Troubled Songs: Music of the Northern Ireland Conflict

I had the great idea of putting together a compilation of songs about the Troubles, by which I mean the violent conflict that erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and continued until the peace process of the 1990s mostly moved the conflict into the political arena. I am trying to look at the conflict through the way it was represented in song and to explore the events that inspired particular pieces of music. So I've put together slightly more than a CD's worth of tunes, which you can listen to as a playlist on Spotify or YouTube.

A word of warning: musically speaking, these songs are of variable quality and some of them are not good at all. I'm not expecting anyone to listen to these tunes over and over and feel that they have discovered some lost classics (although I think some of these songs are worthy of a wider audience). My hope more is that people will find the songs and the accompanying text an informative and interesting way of exploring these events that are now starting to recede into history.

But first a history lesson on the origins of the conflict, with the massive caveat that the historiography of the Troubles is itself a contested subject. In the 1920s Ireland was partitioned, with 26 counties becoming a self-governing free state (and later a fully independent republic), while six counties in the north east remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, with its own devolved parliament. The Unionist-Protestant majority monopolised power in Northern Ireland, keeping the Nationalist-Catholic majority marginalised, discriminating against them in the workplace and the provision of social housing. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched periodic military campaigns to force the British out of the Six Counties; these proved ineffectual and by the mid-1960s the IRA had tacitly given up on the armed struggle and was devoting its efforts more towards non-violent engagement with social issues.

In the 1960s a new civil rights movement emerged through which members of the Catholic-Nationalist community sought greater equality in the life of Northern Ireland. Inspired by the African American civil rights movement, this campaign used sit-ins, marches and civil disobedience to advance its goals. Members of the Protestant-Unionist community were unnerved, fearing the loss of their privileges but also concerned that the civil rights movement was simply a ruse by the IRA. At the time Northern Ireland had a reformist prime minister, but he was moving too slowly to satisfy the demands of the increasingly radicalised civil rights movement while also contributing to the sense of his own Unionist community that events were spinning out of control. Loyalists (hardline Unionists) reacted violently against the civil rights movement, attacking marchers (often with the overt or tacit support of the local police). Loyalist paramilitaries launched a bombing campaign.

In August 1969 Northern Ireland exploded, with rioting and sectarian violence erupting in the towns. The police lost control and the British Army was deployed. The previously moribund IRA was revitalised, with an influx of new members initially seeking to defend their communities but then seeing the disorder as an opportunity to advance the cause of Irish unification.

That's the background for these songs. I've only picked ones from the time of the conflict (so no "A Nation Once Again", "Only Our Rivers Run Free", or "Come Out Ye Black and Tans") and I've mostly avoided ones that address the conflict so obliquely that they could be about anything (so no "Invisible Sun" or "Spirits in the Material World"). I'm presenting them chronologically so that they can bring us from the conflict's start up to the time it began to fade away.

The Barleycorn "The Men Behind the Wire" (1972)

There was a brief moment where some Catholics in Northern Ireland welcomed British troops as a more palatable alternative to the Unionist-controlled police, but the honeymoon proved short-lived. Soon the IRA and British Army were trading shots. In an effort to crush the growing IRA campaign, the authorities in 1971 introduced internment without trial, rounding up Catholics suspected of IRA involvement. This proved controversial and also ineffectual, as the authorities had no accurate list of IRA activists. This song sees The Barleycorn protest against internment with a surprisingly jaunty tune, which spent three weeks at the top of the Irish singles charts (and was more recently sung by Alan Partridge's Irish doppelgänger). The Long Kesh prison mentioned was subsequently the site of the H-Blocks, where IRA and other Republican prisoners staged the blanket and dirty protests and then in 1981 the hunger strikes, in which 10 prisoners died.

Wings "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" (1972)

On Sunday 30 January 1972 in Derry British paratroopers shot 26 unarmed men taking part in a demonstration against internment, 13 of whom died immediately with another dying later. Unsurprisingly this caused outrage and led to a surge in IRA recruitment. Paul McCartney's Wings rushed this song out as their protest against the paratroopers' actions. It is a strangely anodyne offering, failing to communicate any real sense of shock and anger at what had just happened and featuring lyrics and a tune that are all pretty fatuous. It was banned by the BBC but still made number 16 in the UK singles chart.

Plastic Ono Band "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (1972)

John Lennon also felt the need to comment on Bloody Sunday and his band released this record, which I had somehow never heard before. Lennon's solo career I mostly associate with schmaltzy piano led ballads so this groover was a pleasant surprise. Unlike McCartney's tune, this actually engages with the events of Bloody Sunday and attempts to communicate a bit more detail about the history of the conflict, albeit from a partial perspective.

