SIMPLE MINDS – “Belfast Child”
The facts: “Belfast Child” is a song written by Jim Kerr in grief and anger after the atrocity of the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, built on a traditional Irish folk tune. “I’m not saying I have any pearls of wisdom,” he’s quoted on Wikipedia as saying, “But I have a few questions to ask.”
Noble intentions rarely translate into effective outcomes. There are an awful lot of cynical and rude things one could say about “Belfast Child”. They might involve words like “stupefying”, “leaden”, and “is that the time”. Or indeed, “desperate”, “wannabe” and “Bono”. But that would be too glib, and would also underestimate the extent to which this kind of statement-making seemed at the end of the 80s like something rock music could and must do. Rock was now happening at a scale where its practitioners felt they should use it to raise awareness of certain issues and causes. The B-Side of “Belfast Child” was “Mandela Day”, premiered at the 1988 Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, the climax of this entire tendency – the line-up now reads like a nightmare of worthiness but there was no doubting the performers’ sincerity, or the cause’s importance, or the way that this idea of rock as a moral force had become naturalised since Band Aid.
But that very scale was also a trap. Kerr’s “few questions to ask” catches the problem – stadium rock amplifies and simplifies a musician’s feelings, and you need a remarkable level of skill to keep nuance alive in those circumstances (just ask “Born In The USA”). So when a musician “raised awareness”, it wasn’t simply in the form of a PSA, it was awareness filtered through their own understanding and response. “Belfast Child” rests on two assumptions which can’t easily be separated: that the situation in Northern Ireland is worth making this kind of record about, and that Jim Kerr’s take on that situation is a valuable lens for it. And if Kerr doesn’t really have a take – if all he’s got is “a few questions”, the same baffled anger and horror with which most of the mainstream mainland reacted to Northern Ireland, when they thought about it at all – then the danger is that the music he’s playing will shape itself into a take by its simple force.
Which is exactly what does happen. “She Moved Through The Fair” is actually quite a good song for the purpose – it’s about disappearance and death, the random and mystifying cruelty of sudden loss – and it’s got a lovely melody, the kind which would force the word “haunting” even if one wasn’t in the song. A straight cover might have been effective – OK, not a straight cover played by Simple Minds, but by someone. But “Belfast Child” takes the song’s weight and associations and won’t leave them alone: it piles on more and more over six long minutes, switching from cod-folksiness (“gallows tree” and that bloody tin whistle) to full-bore Rock Unleashed Mode.
The first sign of this shift is when Kerr sings “some say Troubles” with clomping emphasis and then turns the next word into a big arena rock growl just like the one he used on “Don’t You Forget About Me”. And now he’s getting to the real meat of the song he can properly let rip, so in come the drums and he’s off, yelling “Come on Billy!” and “War is ragin’! Cross the Emerald Isle!”. When surely the whole point of the record should be that getting quite so excitable about that stuff is a bad thing. But he can’t help it, this is arena rock and this is what arena rock does: the song is structured so that invocation of war is its natural climax. If you wrote a hands-in-the-air trance anthem about Gaza you’d end up with the same problem.
Scale and abstraction were once what made Simple Minds worthwhile – on New Gold Dream (“worldwide on a wider screen”) they were making big music too, as enormous, beautiful and unreal as the grid-plans for some great future city. Then during their chest-thumping years there was an exhuberant innocence to their huge singles, empty and absurd though they were. But this awfully misconceived thing is where it all comes crashing down. “Belfast Child” takes the grubby, botched, intractable brutality of the Troubles and makes them sound grand and mythic, which would be embarrassing enough even if it weren’t exactly what the fighters on both sides liked to play it as too.
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Speaking as someone who saw Boots for Dancing on a bill with U2 and Talking Heads, Nazareth are WAY better than the Proclaimers.
I once saw Sheena Easton at an open air concert in George Square about twenty years ago. She was proclaiming (ahem) how great it was to be back in her home town in an accent which sounded as though it had been sent by Western Union from Austin, Texas. Cans and bottles were thrown.
I loved how in the early eighties Radio Clyde would invariably refer to “Glasgow’s Simple Minds” every time they played one of their records (which was quite often; “I Travel,” “Celebrate,” etc. were big sellers up in Scotland but never crossed over to the national chart).
