Original subtitles

This programme contains some strong language.

U2 are part of everybody's history of rock music - the biggest band in the world.

MUSIC: Elevation by U2

But they're also part of a less well known story -

how rock and roll changed Ireland.

I watched, as little girl,

a lot of what the conditions for grown-up women in Ireland were

and I wasn't having it.

MUSIC: Gloria by Them

The creation of Irish rock is a 40-year story.

Ireland had a guitar hero...

It was just very rock and roll, but it was very much him.

..and one of the few black rock stars.

And the most bizarre thing - he married Leslie Crowther's daughter, which was weird.

I used to watch Crackerjack.

MUSIC: Teenage Kicks by The Undertones

John Peel's favourite band...

Ah, they were great. How could you not like The Undertones?

MUSIC: Rat Trap by The Boomtown Rats

..a big mouth...

And I just thought "Finally, the Paddies did it," you know?

MUSIC: Mandinka by Sinead O'Connor

..the rare sighting of a female rock star...

..and finally, the biggest band in the world.

We had to work hard, cos we were absolutely the worst band ever.

This is the story of the pioneers of Irish rock -

how they forged an international presence

and helped change Ireland along the way.

MUSIC: Elevation by U2

The birthplaces of Irish rock

are the two capital cities of this divided island -

Dublin in the Republic

and Belfast in the United Kingdom.

Two cities that disagreed on virtually everything,

but united in one goal -

to repel the new sounds of '50s rock and roll

wafting in over the airwaves.

In the 1950s,

the streets of Belfast seemed an unlikely breeding ground

for the blues scene that would emerge there.

The hard-line Protestant ethos of the ruling majority

preferred church to rock and roll.

MUSIC: Come Running by Van Morrison

But in Protestant East Belfast,

a young Van Morrison -

the founder of the Belfast blues scene -

had unique access to the new sounds.

Belfast was a busy international port

where Van's dad worked as a shipbuilder -

and just as in Liverpool and Newcastle,

the port gave the Morrison household access to the R&B records

coming in from the States.

MUSIC:

Well, I think we was very lucky,

because we had a great record collection of gospel, blues, jazz -

we just played this stuff.

The first time I heard Ray Charles, I completely just...

You know, it totally just changed my life.

I went out and bought the records immediately.

They were hard to get, then.

You had to go to a specific place at that point, there was...

In Smithfield, there was a shop that got these 45s.

There was no scene yet in Belfast,

but at least the music was being heard.

100 miles south, over the border in Dublin,

it was being strangled at birth.

There, the twin powers of church and state didn't want new music -

they wanted very old music...

..a kind of state-sponsored folk music,

designed to form the bedrock for this new Gaelic and Catholic nation.

MAN SPEAKS IRISH

Not an ideal breeding ground for the aspiring rock musician.

This church-state compact

was an utter disaster

and we were trapped by it.

It was...an appalling fraud on the Irish people.

Frankly, I wish England had never left Ireland.

I think we would have been a lot better off, you know?

We were going to be colonised by someone and as it happened,

the coloniser which took over was the Church

and that was disastrous.

If the Brits hadn't left, that wouldn't have happened.

My dad grew up in the '50s and '60s.

He could remember sermons

in opposition to jazz, you know?

The Catholic Church had so little on its mind in those days,

that they would preach against jazz and rock and roll.

With rock and roll being repressed

by watchful clerics south and north of the border,

a uniquely Irish solution emerged -

the showbands.

MUSIC: Johnny B Goode

The hits of the day, but played by Irish lads,

who toured the ballrooms right across the island.

It was like the circus coming to town.

Everybody saw it - entrepreneurs saw it, priests saw it,

making money for the parish.

There was no drink

and the priests used to oversee that they didn't dance too closely.

And from that moment, it was like a disease spread right round Ireland.

The showbands provided a valuable training ground

for two of the first generation of Irish rock musicians.

The Northern Ireland Protestant, Van Morrison...

..and the Southern Irish Catholic, Rory Gallagher.

It's a dance band, you know?

You do everything, from classic Brothers material to rock and roll,

to pops, to everything.

But it was a good schooling, you know? And you got...

You got your wings there.