The Dubliners "The Town I Loved So Well" (1973)

The Dubliners are not from Northern Ireland (the clue is in the name) but their manager Phil Coulter was a native of Derry. Coulter is often portayed as the bad guy in Irish traditional music narratives: the breadhead impressario with the ear for cheesy pop adjacent tunes and plinky piano flourishes. Yet he wrote this affecting song for The Dubliners, sung here by the legendary Luke Kelly. By now the penny was beginning to drop that the Troubles were not going away any time soon. The song nostalgically compares the pre-conflict era, warts and all, with the disconcerting present.

I'm not including any related music but I should also mention the 1975 Miami Showband massacre, whose anniversary fell a few days ago. This saw three touring musicians killed and another two left for dead by loyalist paramilitaries. Following this horrific event many bands gave up on playing gigs in Northern Ireland.

Boney M "Belfast" (1977) Boney M were a vehicle for German record producer Frank Farian. They had already had a hit with a song about Depression-era gangster Ma Baker and would go on to release one about Rasputin, so why not a disco song about the horrors of the Northern Ireland conflict? This song could really do with a spoken word breakdown explaining the Troubles or a closing explanation along the lines of "Oh, those paramilitaries" but it's still a classic and with a few lyric changes could surely become a theme song for the Belfast tourist board.

Stiff Little Fingers "Suspect Device" & "Alternative Ulster" (1978)

Anyone who has scene the brilliant film Good Vibrations will be aware that punk was a big deal in Northern Ireland, with some even claiming that punks played an important role in keeping Belfast's city centre open at a time when many were afraid to go out after dark. Stiff Little Fingers were not shy about railing against the shit situation in which they found themselves, with "Suspect Device" skewering the paramilitaries promising a bright future while "Alternative Ulster" seems more hostile to the forces of the state. These could be the two best songs in this compilation.

Gang of Four "Ether" (1979)

Gang of Four were one of the more political of the British post-punk bands. In this song they evoke the enhanced interrogation techniques British forces took to using on IRA suspects (techniques subsequently recognised legally as torture). The H-Blocks get another mention and the song hints at an economic reason for the British presence in Northern Ireland with its reference to possible oil reserves under Rockall, an uninhabited island north-west of Ireland whose ownership is disputed by Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Kate Bush "Army Dreamers" (1980)

The song does not mention Northern Ireland but in 1980 this was the only place where British soldiers were fighting or dying, something that was probably not lost on the half-Irish Bush.

Eric Bogle "My Youngest Son Came Home Today" (1982)

Australian folk singer Eric Bogle is best known for his anti-war songs dealing with the futility of fighting for the British Empire, notably "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" and "The Green Fields of France". Here he gives us an anti-war song about the Troubles, which I first heard sung by Billy Bragg. I gather this has subsequently been adopted by Irish Republicans; if so I think they understand the lyrics differently to me, as I hear the song as articulating the pointlessness of dying for the IRA.

Fun Boy Three "The More I See (The Less I Believe)" (1983) The lack of any coherent message here is what appeals to me about the lyrical content, with the vocals just enunciating a sense of "what the fuck, that shit is fucked up" while the music has an appealing post-punk oddness to it that makes me want to explore further this band's work.

U2 "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (1983)

They used to say of peak-era method actors like Marlon Brando that you might not know what they were saying, but you definitely knew what they were feeling. And so it is here with Bongo and his buds. Reputedly the song has its origins in U2 being scheduled to appear at New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade but then withdrawing on discovering that the honorary grand marshal was likely to be deceased IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Like Edwin Starr's "War", the song uses the classic device of combining anti-war lyrics to a martial beat.

Paul Brady "The Island" (1985)

Strabane-born Paul Brady started life as a folkie but over the years moved in a far more lucrative AOR and pop direction. This is another song about the pointlessness of the struggle, with Northern Ireland compared to Lebanon (very much the poster child at that time for countries tearing themselves apart in internecine violence), with Brady contrasting his disdain for the IRA's struggle with his longing for a bit of seashore shagging. I could probably do without the smutty content but I've always liked the piano line in this song, although some consider that the tune veers overly into schmaltz.

Spandau Ballet "Through the Barricades" (1986)

Belfast native Thomas "Kidso" Reilly worked for a number of British bands, including Altered Images, Bananarama, and Spandau Ballet. While on a trip home he was out with some friends and happened to fall foul of some British soldiers, one of whom shot him in the back, killing him (the soldier was convicted of murder but released on parole after two years). Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp subsequently visited Kidso's grave and met his brother; while traveling through West Belfast he was shocked by the sight of "peace line" barricades that separated Catholic and Protestant areas of the city, and so came the inspiration for this song (Joan Lingard's YA novel Across the Barricades might also have played an uncredited part here). The lyrics centre on that great cliche of Northern Ireland fiction, a cross-community love affair. And for all the Yeats-quoting lyrics it is a song I am including here for its noteworthiness but not because I in any way like it. I'm not sure if it is actually bad or if it is just my youthful dislike of Spandau Ballet being impossible to shake off, but it does feel too much like a "lovely song" for me.