“I Travel” <– clue in songtitle?
re96
the embarrassed attitude towards one’s own cultural output has been described as ‘the cultural cringe’ (more detail at wikipedia) and is explored in Peter Carey’s novels for one.
@104 Like the “tall poppy syndrome”, “the tyranny of distance”, “the lucky country” (used ironically), a subject of endless Australian academic and media debate!
Has the “No Mean City” era of Glasgow not been awarded cuddly-toy status now. Alex (and Les), Frankie and Maggie, all national treasures – even my mum talks fondly of them, and she’s 77!
I think the adversities suffered by most of the “No Mean City”-era Glaswegians, has rather romanticised and sanitised our collective memories of them.
I want my hell-raisers back!
# 102 Didn’t she get a similar reception at a gay venue a few years ago ? Like the Dragon’s Den band she should accept that she’ll never transcend how she came to our attention; she’ll always be a pub singer who got a very lucky break.
I still can’t understand a word Alex Ferguson says, I darkly suspect Julia Gillard of exaggerating her ocker accent (to forestall accusations of either Welsh alienness or out of touch limousine leftish-ness), and Leon on Curb Your Enthusiasm is my fave comedy character since Susie Essman on Curb. Accents friggin’ rule. The world is full of complainers….
“I darkly suspect Julia Gillard of exaggerating her ocker accent ”
Just this past weekend I caught up with an old acquaintance I haven’t seen in 30 years, who’d been to school with Julia Gillard – apparently she’s just the same now as she was then (JG, not the acquaintance)
“If people outside Britain think of the Proclaimers nowadays, it’s with nostalgic fondness for one or two songs from the 1980s;”
Tick.
By the way, what is havering? I used to be (still am, really) crap at deciphering song lyrics, and at the time thought to myself “Sounds like havering, but there’s no such word, surely?”
@snif, 109. Excellent, then in that case she has a unambiguously magnificent accent, which I’m all for.
@109 – “Havering” is talking nonsense.
Havering
@112 – Ha! Bet it’s a place where every Scots tourist stops to get their photo taken next to the town sign.
Rory, although I assume he’s not being serious, has just illustrated my point perfectly. Non-Scots assume that it’s all part of Scottishness, but it’s not – it’s part of the cartoon.
“Havering” is not a widely used word. Yes, we may know what it means, but we know what “Och aye the noo” means as well, and to bring it back to Andy Stewart, we know what “troosers” are although not many Scots would actually use that word.
Rory, you’re Australian – how much of Barry McKenzie’s slang were you happy with? – “whack-o the diddle-o”, perhaps?
And Rory, I’m not having a go at you personally, just trying to put my viewpoint forward.
I’d always thought havering was included as a deliberate archaic term because the subject of the song is historical (well, I’m not sure if it’s specifically about emigration in the past or more generally throughout Scotland’s history including the present, but the fact it’s a “letter” and not a phone-call makes me think it’s largely historical)
To rethink #88 on the back of this (very interesting) debate, maybe when it comes to politicised cultural nationalism you have always to be aware that one person’s stance is another person’s kitsch, very much depending on where (and when) they’re standing?
(As in “these cartoons degrade us” vs “even our seemingly silliest moves are not to be sneered at”)
“Letter From America” surely an Alastair Cooke reference? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_America
So not a literal pen-and-paper deal. (well, in the song it probably is, but it doesn’t imply archaism to me, just the songwriters knowing a catchy/resonant title when they saw one.)
#117 That’s undoubtedly true, but the fact it also mentions sailing (from Wester Ross to Nova Scotia) also makes me think it’s largely a reflection on emmigation in times past. Do boats even sail from Wester Ross to Canada anymore?
.. and “Lochaber no more” I saw on an old 78rpm record once.
@114 – Not serious? Well, yeah, I don’t expect every Scots tourist would do that, but if I came across a town in England called “Boofhead” or “Drongo”, too right I’d take my photo next to it. In Australia I once made a 100km detour on a long and boring drive home to see a flyspeck of a settlement called Grong-Grong, just because it was called Grong-Grong. (Which doesn’t mean anything in particular, but come on, Grong-Grong.)
