisputed king of country music, and so I was thrilled when, in 2003, the BBC rang me up and asked me to take part in a radio programme to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death. They had been looking for someone to take part in the programme for a while, but couldn’t find anybody suitable until my name came up. People often mistakenly assume that my musical taste is restricted to punk when, in truth, I am as happy listening to gospel, reggae, blues, folk and country. So when the researcher on the programme rang me she said, ‘I can’t believe the Godfather of Punk is a Hank Williams fan!’

  I went on the show and told the story of my earliest musical memory, but I couldn’t really explain to the listeners why the song had come into my head at su
ch a traumatic moment. Some days after the programme, however, I got a phone call from a lady who had heard the item on the radio – she had asked the BBC for my number – and she told me she could solve the mystery of my Hank Williams obsession.

  It turned out that her aunt had run a guesthouse in the Botanic Avenue area of south Belfast and her family had been members of the same Methodist Church my family had belonged to. She told me that, because of their business, they weren’t always able to attend services and so my grandfather would often call down to see them and collect their donation to the church. According to this lady, my grandfather took me with him one day – I could only have been about three years old – and on this particular day the family were playing a Hank Williams 78 on a big old gramophone player. I had been mesmerised and wouldn’t leave until they had played it again. There was something about his voice that had captivated me and three years later his song came to comfort me as I was loaded into the back of an ambulance.

  As a six year old the journey to Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital was full of dread. I didn’t fancy the idea of staying there and I remember just focusing my energies on getting out as quickly as I could. It soon became very clear that I had lost my eye but, thankfully, they only kept me in for one night. My mum took me to a park on the Falls Road, just across from the hospital, and I remember playing on the swing, just so happy that I was going home. The missing eye never caused me a second thought.

  I’ve heard some really weird stories about how I lost the eye and it has sort of become my trademark, in fact it went a long way to making me the person I am today. When I was a young boy, for example, my brother stole my glass eye and hid it. I couldn’t find it for two whole days, despite searching the whole house. I was distraught and was stuck indoors until the heartless bastard finally owned up to where it was. There have, of course, been other times when I have become separated from it; I’ve even shocked a few people by answering the door without it first thing in the morning. A few years ago I was without it for a full thirty-six hours because it had been accidentally thrown in the bin.

  Despite numerous stories to the contrary, I have never put my glass eye in anybody’s pint – I’m too afraid of losing it! Besides, do you have any idea how long it actually takes to get a new glass eye made? It’s just not worth it!

  Of course, I have been known to take it out on-stage at times, and it has always helped me work out if a girl liked me. I would test the water by asking them, ‘Do you mind if I take out my glass eye?’ and then if they offered to hold it I knew I’d scored, but if they said, ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ I knew nothing was going to happen!

  My parents first met in Belfast during the Second World War. My grandfather let rooms in Cameron Street in the south of the city and he had sent my mum down to place an ad in the Belfast Telegraph. My dad always joked that the ad wasn’t for a room, but that it was actually for someone to take Mavis off my grandfather’s hands, because it was on her way to the Telegraph offices on Royal Avenue that they met.

  George Hooley was a handsome man, very popular and very active in the Labour and trade union movements. Originally from England, he spent the early years of the war in the Merchant Navy. There was one story he used to tell us, about a time when his ship had docked in Houston, Texas. He had caught a bus going into the main town but the driver refused to leave the terminus because he was sitting on the ‘black’ side of the bus. It was the first time that he had had any experience of that sort of bigotry, and I think it shaped a lot of his political thinking in years to come. Anyway, as I said to him years later, ‘No wonder you were asked to move, what self-respecting black person would be seen dead sitting beside you!’

  A few years into the war he jumped ship, and signed up to the Royal Irish Fusiliers, who were then posted to Belfast for a brief period. The rest, as they say, is history! However, meeting my mum was not Dad’s only stroke of luck during his war days – his skill as a bridge player would keep him safe when nothing else could.

  His unit was in India, preparing to move to Burma where they were to take on the Japanese, when he caught malaria. He made a quick recovery but when it came time for his unit to move out, the doctors wouldn’t let him go – it turned out he was a great fourth man in their bridge team!

