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  Our branch hired rooms over a billiard hall in Upper North Street near the city centre to hold their meetings and for a while, I did everything I could to raise our profile. Every Saturday I would stand at the front of Belfast City Hall selling Sanity, the CND newspaper, and at night I would be out collecting funds for the campaign. In fact, I would even give them a slice of my earnings if I got a gig as DJ.

  On Saturday afternoons, wearing our polo necks, duffle coats, jeans and sandals, we would march and demonstrate. We would sit down in the middle of the road, get arrested and, when released, meet in the Lido Café in the city centre to organise the following week’s escapade. The Lido was across the street from the Great Northern Railway station where the Europa Hotel now stands, and every week we would leave our banners in the left-luggage department for collection the following week.

  CND was important to me and I was very active in giving my support, but it soon seemed that every time I gave our local committee a donation they would go straight down to the pub to buy rounds, and I began to suspect that these guys were just drinking the money. I had always got the feeling that our leaders just liked the idea of being in an organisation but weren’t really committed to its ideals.

  It was 1965. I was seventeen years old and had become increasingly frustrated with the way CND in Belfast was being run. And so, during one particular meeting with the support of hundreds of people from the Jazz Club at The Maritime – which also seemed to double up as a sort of soap box/political think tank for me – I tried to vote off the committee and take control.

  Sadly however, our bloodless coup failed. It turned out that not everybody I had brought with me were fully paid-up members of CND, and we were told that they would not be able to vote. Of course, it turned out that a few members of the committee weren’t paid-up members either, but it didn’t matter, we had failed in our mini uprising and so we decided to leave the group.

  I suppose I never was one to shy away from confrontation, I knew it was too important to stand up for what you believe in, and I guess that was why I didn’t last too long as a member of the Peace Pledge Union either. I had joined this group earlier that same year and had signed their pledge to renounce war and to never take part in, or sanction another. I sold their pamphlets, I sold their badges and I thought that was all I had to do in order to be a member but, a little while after joining, I was surprised to receive a letter from London telling me they had thrown me out. Apparently a few of my fellow members had informed the organisation that I wasn’t a pacifist – I guess they hadn’t liked me too much. ‘Fair enough,’ I thought and wrote back to tell them I would never just sit back if the storm troopers came walking down my street, and that was the end of that.

  But it was that experience with CND that encouraged us to set up our own breakaway group, the Northern Ireland Youth Campaign for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament (NIYCPD). We were very active in organising anti-war and disarmament demonstrations and marches and at just seventeen I became chairman – the Josef Stalin of the peace movement in Belfast you might say.

  I remember one demonstration where we blocked off Wellington Place just down the road from the City Hall, and which ended up with me, and my fellow campaigner Paul Murphy, being arrested. The cops had tried to smash his guitar as he sang ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’, then they roughed us up and dragged us to the nearby Queen Street police station. We were the first people to be arrested under the terms of the new Civil Disobedience Act in 1966.

  But far from being nervous, I thought this was great! I saw our scheduled court appearance as my chance at martyrdom, so I spent weeks working on the speech I was going to make in the courtroom. I would tell them how I believed in the fight to abolish nuclear weapons, in the preservation of humanity and in the end of the war of aggression on men, women and children in Vietnam, then I planned to attack the British government about their involvement. I went down to the courts and I was dismayed to find that neither Paul nor any of our supporters had turned up. I sat there for about an hour, wondering what was going on, when a policeman approached me and said, ‘Don’t tell me you’re married son.’

  ‘Not fuckin’ likely,’ I replied, ‘I’m only seventeen and I think I’ve got a few years before I head down that road.’

  ‘Why are you here then?’ he asked.

  Well that was my cue! I launched into my pre-prepared speech and the cop listened patiently to the whole lot before telling me that I was in the wrong court; I had been sitting for over an hour in the maintenance court! Some revolutionary I was.

  By the time I got to the magistrates’ court, Paul and I had been fined twenty pounds and a couple of friends of ours, Pauline Harrison and Valerie Hewitt, had already paid it! I suppose they couldn’t bear the thought of me being locked up!

  So in the end, while I never did get to make my speech in court or do some time in jail where I could write page after page of inspirational prison letters, at least I did get to show the girls who paid my fine how grateful I was!

  On 6 August 1966, our group wanted to mark the anniversary of the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, so I wrote a letter to the authorities asking for permission to stage a protest. They agreed to let two of us hold a banner at City Hall, but warned that if anybody else joined us they would be arrested. Sid Little and I were the two members chosen for the demo though, despite the orders, a good few other supporters did arrive. We grew a little concerned, but then some Paisley supporters turned up calling for Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill to stand down. The authorities’ focus was now on them and they were quickly arrested and taken away. Very amusing!

  Of course, my dad was very pleased with my antics and joined me on marches on many occasions, and my parents were quite happy for me to have people round to the house, to sit in the kitchen and organise protests. I remember David Bleakley – Labour MP for east Belfast – coming up to my room where I was painting anti-nuclear banners for a protest march in Belfast.