You say “it’s part of the cartoon”, but in that case it’s a cartoon that only Scots know. We’ve just heard from a non-Scot who didn’t know what it meant, and neither did I until I moved here. It’s not a word you hear outwith Scotland (like “outwith”), which is why its use was so striking to non-Scots in “500 Miles”.
But just because a term seems dated or cartoonish to some locals doesn’t mean others don’t or won’t use it. I’ve worked with people here, within the last decade, who say “och, aye” unselfconsciously. I know that’s not the norm, at least not in my circles, but clearly it isn’t unheard of.
And it doesn’t mean you can’t reclaim a term and reinvent it. I do that with some dated Australian slang, using it and keeping it alive, because it reminds me of older Australians I used to know when I was a kid, not least my grandparents. So your question about Barry McKenzie isn’t as straightforward as all that. I’m actually perfectly happy with his slang, because it’s a great time-capsule of its era, the late ’60s and early ’70s, and a testament to his creator, Barry Humphries, who actually invented a lot of it out of whole cloth, and brought to wider attention what previously had been very localized terms, some of which have since passed into the national language (like “chunder”). I wouldn’t myself go around calling women “sheilas”, because that’s very dated – but I know people who do, even today. There are regional and class factors at work in how any particular term is used and perceived; just as there could well be regional and class factors at work in your response to some of these Scottish terms. Glasgow isn’t Edinburgh, as we both well know.
So the Reids could easily have had more complicated reasons for using it than just playing to populist sentiment, to a “cartoon”. They used it on the lead single from their second album, the one after they’d already had a number 3 hit single and been feted down south. They knew they had a sizable audience who wouldn’t know the word. And they knew that the people who would know the word would also have known that it was old-fashioned or regional within Scotland (its first recorded use in the OED was by an Edinburgh councillor in 1721), and consciously using such a word can mean all sorts of things. And what does the word actually mean? To talk nonsense. Talk about an in-joke.
So we’ve got to sort out the “cartoon Scotlands” here, and how the Proclaimers relate to them. There’s the cartoon Scotland that the rest of the world knows: tartan on everything, Nessie, “och aye the noo”, all the tourist crap they sell on the Mile. The Proclaimers have nothing to do with that; they didn’t and don’t sing about it, they don’t pander to it, their music didn’t code that way to the Australian audience (and presumably Americans, but I’ll keep it to the audience I know). The stuff you object to, the “exaggerated, unnatural” accents, just sounded Scottish to us (cf my comments on Hogan and Irwin), and words like “haver” were just meaningless colour, but intriguing because of it. So we looked past those things and related to the music, the singing, the lyrics, and liked what we heard. That’s why I’m saying they don’t make the Scots look stupid to non-Scots; and if they make you look stupid to yourselves, and if your perception of how stupid they look depends on what part of the country you’re from (Edinburgh/Fife vs. anywhere else) and/or what class you come from, then we’re in classic cultural-cringe territory.
Back in Oz, musicians and writers and comedians and cartoonists play with the cultural cringe all the time. They toy with it and make fun of it and explore it as a way of reclaiming old identities and creating new ones, pointing out that there’s a there there, not just a few leftovers of our former colonial masters. And those cultural games don’t have much to do with other countries’ “cartoon Australia”, with its walking upside-down and corks on hats (both the invention of English cartoonists), although every now and then something breaks out and gains an international audience and adds to that bigger cartoon. Sometimes that’s accidental, but sometimes there’s a clever mind behind it, someone who plays off the national cartoon and translates it for an international audience – like Barry Humphries.
So no, I’m not embarrassed by Barry McKenzie. Of course it’s a cartoon: it started as one, and was written for a non-Australian audience, but in a way that nodded and winked to Aussies as well. Which annoyed some Australians at the time, too: the conservative government of the day banned a book compiling the original Private Eye strips on the grounds of indecency. If your jokes have any edge to them at all, there’ll always be someone who won’t like ‘em.
(And I very much appreciate your carrying on the conversation, vinylscot – no worries there on my account. I’m increasingly aware that I should have saved all this for #1054, but strewth, I mighta carked it by then. Someone remember to link back to it if I have.)
I’m just surprised you haven’t accused me of “crying stinkin’ fish in my own back yard.”, or is that one that Humphries made up for Barrington?