If you were playing in showbands, where you had to play

other people's music that you didn't really want to play,

the ultimate goal would be to have a band that would play

the music that you wanted to play.

MUSIC: Mystic Eyes by Them

In 1964,

19-year-old Van Morrison formed an R&B band

and named it after the 1950s horror film "Them".

They got a residency at a trad jazz club called the Maritime Hotel

and so was born the Belfast blues scene.

And we went down and we got to the stairs

and you could hear it on the stairs -

this pounding, electric rhythm.

Really raucous, really loud.

God almighty, you know? It was just... "What's this?"

It was just exciting.

For me, it was like being in Memphis or something, or Chicago

and here it was, on my doorstep.

And they were great teen anthems -

Gloria, Here Comes the Night...

Just really great songs.

Within six months,

Them were in the top ten with one of the abiding anthems of British R&B,

the Van Morrison-written "Gloria".

# Lord, you know she comes around

# She's about five feet four

# Right from her head down to the ground

# Well, she comes around here

# Just about midnight

# She make me feel so good, Lord...#

Gloria, I mean, it's an amazing song isn't it, you know?

It's just like an Irish Chuck Berry song in a sense, you know?

It's got the simplicity of Johnny B Goode,

but this is like...

This is Van The Man, doing his thing.

# Gloria

# I want to shout it out every day

# Gloria.. #

I mean, it was great, because up to then,

it was like English, British bands that were happening all the time

and this was the first real Irish band that was happening, big time.

Them had another big hit...

..but Van Morrison soon found the constraints of pop

almost as restricting as the show bands.

By the time we'd got to Here Comes The Night,

to me, that was, you know, going in the direction of making pop records.

That's not really what I wanted to do...

That wasn't what it was about.

So that's where it all started to go haywire.

Van Morrison quit Them

and took the time-honoured Irish path to America,

to launch a solo career.

But in his wake,

the blues scene in Belfast had attained legendary status

and had caught the eye of his fellow showband veteran, Rory Gallagher.

# Everyone is saying what to do and what to think

# And when to ask permission when you feel you want to blink

# First look left and then look right and now look straight ahead

# Make sure and take a warning of every word we've said... #

250 miles south in Cork,

Rory uprooted his newly-formed blues trio Taste and headed north.

# Fireman, please won't you listen to me

# Gotta pretty woman in Tennessee.

# Keep rollin' on

# Keep rollin' on.

# Goodbye, goodbye It's all over now

# I'm movin' on... #

Rory Gallagher came to Belfast in 1965,

equipped with the first Fender Stratocaster

to ever arrive in Ireland.

RORY GALLAGHER JAMS

He has a really great, very visceral kind of approach.

It's very physical, very sort of tactile

and then the other thing was, it was just raw, you know?

It was very improv-based, you know?

There was a groove to what he did that was sort of sexy

and there's not a lot of people that I listened to coming up

that did that in the realm of sort of rock stuff.

You'd find '50s guitar players that did it,

but in rock and roll, it's usually much more straight ahead.

This had a kind of roll to it.

Over the next 30 years, Belfast became Rory's spiritual home

and he became one of its best-loved sons.

Rory sort of regarded Belfast as his second home, anyway.

And the first time I saw Taste,

it would have been '67 in the Maritime

and it was like, devastating.

I mean, when they finished...

I mean, the crowd were just stunned by the whole thing. It was amazing.

CROWD: We want Rory! We want Rory!

I mean, Rory was becoming a bit of a star around the town, you know?

You'd see him around town and people would just recognise him.

But he saw Belfast as a Northern Catholic,

as he'd been born in Ulster, before moving south to Cork.

And in the 1960s, the Catholic minority

were beginning to demand equal rights in Northern Ireland

with the Protestant ruling majority.

Probably from growing up in the North of Ireland,

Rory could see that my father had been victimised,

in terms of getting work in Derry,

cos of the side of the water he lived on.

Obviously, his love of the blues - it wasn't just playing the music.

Rory was reading a lot on civil rights in general,

which was very parallel with the movement in the North of Ireland.

I wouldn't regard myself as a top 20 musician at all,

even though I might be...

I could write a top 20 song, but I wouldn't, but...

