and its environs. I think it’s very much down to Van Morrison’s example, along with one or two poets whose work I greatly admired, namely Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. What strikes me about his music and influence is his ability to move in and out of different forms. He tapped into a form of expression which drew on poets like William Blake, and at the same time brought together some of the American Beat poets. There’s a freedom in what he does, and that’s exhilarating for a poet. We can get stuck on very narrow gauges, but Morrison’s ability to blend, mix and draw on different kinds of energy and generate writing out of his own self was ‘empowering’, as they say. It was enabling and striking.
Towards the end of the 1980s, Van Morrison was planning a programme on poetry and music and I was involved. We travelled around east Belfast, going to Orangefield – the school that both Van and I had attended. Being with him around that almost ‘sacred’ environment – the streams, the mountains, the hillside, the whole area – was exciting. I also realised the extent to which he was an artist who had a strong commitment to the place, but also to a particular vision. It wasn’t as if he was just documenting this area. He had a powerful sense of how ordinary life is suffused with the spirit of place and, besides the fun that we had, it was intriguing to be with him as he walked through this neighbourhood that he had done so much to praise in his music. Van Morrison’s voice is distinct and unique. It’s like having a presence that is unmovable. And that’s refreshing in this day and age, when people market themselves and put themselves into little slots and niches. Morrison is himself; he does exactly what he wants to do and he’s totally committed to that.
The sense you had in Belfast in the 1950s was that everybody had to be in his or her own place; everything was correct; things were in their spot. Music was the way to break out of that; there was a strong feeling that you could escape that control. This was what I loved about it. By the mid-1960s, Van Morrison, Them and others were breaking through and transgressing, just by the sheer energy of their voices and music. Van Morrison’s music will live for ever. There are so many magnificent albums, from Astral Weeks to the present. Morrison’s music will always ‘be there’ for one basic reason – that he sets out on a journey and he makes a bold statement. The music is not constrained. You can move backwards and forwards through all these different artistic forms: that’s an important lesson, and a fantastic example for future generations.
TWO
Coming into Belfast is like approaching a sunken city. It lies inside a horseshoe of surrounding hills; the coastal land to its southern shoreline is the rich, undulating landscape of County Down; on Belfast’s northerly shores is County Antrim: a harsher, more dramatic terrain that faces Scotland across the narrow straits of the Sea of Moyle.
Unlike most Irish cities, which give their name to the immediate hinterland – Dublin, Galway, Cork, Sligo, Waterford, Derry, Donegal – Belfast is just itself. The lough at whose mouth the city fans out is fed by the River Lagan, which flows down through the untouched meadows and park forests, along the embankments and under the bridges that link the south and east of the city with the north and west.
In the building docks and islands, old quays and wharves, Belfast’s industrial history as a shipbuilding and merchant port makes way for the new ferry terminals. Channels such as Victoria and Musgrave and basins like Pollock, which had borne tankers, liners and gunships for the British fleet, rub shoulders now with a busy and expanding city airport. The massive gantries of the Harland and Wolff shipbuilders – once the greatest of its kind in the world – straddle the city’s horizon like monumental arches.
Clutched around Belfast’s inner reaches are the refitted mills and factories, warehouses and engineering works that are isolated by the svelte dominance of motorways and bypasses. What remains of Belfast’s industrial architecture has a strangely marooned look to it. The red-brick Gothic of insurance houses and banks, stores and churches, hotels and theatres, which were once the city’s Victorian legacy, have all but vanished.
Belfast suffered the fate of many cities in Britain and Ireland caught up in and mauled by the hectic redevelopment boom of the 1980s. What has taken over, inside-out as it were, are the shopping malls, the steel-framed centre and the masked facades. These changes belie another truth, however, of the profound, irrevocable change Belfast experienced as the site of sectarian violence that took possession of the city from the late 1960s: bombing campaigns in the name of Irish national liberation vied with bombing campaigns in the name of preserving the British way of life. Peace lines of metal girders divided communities against themselves; security barriers defaced the cityscape and turned the centre into a police zone during the worst years of the Troubles. The map of the city is a history of territorial allegiances and tribal loyalties.
For anyone growing up in the Belfast of the late 1940s and 1950s, there was always going to be an inbred sense of where one walked. This sense of place has been grotesquely theatricalised as a result of the Troubles and the physical manifestation of sectarian divisions during the 1970s and 1980s. But it is true to say, that, over the generations, Belfast people, particularly working-class people, were born with a radar that made them aware of where they were in the city.
Lacking such instinct could spell danger in the nightlife of Belfast, and most certainly led to many a harsh word and ‘scrap’ (or street fight). Eventually the political divisions of the city, crackling like an electric storm, were earthed in these intensely intimate and cross-grained inner lives of the city’s myriad neighbourhoods. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, what had once been a ‘mixed’ neighbourhood, where Protestant and Catholic families had ‘got on well’, experienced the shock of having to face the truth about Belfast’s sectarian divisions. Similarly, the traditional Protestant and Catholic areas, which had previously been negotiable by bus or foot when leaving a girl home after a dance, or meeting a pal, or going to a party, became increasingly dangerous and represented a perilous risk upon which few would chance their lives. By the mid-1970s, when assassination squads roamed what became known as ‘twilight zones’, or interfaces between the dominant working-class districts, Belfast had ceased to be a living city and became, for a decade and more, a ghost town.
Districts played, and still play, a key role in defining the identity of Belfast. Even though there have been extraordinary population shifts within the city over the last twenty-five years, because of intimidation and violence on the one hand, and redevelopment on the other, the sense of being from a particular area is strong and lasting. It is a common in many industrial cities.
Put at its simplest, Belfast’s history is physically indistinguishable from the industries that were established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: linen mills, rope works, tobacco factories, shipbuilding and engineering works.
Erected within this formidable industrial landscape were the streets and houses of the workers. It is not possible to think about Belfast as distinct from this industrial past. Consequently, Belfast is unique in Ireland and has much more in common with Liverpool or Glasgow since the pattern of its streets, as much as the commercial nature of the city, centred on the industrial heartland and little else. Each district had its own factories, its own customs linked to the work practices of the factory, its own destiny and well-being, tied irrevocably to that factory. The Falls, a predominantly Catholic road, had its mills; York Street, in the Protestant lower north side, had the famous Gallaher’s tobacco factory; while the shipyards dominated the east of the city. It was a pattern replicated throughout the city, layer by layer, from the dockland up to the prosperous higher roads that circle the outer city, heading for the nearby countryside.
This pattern rapidly disappeared in the post-industrial 1990s. By the early years of the new millennium, developments along the Lagan waterfront transformed parts of the city into apartment villages and multinational ‘nowheres’, and the birthplace of the Titanic and other world-renowned passenger liners has been reimagined as the (hugely popular) Titanic Quarter.
Going back forty years, it was a fact of life that those