  Dad never really spoke in any detail about his wartime experiences, and I can only imagine how dangerous it must have been. His brother was killed during the war and he must have lost many friends, but he chose to keep all those memories bottled up inside. Even in his later years, when he and Mum found his brother’s war grave during a holiday in Italy, he didn’t speak about it to me. I know it must have been a very emotional time for him and Mum said it had been very difficult. I admired him all the same; he was undoubtedly a brave man.

  Mum and Dad were married in 1945. They moved to a small house in Leek in Staffordshire, where my dad got a job in the local textile mill and he soon ended up as the trade union rep. Shortly after, he joined the local Labour Party and, in 1947, was even selected as a candidate for local council elections, which he won by narrowly defeating the sitting Tory councillor. He told me once that the day after his election victory he went to work at the mill only to be greeted by the owner who told him that had he been late he would have been sacked. I’m guessing he was a Tory voter!

  In 1946, my brother John was born and the family were very happy for a while.

  But my mum was homesick and just couldn’t handle revolution in her living room: there were always people coming to the house and Dad’s door was always open. Besides, Dad was very good looking and was always drawing attention from the ladies, which I know made Mum feel very uncomfortable. Even years later, when they went back to Leek to visit old friends, Dad was treated like a returning hero. Mum missed having her family round her, and by 1948 she was pregnant with me, so she moved home to Belfast.

  I came into the world on 23 December 1948. I had missed the hungry thirties, two World Wars and arrived just in time for rock ’n’ roll and the swinging sixties! My father was still in England at the time waiting for a suitable replacement candidate for his council seat, so it was left to my uncle Wilf to act the part of the surrogate father. He got the doctor when my mum was giving birth, and for his journey through the snow-filled streets of Belfast he was granted the dubious honour of having the new arrival named after him – Terence Wilfred Hooley. Inevitably people shortened this to Terry and, in 1967, following an article in the New York newspaper, The Village Voice, in which they misspelt my name as Terri, I began to use the ‘i’ spelling myself – becoming, once and for all, the man with one ‘i’!

  As soon as he was able, Dad stood down and came back to Belfast. He got a job as a Post Office engineer, but his trade union calling was never far away and he soon began working for the Post Office Engineers Union, with which he served for many, many years. Our house was always full of trade union officials!

  I often wonder how Mum and Dad’s marriage lasted so long, Mum was a committed Christian with a deeply held faith which she maintained till her dying day while Dad was never a churchgoer. However, he had a strong sense of justice and cared passionately about human rights, often doing his best to stick up for the little guy. He was always organising things for the Labour Party and frequently ran whist drives, beetle drives and social evenings, and occasionally he would get up and sing. He could be a great entertainer. I remember one night about twelve years ago he took to the stage during an event at the Royal Ulster Rifles Club in North Street and did a fantastic version of the Tiny Tim number, ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’, but then he spoilt it by asking the band to play ‘The Birdie Song’! Dad was actually the first man to sing the Labour standard, ‘The Red Flag’, in Belfast City Hall, which caused a bit of a stir, and my memories of him centre on his political activities.

  I’ll always remember us going to anti-apartheid rallies and on anti-nuclear marches for CND together. And he didn’t like Spain. I often say to people that in our family the Tr
oubles never meant much but we never got over losing the Spanish Civil War!

  He travelled the world as a trade union activist and was a committed socialist, standing for election as a Labour Party candidate in east Belfast on more than one occasion.

  However, he soon found that it wasn’t the same political scene as it was in England. In Belfast, Labour candidates would often get beaten up at election time because Labour was perceived to be Catholic. People used to gather outside our house and shout, ‘Go back to Cork you fenian bastards’, which always amused me with my dad being English! He was a very proud man though, and every time he lost an election he would put on his suit and walk down the road with his head held high – you would have thought that he’d won it.

  Having said that, in 1958 the local Labour parliamentary candidate, David Bleakley, actually did win his seat. I remember the unionists parachuted Roy Bradford in to contest the election and they had a van going round the area with loud speakers exhorting people to vote for him. So me and my mates used to go round the streets singing, ‘Vote, vote, vote for David Bleakley. Let us put him in again, Bleakley’s win will be our gain’ to the theme tune from Z Cars!

  We were living in Garnerville at the time and we were happy. Dad used to grow his own vegetables and the neighbours would come round if they had forgotten to buy a lettuce or whatever and my dad would always give them what they wanted at no charge, even though these were the same people who used to shout at us at every election!