Shiraleo - Belfast City's Power Pop Classic

My enthusiasm for association football and popular music alike did not long survive the fading out of the 20th Century. It terminated essentially with Matthew Le Tissier of Southampton FC, Blackwood's Manic Street Preachers and Therapy? from Larne in Northern Ireland (or Ulfreksfjordr in its appropriately dark and menacing Old Norse).

Some posts ago I referenced Mark J Prendergast's Irish Rock: Roots, Personalities, Directions
from The O'Brien Press which remains for me the definitive overview of Ireland's rock music history. There are excellent narratives here on the careers of Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, Horslips, Van Morrison and U2 though with no further editions following upon from its 1987 publication the coverage missed out on globally successful Nineties artists such as The Cranberries, Ash and The Divine Comedy.

The book was released at a point where the careers of Ireland's main punk and New Wave acts had drawn to apparent closure. Northern Ireland's Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones fell apart in 1982 and 1983 respectively after the release of their fourth albums Now Then and The Sin of Pride respectively. In the Irish Republic The Radiators From Space disbanded in 1981 having produced two albums in the late Seventies while fellow Dublin act The Blades broke up in 1986 after The Last Man in Europe and Raytown Revisited releases of the previous year.

However I can clearly recall some other Northern acts from the time who put out material that has dated fundamentally well in the main.  In particular there was The Moondogs of Derry who had a great run of single releases from She's 19/Ya Don't Do Ya on the Good Vibrations label onwards and who eventually were gifted their own 1981 seven-part music show on Granada TV - this without even releasing an album or having well-connected parents in showbusiness for that matter. Guest artists included The Boomtown Rats, David Bowie and The Police.

There was also Bankrobbers who were the support act I saw on the SLF Now Then gig in Belfast. They opened for The Kinks at one point in their career and their incredibly catchy Jenny single in 1983 was performed on a special Belfast edition of Tyne Tees' The Tube on Channel 4. That Petrol Emotion in turn had an impressive creative run through from their debut Manic Pop Thrill album in 1986 right up to the fantastic Hey Venus single at the start of the next decade which I remember hearing on crackling early hours London wavelengths as Radio Luxembourg's Power Play of the week. Then there was the equally wonderfully named Ghost Of An American Airman whose debut I Hear Voices single in 1987 remains a smart and melodic pop record alas buried in some questionable production values of the period.

Every edition of Moondogs Matinee commenced with a rendition of the artist's Power Pop. The other Northern Irish band long associated with this particular rock genre - of the stylistic ilk of Badfinger, The Raspberries, Flamin' Groovies, Big Star or The Knack  - was The Starjets from West Belfast's Falls district who were formed in the Summer of 76.

Unlike other gritty and aggressive punk sounds produced on the city's very mean streets, earlier concert material performed by The Starjets included The Archies' Sugar Sugar and The Beatles' Please Please Me. Their harmonious sound and clean-cut look had them labelled as The Bay City Rollers of Punk in some clearly spiteful quarters as their career started to roll. Having moved to London and signed to Epic Records they released several singles and one long player God Bless The Starjets in 1979 - the only commercial success coming from the War Stories 7" which reached Number 51 in the UK charts and rewarded them with a performance on the BBC Top of the Pops.

War Stories namechecks several Sixties and Seventies British comic book legends from back in the day when the only safe space a teenage boy needed was throwing himself headlong into a World War Two dream landscape after his own da had finished reading the travails of Captain Hurricane, Johnny Red and Sgt Fury himself in Victor, Battle, Valiant and the wee ubiquitous Commando magazines. All good healthy preparation for the Sven Hassel and Leo Kessler Wehrmacht pulp to come of course. The Johnny Red story title I now realise was wordplay based on the Johnny Reb nickname bestowed by Yankee soldiers on the Confederacy rank and file in the American Civil War - a large section of which were of Scots-Irish descent as indeed was Ulysses S Grant whose family hailed from the beautiful county of Tyrone.

The Starjets released a final single Shiraleo in March 1980, changed their name to Tango Brigade for a final release called Donegal and split up. Singer Terry Sharpe then cultivatied more public appreciation with The Adventures - this including a Top 20 single Broken Land and Top 30 album The Sea of Love.

And thus the Belfast post-punk group's story would reside in the dusty and scratched vinyl annals of British and Irish chart rock history were it not for the fact that Shiraleo happens to sound today as effective, sunny and engaged a piece of Power Pop as anything released by the international artists named above - up there with No Matter What, Tonight, Shake Some Action, Back of My Car and Good Girls Don't.

Several public comments on Youtube seem to clearly concur with that appreciation alongside disbelief as to how The Starjets final single commercially flatlined on the musical radar screen:

It must be heartbreaking to write a killer song such as this only to see it fail...

If I had written this, and released it, and it hadn't made the charts, I would have gone mad with frustration. I don't know how The Starjets stood it....

I was baffled at the time, thought it had all the right ingredients to be a big hit - shame.

Powerpop Punktastik...why wasn't this anything like a hit?

Now having listened to the song a lot over the past few weeks - and even with the twin qualifications on board that I cannot fathom the meaning of the lyrics and that the group did not play that often in Belfast during their very fleeting brush with chart fame - it has nonetheless brought back a raft of memories of teenage years in Northern Ireland in the Eighties.

Granted these stand a long metaphorical distance away from how John Luke's previously discussed portraits of Ulster life can instill measured melancholic reflection upon vanished urban landscapes and rural idylls from the Fifties. Nonetheless the music does concentrate the mind on a strangely disjointed and still little analysed decade that played out under considerable strain and darkness in a troubled Ulster.

The levels of political discord and violence in the North were underpinned by the ramifications of the 1980-81 Maze Prison hunger strikes upon Sinn Fein electoral support and how the imposition of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the middle of the decade lead to loyalist paramilitary revival. Yet I remember other sustained features of life from the time that were to undergo staggering transformations ahead.

These include the absence of alienating (and now literally transhuman) behavior patterns gauged to the digital revolution, a world of employment and recruitment yet to be totally wankered into total checkmated oblivion, an existent connectivity with the afterglow of the Seventies Golden Age of cinematic and televisual excellence,  the sustenance of genuine creative spaces as directly linked to potential financial remuneration, heavily animated downtown landscapes full of financially sustainable commercial footprints, a generation gap still grounded on some residual deferential respect and a time when the past still felt close in comparison to this century's engineered drift and lack of focus.

So whereas on a personal level Shiraleo tends to engender somewhat bittersweet recall by way of the Ulster people and the places who have passed on from those days it is still  tied fast to memories which are fundamentally positive of a time when the nightmarish socio-economic and political shifts around us today were still to globally engage and seal fast.

An intelligent and empowering piece of Irish popular music in itself but also one that has yet excavated some long buried thoughts and feelings about the certainly unique, frequently edgy, often crazy and yet still wonderful place we either call or once called home.