In Another World. Gerald Dawe
which some were held was considerable. When Otis Redding, the great R & B and soul singer, died tragically in December 1967 at the age of twenty-six in a plane crash in Wisconsin, en route to a Sunday evening concert in Madison, young men in Belfast wore black armbands. The former well-driller from Georgia was a kind of icon to many hundreds, maybe thousands, in the provincial Northern city. ‘Pain in My Heart’, ‘Mr Pitiful’, ‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’, ‘Shake’, ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’, ‘Sad Song’, ‘Respect’ and ‘Dock of the Bay’ were anthems for a group of young men and women who dressed in imitation of black American ‘cool’. In ‘night’ clubs and in afternoon sessions in Belfast’s Plaza, we would dance our young lives away – solo, with our girls, or in groups. It was a macho scene. Fights were not uncommon, though sudden and short-lived; what mattered was something other than ‘scrapping’.
White blues on vinyl from Chicago, such as Paul Butterfield; neat, three-piece jazz combos, such as The Peddlers; touring bands under John Mayall, from the Bluesbreakers through Aynsley Dunbar’s Retaliation; Cream, Chicken Shack, Fleetwood Mac; black blues men like Champion Jack Dupree; soul and R & B like Gino Washington and the Ram Jam Band, and many other first-rate variations performed regularly in the city throughout the 1960s.
Why there was such an intense appetite for R & B, soul, blues and jazz in a city that became synonymous with the most virulent kind of sectarian violence is a question that has more to do with clichéd perceptions of Belfast than with a rounded appreciation of the city. Had it something to do with the thousands of America’s GIs, many of them black, stationed in the North during the Second World War who brought their music with them? Or the human traffic that swept thousands of men and women to America throughout the last century in search of work, particularly in the recessionary years preceding the Second World War? Or perhaps it was due to the more immediate cultural bonds that linked industrial Belfast, the harbour port, to other industrial ports like Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle and of course London? Belfast families had for generations moved back and forth across the narrow stretch of the Irish Sea, in their search for work, taking with them an inherited local exposure to music of one kind or another.
Both radio and television, but primarily the former, were a hugely influential and great transmitter of music in the 1950s. The freedom of movement that the transistor radio brought allowed a younger generation to switch channels to the independent radio stations, such as Radio Caroline or Luxembourg, and play ‘their own’ music, wherever and whenever they wanted, indoors or out, day or night.
By the 1960s, television programmes such as Ready Steady Go! and Six Five Special were putting faces, styles and dance moves to the music. There were also the weekly musical magazines, including Melody Maker and New Musical Express.
Was there a widespread, urban elan that R & B, blues and soul represented for a generation of post-war working- and middle-class kids, alongside the increase in general affluence which Belfast had started to experience along with other British cities? I don’t know. The music that developed from the city certainly revelled in its self-assured, passionate singing as much as its raw, intimate, emotional energy. Them was one of the more well-known local bands, and Van Morrison, their lead vocalist and guiding spirit, unquestionably gave voice to that mood.
But there was another side to the story – a poetic side to Morrison’s achievement that has kept achieving, producing over the next fifty years lyrics of the first order, and some of the best popular love songs of modern times. In the summer of 1970, sitting on the tiny balcony of my mother’s flat, which overlooked a square in an estate of houses in east Belfast, I was looking at the sky when ‘These Dreams of You’ came over the radio; the voice of my home town. This is what In Another World is about.
Gerald Dawe
Dún Laoghaire/Belfast
October 2017
ONE
The radio had a cloth face and was quite an imposing-looking object, sitting in an alcove of the living room, alone, slightly iconic, above the television that was equally sturdy-looking in its timber housing. The furniture of the 1950s remains set in place: the sofa, the presses, the dinner table, the side table, the baize tablecloth with its tassels, the little door under the stairs, the stepdown to the foreboding pantry, the workaday cottage-like air of that kitchen, and the yard with its high walls, mangle, washing line, larder, coal sheds, outdoor lavatory and the door to the entry or alleyway.
The back of the house was the working half, the engine room; the front was for entertainment and, in our case, for business – where my grandmother taught elocution, piano and singing. The rest of the house was all about privacy, rest, dreamland.
It was an unexceptional house, in its own little terrace, a version of grander houses with grander expectations, a different kind of lifestyle than had been lived in the earlier decades of the last century. Now, post-war, post-marriages, in this house of women – grandmother, mother and sister – I was the only man (and a mere slip of a boy at that), notwithstanding the occasional visit of my uncle, stationed in foreign climes, and of my grandmother’s party-going friends – ageing stylists of a bygone time.
I remember it all well. Or maybe I remember well what I think it all was. One way or another, in the regular world of those years, as people got on with their lives as best they could – the experience of the Blitz still very much inscribed on the Belfast landscape of the time – and returned to a normal world of work and play, I was utterly unaware of all this. As a self-absorbed young boy I was, however, fascinated by stories overheard, the hints of a previous world, before ‘my’ world, the way things ‘once were’; my young-boy radar fixed on the songs that came out of the front room, the laughter, the recitations, the piano playing, the singing, but also the music that ‘came over’ the box in the corner, and by decade’s end, the sound of music my mother listened to, from Workers’ Playtime to Billy Cotton, Two-Way Family Favourites, the Broadway hits, swing and trad jazz. And when her brother was home ‘on leave’ from the RAF, the sound of American leading ladies, such as the queen-like Ella Fitzgerald, but also the unmissable, alluring otherness of quite a different voice – rich, exciting and unforgettable – Sarah Vaughan, a familiar name, a name you might hear in the street, and yet so totally unexpected. It was probably from listening to my aunt’s stories of minding Judy Garland during the fading star’s last great hurrah in London’s Palladium, as well as her anecdotes about Frank Sinatra and the swooning 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