  It soon came to our attention however, through friends we had in the police, that our phone was tapped. This came as no great surprise, given that my father was a senior trade unionist, but he was dismayed to learn that it had nothing to do with his trade union activities at all, but with his son’s protest politics! I don’t think he ever got over the disappointment of me upstaging him.

  Unlike my dad, however, I was never an official member of any political organisation. I did often go along to the parties held by the Communist Party, where they would sell drink to raise money – although we often arrived with bottles of scrumpy up our coats, which totally wound them up. We were always very careful to ensure the NICYPD was not given a political label. Everybody reckoned we were commies but we did our best to ensure that whoever joined our movement was not involved in a political party.

  At that point our main rival for support was actually the World Socialist Party (WSP), which consisted of four members – two of them survivors of the 1950s IRA border campaign. They believed in a society without a class system or the need for salaries or money, and they were always trying to get us to go to their meetings. They had great premises at 53 High Street, close to where the world famous Morning Star pub still stands today in Belfast city centre. The building is gone now but at the time the WSP had two rooms, a big one and a small one, and I knew there was potential for making money!

  So I approached them and offered them 12s 6d per week for the big room, which they accepted. I told them I was planning to use the space for political meetings but I actually used it to run an underground folk club, charging girls 1s 6d and boys 2s to get in. We had some great nights there – a lot of sex and drugs – and word soon spread about the excellent parties we were throwing. Before long we had around one hundred people crammed in there and I was making a fortune, though most of the money went to the anti-nuclear and anti-Vietnam War groups we were associated with.

  It did get a bit crazy at times. I think it was Easter 1967 when we planned to have Belfast�
��s first happening: it would be thirty-six hours of love, peace and joyous liberation. We got high to the music of Jimi Hendrix, The Move, Pink Floyd, and The Temperance Seven and people started painting the walls, and themselves, with flowers – some even formed a new free-love movement called Indecent Exposure!

  One night the WSP came down to find three hundred people in the building – they were beside themselves! I don’t know if they were more pissed off about us using one of their rooms to run a club or the fact we had so many people there while they could barely muster a quorum. It didn’t really matter in the end though as the building’s landlord decided not to let them renew their lease and effectively chucked them out. This, however, worked out well for me as I was quick to go to the landlord and arrange to take both rooms myself on a full-time basis.

  By that time I had pretty much moved away from home. Dad was strict about me being home for midnight and sometimes our parties were only starting at that time, so I would just stay in the city centre. I moved myself into the building, setting up a bed and a small stove and started to lead a sort of beatnik lifestyle, with lots of loving and lots of drugs.

  The anti-Vietnam War movement was probably the biggest single issue that I was involved in. The NICYPD, thanks to our folk club, used to collect money for medical aid to relieve the pressure on the Vietnamese people – the horrors they had to endure were atrocious. We would march and we would demonstrate, anything to raise awareness. We would make sure to always mark International Vietnam Week, which was held in March every year, and still is in some parts of the world. For the 1967 event, we printed up some big display boards and set off for the city centre to demonstrate. On the way back to my grandfather’s house – I was going to leave the boards in his shed – we decided to stop off in Lavery’s for a pint. We left the banners in the back entry and somebody actually stole them! I can only hope the thieves used them to protest the war too!

  The British government, thanks to their ‘special relationship’ with the US, did not want to appear to be encouraging opposition to the Vietnam War and so we did encounter some resistance, but in truth the Irish government wasn’t much better. In 1967 I was invited to address a protest rally outside the American Embassy in Dublin. I was pleased to have been asked and I knew it would be a big moment for me but, much to my disgust, I never made it. We got the train from Belfast to Dublin but no sooner had we arrived into Connolly Station than I was arrested and taken away without explanation. I was thrown in a cell, left there overnight, and the next morning was fed the worst breakfast I have ever tasted before they kicked me out.

  I also remember holding a vigil outside City Hall one Sunday afternoon. I was proudly waving a Viet Cong flag when suddenly all these Orangemen arrived. There were always those who would turn up at our demonstrations and give us a bit of stick, but when this particular crowd showed up I thought, ‘This is it, we’re going to be battered!’ Luckily one of them realised what we were doing and said, ‘It’s OK they’re not fenians.’

  We used to go to the Ambassador Cinema on the Cregagh Road in east Belfast – a cinema better known for showing soft-porn movies – and watch films that weren’t being broadcast on TV; films that were banned by the censors. I remember one in particular, The War Game, a drama which showed the effects of a Soviet nuclear attack on Britain. It had been banned by the BBC in advance of its scheduled screening. It was all Cold War stuff and it fascinated me, it still does to this day.

  I even lost one of my regular DJ’ing gigs, in The Maritime Hotel, because I was always making anti-Vietnam War speeches. What made it worse was the fact that the person who got me barred was our next-door neighbour Eddie Kennedy! From that point on, we used to glare at each other over the garden fence.

