lovely loyalist musical culture

parkhead_rfb · lovely loyalist musical culture

http://www.opendemocracy.net/deba...mp;debateId=33&articleId=2876

The riots, paramilitary assaults, car-hijackings, road-blockings and widespread mayhem which swept Northern Ireland in the second week of September 2005 were the worst for many years. They involved, almost exclusively, working-class Loyalists in Belfast, Ballymena and other parts of County Antrim battling the police and army. It was hardly the first time that “Loyal” organisations had been in violent confrontation with the state. But the depth of hatred and alienation on display still struck many observers as unprecedented. There is no sign that any political development in Northern Ireland – including the report of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning two weeks after the riots that the IRA had put all its weapons beyond use – is working to diminish it.

“For some years now, a complex, sophisticated discussion has been proceeding about the nature of modernity in Ireland…(but) northern Protestants, Unionists and Loyalists, are simply absent from the debate.”

openDemocracy publishes part two of Stephen Howe’s major essay on Friday 30 September

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Much media and political comment has “explained” the profundity and rootedness of this feeling in terms of bigotry and criminality, of archaism and atavism. Defensive Unionist politicians speak in terms of Protestant disillusion, even desperation, at a peace process which they think has invariably favoured Catholics. None of those labels is entirely wrong – yet what lies behind the events of recent days goes much deeper. It engages the whole nature of Britishness in Ireland and beyond, and the very ideas of identity and community, modernity and tradition most of us use so routinely. And as I’ll try to show, the songs Loyalists sing, the pictures they paint, even the tattoos and t-shirts they wear, tell us a lot about what’s going on and what might happen next.

Back in August 2000, the excellent Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole reflected on the cultural significance of a notorious paramilitary figure, Johnny Adair. He argued that:

“A culture is a more or less coherent set of values and assumptions. A tradition is an array of skills, images or beliefs handed down more or less intact from history. In the kind of analysis that tends to be applied to the Northern Ireland conflict, people like Johnny Adair are regarded as stuck within a particular Protestant culture, and their tendency to violence is seen as an expression of their need to defend that culture...

Yet what is most obvious to anyone looking at the symbols in which Adair has wrapped himself is that ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ are somewhat beside the point. What you see in Johnny Adair is an extraordinary mish-mash of confusion and amnesia.”

O’Toole pointed out that a slogan which Adair, despicably, employed about Catholics, "Kill 'em all. Let God sort them out", actually derived from a medieval Catholic bishop’s words about proto-Protestant heretics in southern France. Obviously, Adair and his fellow gunmen must be unaware of this. O’Toole went on:

“In anything that can be called a culture or a tradition, this phrase can only be heard as a warning about the consequences of a religious intolerance that generates insane violence... That it can end up as a slogan on the wall of a self-styled defender of Protestant culture is a sign, not of the persistence of a historic tradition, but of the idiocy that comes with a fragmented culture that has lost both memory and meaning.”
What political gangsters like Johnny Adair represented, then, was not immersion in cultural history, but “a mind shaken free of any real connection to any coherent set of cultural connections”. As O’Toole pointed out, Adair did not march down the Shankill Road to the tune of God Save the Queen or Rule Britannia, but to the sound of Tina Turner:

“The slogan on their T-shirts isn't ‘For God and Ulster’ but ‘Simply the Best’, the title of Tina's gooey pop hymn to some standard-issue fantasy man. Over this T-shirt, Johnny's sweatshirt proclaims, not the dignity of Protestant Britain, but the virtues of Nike Athletic. The tattoo on his arm isn't of Carson or Paisley, but of Mickey Mouse.”
So, O’Toole thought, the cultural influences at work were “not Britishness and Protestantism, but Hollywood, Top of the Pops and the Sun… the flotsam and jetsam of movies, pop songs, brand names and tabloid TV…a jumble of commercial clichés and meaningless slogans.”

Fintan O’Toole has latched on to something important, which surprisingly few other commentators have noticed. I want to suggest, however, that he is wrong to dismiss the phenomena he discusses as “commercial clichés and meaningless slogans” and counterpose them to “proper” traditions and cultures (though the anger and scorn towards sectarian gangsters which leads him to make those judgments is not, of course, in the slightest wrong.) They are, rather, part of what happens when the decay of one form of cultural modernity (the northern Irish variant of an urban, working-class Britishness) clashes with the rise of another (a north Atlantic, if not global, popular culture) and the resultant hybrid is refracted through an intensely local, territorial, violent and sectarian milieu.

