Re-Viva la Revolución! Addendum
Culture as Threat
The type of punk memories re/enacted in Good Vibrations were recorded at the time by filmmaker John T. Davis in Shellshock Rock (1979). The documentary was famously banned at the now much more liberal Cork Film Festival for its ‘poor quality’, that is, its energetic lo-fi presentations of bands’ live performances – an aesthetic now long standard in music videos – and the anarchic punks’ unsavoury behaviour (including instances of mooning), which, again, are tame by today’s standards. Davis’s film indicates that Good Vibrations is an accurate portrayal of twenty-first-century nostalgia for punk and the hopeful message in official peacetime invoked by the notion of Northern Irish punk having more in common with hippy values than the anger and style of punk’s branches in Britain, Ireland and North America. Good Vibrations also had to become a saleable product, and so appeal to the nostalgia for vintage as a way to ease communication with postmemory (and record-buying) contemporary viewers.
Shellshock Rock also confirms the sidelined female roles of chittering about who wants to see who, keeping the peace with older members of the public, and gently procuring information. I can’t help but wonder, what real community was there anywhere for women of any kind? I know they existed, but in all forms of documentation I can think of, their absence is resounding unless it concerns a specific individual, usually someone divisive and public such as Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. That afterthought aside, Shellshock Rock is a greatest hits archive of bands and songs from the late 1970s/early 1980s that in its soundtrack acknowledges some classics embedded with the DNA punk from which punk evolved, including some Hank Williams, the idea of whom punctuates the narrative of Good Vibrations.
What comes across most strongly in the music documentary through repetition is friendship and understanding across the sectarian divide in sentiments that are at times uttered from amongst bomb rubble. Some of the young men interviewed mention receiving threats of violence for continuing to perform and tour, threats which they meet with quietly determined defiance; they are not Johnny Rotten (oh dear) wannabes shooting their mouths off in anger for the sake of it. The danger they face is very real, while the ‘mouldy oldies’ vox popped in Belfast city centre are actually quite good-natured and understanding, with one man even supposing he’d be ‘indy all that’ too if he were young.
Although they involve comedic moments and overall sustain a ‘feel-good factor’, Good Vibrations and No are structured around regular reminders of these very real and ubiquitous threats of violence. In particular in both cases, the violence is targetted at producers of culture of one kind or another and they each knowingly point towards real cases of the violent death or disappearance of musicians and artists. Becoming a ‘legitimate target’ was the high price for speaking your mind, even if only to publicly warn off anyone who defied the undefined limits of escalating conflict and political unrest. Crossing the border with the Republic of Ireland was a particularly serious offence.
An early sequence in Good Vibrations visualizing Hooley’s voiceover account of the early years of the conflict refers to a UVF interception which resulted in the murders and serious injury of members of the Dublin-based showband, the Miami, in 1975. The story is used to concisely and emotively illustrate why music acts became reluctant to travel to Northern Ireland as the conflict became established (the band are also mentioned in Hooleygan for the same purpose). This is shown in a series of silent static shots of a bomb aftermath titled ‘Fran & the Miami’ amongst a visual fanzine-like sequence over which Hooley’s voiceover narration remembers the dramatic cultural shift he experienced as the togetherness for common causes as he recalls them during the 1960s gives way to the violence pervading the 1970s. A poignant shot of a glittery platform boot lying in the road amidst the debris from the band’s bombed bus epitomizes the death of visiting music and culture and the increasing enclosure of the conflicted region within a hardening border.
This is where Good Vibrations connects with another music documentary, this time a more recent one that not only looks back at the Miami, but forward to a time when hard-fought justice will be brought to bear for the band’s members. Remastered: The Miami Showband Massacre (dir. Stuart Sender) can be viewed on Netflix and presents an urgent call to arms that documentary rather than biopic is wont to do.
The Miami’s fatal encounter with what sounds like an inexperienced group of insurgents (as was common in the early years) is marked as the tipping point for what had been a vibrant and diverse live music scene in Northern Ireland. The nostalgic language on the band’s representative webpage serves as a memorial while perhaps embellishing the lasting impact of the tragedy: ‘The killings shocked the entire country and changed the showband scene for many years to come as overnight, the North was avoided by most bands from the South. It would take years before bands started to make the trek across the border in any numbers. More importantly, the tragedy struck at the core of the showband industry, cutting short the lives of three musicians whose only crime was that they dedicated their lives to entertainment. Ireland would never be the same’. No doubt we each have our equivalents of such events that have shaken us to the core like this, but life moves on regardless of our tragedies.
It could be conjecture from my own experience of betweenness, but the Miami sequence in Good Vibrations might call them to mind to older audiences who may or may not remember them or this harrowing attack while being almost lost on the younger postmemory audience the film feels mainly aimed at. It is about youth culture for youth culture, after all. Incidentally, it never overtly states beyond codings in their ‘look’ that the paramilitary antagonists in Good Vibrations are loyalists. As recently as 2013, Hooley was attacked by loyalists near his home in East Belfast, and certain instances in the film reflect a life-long tension between him and the wider unionist community, largely as this is a community whose harder-line members – as senior loyalist Andy (Adrian Dunbar) warns tend to be its younger members – do not take kindly to dissension against birth-right allegiances and collusion with the enemy/other. In these sub-cultural instances recreated in Good Vibrations from Hooley’s (one-eyed) point of view, there was no higher betrayal than not minding who you were moshing, snogging, singing and swapping sweat with in the Harp Bar of an evening. Any youngsters today making friends without awareness of ‘the barricades’ probably don’t even realise how punk they are.
Link to the full Shellshock Rock documentary. Contains flashing lights from the start, and swearing.
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