  I also used to protest outside the US Consulate all the time, to the extent the Consul must have been fed up with the sight of me. I used to turn up and demand to speak to him about the latest bombing outrage in Vietnam. I remember being in the audience of a TV discussion programme in which he was a panel member, and he refused to speak to me. Every time I asked a question he pleaded the Fifth. You have to remember the Americans were losing the war at this point, and I was convinced they would drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi as a last resort.

  I’m still very passionate about that time and those protests, and I’ve never forgiven the Americans for what they did in Vietnam. Americans in the sixties seemed to have no idea what was going on in the world outside, let alone inside their own country, and I think it’s still a bit like that. You can’t tell me that the fact so many soldiers came out of Vietnam hooked on smack was an accident – how the fuck did they get it all? In my opinion, the US government sowed the seeds of the mass drug addiction in America that we see today and if you’re looking for the drug-dealing godfather, look no further than the CIA. In fact, it was this staunch, anti-American feeling that led, in part, to my queuing all night outside the ABC for tickets to see Bob Dylan in May 1966.

  My musical taste has always been extremely varied, but back then I was very much into folk music and the protest songs of Dylan and of Joan Baez. At this stage, Dylan was just breaking into the big time but he was a renowned protest artist who had given his voice to many campaigns over the years. On this particular occasion he had arrived in town on the back of a controversial confrontation with his fans at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in America, where he had lifted an electric guitar for the first time, prompting many of his fans to accuse him of abandoning his folk roots. Dylan was moving in more of a ‘rock’ direction, so the first part of his Belfast show was acoustic and the second half was with his band. During the interval, all the folkies actually walked out, but they missed what turned out to be a sensational show.

  The main reason I went to the gig was also to protest, though not against his use of the electric guitar. I was making a statement against the war in Vietnam. Dylan had always been very vocal about his opposition to the war, so a dismayed tour manager came out to ask us why we had been heckling Dylan when he too was opposed to America’s involvement. I told him it was because Bob had refused to withhold his taxes, which were being used to pay for the war in Vietnam. Believe it or not, this led to me being invited to come and meet him after the gig which, of course, I did. I told him that Joan Baez and other artists had refused to pay their taxes in protest against the war and I asked him why he wouldn’t do the same. He just looked at me and said in a slow drawl, ‘Why don’t you just fuck off?’

  When I went outside the other protestors wanted to know if I had met him. ‘I did,’ I told them, and they cheered. ‘What did he say?’ they asked. ‘He told me to fuck off,’ I said, and they cheered even louder!

  Not that Bob Dylan was my first brush with musical genius. Only a year before, in 1965, the Rolling Stones had played Belfast. It just shows what we all chucked away when we started shooting each other, Belfast was firmly on the concert circuit and all the big acts were starting to come here, it’s only in the last few years that we have been truly back on the map as a proper destination for a touring band.

  Anyway, in the mid-sixties the Stones were just beginning to make it big and by the time they hit our town they were riding the crest of a wave. Mick Jagger had already become one of the most iconic figures of the decade and, along with The Who and The Beatles, the Rolling Stones were one of the biggest bands in the world, putting the UK at the top of the heap.

  They were booked to play the Ulster Hall, and it was the most eagerly awaited concert Northern Ireland had ever seen, but nobody got to hear very much of the set! The lads were mobbed as they arrived at the venue, which was swamped with hysterical girls screaming and crying. After reaching the relative safety of their dressing room they then took to the stage, but less than twenty minutes into the gig they had to run for their lives as screaming female fans launched a stage-invasion.

  I suppose I was a bit of a groupie too, and I was determined to meet the band, so I headed towards the Grand Central Hotel where they were staying.
I didn’t really know how I was going to get to meet them but I did have a few contacts that I was planning to exploit! Being involved in the jazz and folk clubs had its advantages; I was already doing gigs round the country and putting on bands, so I was well known to the promoters. To be fair, it was also easier to get backstage then than it is these days, so my hopes were high. I was having a coffee in Café Lido close to the hotel when I got my chance. I got talking to this bloke called Jim Hurst who turned out to be part of the tour management, and he invited me over to meet the band.

  I have to say they were lovely guys. Jagger even bought me a Coke, which I thought was extremely generous as it would have cost 1s 6d in the local shop but in the Grand Central it was 12s 6d, which just seemed outrageous to me. Brian Jones was with them at that stage and I remember him being such a pleasant man. They were all so generous, giving me autographs and guitar strings, posing for pictures – it really was a memorable day.

  During the late sixties, my own music career was starting to take off. I was getting bigger DJ’ing gigs in hotels and word had got round about our underground folk club in High Street, though this had folded by then, after we had received a letter warning us we risked prosecution for operating without an entertainment licence.

  If I was involved in organising a gig or putting on a band, people would often expect me to get on-stage and do something myself, so I began to perform fairly regularly – I couldn’t resist getting on-stage whenever the opportunity presented itself. I had been contributing to a few underground poetry magazines at the time, so on one occasion I got up on-stage with Creative Mime and did some psychedelic poetry. Once I even got on-stage with the blues band, Fickle Pickle!