English girls who fell head over heels in love with the great crooner of the 1950s that sparked my interest.
Our house always had music somewhere – from piano practice to that big awkward radio set that sat brooding in the corner of the living room: Edmundo Ros gave way on the Light Programme to Nat King Cole and Peggy Lee, and by the end of the 1950s and into the early years of the 1960s, the radio yielded to the transistor, and more emphatically to the glumpy record player that took over the front room.
My mother enjoyed jazz. She listened to it on the radio, and when her brother finally left the RAF and settled briefly back in Belfast, he brought records with him. The television, which formed part of our communication centre, sat there under the radio, and between them both the sounds of British jazz started to filter through: Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger on the Shore’ was a signature tune; Kenny Baker, with his bouncing Brylcreem hairline; George Chisholm, and the cool, perplexing beauty of Cleo Laine’s voice, with Johnny Dankworth, a seemingly shy presence in the shadowy background of whatever show it was we were watching.
Laine sounded so different, when compared to other acts that were beginning to get air time, at that moment with singers such as Helen Shapiro and Dusty Springfield. There was something so utterly contained in her voice that even when she went off on one of those scat-like a cappella riffs – part madrigal, pure invention – I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The calm seriousness, the conviction, the controlled flights of invention – for a young lad, it was all breathtakingly uncertain what was going on.
There was a jazz combo I used to love hearing called The Peddlers, and on one show on which they were guests (when they performed a brilliant version of ‘Misty’), Cleo Laine appeared after their set. The mood she created on our black-and-white TV was haunting and mysterious.
When the chance arose many years later, during the Belfast Festival at Queen’s University, I went along to hear Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth talk about their music and play extracts of it. I think it was in the old Music Room, one of the smaller lecture theatres, and there were about twenty people present. That’s what it seems like in memory, at least; I recall my discomfort at being one of a few and not really knowing where to look; but they talked and joked and we had a session, unplugged before unplugged happened. I’ll never forget that. This is what real artists do, I thought; the size of the audience isn’t important.
Looking out the back window, waiting for Match of the Day or The Day of the Triffids to come blinking on to the television set in the gathering dusk of a Saturday night, a young lad born in the early 1950s hears for the first time Sarah Vaughan sing her great love song ‘Lover Man’, and the 1960s break cover in north Belfast.
What stands out in my mind is that house in which we lived in north Belfast throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s. It overlooked the lough and harbour port. My grandmother was a singer, a light-opera singer, and she used to have these soirées in the front room. I used to stand at the top of the stairs listening to this, and it always fascinated me that it was as if there was a little theatre in the front room.
It was always very well organised, it was good fun and the pupils enjoyed themselves; they would always leave happy. What struck me from an early age (I would have been five or six at the time) about the adult soirées she held at night, and at weekends, was their manner. Everything was contained – nothing ever got out of hand, and even though the people enjoyed themselves and you could hear the laughter, there was something reserved about it all. My grandmother would sing the odd time, but mostly she kept her voice to herself, so to speak.
Later on, with the record player in the front room, my sister and I took over that space and I’d play records by people like Lester Young, George Shearing and Ella Fitzgerald. I used to hear Ella on that gramophone: another woman’s voice to join the voices of the women I lived with. And then one night, Ella Fitzgerald played Belfast. I remember my mother coming back from it – she went to that ‘gig’ with our next-door neighbour, an Austrian woman – and she was very excited and told me it had been an extraordinary experience.
The funny little comment that she made, ‘I’m sent’ stuck in my mind – clearly she was rocking and rolling in the aisles, not literally, but almost. Our next-door neighbour was rather austere about such displays. She was a private woman who had endured a lot during the Second World War in Vienna, where she had met her husband, one of the liberating Allied officers. My mother’s enthusiasm for this music was infectious. What I remember most about those days was a feeling of being underground, though I’m sure there were other houses throughout Belfast where this kind of interest in music was being shown in the parlours and living rooms.
There must have been an adult generation who had done something similar a decade before the 1950s, when all the soldiers had returned from the war. There is an obvious parallel. They had been stationed in Germany, listening to American music, and there had been a whole series of army installations in Northern Ireland. Black guys stationed there must have been playing music. They’d go down to the Plaza Ballroom in Belfast; they’d have been dancing down there too.
There were so many different kinds of music at that time, but the one that seemed to have the biggest impact was jazz, in all its subversiveness. By the early 1960s, a group of little clubs springing up around the town were playing R & B, soul and Tamla Motown. A bridge was built between the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Lester Young, whom I was hearing in the late 1950s, and then, ten years later, with the friends I had in my mid-teens, we started to get into R & B and blues.
The one voice, the one name that summed all that up for us was Van Morrison and Them. There were other very good bands around during the mid-sixties, like The Few, The Interns, Sam Mahood and The Just Five. It seemed there were bands playing every night. I remember clearly that we didn’t get into the pop stuff so much as young teenagers. It was mainly R & B and then acts like the Jimi Hendrix Experience that were popular with us.
Belfast was still open then. Everybody lived in the city and there wasn’t a sense that the city was ghettoised or that there were neighbourhoods you couldn’t move in and out of; the city centre was a home for everybody and it had a marvellous energy to it. There would be dances on a Wednesday night, Friday night, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, and even Sunday. Everybody went dancing. Around the side of the City Hall, one afternoon in late spring, the weather was good and somebody had a transistor on. We were lying on the grass and we heard Van Morrison with Them, singing ‘Here Comes the Night’. That song became a theme tune, a hymn.
When I started to go to The Maritime (where Them had played), it had changed its name and was called Club Rado, although we all still knew it by its original name. I never saw Them live on stage, though I did hear Morrison on the tiny stage of Sammy Houston’s Jazz Club performing Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ with Frankie Connolly and the Styx, a rare combination for sure.
What I do recall very clearly is the energy in Van Morrison’s voice, a very Belfast voice. That somebody could get up on stage and sing with the accent you heard in the streets was unimaginable. To think that this was a guy from Belfast who was on Ready Steady Go!, a guy who was in a band that was doing well in Britain, and, despite all this, you’d see him around town the odd time. It was a great source of pride.
In those days there wasn’t the hype or the self-consciousness that there is today. Them with Van Morrison gave voice to a generation. I don’t want to put too much on it, but we did not know a great deal about sectarianism. It just wasn’t part of the psychic landscape. I used to date girls from the top of the Falls Road and we’d walk home together. We used to walk everywhere. Everybody used to meet in the clubs; Van captured that defiance in his voice and, with Them, aggressively declared ‘We’re here’, with a kind of dismissiveness, publicly, about being in ‘the business’– the music business. I know now that they had to fight their corner.
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