Belfast Punk and the Troubles: an Oral History

This book is an oral history of punk in Belfast from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. It reads a small number of interviews in close detail to place them in the context of the Troubles and to draw out the imaginative ways that interviewees evoke the experience of growing up in Northern Ireland and punk’s intervention in that complex conjuncture.
Belfast punk and the Troubles is an oral history of the punk scene in Belfast from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s. The book explores what it was like to be a punk in a city shaped by the violence of the Troubles, and how this differed from being a punk elsewhere. It also asks what it means to have been a punk – how punk unravels as a thread throughout the lives of the people interviewed, and what that unravelling means in the context of post-peace-process Northern Ireland. In doing so, it suggests a critical understanding of sectarianism, subjectivity and memory politics in the North, and argues for the importance of placing punk within the segregated structures of everyday life described by the interviewees.Adopting an innovative oral history approach drawing on the work of Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli, the book analyses a small number of oral history interviews with participants in granular detail. Outlining the historical context and the cultural memory of punk, the central chapters each delve into one or two interviews to draw out the affective, imaginative and political ways in which punks and former punks evoke their memories of taking part in the scene. Through this method, it analyses the punk scene as a structure of feeling shaped through the experience of growing up in wartime Belfast.Belfast punk and the Troubles is an intervention in Northern Irish historiography stressing the importance of history from below, and will be compelling reading for historians of Ireland and of punk, as well as those interested in innovative approaches to oral history.