Stephen Howe is professor of the history and cultures of colonialism at Bristol University. His most recent books are Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (Verso, 1998), Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Also by Stephen Howe in openDemocracy:

“Edward Said: the traveller and the exile” (October 2003)

“American Empire: the history and future of an idea” (June 2004)

“An Oxford Scot at King Dubya’s court: Niall Ferguson’s Colossus” (July 2004)

“Dying for empire, Blair, or Scotland?” (November 2004)

“The death of Arafat and the end of national liberation” (November 2004)

“Israel, Palestine, and campus civil wars” (December 2004)

“Boycotting Israel: the uses of history” (April 2005)

If you find Stephen Howe’s informed, acute, and fair-minded analyses of contemporary global issues valuable, please consider donating to openDemocracy to help us keep our content free

What ensues is truly an “alternative modernity” which, however unattractive it may appear to most observers, almost disconcertingly echoes the cliches about what is supposed to characterise the culture of postmodernity. This is a world marked by the collapse of old certainties and grand narratives: one of marginality, fiercely asserted locality, obsession with identity, difference, otherness; united only in its fragmentation, its assertion of multiple, unstable identities; finding expression via pastiche, bricolage, promiscuous cultural borrowings of all kinds.

Fintan O’Toole thus misses a crucial point. The features of Adair’s, or the lower Shankill’s “culture” which he finds both so feeble and so objectionable are just those which make it contemporary – or even postmodern – from top to bottom. It may be a portent, not a relic, in the terms Tom Nairn once applied to Northern Ireland’s political culture as a whole.

Landscapes of identity

What formed in Belfast and other northern Irish urban centres in the course of 19th-century industrialisation was a variety of Britishness, not only in its stridently proclaimed nationality-claims, but in the texture of everyday life. Belfast, its youth and its working class had a great deal in common with similar cities “across the water”. Many of its characteristic features were shared with English, Scottish and Welsh industrial centres. It was intensely localised, with social networks and loyalties focused on very small, usually densely inhabited urban neighbourhoods.

It was often seen as an anti-educational culture: even more so than was the norm for English or Scottish working-class communities reliant on heavy industry; where the expected post-school route was not to social mobility via education, but to a secure position within the community through apprenticeship in a skilled manual trade. Equally evidently, it has been a profoundly masculinist culture – again perhaps even more so than its equivalents elsewhere, in ways that decades of violence could only reinforce. Both the (partial) ending of paramilitary violence, which threatens to deprive “hard men” of their raison d’etre and aggressive youths of their role models, and the precipitous decline in industrial employment, must intensify the “crisis of masculinity” which many commentators identify as a more generally pervasive western, post-industrial phenomenon. This has, as yet, been little analysed in Northern Ireland.

It could be seen as an utterly stifling environment. The pressures to conformity were intense: anyone inclined to question the shared truths of the community found themselves labelled a Communist or a Fenian. Loyalty to the crown, to Britishness, and to the Ulster Unionist Party (which repaid its working-class supporters with total indifference, perpetuating some of Europe’s worst social conditions) was almost unquestioning. Traditions of military service were strong: yet the liberalising influence of the Northern Ireland Labour Party – surely the unsung heroes of modern Ulster history – was also felt, as were ideas further left. And there were, at least before the late-1960s eruption of violence, more links with neighbouring Catholic communities, including ones of marriage, than outsiders often think.

Despite such connections and cross-currents, there was a dreadful naturalness, even inevitability about young men in working-class Loyalist areas seeing any manifestation of Catholic discontent as an IRA plot, and hitting out at it. In that environment it is not the early violence or bigotry of such men that is remarkable, but that some later repudiated it. Crucially, some influential ex-gunmen came to feel that “respectable” Unionist politicians had manipulated them by first inciting their violence, then indignantly disclaiming it. The people of the Shankill and other poor Protestant districts, so it was ever more assertively, even bitterly said, must no longer act brutally at others’ behest, but start thinking for themselves.

Perhaps that realisation came too late. The working-class Loyalist communities of west and north Belfast are in a probably irreversible territorial, demographic, economic and political retreat – hence, in large part, the rage and fear of those who mobilised in autumn 2001 against the “threat” of Catholic schoolchildren passing through their streets, who repeatedly battled over Drumcree, and who have fought the police and army in recent days. Paramilitary warlords and drug barons fight over the ruins. De-industrialisation, demographic decline, the tendency of the more enterprising or successful to move out to the suburbs if not further afield, low rates of educational achievement and very high ones of family breakdown, petty crime, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse – all these are features which the poorer Protestant districts of Belfast, Portadown or Ballymoney share with those of Liverpool, Glasgow or Swansea, and indeed those of Dresden and Detroit.