I don't think that's important, you know?

# Go on and ask him his name

# Let him try and explain... #

Taste may never have been in the pop charts,

but this was the period of the power rock trio,

led by Cream and Jimi Hendrix...

..and driven by Gallagher's guitar virtuosity,

Taste quickly moved up their ranks.

# Tell the man, lift him up

# Hand him a paper cup

# Take away that gin... #

Taste were a great band in Ireland's bid for...

..hard rock.

In an age of guitar heroes, put Rory up there.

I saw him at the Isle of Wight, up against The Doors, The Who,

Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen.

I would put them, at that festival,

top three acts - easy.

We lived on an island, the influences on us were limited

and rock music provided us with a great window on the world.

But we assumed that the gatekeepers of this window

were all either English or Americans.

It was only really when Rory Gallagher came along

that we realised that this world of rock music

could also be interpreted by Irish people

and for a student in the 1970s, that was a very big eye-opener -

that we could have a local Cork musician

who would become a world star.

MUSIC: Leavin' Blues by Taste

The Isle of Wight was Taste's swan song...

..but not before they played Belfast's Ulster Hall one last time.

This was a very different Belfast.

Sectarian hatred had erupted.

The Civil Rights movement had led to violent confrontations

and had eventually been supplanted

by Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries.

There was murder and mayhem on the streets.

There had been quite a harmony.

It was extraordinary to see

how the whole thing so quickly got so radical.

The unique thing was that you had the Ulster Hall,

where Taste were playing, with the unity of young fans...

and at the same time, it was being used as a so-called church

by Ian Paisley at that time.

It just seemed to get worse and worse.

By the end of the '60s,

the blues boom in the divided city of Belfast

had produced two of rock music's most enduring stars -

Protestant Van Morrison

and Catholic Rory Gallagher.

It was time for folky Dublin to catch up.

Rory was huge in Belfast. It seemed to be bigger up there.

You always got the impression that if you went up there,

you'd a better chance of getting from B to A, than from here.

But that changed.

Everything just took off in Dublin.

It was unbelievable.

In the late '60s, Dublin was still a predominantly folky town.

HE SINGS A FOLK SONG

But it moved on from the enforced Gaelic culture

of a decade earlier.

Folk was now fashionable -

and out of this scene came Dublin's first bona fide rock star.

# I am your main man if you're looking for trouble

# I'll take no lip, no-one's tougher than me

# If I kicked your face you'd soon be seeing double

# Hey, little girl, keep your hands off me

# I'm a rocker... #

Philip was one of those guys who believed that...

every morning that you got up, you dressed in leather trousers

and that there was a limousine to take you to Tesco's.

# Down at the juke joint me and the boys were stompin'

# Bippin' and boppin' and telling a dirty joke or two... #

He knew his Irish history.

He could even speak a good bit of Irish

and he was very proud of being Irish,

there's no doubt about that whatsoever.

But he was still black

and he liked being black.

Philip Parris Lynott was born in Birmingham in 1949

to an unmarried 18-year-old Irish girl and a Caribbean father...

..but soon was sent to Dublin.

You see, I'd kept a secret from my parents that I'd had a child -

never mind a black child -

and thank God, they had got a heart

and they told me that they would take him.

It all began in 85 Leighlin Road, Crumlin, Dublin.

Well, I was brought up in a corporation scheme,

where every house looked the same

and the biggest way to get a reputation was to be tough -

and I got myself a reputation!

Philip used to carry a hurling stick in school

and he would just lay into anybody that said anything to him

about being black or "Hey, Sambo, way back home", which he did get.

Phil was at school with me.

The only black guy in the whole school, right?

So everybody knew who he was, you know?

After a couple of years I found out that he played in a band.

It was called The Black Eagles and Phil was great.

He wasn't playing bass, he was just singing,

but he had a great voice and a great presence.

His stage presence was just brilliant.

By his late teens, Phil was a face on a hip Dublin beat scene.

The beat scene in Dublin was traditional stuff,

but with a hippy undertone to it, alternative folk,

and Philip would go down and play and sing folk music

with a lot of these people, as well.