It’s odd reading your last piece, because although you’ve written it as if you disagree with me, our positions are actually pretty damn close, the difference being that you seem to be allowed to have your own cultural cringe (because to you it seems minimal), whereas I am not.
There are many recognisably Scottish artists I have a lot of time for; I have been a big fan of Alex Harvey (and he DID a Loch Ness Monster album), and Ivor Cutler since the early 70s. My record collection is full of Maggie Bell, Frankie Miller, Davey Henderson, The Associates, The Skids, The Delgados, Belle and Sebastian and many many others.
I don’t like the Proclaimers. I don’t like the sound of their voices. I don’t like their songs. I don’t like the way they use their accents; I don’t understand why they decided to make that their gimmick. I think it’s grating, childish, and phoney, and that it projects a worse image that any number of tins of shortbread ever could. I think their talent, influence and worth have been massively overplayed in the media – I keep thinking it’s all just a big joke, and some day someone will turn around and say “we were kidding all along – the Proclaimers really ARE sh*t!”
… and I’ll admit I don’t like the idea that anyone may take their accents, language, and overall image to be typical of Scots.
These are my own personal opinions, to which I am entitled. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if others don’t agree – they’re entitled to their opinions too, even if I don’t agree.
I’ve enjoyed the banter too (is that Scots slang?) Rory – have a good weekend.
I’m fine with all that, vinylscot – different strokes and all that – except that I never meant to suggest that I’m allowed my cultural cringe and you’re not, or that mine is minimal! My life has been a succession of cultural cringes and coming to terms with them – son of white-collar commuters growing up in a depressed rural town, Tasmanian living on the mainland, Australian living in Britain – and at various points along the way I would have said things about particular Australian artists that sound every bit like what you’re saying about the Proclaimers. I might even say the same things about some of them today. But my attitudes towards others have changed over time, as I reassess what they were doing or really do signify, in light of my experience as an expat or just having a few more miles under my belt. It’s a constant process of evaluation and reevaluation, which I don’t ever want to end, really. That’s what draws me to projects like Popular, which gives us license to reexamine our old thoughts about the music of our youth (those of us who were there, that is) and bring them up-to-date.
Don’t worry, though, I don’t think anyone ever did take the Reids as “typical of Scots”. More to worry about from Mel-as-Wallace and Groundskeeper Willie, I suspect.
Cheers!
Or The Chaps doing “McRawhide”
I always look to the other set of Reid brothers as being just as representative of Scotland as the other, myself ;-)
Lostboy! is a fine album, I agree, he is always best when doing what he wants to do; when I get to Sparkle In The Rain and Once Upon A Time I’m going to discuss the whole problem (yes) of being successful and happy and how this can influence your work.
# 102 For the sake of historical accuracy, I must correct Punctum about Sheena Easton. She was bottled off at Glasgow Green and not George Square. You would have seen Wet Wet Wet(Why god, why?) and The Associates there and I’m not entirely certain, but you might have seen Texas but you wouldn’t have seen Sheena who was due to headline at the Green later on in the day.
As for Simple Minds, I was a huge fan right up to and during the ‘Once Upon A time’ period but lost interest when Kerr decided he was a Scottish Bono. ‘Belfast Child’ is just the first in a long line of inexorably bad songs with dustbin lid lyrics; the nadir being ‘African Skies’ from the piss poor ‘Real Life’ album.
Don’t think anyone’s mentioned yet that “Belfast Child” featured in “Which Decade” last year, and at the time I admitted that the ambition, atmosphere and sheer scale of this record do win me over.
I’m not a natural advocate for Simple Minds. I remember a Q&A session with Jim Kerr on an 80s yoof TV show where he talked about sneaking into gigs as a youngster and then rounded on a kid who asked about high ticket prices for Simple Minds gigs with the words “Find another hobby”. If anything screamed “lost touch with his roots” that did.