On that level, their crisis is generic, a variant on the crisis of socio-economic modernisation which afflicts large sectors of the older industrial economies everywhere. Not only has “globalisation”, in many of its aspects and especially those which enthusiasts hail as positive, enabling, freedom-enhancing, never fully penetrated those sectors, but in a sense it has already been (it was there, for instance, when Belfast could truly claim to be at the centre of worldwide networks of trade and manufacture), offered its tantalising promises, and then gone again.

Thus we should perhaps even speak of such districts as undergoing demodernisation, in tangible and socially damaging ways. Belfast-born poet Gerald Dawe writes well of how Belfast’s nightlife (and, one could add, its consumption patterns) “is today indistinguishable from Bristol or Birmingham, or, for that matter, Temple Bar. We all live, more or less, in the same postmodern heaven.” But in Belfast, as in Birmingham or Dublin, many people resentfully find they cannot afford a place in postmodern heaven. The syndromes of “Protestant alienation” and defeatism, including their additionally intense, working-class Loyalist versions, are in these senses phenomena of and explicable in terms of Charles Taylor’s and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar’s “acultural”, socio-economic modernisation processes.

Yet their culturo-political origins and expressions are, of course, more obvious and more widely remarked. These are crises also of collective identity. Dawe’s essay goes on to remark that, simultaneously with the globalised “postmodern heaven” of Belfast nightclubs or shopping malls there flourishes, or festers, “a lifestyle based upon the conscious pursuit of cultural identity; a pursuit, if you like, of authenticity, of ‘Irishness’, or ‘Britishness’, or ‘Ulster-Scots’ which are no longer the preoccupations of the fathering or mothering homelands.”

This operates across communities and classes; but it is generally agreed that the pursuit of “authenticity” is most fraught, even desperate, among working-class Protestants. As Marianne Elliott summarises the conventional wisdom: “Catholic culture and identity is far more secure and all-embracing than that of Protestants”; while more affluent Protestants, with transferable skills and very often experience of non-local education or employment, can more readily assimilate to contemporary kinds of Britishness. Indeed almost three decades of direct rule from London greatly furthered that middle-class assimilation, in a variety of both material and less tangible ways.

On the Shankill and Sandy Row, in Portadown and Carrickfergus, in the myriad bleak housing estates where grievance festers and violence rarely hides far beneath the surface, the cultural response has been the kind of pastiche which Fintan O’Toole identified, but whose complexity he greatly underrates. In the first part of this essay, I shall explore this by looking in turn at three Loyalist culturo-political expressions: Loyalist songs, visual imagery (especially murals) and bodily self-fashioning, and its racial imaginings.

The music of Loyalism

The musical subcultures of Loyalism remain – to my knowledge – almost entirely unanalysed. Their best-known aspect is of course the “tradition” of marching bands, which accompany the numerous annual summer parades of the Loyal Institutions. They feature in much reportage on Northern Ireland; but discussion centres almost exclusively on their political and ritual significance rather than the content of their performances. Indeed they are generally viewed as being, in strictly musical terms, a limited and uninteresting phenomenon.

This is not entirely unjust, especially in relation to the mostly young, technically unaccomplished and often overtly sectarian “Blood and Thunder” or “Kick the Pope” bands, which have been in the ascendant in recent years. Clearly, music itself is only a small part of the point and the appeal of such ensembles – as is made clear in the numerous and rapidly proliferating websites maintained by such bands in both Ireland and Scotland, where material on repertoire, instrumentation or technique very rarely features.

The main focus is on generalised, and often highly belligerent, culturo-political assertion (with the sites maintained from Scotland often appearing more aggressive and sectarian than the Northern Irish ones). The older-established bands, however, often still feature an intriguingly eclectic repertoire, drawing sometimes on specifically Scottish themes, on Irish traditional airs, on a wide range of popular forms, on hymn tunes, and on the influence of British military band music.

The relationship of Ulster Protestants to Irish traditional music has been much debated, as has the extent to which music whose origins and essential character are in no way religiously specific has come to be associated almost entirely with one community. Some attention has also been given to pop and rock music’s treatment of the Ulster crisis, including the work of local artists: but very little has addressed pro-Loyalist sentiments in this music, for the good and simple reason that few such sentiments have been expressed.

The past three decades’ Northern Irish rock music has included some that is explicitly pro-Republican (most notably, Sean O’Neill’s That Petrol Emotion, which emerged from the determinedly non-political Undertones); much that insists on “not taking sides”, in the sense of espousing a sharply anti-sectarian, non-partisan politics (much Belfast punk music, the best-known instance being Stiff Little Fingers); but only one band which achieved even the most minimal public success espoused pro-Unionist sentiments – Paul Burgess’s Ruefrex.