The Pogues "Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six" (1988)

In the first half Terry Woods sings from the point of view of someone who has had enough of Northern Ireland's political violence and is leaving, never to return. But then Shane McGowan sings of some of those who did leave, the people known as the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, who were convicted for IRA crimes (pub bombings in Birmingham, Guildford and Woolwich that killed 29 people and injured 320) they didn't commit on the basis of confessions extracted under torture and, in the case of the Birmingham Six, deeply flawed forensic evidence. The Birmingham Six and Guildford Four were subsequently exonerated but when this song was released its subjects were still in prison.Although doubts as to the safety of their convictions were becoming more widespread, suggesting their innocence and the moral corruption of the justice institutions was still controversial, and the Shane McGowan portion of the song was effectively banned from British television.

Simple Minds "Belfast Child" (1989) The title references Belfast, but the song appears to have been inspired by the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, when the IRA killed 10 civilians and one policeman. The melody draws on the folk tune "She Moved through the Fair", while the lyrics are somewhat oblique but suggest a certain "war is bad" sentiment.

Tina Turner "The Best" (1989)

What, you may be wondering, is this song doing here? Tina Turner has no obvious link to Northern Ireland and the song's lyrics do not suggest any link to the Troubles. But somehow this song became a loyalist anthem, often played when loyalists were celebrating a release from jail or a successfully completed sectarian murder. Loyalists are often portrayed as the irredeemable bad guys of the Northern Ireland conflict, their insularity, thuggishness, reactionary far-right adjacent tendencies and fondness for their links to a country that isn't that pushed about them making it easy to dislike them. There was also their tendency to really go for it with sectarian killings of random civilians, in contrast to the other actors who made a bit more of an effort to go after enemy combatants at least some of the time. And then there is their heavy involvement in the North's drug trade. So it isn't hard to see why some might describe them as simply the best.

The Cranberries "Zombie" (1994)

One tactic the IRA became quite attached to was detonating bombs in the commercial districts of English towns and cities. In 1993 the IRA hit the Cheshire town of Warrington twice, a few weeks between each attack. The first explosion caused extensive damage but no injuries, but the bombs exploded on 20 March on a shopping street injured 56 people and killed two children (one of them just three years old). Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries wrote this song in response. It's easy to scoff at the song's somewhat simplistic anger but I like how the lyrics reference "The Men Behind the Wire" and I feel it does capture the pointlessness of the IRA's struggle at this time. No longer could the Republicans claim to be defending Catholic communities in Northern Ireland and their efforts were not obviously bringing a united Ireland any closer, so it was hard to see what they were still killing and dying for. To many it looked like the IRA's war had become self-perpetuating and was continuing because the organisation's cadres could not see any way of stopping that would not be an admission of failure.

In the shadows though strange things were happening. Back channel negotiations were taking place between British representatives and figures close to IRA thinking, combined with more public discussions between the Irish and British governments and different nationalist-republican political leaders in Northern Ireland. Something was going on, even if no one quite knew what.

By the time "Zombie" was released as a single the IRA had already declared a ceasefire, which lasted until January 1996 before becoming permanent in July 1997, with loyalist paramilitaries eventually following suit. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 is seen as effectively bringing the Troubles to an end (even though the Omagh bombing later that year by dissident Republicans was the single bloodiest incident in Northern Ireland during the whole of the conflict). Since then the troops have come off the streets, the prisoners have left jail, and the gun has largely been removed from Northern Irish politics, which now revolves around a somewhat dysfunctional but non-violent enforced power-sharing arrangement.

Even so, Northern Ireland remains a divided society, with Belfast reputedly featuring more peace walls now than before the Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland's government regularly collapses over issues that seem pretty minor and inconsequential to outsiders. And intermittent street violence remains a thing, with loyalist mobs driving immigrants from their homes in riots a few weeks ago. But compared to the early 1970s it's all pretty quiet.

"Zombie" has had an odd afterlife, becoming a popular stadium song for sports fans from Limerick (the Cranberries' home town) and further afield.

The Young'Uns "Lyra" (2023)

The gun has largely departed from Northern Ireland's politics, but not entirely. The IRA went on ceasefire and eventually left the stage entirely, but various dissident Republican groups attempted to continue armed struggle against British rule. Their efforts have been relatively unsuccessful, although their attacks occasionally kill or injure people, mostly members of the security forces. In April 2019 during rioting in the Creggan area of Derry, dissident Republicans shot at the police and missed, but one of their bullets fatally wounded journalist Lyra McKee. Dissidents have not staged a fatal attack since then, so for now Lyra McKee remains the last person killed in the Troubles.

