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.

Among the anecdotes he recounts are those concerning the loss of his left eye to a neighbour’s arrow at age six; his seduction by a bank robber’s wife when he was just 14 and an altercation with a young Bob Dylan.

His run-in with Dylan occurred shortly after the singer outraged his diehard fans by taking up the electric guitar. When he played Belfast, Hooley and his cohorts protested. They were not bothered by his supposed betrayal of the folk spirit, but believed he should join other artists in refusing to pay taxes to protest at America’s involvement in Vietnam. Hooley was introduced to Dylan after the gig. Dylan, he recalls with glee, told him to “fuck off!” (a retort that deserves its exclamation mark).

Hooley later had a run-in with John Lennon at a party in London. It was shortly after the break-up of The Beatles, and Lennon was one of the most famous people on the planet. But Hooley objected to his ill-informed support of the IRA’s campaign of violence, and duly laid him out with one swift punch — “a haymaker”.

Punk galvanised a generation of activists such as Hooley, who saw his role as playing mentor to young acts such as The Undertones, the Outcasts and Rudi. It scarcely mattered that most were inclined to write songs about the terrors of dating girls than the sectarian divisions of the North; Good Vibrations’ acts were all about attitude, which Hooley had in spades.

In Hooleygan, Hooley’s memories are padded with those of his friends and comrades, such John O’Neill of The Undertones and That Petrol Emotion, and John T Davis, who directed the Northern punk film, Shell Shock Rock.

Rough and ready as Hooley and his Good Vibrations stable were, one can only wish his achievements were better served by this unpolished memoir.