Some of the most admired and accomplished performers from northern Protestant backgrounds, indeed, have entirely eschewed any explicit local references at all in their music, let alone political ones. Thus Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy – arguably the wittiest and most literate songwriter to have emerged in Ireland in decades – has never included either “Irish” or “Ulster” allusions in his work (unless, that is, the delightful “Oh Danny Boy the pipes are blocked”, from Through a Long and Sleepless Night on the 1996 album Casanova is included). He has, though, featured a mock-heroic performance of Wordsworth’s ultra-patriotic lines from Lucy: English-patriotic, that is.

Loyalist song as such, however, has received only one substantial published discussion: and that a sharply hostile one, by Bill Rolston. One should not perhaps be surprised at that fact; for this Loyalist musical culture is an almost entirely self-contained one. The bands and singers perform almost exclusively in specifically Loyalist venues; often social clubs which are linked to paramilitary organisations.

The CDs and tapes sell only to the faithful, through specialist outlets: they are not even sold in Northern Irish branches of the major international music retail chains. They receive no radio play (even the local community station Shankill Radio largely eschews such material); and even if any of the performers involved had ever made a video, one doubts if MTV’s producers would be beating a path to their doors. It is, of course, an amateur culture, and a markedly limited one. Apart from some of the older-established marching bands – who are usually also those with the broadest, and least sectarian, repertoires – the only group in this milieu striking this listener as even minimally competent is the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF)-linked Platoon.

Yet it is a remarkably vigorous “subculture”. The “Union Jack Shop” on Belfast’s Newtownards Road, to cite just one retail outlet, currently advertises over 200 cassette tapes and CDs for sale. In the sense of being a musical culture produced by, for and remaining within a relatively restricted public, with almost no intervention from large-scale commercial concerns or communications media, it fits oddly well into the conventional, indeed even the restrictive, definitions of “folk music” – more so, indeed, than its Republican counterpart, which attains rather greater commercial and international exposure, not least through Irish-American support networks. But it contrasts intriguingly with Republican music in another respect. Whereas Republican song mainly reworks a well-defined repertoire of “traditional” airs, Loyalist song involves a remarkable, sometimes bizarre melange of old and contemporary idioms.

Bill Rolston notes this hybridity, recognising that “loyalist songs come in a range of styles: from folk, through country and western, to pop, and what is termed in the United States ‘adult-oriented rock’.” He might have added that today, trance, rave and other dance-oriented (not to mention recreational-drug-oriented) remixes – albeit often painfully amateurish ones – can also be encountered. In so doing, he raises the possibility which I am exploring here, only summarily to dismiss it:

“It could be argued that such hybridity is a healthy sign, revealing loyalism’s postmodernist credentials or its multiculturalist ideals. However, there would be great difficulty in sustaining such an argument. Instead, the range of styles in loyalist tunes is in fact symptomatic of a more general problem within loyalism: that of defining identity. As a result, there is often great incongruity in loyalist songs.”
The antithesis is surely false: while few would wish to argue that militant Loyalism is “consciously” inspired by postmodernist, let alone multiculturalist, theory, the instability of identity-claims and the internal formal “incongruity” to which Rolston points are often in other contexts thought characteristically, classically postmodernist.

Undoubtedly, though, the mixture of styles and genres in this music is striking, as on occasion is the seeming lack of “fit” between tune (or the memories evoked by the song’s original words) and lyrics. A “shock of misrecognition” may be evoked by hearing the young Bob Dylan’s anthem of generational revolt, The Times They Are a’Changing transmuted into:

“Come on you young brethren and listen to me And pledge that your country stays loyal and free And step proudly forth each 12th of July And let Dublin know now that Ulster won’t die.”
It might be yet more surprising to hear John Denver’s sentimental country-pop ballad Take Me Home, Country Roads reworked into a bitter litany of Ulster’s sufferings from the IRA, or a well-known Republican rallying cry like The Men Behind the Wire drastically reshaped to appeal for solidarity with Loyalist prisoners (one of several examples of green “party tunes” being repainted bright orange).

The diversity of themes is as great as that of styles. If some Loyalist songs evoke a broad sweep of the past – often visualised in terms of eternal recurrence, with nationalist threat, siege and fear of British betrayal reappearing, essentially unchanged, across the generations – the very point of others is their topicality. Some, indeed, are regularly updated. Thus Thatcher-era references to “Maggie’s” treachery in the 1980s become allusions to “Blair” in performances after 1997. Each new Loyalist “martyr” will be mourned and celebrated in a rash of rewritten ballads: most recently, those in memory of Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) leader Billy Wright.