Eric Bell was a Belfast blues guitarist

who'd played with Van Morrison

and when Eric joined forces with Phil Lynott,

Dublin folk met Belfast blues for the first time.

That was how Thin Lizzy started.

If anyone asked Philip, "What do you want to be?"

"Rich and famous."

It wasn't a big, long-winded explanation -

"rich and famous."

So he knew exactly what he wanted.

MUSIC: Shades Of A Blue Orphanage by Thin Lizzy

# And it's true

# True blue

# Irish blue... #

He was a very interesting writer, you know?

The first time I ever heard the word "Dublin"

in a song that wasn't a folk song or a traditional song

was in a piece he wrote.

"I always said that if our affair ended, I would leave Dublin"

and there was a kind of curious validation in that -

just those two syllables being included on a record anywhere.

Once in London, Lizzy signed to Decca records

and Phil set about his task of becoming

Ireland's most famous Irishman.

Philip's trying to belong -

"Look, I'm more Irish than the Irish, you know?

"I'm black, but I'm more Irish than the Irish,

"even though my dad was... whatever the fuck, you know?

"Look, I'm writing your songs for you".

Insisting on a Celtic mythology.

Look at his Jim Fitzpatrick sleeves -

and of course, Philip loved all this.

MUSIC: Whiskey In The Jar by Thin Lizzy

The band hit on the idea of doing

a rock version of an old Irish folk song,

but were struggling with the sound.

Philip put on this cassette and it was The Chieftains

and I suddenly said, "That's what you want -

"traditional Irish pipe -

"try and get it on the guitar."

The chemistry worked.

The mix of Dublin folk and Belfast blues

created a timeless classic, which Lynott desperately wanted.

# I first produced my pistol

# Then produced my rapier

# I said "Stand-o, deliver

# "Or the devil, he may take you

# Musha ring dum-a-doo-dum-a-da

# Whack for my daddy-o

# Whack for my daddy-o

# There's whiskey in the jar-o... #

While Phil Lynott was basking in the glory of his debut

in the British charts...

MUSIC: Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison

..across in New York,

Van Morrison was still on a search for his sound,

despite a solo top ten hit.

# Heart's a-thumping and you

# My brown eyed girl

# You my brown eyed girl. #

My original intention, where I was coming from, musically,

was rhythm and blues and soul.

I just wanted to break everything down and...

..create my own soul music.

# If I ventured in the slipstream

# Between the viaducts of your dream... #

Once Van Morrison finally got control of his output,

he released a series of albums

that expanded the boundaries of rock music.

# Could you find me? #

They chronicled his own personal journey into the mystic,

but were also shot through with Irish themes,

like exile and redemption.

# Lay me down

# In silence easy

# To be born again

# To be born again... #

A singular, really original,

intuitive and instinctive genius is Van Morrison...

..and he took this bedrock of excellence -

the blues and jazz -

and he married it to this other feeling,

using this...Yeats-ian language.

It was profoundly Irish Van Morrison,

in that he tuned in, instinctively, to language.

Primarily, yeah - I'm an Irish writer and I think that...

I mean, I think... We're preoccupied with the past, because...

you know, we're sort of trying to get to

transcending the mundane existence.

# Down on Cyprus Avenue

# With the childlike visions leaping into view

# Clicking clacking of the high-heeled shoe... #

Like many an exiled Irish artist,

Van was preoccupied with the city of his childhood.

What Joyce did for Dublin, Van did for Belfast.

# Marching with the soldier boy behind... #

There's a preoccupation with the past - it's not sentimental.

I mean, the actual street...

Rather than being like a street with a row of houses,

you're coming away thinking that this is an incredible place,

it must be, it has to be.

I mean, the lives that have been lived in this place

and the things that have happened.

East Belfast is so topographically specific

in Van Morrison's work.

It is probably one of the most extraordinary examples

of imagination acted on by environment

in any art form I can think of.

And yet, it's also the launchpad

for his explorations of wherever he goes

in those extraordinary songs.

Van, I see as a priest.

You know, he's a searcher - all his records,

he's been on a search for God.

I call them sky-rippers - somebody who opens up the sky.

You look through, you know that there are other worlds

and there are other things going on.