English folkies The Young'Uns commemorated McKee on their Tiny Notes album. Like all the Troubles' victims she deserves to be remembered as more than just a statistic, with her LGBT activism and investigative journalism making her an inspirational figure. Like the other victims of the conflict, she died far too soon. Some readers might find this song mawkish, but it brings tears to my eyes whenever I listen to it. Born in 1990, McKee came of age when the Good Friday Agreement seemed to have consigned the Troubles to the dustbin of history and looked like someone who represented Northern Ireland's future, except the past still reached out to claim her.

image sources:

Billy Campbell after being beaten by loyalists at Burntollet Bridge (Derry Journal: "Fifty year ago the People's Democracy organised civil rights march from Belfast to Derry bravely completed its journey")

British troops on the streets of Belfast, August 1969 (Guardian: "Paul Hill’s best photograph: the day troops arrived in Belfast, 1969")

Bloody Sunday: Father Edward Daly waves a white handkerchief as he tries to bring the fatally injured Jackie Duddy to safety (Ulster Museum: Bloody Sunday)

Miami Showband massacre aftermath (Belfast Telegraph: "The Miami Showband Massacre: 'They tried to wipe out the entire band'")

The H-Blocks (Irish Central: "Cillian Murphy, Jamie Dornan and Pierce Brosnan to star in new H-Block Jim Sheridan movie")

Bananarama at Thomas Reilly's funeral (RTÉ Archives: "Kidso Laid To Rest 1983")

Mugshots of the Birmingham Six, showing the beatings they had received after their arrests (The Conversation: "Would the Birmingham Six be victims of miscarriage of justice today?")

Loyalist mural, Belfast (The Clairmont Colleges, Digital Library)

Cupar Way peace line, Belfast (Wikipedia: "Peace Lines")

Emmalene Blake's mural for Lyra McKee, Belfast (CNN: "Belfast mural memorializes journalist Lyra McKee")

Gamelan Corner: Accumulation

Have a look at this:

That's the score for a piece called "Accumulation" by the American composer Daniel Schmidt. But first let me step back. After I previously used the score of Lancaran Serayu as a way of explaining some basic Javanese gamelan concepts I started thinking about what other Gamelan things I could write about. The problem I had though was that a lot of the other concepts are somewhat bitty and not always ones I could talk about at length. So I put that idea to one side. But then in my gamelan class we started rehearsing "Accumulation" and I found myself thinking it would be an interesting piece to write about.

So first up, who is this Daniel Schmidt guy? As you might have gathered, he is not from Indonesia but is an American composer and academic with a longstanding influence in gamelan and an associate of Paul Dresher and Lou Harrison. Schmidt is also a builder of gamelan sets. I understand him to be an expert in Indonesian gamelan forms but he is also a leading figure in the American gamelan tradition, which involves writing new pieces for the instruments outside the structures of the Indonesian forms but still in some dialogue with them. "Accumulation" is one of Schmidt's pieces and our director acquired the score from him when he paid a recent visit to his California home.

So a recap. Javanese gamelan instruments have two scales, Slendro (which runs 1 to 6 with no 4, but also has a low 6 below the 1 and a high 1 above the 6) and Pelog (a seven note scale from 1 to 7). The above piece can be played in Pelog or Slendro (that's what the "(sl or pl)" means). We are playing this piece in Pelog but if we were playing it in Slendro we would substitute a high 1 for 7 whenever it appears.

The numbers show the balungan line of the piece: its skeleton, approximating to the main melody line in Western music. The full stops are rests, where you don't play anything on the beat. The little hats above the numbers indicate that the kenong (one of the metal pot instruments) also plays that note, while the little u indicates that a kempul (a set of small hanging gongs) also plays then. The O around the number tells us that the big gong plays on this note; I think the sideways bracket on the 6 at the end of line F is telling us that the secondary gong plays then, but don't quote me on that.

Now, why are the lines in this piece numbered from F to A? Actually I'm not sure, the order could have been reversed. But what I can tell you is that with "Accumulation" we start with line A at the bottom of the page. You might think that we play line A, then we play line B, then line C, and so on to F. If only it were so simple. What actually happens is we play line A four times. Then we play line B four times followed by line A once. Then we play line C four times, followed by line B once and line A once. And so on. I think the collection and repetition of lines is also where the accumulation comes from. Also some of the instruments don't come in on the first line of each set of four plays of a line, meaning the sound builds in complexity.

What is it like to play? Well it starts off easy as lines A and B have a nice steady beat. But things get a bit crazy on line C, as it starts with a rest but then you have to play 2 and 3 quickly, with 2 on an off-beat, and more off-beats and fast plays coming later in the line. After that each line has either rests or off-beats (or both), which make them fuckers to play. I think Schmidt might have called the piece "Accumulation" because the difficulty of playing it accumulates. We struggled with this in rehearsal but we did get better over time (you could say our skill levels accumulated). By the time our class played it live we had reached the stage of hitting the right notes most of the time, which for us is a result.

I should add that the score above only shows the main balungan line (and by extension when the gong, kempul and kenong play), but there are other instruments playing different things. In Javanese gamelan these would have to interpret their parts from the main score (a process known as garap), but for "Accumulation" Schmidt has provided a score for all of these. See image below for the full score. Note that as well as the main balungan line there are four other lines as well, for the bonangs (two separate sets of pots), the saron (normally part of the balungan set but in this case separated (the screenshot is from a saron player's copy of the score, which is why the saron line is highlighted)), and the peking (a small balungan-like instrument played with hammers rather than mallets).

