Belfast Good Vibrations

Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations. Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan, Blackstaff Press; £14.99.

FEW people in Irish and British music circles are as deserving of a biography as Terri Hooley. The music impresario single-handedly launched the careers of a slew of Northern Irish bands on his Good Vibrations record label, run from his shop of the same name in Belfast. Among them were The Undertones, whose single Teenage Kicks was the fourth to be released on Good Vibrations and the first to be played twice in a row on BBC radio. Its champion there was John Peel, another maverick, and one who recognised the genius for finding talent that was Hooley’s.

The pity of Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations is that it is so poorly presented. Hooley can be excused his limitations as a prose stylist, but his co-writer, journalist Richard Sullivan, could surely have done a better job of editing. Hooley’s account is littered with exclamation marks, for example, when such a remarkable story has no need of them.