The following article is the compere speech in essay form that was given by the group’s President, Thomas L Muinzer, to a packed house at this fiftieth Knights Night.
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String & the Police do Stormont
Does anyone remember a while back when Sting & the Police announced that they were going to do one big, final world tour, their last live show ever? Wasn’t it interesting to hear that the tour was due to take in Belfast on its circuit. And so a short while ago on June 20th Sting & the Police made their Ulster debut at Stormont. One last big blow-out to mark the end of the band’s live gigging for good. No matter whether we think Sting is the best thing since sliced bread, or whether he makes us want to reach for the ear-plugs: as a proud, thriving modern city, we want to see Belfast being worked into big touring schedules like this one.
But instead of feeling like we’ve gained something by having the band come here, perhaps it actually emphasizes that we’ve lost a lot over the years. Sting & the Police had never played here before, worried, like the other conventional run of big groups over recent decades, that the Troubles would come up and bite them; that the IRA or the like would bomb one of their concerts. So for years upon years bands avoided Belfast like the plague, bands like the Police. We notice this problem more strongly than ever where Sting is concerned, given that his first wife, Frances Tomelty, by whom he had two children, comes from here, and his Financial Exec. in and around the years of his first marriage grew up here too.
So, now that the Troubles are over, although Sting & the Police doing Stormont on June 20th reminds us that Northern Ireland has gained something, it also emphasizes what we’ve lost. Yes, the band has come to play here, but for the last time, this being, as we’ve said, their farewell tour. Just as Belfast is ready to receive performers like this, and the performers are willing to come, we find it’s too late. At least we caught the Police at the end of their run; a lot of their contemporaries are disbanded for good, or even dead.
Thank god, by the way, for the rare run of world class musicians who did brave the intimidating elements to perform in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles, like Donegal’s Rory Gallagher.
The Death of the Showband
So just what was going on with Irish music if famous international acts were too intimidated to come to our humble little thimble of a province? Well, if they wouldn’t come externally, we’d work with what we had internally. In particular, we had our great Showbands. These popular all-Ireland bands toured the island’s music halls playing cover versions of the big hits on the radio at the time, often working their own, original music into their sets too. The Showbands provided many wonderful hours of entertainment all over the country, but in the North during the rise of the Troubles the Northern Irish public gradually (and unfairly) came to view them as being affiliated with the nationalist community, often due only to the simple fact that many of them were coming up to the North to play from the Republic of Ireland.
In 1975 the very popular Miami Showband were heading back to Dublin from a gig in the North and were stopped in Newry by a crew of UDR and UVF men. After a failed attempt to plant a bomb in the band’s van – the bomb went off prematurely, killing two of the UVF men – the ambushers brutally shot and killed three of the musicians, and injured several others. This event quickly put nails in the coffin of the Showband phenomenon in Northern Ireland, groups avoiding the Northern music halls for fear of becoming the next victims of the Troubles. In a sense the shots that killed singer Fran O’Toole, guitar player Tony Geraghty, and trumpeter Brian McCoy, were more than just bullets; they were little gunpowder-driven symbols that expressed the Troubles’ repression of creativity, pleasure, and artistic fun in Northern Ireland. In other words, while the Troubles were keeping people like Sting & the Police outside of our province, they were also throttling the life out of creative expression within the island.
When we use a term like “creative expression”, as I have just done, we are aware, of course, that music is only one example of Northern Irish creativity. I’m holding music up as a representative example for the Arts in general here. The same black cloud that hung over the Northern Irish music scene during the Troubles hung likewise over writers, painters, poets, and so on. It’s only in recent years, in our post-Troubles climate, that Belfast’s dark cloud has been lifting to let in the sunlight beyond.
“The Curse of Ian and Gerry”
In the programme notes for The Knights’ first play, The Singing Psychiatrist, and in Fortnight Magazine (issue 453), I have written about what I call Northern Ireland’s "culture of politics". Culturally speaking, Northern Ireland is a strange place. As far as cultural figureheads go, modern Northern Ireland has been dominated by the towering personas of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams more than any other two persons from any other walk or genre of Northern Irish life.
In football, we like to shout about Celtic or Rangers without stopping to wonder why two Glasgow teams should inspire us more than our own football teams. In art, tourists flock to see our republican and loyalist murals when they want to get a sense of our skills and achievements in painting. For one big chunk of us a concert from "Irish rebel" band The Wolfe Tones is a great gig, for others it’s the percussion and piping of an Orange Lodge band.
Yes, culturally speaking we’re a very strange place indeed. Because if we really look at it, what are all these attitudes and activities but an expression of Politics? I mean, let’s call a spade a spade– the thing guiding these tastes is the hand of nationalist and unionist politics. Should two football teams in Glasgow really merit our interest over our own local teams? Especially when – calling a spade a spade again – Celtic and Rangers don’t really give a hoot in hell about Cliftonville FC, Crusaders, Glentoran? Should our phony sectarian murals really be admired as public art when our works by genuinely great Belfast-rooted artists like Sir John Lavery and Paul Henry languish un-noticed in dusty galleries and unopened archives? Admire the murals’ politics if you want – that’s your own political business; but don’t go holding them up to open-top-bus-riding and black-taxi-ensconced tourists as representative pieces of the Ulster Arts. And as for Irish rebel and Orange marching music, are the republicans and loyalists who listen passionately to these genres really being inspired by music at all, or is it merely yet another form – audible this time – of political feeling that has become associated with the sounds themselves? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.)
So what does all this frustrating stuff mean then? It means, I suppose, nothing more profound than that for a very long time Northern Ireland has numbed its own sense of human feeling through an obsession with politics. Politics has pervaded our sense of culture and actually become our culture. But what IS politics?– politics is about making policies to govern a set of people fairly; politics is about setting policy. So politics is NOT about culture, it’s about law.
