The Outcasts - The Empire, Belfast

Of all the punk bands that came out of the north in the late 1970s The Outcasts were probably the hardest and edgiest.
Their song lyrics had a dark edge –You’re a Disease, Magnum Force and the catchy but distinctly sinister and perverted The Cops Are Coming.
More than 25 years after splitting up they were back on stage in Belfast on Saturday night at the Empire – well three of them anyway.
Singer Greg Cowan and his guitarist brother Martin, along with drummer Raymond Falls were from the original line up, which also included their late brother Colin also on drums and guitarist Getty.
The reformed Outcasts included former Rudi guitarist Brian Young (whose rockabilly band The Sabrejets provided support) and anarchist-about-town Petesy Burns on bass.
It was a superb, energetic performance that had men in their late forties and fifties, who should really know better, pogoing round the place and crashing in to one another.
There was also a fair smattering of younger people who were clearly not even born when The Outcasts were first on the go.
Greg Cowan – with spiked, bleached hair – is like a punk archetype, his snarling vocal delivery and singer-with-attitude stage presence make him a formidable front man.
The dual guitars of Martin Cowan and Young drove the sound, power chords with chunky but never overstated riffs
They pretty much covered their back catalogue and there were no ‘this is new song’ moments.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
A highlight was the dark and gothic Winter, from their second album Blood and Thunder.
A fitting touch was an introduction by Terri Hooley – lauded in a Guardian newspaper editorial last week as a man who deserves the freedom of Belfast – who managed The Outcasts and released their early singles and first album on the Good Vibrations record label.
The word legendary is overused when talking about bands and performers but The Outcasts were the real thing and Saturday night’s gig was a superb reminder of just why.
Footage of Terri's into and first song here.

Liam Ó Maonlaí at the Black Box, Belfast

This small back street venue in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter geographically shifted several times tonight from a gospel hall in the US deep south, to the Australian outback, a chilled-out club in west Africa to a seisún in Co Kerry.
In between Liam Ó Maonlaí managed to pound out some Celtic soul, down and dirty blues, a couple of ballads, tell a few stories… oh yes and play some Mozart as well.
He is a shamanic figure who seems to almost go into a trance, particularly when playing the bodhrán and tin whistle.
The first half of his set was a bit hit and miss, where he stayed put behind his piano only standing up to remove his shoes and socks after the first song. The highlight was a nifty little number played on the didgeridoo.
However, the second half moved swiftly into a different league as Ó Maonlaí growled a low, throaty bass note and delivered a sean nós-style song as Gaeilge.
From then on he performed in a dazzling display of different style, changing instrument with each song as he displayed his skills on whistle, accordion, bodhrán, mbira (an African thumb piano), as well as guitar and piano.
While on guitar he played a west African-style song, which sounded like a cover of the late Malian Ali Farka Touré, and he used the mbira to back himself while singing a song in Irish.
As well as being a multi-instrumentalist he has a great vocal range, often using his voice as another intstrument. Ranging from gravelly blues, to shrill soul (the hallmark of his Hothouse Flowers persona), to spine tingling sean nós he took his audience into Ó Maonlaí world, which is never a dull place, while the journey there can often take some strange twists.
This is the second time I’ve seen him play in the Black Box. You can read my review of the earlier gig here.