If that description has got you curious as to what the piece sounds like, there is recording of it on Bandcamp here.

You can read more about Daniel Schmidt here.

And if you are now so gamelan-curious that you would like to give it a go yourself, click here.

The films of David Lynch: a definitive ranking

Earlier this year I found myself on panel at Eastercon looking back on the career of David Lynch. In preparation for this I rewatched some of his films and thought a lot about the others. Here is my attempt to rank the films from worst to best.

Inland Empire (2006)

Lynch's last film is one of the weird ones, but on a rewatch its weirdness is relatively straightforward: there is a film within a film and there are people re-enacting the same events perhaps as the real people on whom the film(s) are based. It's not without its moments (e.g. the dancing hookers, Laura Dern's Erich von Stroheim channelling butler, the rabbits, etc.) but it all added up to a big "So what?" for me. I think what particularly irked me was the way it looks: it comes from that strange time when it was considered acceptable to shoot feature films using low-quality digital video that makes everything look a bit shit. The whole look of the film served to remind me of how the cinematography in David Lynch films is usually so much better than it is here. Also the number of screen-filling close-ups of people's faces seemed a bit excessive. Plus it goes on a bit.

Wild at Heart (1990)

I remember loving this when it came out but on a re-watch it all seems a bit pointless and, worst of all, like a second rate Coen Brothers film. Some of the violence just seems gratuitous (which may reflect the source material) while the capricious introduction of plot points that are then forgotten is highly annoying. The film has a certain panache but it's not something I would encourage people to see, and it does not surprise me that it is generally ranked low in Lynch's filmography.

Dune (1984)

We're into films I actually like now. This film was a critical and commercial failure when originally released, but time has been kind to it. It looks great and it is fun seeing loads of David Lynch regulars in key roles. Plus it has the wonderful scenery chewing performance of Kenneth McMillan as the Baron Harkonnen (and yeah I get it, that portrayal is problematic in many ways). I was particularly stunned on a recent re-watch by an early scene in the Emperor's court, where his audience chamber is over-run by various officials, little dogs, and various functionaries, just like in a real imperial court. The film also gave us the key phrase "The spice must flow", which never occurs in the book.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

In retrospect everyone loves the TV Twin Peaks but it's easy to forget how much the rambling and sub-par second series put people off the whole project. When this film came out people mostly reacted with a collective "not more Twin Peaks crap?"; critics sneered and audiences stayed away. But the film is dark and disturbing, one of the great horror films of the 1990s and it presages the surreal turn of Lynch's later pictures. I would probably rank this higher if it was a stand-alone work.

Eraserhead (1977)

Lynch's early low-budget classic starts as he means to go on with its industrial sound design and surreal touches. I would probably rank it higher if I could face ever seeing it again.

The Straight Story (1999)

I rewatched this recently after being disappointed by Inland Empire and Wild at Heart and was surprised by how much I liked its account of an old guy travelling hundreds of miles on a lawnmower to see his unwell estranged brother. It is genuinely moving but I think further contemplation is required on whether it is an aberration or a film that is thematically central to Lynch's oeuvre.

Lost Highway (1997)

This brought Lynch back to popular attention with its ambiguously linked stories of a jazz musician who starts receiving strange videos through the mail and whose wife might be having an affair, and a young mechanic having an affair with the wife of a terrifying mob boss. It's all very tense and unnerving, with the Mystery Man scene one of Lynch's greatest moments. The film also goes big on themes of sleazy voyeurism that are often a feature of Lynch's films, one that some might reasonably find problematic.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

It's another film with two ambiguously linked plots. And like Lost Highway and Inland Empire it moves proceedings from the older Lynch staple of small-town or rural America to Los Angeles. And it embraces the sleazy voyeurism (which not everyone would see as a good thing). While the relationship of the two plots is ambiguous (some might say otherwise), thematically the film progresses from its initial action-packed adventure to a world of increasingly oppressive darkness. One of the all-time great dark Hollywood films.

The Elephant Man (1980)

This will always have a special place in my heart as it was the last film I saw on the big screen before the cinemas closed for Covid. In some ways it is an outlier: like Dune it is not set in the United States, like The Straight Story it is based on real events. And while the David Lynch cliche is that his work is about showing the sinister darkness that lies underneath the shiny surface of happy life, this celebrates the human spirit and the goodness that people are capable of. But it still has its Lynchian elements. The voyeurism is here (the main character is after all someone people are invited to gawp at and in his first scene he is exhibited in the nip to medical students) but also the same kind of industrial sound design he has given us since Eraserhead. And while it never descends into outright surrealism it has its occasional strange flourishes. Overall though this is an astonishingly life-affirming film that would move even the most jaded of cynics.