And they're able to access something - perhaps psychically -

that other artists don't.

He was the first Irish artist, I think,

that shone a light on the fact that

there is a path one can take towards healing.

One could argue...

that perhaps he hasn't got there.

But what's important was that he showed that there is a path,

that the rest of us could take.

Van's healing journey constantly brought him back

to the idyllic days of his Belfast childhood

and in the process,

he imprinted the street names of the city

on the imaginations of his fans around the world.

But he was singing of brighter times.

In the '70s, other Belfast streets were becoming world famous.

NEWS REPORT: 'Daly's bar, on the Falls Road, was crowded with people,

' waiting to watch...

'..a similar explosion in a pub in the Shankill Road,

'a Protestant pub.'

Then, on 31st July 1975,

the terrorists threatened the future of Irish music itself.

Up to that point, the troopers of the music industry -

the show bands - continued to play the ballrooms

on both sides of the border.

On that night,

The Miami Showband had played Banbridge in the North

and were heading home after the gig,

when they were stopped by a gang of paramilitaries, who began to fire.

I was actually shot with a dum-dum bullet

and a dum-dum is an explosive bullet

and when it went in, into my gut,

it exploded into 13 pieces

and all the other guys were falling on top of me

and I could feel them just thumping on top of me.

I think Brian was dead very quickly.

He had been shot in the back and in the back of the head

and they turned Fran over...

and he was lying on the ground,

he was crying and asking them, "Don't kill me".

They shot him 22 times,

but 17 of those was in his face,

because he was, as you said, a particularly good-looking lad

and Tony had been hit in the back of the head

and in the back and his hands...

..and...

..with multiple injuries as well.

And I heard somebody on the road shouting,

"Come on, I got those bastards with dum-dums. They're dead."

The guy didn't fire into me.

He just left.

Three band members were murdered that night

and two seriously injured...

..innocent victims of a complicated game

of false propaganda and collusion.

Miami Showband...

I mean, that was when a place that already seemed difficult

seemed almost impossible

and you just can't imagine it getting any worse than this.

Belfast had, I think, pretty much ceased to be

a place where musicians would come.

'Well, it's time for me to stop "Messin' With The Kid",

'and hand you over to Rory Gallagher!'

MUSIC: Messin' With The Kid by Rory Gallagher

Virtually no-one, apart from Rory Gallagher, that is.

Now a hugely successful solo artist,

Rory never abandoned his adopted city.

He became a hero to the music-starved Belfast fan.

MUSIC: Goin' To My Hometown by Rory Gallagher

'In an Irish tour,

'I always try and include Belfast and the North of Ireland.

'After all, I lived there for a while

'and I learnt a lot playing in the clubs there.

'So I had a certain home feeling for the place.'

# I'm gettin' lonesome I'm gettin' blue

# I need someone to talk to

'It's always a great audience in Belfast.

'It's a pity almost no-one else goes to play there.'

# Now let me tell you where I'm going to

# Yes, I'm goin' to my hometown

# Sorry, babe, but I can't take you

# Yes, I'm goin' to my hometown

# Sorry, baby, but I can't take you

# Only got one ticket

# You know I can't afford two

The dates - they'd have to wait until a ceasefire,

which normally happened over Christmas, anyway.

But it was always a fragile peace

and you'd be told,

"Well, no - there's no way you can drive down to Dublin tonight".

He took the risk of being stopped by rogue paramilitary outfits.

But Rory wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

He said "Well, I'm certainly not going to go back

"and play Dublin and Cork and not play in the North of Ireland".

- # Do you wanna go? - Yeah!

- # Do you wanna go? - Yeah!

- # Do you wanna go? - Yeah!

- # Do you wanna go? - Yeah!

- # Do you wanna go, baby? - Yeah!

- # Do you wanna go? - Yeah!

# Do you wanna go? #

There was always this thing about "where did Rory Gallagher come from?"

I remember Taste were one of Maritime bands,

so I always thought he was from here, you know?

There's an example of someone who defied the border

and those difficulties.

I just want to continue playing.

I want to be able to walk into a shop

and buy a bar of chocolate, if I want to,

or go into a bar and have a pint, without being besieged all the time.