I’m sitting in my bedroom aged about 14 or 15 and ‘Cattle and Cane’ by the Go-Betweens comes on the radio. Or maybe it is ‘Drop-out Boogie’ by Captain Beefheart. Or something by Sonic Youth ? Whatever it is, it’s speaking to me in a way that little else is at this time in my life. Outside my window there are fields falling away from the house. I can see tiny hedgerows and barbed wire fences, dirt tracks and cattle gates, and above it all a huge sky full of rooks.
I am deep in the country. All my friends live far from me and I’m feeling increasingly isolated every year. I’m hiding away here, tracing lines on my own - Warhol to The Velvets to Dylan to Ginsberg to Kerouac to jazz and back and forth. I’m making all these life-altering discoveries but I have no-one near me that I can share them with. No-one in my village would understand. The music coming from my radio makes me stop everything I am doing. It’s so beautiful. It sounds so new and strange to me, it takes me a million miles away from here. It confirms what I’ve probably known for some time now - as soon as I am able, I need to leave this place.

The call that my mother heard, the one that made her leave Scotland for Northern Ireland in 1969, was something that she didn’t really understand at first. But it stayed with her. When it sounded, it filtered through the Beatles and Motown records she and the other girls at work would spend a large part of their wages playing on the jukebox. It cut through the traffic and chatter of the crowds heading homewards when the factories spilled out ; people she had known all her life - from school through church and now work. It followed her along the coast walk, across the field to the main road, and remained with her when she closed the door to it all. On her last trip to Ireland something had told her to keep a coin from a machine at the fun fair stamped with the name of one of the boys from the group she was with. She found his name coming back to her every time she paused to think. The call my mother heard promised her a husband and a new life.
Her new life was to be in Northern Ireland at the start of the 1970’s. She arrived to find that my father-to-be had very little to offer her aside from himself so they moved into an old, retired caravan donated to them by my father’s boss. It was here that I was conceived.
I was born just after the start of the Troubles in a part of the country spread out in a network of tiny villages and towns, turning from farmland to the coast.
While most of the violence of the times seemed centred around the cities and the border towns, you were still very aware of the mistrust and caution in people. You were told to keep to your own, to be careful of where you went and of what you said. Thankfully our area escaped the worst of it but we still had regular army patrols through the towns, bomb scares at school, and our cars would be stopped and searched by soldiers on the country roads.
Division was everywhere. My village (like many other places) was marked to declare the predominant religion of the people who lived there. Kerbstones, bus shelters, old stone bridges were all painted in colours to show if the area was Loyalist or Nationalist, Protestant or Catholic. Sometimes you could follow the line of colours along the pavement of a town - from the red, white and blue of the Loyalists to where it turned into the Nationalist green, white and gold. They stood as boundaries, keeping people in as much as out.
Even music was used to divide. As a child I watched an Orange marching band stop outside the house of a Catholic family and raise their flutes and drums to a deafening level to goad those inside.

Seamus Heaney, a Derry poet, local to me, said of the huge Lambeg drum :

‘His battered signature describes ‘No Pope’.
The goatskin’s sometimes plastered in his own blood.
The air is pounding like a stethoscope.’

My first memory of music being brought into our house is of my parents singing to their now combined record collection while they worked. My father would play his country and folk albums, my mother her soul and pop. They stored their records rather carelessly in a box underneath the turntable with some of the vinyl long having lost their covers, and a few having my parents’ names scrawled over the labels. When I got older they would talk with pride about the bands they had seen in their youth and about the clothes they wore - my father swore that he owned the first Beatles suit in the town - but at this stage it meant little to me - I was just sitting there quietly listening to the sounds and words.

The call, when it came for me, made me walk out of my village one day and approach the farmhouse on the outskirts. There was a boy of my age who lived there with his father and sister. I did not know him very well at all. It was more that I knew of him and that I had heard that he loved music. No one from the village was very friendly to him as he came from a Catholic family. In fact he was normally chased out by gangs throwing stones or whatever they had at hand. For some reason I found myself outside his house that day.
I knocked on his door and told him my name. I told him where I lived and that if it was ok with him I would like to borrow some of his records. I can’t imagine what he must have thought but after a moment of looking me up and down he asked me what kind of music I liked. I’m not even sure that I had an answer to give him. I just liked music. I didn’t know anymore than that. All I knew was that I was hungry to hear as much as possible.
I ended up leaving his house that day with a handful of vinyl. I took them home and eased them out of their sleeves, careful not to scratch them. I listened to them until I knew them by heart.
Very quickly my new friend and I became inseparable. We would walk along the back roads talking for hours - I would always walk on his right side due to him having poor hearing in one ear. People began to grow accustomed to seeing us together around the village so it got easier for him. When we met we would swap magazines or tapes of bands that we had discovered, or even occasionally travel the 60 miles to Belfast to buy albums that we couldn’t find in our town. On the days that we wouldn’t be together I listened to the radio or stole my brother’s records. In the local town we met others and discovered a world of second-hand record stores and fanzines. We even became friendly with some of the students from the university and managed to talk our way into the gigs at the Student’s Union.
Music had quickly taken over my life to such an extent that everything including my school work started to suffer. This of course created tension at home. My parents saw a great academic future ahead of me. I only saw the need to get away. I still had no idea how that would happen.
On one of our long walks my friend mentioned that he was thinking of starting a band. He said that he was going to sing and play bass and that he knew a drummer and all he needed was a guitarist. The last time I had played any musical instrument was a failed attempt at learning the clarinet at school (which I remember ended in tears) so I was a bit hesitant, but in my head I could see those bands on stage at the university and it looked so much fun.
I bought a small amp and a guitar for £25 and came home and plugged it in. I had no idea how to even tune it but it felt kind of right. I stood in front of the mirror and played a made-up chord.
Over the next few weeks, or months, I went from struggling to hold down guitar strings to developing sore, cracked fingertips. I learnt all the major and minor chords and practiced switching from one to the other as quickly as I could. The band rehearsed anywhere that would have us - holding our breath in fish-packing warehouses, booming out our sound in empty school gymnasiums, or shivering, playing the guitar wearing gloves in a barn in winter. We played drunken, shambolic gigs in front of our friends - the set consisting mostly of cover versions because we had only written two songs so far. We recorded our first demo and made covers for the cassettes, selling them from the local charity shops. We drove in a death-trap of a van to go and play our first gig out of town.

And all the time it was about music. However good or bad we sounded it did not really matter - we were still in the middle of it, away from everything else, doing something that we cared about. Nothing in my life came close to making my heart swell the way it did when we played together. In those rooms we wrote and rehearsed and planned a future. And maybe, just maybe it would take us out of here.