Blue Velvet (1986)

You might call this entry-level David Lynch with its easily-understandable plot and neat exposition of his themes of voyeurism and the dark underbelly of everyday life, but it is the perfect summary of his work and obsessions. Also Heineken.

image sources:

David Lynch collage (The Movies that Made Me: "Remembering David Lynch")

Blue Velvet robin (Existentialism is a Film: "Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986): society is a social construct, it’s all made of dreams, and we can’t stop the robin’s dancing")

Music in Film 03: Star Wars, The Long Goodbye, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

I am writing about films I saw last year that had a strong musical element. Previous episodes can be seen here and here.

Star Wars (1977)

The IFI had this idea of showing films from series sequentially each Saturday morning in emulation of the cinema serials of yore (but sadly did not preceed each screening with an episode of Flash Gordon or King of the Rocket Men). I took the opportunity to see this one on the big screen, even though it was the CGI bullshit version rather than the now buried original release. It's still a fun film and watching does transport me back to when I saw it first. And it features many exciting musical moments, of which the greatest is probably the opening 20th Century Fox fanfare and the switch from that to John Williams' main theme, with the opening salvo an orchestral stab to rival the popular ORCH5 sample. Beyond that there are lot of Wagnerian leitmotivs but the most memorable musical bits are probably the jizz [sic] band in the Mos Eisley spaceport and then the bombastic medal ceremony music.

While I liked the film well enough I did not bother going to any of the sequels or prequels. Star Wars itself is by far the best and the endless attempts to milk the intellectual property have sucked much of the enjoyment from the other ones.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

This is the Robert Altman cat film in which Elliot Gould plays a guy who owns a cat who pisses the cat off by getting it the wrong cat food in a scene that will resonate to all cat owners.

The cat guy is also private detective Philip Marlowe and the film is an adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel in which Marlowe is caught up in a complicated caper involving an old friend in trouble, gambling debts, murder, and so on. Only unlike the olde Humphrey Bogart films this is the 1970s and Marlowe is schlebbing through a world where everyone else has given up smoking and the dames are into space cake and yoga. It's also scripted by Leigh Brackett, previously the queen of space opera in the pulp era before moving successfully into screenwriting (she famously wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back, following extensive discussions with George Lucas).

Brackett isn't the only link to Star Wars, as John Williams also did the music for this one. The older tune "Hooray for Hollywood" also features but mostly we get endless re-arrangements of the title track (by Williams and Johnny Mercer): initially sung over the opening credits, then as muzak in the supermarket, then being sung by some guy rehearsing in a bar Marlowe uses as an office, later being played by a Mexican marching band, and so on. Apparently this was Altman's idea and it suggests a certain drift into surrealism but I wonder if it also was a way of saving money.

Arnold Schwarzenegger also features. He does not make any music but at one point he starts to take off his clothes.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (2024)

This is a documentary about the coup that overthrew Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo. But it's got a lot of jazz music in it, as it tries to link the move towards Congolese independence and its aftermath with progressive jazz currents in the United States and also with jazz musicians being used as foot soldiers in the cultural Cold War. It is an odd film in any number of ways. I am not entirely convinced that director Johan Grimonprez successfully knitted together the jazz and Congo strands of the film, but as they are both subjects I am broadly interested in this was not particularly a problem for me. It is also formally interesting in that instead of having a load of talking heads appearing on screen to explain stuff it instead almost entirely featured archive footage, with onscreen text explaining stuff where necessary, combined with voiceover narration from the memoirs of various players in the Congolese tragedy (including our own Conor Cruise O'Brien, from back when he wasn't a reactionary, with excerpts from his book about the Congo read by his son Patrick).

The films is also pretty long (150 minutes), which might put off some people. However the Congolese content is fascinating and I think something people ought to be more familiar with, while the jazz footage is amazing and worth a trip to the cinema on its own, and not just for how funny Dizzy Gillespie is.

For me the two most striking moments in the film were non-musical. Firstly we had Belgium's King Baudouin arriving in Kinshasa (then probably still called Leopoldville) to mark the Congo's independence. At a formal ceremony Baudouin delivers a tone deaf speech pitching Congolese independence as the culmination of the great work of his predecessor, King Leopold II, who took over the Congo and ran it as a giant gulag for his personal enrichment, instituting a regime of such brutality that I sometimes think its main purpose was to make British and French colonial regimes look good by comparison. Lumumba launched an impromptu rebuttal denouncing imperialism, leading Baudouin to mutter to an aide "Is he [i.e. the Congolese prime minister] meant to be speaking?". What makes this all the more fascinating is Baudouin's physical resemblance to Ireland's own Enoch Burke.