Yes, you can say it’s bombastic and empty, and that getting excitable about the situation was a bad thing – but at least it put the subject on the table for discussion. How should pop react to the Troubles? Extremely difficult to say, but however you do it it’s worthwhile discussing it. From Bono’s own reaction to Enniskillen as captured on “Rattle and Hum” (introducing “Sunday Bloody Sunday” onstage the following day with the words “FUCK the revolution!”) to the Fun Boy Three’s downbeat and resigned “The More I See” in the wake of Ballykelly in 1982 (“they keep telling me it’s not my concern … does anybody know any jokes?”) Get it on the agenda and let’s argue about it then. Much the best aspect of “Belfast Child” is the borrowed tune and the atmospheric opening, but I can’t bring myself to despise Simple Minds for it as much as others on here do.
I’m very much drawn to Lena’s analysis about the diaspora and the pull of the words “come on home” – even though I have nothing like as much affection for this song as I do for the Pogues and Proclaimers songs she mentions. Oh, and by the way, re the above discussion, what about those who think the Proclaimers do convey a positive image of Scotland? – passionate, witty and inventive. Knowing nothing about Jesse Rae, I caught his video for “Over The Sea” on the Chart Show one day and thought, what the bliddy hell is this? (He’s now a Scottish Parliamentary candidate for Roxburgh, it seems.)
“If you wrote a hands-in-the-air trance anthem about Gaza you’d end up with the same problem.”
Random play has just brought me the Cafe Del Mar version of the Cranberries’ Zombie, which is making me imagine watching the sun rise, chillaxing to the thoughts “It’s the same old theme since 1916″.
Also–
Cover versions: Lives of the Great Songs I’m very fond of, but I like the structure of the history of a song thru different versions. What it has to say about The Cover itself is only implicit, though.
Proclaimers: The singing in, for example, The First Attack is among the “best” these ears have heard.
WAIT Surely I am not the first to note that the Proclaimers’ relationship with novelty is bunnyable.?
Why I love Popular, no.56. Who knew that this song would give rise to a heatedish debate about accent/language/identity in music? A couple of thoughts to add to the mix:
1) I’m guessing that the Proclaimers singing the way they they did in the mid-80s had at least something to do with (post)punk’s sense of place (Edwyn Collins and Roddy Frame spring to mind as 2 other singers who had allowed their accents to filter into their singing voices); as well as James Kelman, Irving Welsh and all points inbetween, OK Welsh as a published writer comes later, but the point being that the fraught cultural politics of ‘Scottish voices’ went and goes way beyond andy stewart and tartan shortbread, it seems to me.
2) but at the same time I think vinylscot has a point, in that singing-in-your-own-accent is never just ‘natural’ – singing isn’t just the same as speaking, and at least since recorded music ‘our’ musical voices are always plural – so accent is always a Choice, and therefore a Performance, and as such at the very least runs the risk of being heard both as giving voice to what has been silenced, and as a parody, cartoon version of itself. (Funny that Oasis got mentioned upthread as well)
3) also isn’t the issue here partly that there isn’t one single authentic Scottish (or anywhere else) accent and language? Another guess – maybe ‘havering’ sounds like cartoon Scots in Glasgow, less so in north Fife
Unapologetic local accent plus song about the Troubles much plugged on Kershaw/Hepworth/Ellen era-Whistle Test:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZCO0W05nCU
MMWatch: Everett True more sympathetic to ‘Ballad Of The streets’ than you might expect, February 18 1989;
“Tricky one this. Jim Kerr lets rip on a considered, blissfully naieve ballad on the A-side (‘Belfast Child’) which, while not exactly about to make any converts with its thrown-out vocals and mournful pipes, certainly does his fans no disservice whatsoever. The B-side has a couple of well-meant rabble-rousers, ‘Mandela Day’ and a cover of Gabriel’s ‘Biko’. If we’re gonna have straight-laced rock, at least let it be rock with good intentions.”
True awarded single of the week to the double A-side ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ Sonic Youth b/w ‘Halloween’ Mudhoney. Also reviewed that week;
Nirvana – Love Buzz
Throwing Muses – dizzy
Jesus Jones – Info Freako
Depeche Mode – Everything Counts (Live)
Dusty Springfield – Nothing Has Been Proved
S’Express – Hey Music Lover
Fuzzbox – International rescue
The Style Council – Promised Land
The Bangles – Eternal Flame
Bananarama & Lananeeneenoonoo – Help!
Michael Jackson – Leave Me Alone