Maudlin sentiment abounds, some of it in older ballads, some in the numerous songs about dead comrades. Songs relating to the experience and sacrifice from the “Great War” of 1914-18 are numerous, especially from performers associated with the Ulster Volunteer Force. There such anthems serve, among other purposes, to strengthen the (largely fictive) bond between the “original” UVF which lost so heavily at the 1916 battle of the Somme, and the modern incarnation.

By no means all are unquestioningly jingoistic. Anti-war songs like Eric Bogle’s famous modern ballad No Man’s Land (also known as Willie McBride) about the useless sacrifice of the western front are performed, alongside more expectedly vainglorious invocations of the Somme. They appear especially in the repertoires of performers linked to the UVF. These, and the song lyrics reproduced on websites associated with that group, differ substantially though not absolutely from the Ulster Defence Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters ones: the former are more prone to evoke tradition, suffering and self-sacrifice, while overt belligerence and sectarianism is more evident in the latter’s music.

Pro-UVF performance also appears more often to adopt ballad forms and traditional tunes – whether Orange or generically Irish ones – with UDA songs drawing on a more promiscuous and contemporary range of sources. These are accompanied by differences between the organisations’ cultural repertoires in relation to visual imagery and to political rhetoric, which are explored below.

Some of the modern heroes are multiply invoked. Ballads about assassinated Loyalists like the UVF’s Trevor King and Brian Robinson, the UDA’s Joe Bratty and Lindsay Mooney, or the Loyalist Volunteer Force’s Billy Wright each exist in several different versions. Among the most remarkable transcultural borrowings in Loyalist song commemorates UVF “Colonel” Trevor King in an adaptation of Marvin Gaye’s civil-rights anthem Abraham, Martin and John – which becomes “…and Trevor”.

But sometimes even in these works of ostensible remembrance one is stopped short, and chilled. A UVF song, The Battalion of the Dead, celebrates numerous fallen members of the organisation. Some died in the course of what were, by the UVF’s own lights, legitimate operations: killed by Republicans or in a few cases by British forces. But the names of nakedly sectarian murderers, supposedly repudiated by the group and, indeed, probably killed or “set up” by fellow Loyalists, are also there. Lenny Murphy, Robert Bates and other unequivocally sinister figures are part of the battalion of the honoured dead. By what foul magic have they been assimilated into the pantheon?

Here, far more than in Republican song – with which the parallels are otherwise, again, very evident – the sordid is transmogrified into the heroic and elegaic. Elsewhere, different kinds of sentimentalism – the pop-cultural and the “traditional” British military – are mingled. It is reported that at the funeral of murdered UFF man Jackie Coulter in August 2000, the public-address system blared songs by Percy Sledge and Take That, followed by a lone bugler playing the Last Post.

And alongside this sentimentality – and especially in UDA songs – is a swaggeringly in-your-face glorification of violence, which goes far beyond that to be encountered in Republican song. In the latter, the actual business of killing, and especially any hint of overt sectarianism, is euphemised, poeticised, hidden. In some Loyalist song, it is asserted with a kind of desperate bravado. The attitude is, as in the reported slogan on a Loyalist t-shirt: “No one likes us – and we don’t give a f**k”.

Bands carry names like The Young Guns, The Battalion, The Armagh Brigade. Some lyrics do not commemorate the honoured dead or the sufferings of Loyalist prisoners, but glory in their own menace and brutality:

“Their time will come for, mark my words, they’ll pay the price one day, They’ll be cut down like mad dogs by the men of the UDA.”
The final minutes of Peter Taylor’s impressive BBC television history of Protestant paramilitarism, Loyalists, are shot in a west Belfast drinking club. (The occasion, though not stated in the film, is a post-parade celebration by the Shankill Protestant Boys, a marching band closely linked to the UVF – and apparently heavily involved in the September 2005 events.) Two songs are featured – and they mirror two dramatically contrasted sides of the Loyalist musical world.

First, behind Taylor’s commentary, can be discerned Daddy’s Uniform: a sentimental though also militant celebration of the Ulster Volunteer tradition being handed down through the generations, which ends with the ageing father commanding:

“So take this gun, my only son, And join the Volunteers!”
Seemingly the entire packed room – including a well-known west Belfast political figure – sings along with the rather plodding two-piece band. Then, though, a hulking, shaven-headed, black-clad figure takes the little stage. He begins, in a tunelessly roaring voice:

“I was walking up the Falls With my f***ing tommy gun I grabbed a Taig and told him There was f**k all that could stop me. Then I shot him. And I watched that b****rd die.”
The room erupts in applause; in which this time the politician, perhaps aware of the cameras, apparently does not join.