And then there is the last known footage of Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was overthrown in a coup thanks to the machinations of the Belgians and the CIA, with the British security services and UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold playing their evil parts too. The footage shows him just before he is about to be bundled onto a plane and flown from the capital to a region controlled by Belgian-backed faux separatist to be tortured and then executed by a firing squad commanded by Belgian officers. Lumumba was always a sharp dresser with great charisma, and even here, as he sits dejected in a white shirt while his guards stuff pages from one of his speeches into his mouth, he exudes a defiance that seems to diminish his enemies.

images:

Patrice Lumumba with his future successor, Joseph Mobutu (BBC: Patrice Lumumba - Why Belgium is returning a Congolese hero's golden tooth)

King Baudouin (Wikipedia)

Patrice Lumumba bound (IPOB Ontario: Last letter from Patrice Lumumba, First Prime minister of Congo (born in 1925, assassinated by Belgium and its Western allies in 1961) to his wife)

Music in Film 02: All You Need Is Death, Eno, The Colour of Pomegranates, Portishead, Lone Star

I continue my trawl through films I saw last year that had a strong musical element. See the previous instalment here.

All You Need Is Death (2023)

This is Paul Duane's odd folk horror about these two song collectors who head up to Enniskillen because they hear there is a crazy lady (played by Olwen Fouéré, obv.) who knows a song that is indescribably ancient but has never been recorded or transcribed. Aspects of the film are deliberately enigmatic, like the early scene where the song collectors meet a client in a car park like they are conducting a shady drug deal rather than engaging in an entirely legal activity. And some of it is pretty funny, like when they meet an old singer (played by Brendan Gleeson), whose daughter makes sure they hand over any money for his songs to her and not to her alcoholic dad.

The soundtrack is by Ian Lynch. He is one of the Lankum people, so you probably have a bit of a sense of what the music sounds like: droney, trad adjacent, etc. He doesn't noticeably lend his vocals to proceedings, with the soundtrack mostly instrumental apart from a couple of points where we have characters on screen singing: the aforementioned Brendan Gleeson (who as well as being an actor has some interest in the world of traditional music), one of the song collectors (played by Simone Collins, who has a background in musical theatre), and then Olwen Fouéré herself singing "Old God Rising". That's the ancient tune the plot revolves around, a song in the language people spoke in Ireland before there was Irish, a song passed through the female line that no man is ever meant to hear. It is deliberately harsh and unnerving, sounding as much like a curse being called down as anything approximating to music.

But is the film any good? One of my friends said that she admired it more than liked it, and I see what she is getting at. You could argue that it is does well at first with the tension building as the song collectors move towards Enniskillen but that it becomes less coherent once the film has to deal with the complicated results of finding the song as opposed to the more focussed quest for it. And the film also has to roll with the limitations of its modest budget as it tries to portray the horrors unleashed by the cursed song. There might also be a sense that the film accelerates a bit too much in the last half or third, with perhaps a bit too much exposition left out in the interests of keeping things moving forward. Perhaps so, but I still like its enigmatic atmospherics and find myself interested in the idea of seeing it again. It is on IFI Home so Irish readers can check it out in the comfort of their homes.

Soundtrack available here.

PNYC: Portishead - Roseland New York (1997)

A film of a live performance by Portishead in New York some time after they released their second album. It made me think of a few things. Firstly, there is Portishead's second album, which manages to sound broadly like the first album except not as good, despite being recorded in a rather different manner: instead of the music being mostly put together from samples it was created by weaving together pieces of original music. The other thing I found myself reflecting on is that while Beth Gibbons is great on record she is less brilliant at fronting a live band: there is something very draining about her way of hanging onto the microphone for dear life while singing every song, with a never changing look on her face suggesting she is dying of the anguish.

The Colour of Pomegranates (1969)

There is music in Sergei Parajanov's enigmatic telling of the life of 18th century Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat-Nova but really the film is all about the visuals. It is a stunningly beautiful work that repays trips to the cinema whenever it is shown while also being the kind of film that would annoy plot-oriented people. I have developed a theory that this film is a major influence on Wes Anderson, particularly the more recent of his works that did not trouble themselves too much with narrative. As well as going beyond narrative, Wes Anderson films share a commitment to making things look great and might even have recourse to a similar colour palette.

Lone Star (1996)

John Sayles directed this greatest of films, which features a star turn in flashback sequences by Kris Kristofferson as Charlie Wade, the terrifying sheriff of a Texan border community, with the rest of the film set in the then present day after the body of the long vanished Wade is discovered, triggering a murder investigation for which the current sheriff's late father and former sheriff is the prime suspect (there are a lot of sheriffs in this film). A big thing is the way buried secrets of the past don't always stay buried, while the film also interrogates the history of border communities in parts of the United States that used to be in other countries. I really can't recommend this film enough: I think it is one of the five best films I have ever seen.

Music isn't a big presence in the film but there is a bit of Tex-Mex-Mariachi style stuff going on, which fits the whole Mex-American theme.