A Hole in the Head by Francis Stuart

Although the central character in this novel shares many of the traits of a typical Stuartian character the story is less obviously biographical than many of his other novels.
Stuart often took parts of his own life and recast them as fiction, playing on the outsider role which it seemed he willingly embraced following the condemnation heaped upon him after he spend the Second World War living and working in Germany.
The narrator, Barnaby Shane, is still a fringe figure, damaged and isolated, but this time because of a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide after his wife leaves him.
Mentally surfing on a cocktail of perscription drugs (although stolen by him) he arrives in his homeland – never named but easily identified as 1970s Ireland – accompanied by Emily Bronte.
Emily is his muse and, because of medication he has taken, as real to him as the doctors and nurses who treat him.
Barnaby is a writer who has lost his way, earning acclaim but whose own novels no longer inspire him.
Stuart paints a picture of a smug literary circle in Barnaby's home city (Dublin) where novelists, poets and playwrights tread on uncontentious ground and rely on literary tricks and forced drama rather than truly challenging their readers.
Emily's Wuthering Heights is highlighted by Barnaby as a truly daring novel in which the heights of human passion and madness are explored.
Barnaby and Emily venture north to the city of 'Belbury', easily identifiable as Belfast, which like its real-life counterpart in the 1970s has been ripped apart by inter-communal conflict.
According to his biographer, Kevin Kiely, Stuart was a regular visitor to the north in '70s and the depiction rings true.
The dynamics of the conflict are glossed over and Stuart does not really want us to identify the various warring factions as republican or loyalist. They are a backdrop to his more intense tale of a disturbed individual wrenched from reality into a self-created parallel world in which aspects of his unconscious (Emily) interact with the reality perceived by everyone else.
As he weens himself off the medication he drifts back to normality but in the process loses Emily, although his memory of his imaginary encounter with her continues to haunt him.
The second part of the novel sees Barnaby, still nervous and edgy, more or less restored to the accepted definition of sanity and after a brief period spent back in the south he returns to Belbury.
He gets caught up in a siege situation where he is sent in as negotiator.
The plot of A Hole in the Head, occasionally drifts into absurdity, but like many Stuart's novels it is more a vehicle for him to explore an isolated individual who finds himself cut adrift from the world in which he lives.
It is one of Stuarts most satisfying novels and one that confirms for me why he is my favourite writer whose novels I keep returning to and finding something new in each rereading.

Alternative Ulster

Yesterday was a strange day which came at the end of a stressful week where I found myself getting caught up in all sorts of meetings and huddled conversations in my role as a union representative (for the National Union of Journalists) over various shifts in working patterns in the paper where I work.
Anyway I was feeling drained after forcing myself to be a conduit for other people’s worries and preoccupations and often finding my own analysis of things being totally ignored and so was just looking forward to getting Saturday’s paper off to the printers and coming home for a glass of wine.
Then at about 5.30pm we were told to evacuate our city centre offices because there was a suspected bomb close by. It was a throw back to a 20 years ago when such things were not that uncommon in Belfast but which now seems outrageously shocking.
After about 10 minutes standing outside we were told it would be at least 45 minutes before the bomb squad arrived and so split up in to various groups to go off to shopping, to pubs and in my case to a venue called The Black Box, where I had my book launch a few years ago.
I’d merely suggested it as a place to go for a coffee but when I and a few colleagues got in I saw Terri Hooley, ‘the godfather of Northern Ireland punk’ sitting talking to someone who I vaguely recognized but couldn’t quite place who turned out to be Don Letts.
Letts is an iconic figure in punk mythology, a ‘black English man’ who is credited with instigating the cross fertilisation between punk and reggae which so influenced The Clash.
It turned out that he was doing a question and answer session with Terri, in front of a modest audience of about 40 people. Within a few minutes Terri and Don were in full flow and reminiscences and names were being bandied about – Terri’s of Belfast, Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones, The Outcasts and Rudi and Shane MacGowan. Don’s involvement was in London – Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, John Lydon and the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the Clash, Bob Marley and The Slits.
Don Letts became involved in the Punk scene through a shop, Acme, he ran in the mid-70s and by becoming a DJ at the Roxy where many of the early punk bands played. He later turned his hand to filmmaking and his footage of The Sex Pistols and The Clash in 1976 and 77 provides some of the most iconic moments of that era.
He filmed many of the best-known punk bands and was later a member of Big Audio Dynamite, along with former Clash guitarist Mick Jones.
Unfortunately just as the conversation was getting interesting I had to make my way back to work, although when I got there I ended up standing outside The Irish News for another hour while a controlled explosion was carried out in a neighbouring street before we were allowed back in to the office to finish off producing the paper.
Anyway, by the time I was back at my desk I felt fully reinvigorated by the little interlude and my brief brush with punk history.