In May 1983 Gerry Adams was asked by Hot Press magazine for his opinions on The Wolfe Tones and their music. His response was to suggest that “the problem with The Wolfe Tones is that they very rarely come to places like Belfast, and they make an awful lot of money singing about places like Belfast”.
That the Sinn Féin leader was so dismissive about what many people see as Ireland’s leading exponents of “rebel” music reminds us that context is vital. Though few on any side of the debate seem aware of it now, during the 1980s many republicans regarded the group with disdain, with “plastic Provos” being one of the politer epithets used about them.
Some favoured instead bands such as The Irish Brigade, the NWA to the Tones’ Vanilla Ice, as it were, while others disliked the “barstool republicanism” that accompanied the entire genre.
We live in very different times now. Huge crowds have flocked to see The Wolfe Tones at successive Electric Picnics. Most young people sided instinctively with the Republic of Ireland women’s team when they faced a hysterical backlash for singing Celtic Symphony. And while The Pogues’ Streets of Sorrow-Birmingham Six was banned from British airwaves in 1988, today “Tiocfaidh ár lá, get the Brits out now” rings out without comment on BBC Radio One, courtesy of Kneecap.
It is a good time then, for Stan Erraught’s new study of popular music and conflict in Ireland. Erraught, a lecturer in the school of music at the University of Leeds, is ideally placed to navigate this territory. He was for much of the 1980s a member of the critically acclaimed Stars of Heaven, who appeared in the pages of Hot Press themselves, alongside several of the artists whose opinions are discussed here.
Hot Press is an excellent source for 1980s politics and Erraught makes good use of it, along with New Spotlight, a music magazine from an earlier era. The changing context regarding popular expressions of republicanism features early on, when Erraught describes the largely amused and positive response to Steve Coogan’s use of Come Out Ye Black and Tans on his Alan Partridge show in 2019. But only a year later Dominic Behan’s ballad acquired a new potency when government proposals to commemorate the RIC quickly became Tangate.
In October 2022 the controversy over the women’s team brought “rebel” music and The Wolfe Tones themselves back into the centre of public discourse. Erraught’s work concerns how the “content and context of music and of its production is intimately bound up with the wider social and political world it inhabits”. There is perceptive commentary on, among other things, the origins of Irish folk, Dominic Behan’s politics, the largely middle-class nature of early Irish punk and the emergence of Kneecap.
His explanation for the newfound popularity of The Wolfe Tones is that rather than “a portent of any immediate upsurge in ‘hard-core’ republican sentiment” the group instead offer younger audiences ‘an agreeable sense of transgression without responsibility’.”
But some of the book’s other assertions are less convincing. I certainly recall the Hot Press of the 1980s quite differently. I found it refreshingly interested in what the musicians and politicians thought about the North and the diversity of opinions revealed something about how confused many people were about the conflict. I don’t agree either with the assertion that The Wolfe Tones “never hid” their politics. The band were invariably evasive about their views.
That may be why Christy Moore enjoyed what Erraught rather dismissively refers to as a “free pass” in the Irish media. During the 1980s Moore openly supported the Provisional IRA. Many people disagreed with his stance, but his honesty and commitment to a range of other causes (from the Stardust victims to the Dunnes Stores strikers) also gained him respect. And when Moore changed his mind he again explained the reasons why.
Other complexities might also have been teased out. Perhaps the Cranberries’ Zombie is the “perfect partitionist anthem” but that didn’t stop thousands of young nationalists singing along to it at the West Belfast Feile in 2021. Indeed they were lauded by a Sinn Féin TD (quoting Bobby Sands) for doing so.
Similarly, republican enthusiasm for Kneecap can seem strange given that group’s glorification of drug taking. You can only buy drugs, after all, from criminals, and these gangs constitute an oppressive presence in working-class areas North and South, something republicans once took very seriously.
The Wolfe Tones eventually made it to Belfast, of course, and Adams probably takes a more benign view of the group today than he did in 1983. At its best Rebel Notes reminds us that music can be “a social force … a producer of the forces that shape our social reality”. But never ignore the contradictions.
Dr Brian Hanley is assistant professor in the history of Northern Ireland at Trinity College Dublin