Eno (2024)

Gary Hustwit made this film about the popular producer, but I think Eno himself had input into the film's central gimmick: that it is different every time it is shown. I only saw it once so I don't know how different it is each time or whether the film has some stuff it always covers with the variation being in how much of it appears, or if the film sometimes leaves out entire sections of Eno's career. What I saw was broadly chronological, interspersed with present day stuff in which Eno yapped away about stuff (either past stuff he had been doing or his curious eating regimen). There was little-to-nothing about Roxy Music but quite a bit about his time working with U2, which was actually very interesting (and possibly would be even to people who are not that pushed about the popular Dublin band). They had quite a bit of footage of Eno and U2 in the studio ("That's great Bono - now could you do it again with a bit more passion") and I was fascinated by how they interacted. I got the sense that one of Eno's strengths as a producer might be a natural aptitude for plámásing people and avoiding confrontation while still pushing them in particular directions. You also got the sense that the members of U2 (who were all still pretty young at this stage) were in awe of Eno as someone who had worked with Bowie and Roxy as well as releasing cool albums of his own.

Eno generally came across as someone who has worked out how to live.

image:

All You Need Is Death (FilmGrab)

Music in Film 01: The Zone of Interest, Perfect Days, and others

Let's talk about some films I saw last year, but only where they have a significant musical content.

The Zone of interest (2023)

This is the Jonathan Glazer directed film about the guy who was in charge of Auschwitz, with almost all the action taking place in his house and its garden, which was located just outside the main camp. It features a stunning Mica Levi soundtrack of discordant noises that merges into the sound design, becoming at one with the strange and unnerving noises we hear continuously in the background (shouts, screams, clanking machinery, shots, etc.). The music contributes strongly to the sense of unease that permeates the film. I spent most of my time watching this on edge, waiting for something terrible to happen; then I realised that the something terrible was happening all the time. It does not surprise me that many people picked this as their film of the year, and the music and sound design combo is one reason why I pity people who did not see it in the cinema.

Perfect Days (2023)

Wim Wenders goes to Japan and makes a film about a guy named Hirayama, who cleans public toilets. initially it feels like is a film about the importance of just getting on with it and doing every day stuff as well as you can, with the film starting off by showing a typical day for Hirayama and then repeating that for a bit so you think "OK, this is not a plot film", but then there is a bit of a transition and gets a bit more plot-oriented.

Where does the music come in? Well Hirayama listens to music as he goes about his day. The music he listens to is from the 1960s and 1970s. Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" features (obv.) but also tracks by Nina Simone, the Kinks, Otis Redding and Patti Smith. And he listens to all his music on cassette, which I think is meant to suggest the extent to which he is aloof from contemporary trends. There is also a suggestion at one point that the music Hirayama listens to is somehow more real and engaging than the digital music of the young people, but that's a bit OK Boomer.

Some of the way cassettes are treated in the film seemed a bit fanciful. Like, people are always able to play particular songs from the start and never have to spend ages scrolling backwards and forwards to get to the right point. And at one point Hirayama's idiot co-worker brings him to a second-hand cassette shop, where it is established that second-hand cassettes are very expensive in Japan and that the various cassettes he owns could be sold for a pile of money. I had definite "O RLY?" thoughts at this point but it has long been established that any claim about Japan is somewhat credible.

Nearly all the music in the film is western, although I see from Wikipedia that there is a track by Sachiko Kanenobu; I don't remember when her track comes up in the film but reading about the album it is from on Wikipedia makes it sound like it might be worth investigating (influences of Pentangle, Donovan, and Joni Mitchell) and she so impressed Philip K. Dick that he later produced one of her singles (er wait, did I really read that?).

But there is one striking piece of Japanese-language music. At one point Hirayama listens to "House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals. And then later he is in one of those tiny Japanese bars you see in films and the patrons ask the manager to sing her song, and she sings a Japanese translation of the song, except the subtitles reveal that the Japanese lyrics are much more explicitly about prostitution and the song's narrator being trapped in that world (as compared to the English lyrics being so oblique that they make almost no sense when listened to closely).

Anyway, a good film and one I recommend to all cassette fans.

Poor Things (2023)

There is a bit in this Yorgos Lanthimos film where Emma Stone's character dances to music, yes? Overall though I wasn't really sure about this one. While never boring it felt like maybe it was a bit exploitative and wasn't really saying anything.

Dune 2 (2024)

The music was not as memorable as in part one. That might be because it was broadly the same, but also there was no Sardauker throat singing in this part.

Birdsong (2024)

A short-ish documentary by Kathleen Harris about Seán Ronayne, who is on a mission to record the singing of every bird in Ireland. That's nice, birds singing and stuff, except lots of the birds are becoming extinct due to climate change and habitat loss, so it's a bit sadface. I did find myself thinking that for all my sense that meaters are people with no moral compass there might be something to be said for eating wild and unfarmed deer, as they lack predators and are stripping the cover off the landscape that ground nesting birds need to hide in. There might also be something to be said for eating meaters. Or for reintroducing wolves to Ireland.

Devo (2024)

Not mentioned in this documentary is the bit in Watchmen where Laurie finds the night vision goggles Dan uses when he dresses up as Nite Owl and she says they remind her of Devo; then she has to explain to Dan what Devo are, as he is not really into new wave music. And a bit later Dan for some reason is wandering around in the nip but wearing the night vision goggles and he says "I guess I look pretty Devo, right?".