Each time we delude ourselves into thinking that politics is an expression of genuine culture we ignore the real cultural treasures that Northern Ireland has to offer. We rob ourselves of a part of our self worth in the same way that the Troubles robbed us of years of great musical acts. Just like the fear of IRA bombs kept Sting from playing in his wife’s native Belfast, and just like the UVF bullets helped rob us of the Showbands, politics and the Troubles have suppressed our will to create independent of political constraint.
The Hooped Lady
This phony smokescreen of politics posing as genuine culture holds back our most important cultural force, the Arts. It is the writers, musicians, painters, film makers, etc., that generate a deep, rich, and real sense of culture in our world.
Let me take a personal example to stress the kinds of things I’m talking about. A couple of years back the “Thanksgiving Square Beacon” (not exactly a name that rolls off the tongue) was erected near Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. It’s the tallest sculpture in Northern Ireland, stretching up to a big ol’ 19.5 meters. If you’re from Belfast it’s pretty impossible not to have run into the stature (perhaps literally) at one time or another. It depicts a hooped woman (that is, a woman made out of metal hoops) standing on a globe and holding a huge ring up towards the heavens. The ring emblematizes Thanksgiving, and symbolizes Belfast’s current sense of regeneration. The globe she stands on has cities marked out on it that have been particularly influenced by Belfast trade and migration.
The first time I saw this giant sculpture I was going past in a taxi. Catching me by surprise as I looked out my window, it seemed like something massive and unworldly. The taxi driver was a pleasant bloke, and we were nattering away.
"What do you think of the new statue?" I asked, looking up at it, excited.
"Ah, bit of a waste really. Sure there are people starving in the third world. Why are we wasting money and energy on something like that when we could be using it to help people."
That’s a good point, I guess, I found myself thinking, and it took some of the sculpture’s luster away for me. But I still had a sneaking sense that I rather liked it.
A week later I was going past the statue again in another cab and I happened to ask the next driver what his opinions were.
"Can’t stand it. Sure there are people starving in the third world, know what I mean?"
Same response as the last driver. This really got me thinking.
There are people starving in the third world, know what I mean? No, I realized, I didn’t know what he meant. The first cab driver had a big Mercedes. He could have done with a car that cost nowhere near the price, but he wanted an expensive one. What about the people starving in the third world? The second driver was going to Manchester to see Man United play, as, he told me, he regularly did, and he’d been getting the wife’s back up for splashing out on expensive tickets, not to mention all the beer he and his mates liked to knock back when they were over there. Why, I wondered, is it ok to plough money into the grossly over-financed Man United industry and the breweries of the rich beer moguls, but when it comes to a piece of art there are suddenly "people starving in the third world"? Do Africans politely stop starving while we buy our cars, tickets, and drink, and then start again when the issue of the Arts comes up?
It seems to me that the only place that the Third World stops starving is in the imagination of my two taxi driver friends, and the imaginations of people with similar socially conditioned opinions.
And unlike the Mercedes, unlike the United tickets, this piece of "public art" is just that– public. Everybody can enjoy it, admire it, share it, look at it. It belongs to the city as a whole, to all of us. And in my opinion, and unlike a bunch of the sculptures round about, it’s a damn good piece of work. The Mercedes was one man’s extravagance, the United tickets were another man’s. And if our hooped lady is an extravagance, at least she’s unselfish about it; she’s the whole city’s extravagance.
Politics Vs. Art?
To be brutal, it struck me that the root attitude presented by my two taxi pals, and that echoes a general attitude to the Arts that seems to be encountered on a daily basis, is that "this is art and therefore it’s a waste of space." But the Arts, often perceived as a third rate waste of time, are anything but that, especially in Belfast of all places: Belfast needs creative arts to fill in the cultural void left by the smokescreen of our phony culture of politics.
Now, don’t get me wrong: there’s no law to say that the two cabbies should have liked the statue, but dismissing it on aesthetic grounds gives an actual meaning to their dislike. Maybe it’s too big. Maybe it’s too monochrome. Perhaps the bronze casting and stainless steel are unflattering materials. Perhaps a local artist should have done it – as, say, Anto Brenan did in the case of the wonderful Jim Larkin statue behind the John Hewitt Bar – instead of a Scotsman (Andy Scott). Aesthetic criticisms like these actually carry meaning. Dismissing it on the grounds that “there are people starving in the third world” is a hollow, throw-away political statement.
And don’t get me wrong about world poverty either. Third World poverty is a terrible thing, something we must all address, artists and politicians alike. All I’m saying is that it doesn’t begin and end at the foot of a piece of public artwork.
Many of us [the Knights] are recently back from Edinburgh, a city rich in its associations with Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robbie Burns, Sir Walter Scott, etc., etc; great cultural figures who are loved and respected by Edinburgh’s people and who are, in this sense, very much alive and well in Edinburgh today. That is a real cultural heritage. We have one here in Belfast too, but it has to be carefully resuscitated, and the dust of politics needs to be knocked off of its scarcely breathing corpse. It needs to be nurtured. The metaphorical bullet that the Troubles shot mercilessly into its head needs to be pulled out.
To this end the Knights can be very glad that we’re seeing in our 50th public event at the Pavilion today, and that we have such a huge ream of plays, shows, paintings, workshops, talks, articles, and reviews under our belt in our few years as a part of the emerging young arts scene in post-Troubles Belfast. The artists in Belfast should wish the politicians all the very best in forging what seems to be a very promising political future, but it’s time for the emerging Arts scene to continue to step up and forge our cultural future.
Thomas L Muinzer
President,
Knights of the Round Table Arts Collective