Book review: Surviving a massacre, and the lasting emotional toll it takes

Tipperary-born musician Stephen Travers was a member of the Miami Showband and had witnessed the brutal murders of three of his bandmates by the UVF in Co Down in 1975

Stephen Travers of the Miami Showband, attending the launch of Punks Listen at the Boole Library in UCC in 2022. File picture: David Keane

• The Bass Player: Surviving the Miami Showband Massacre
• Stephen Travers with Alexandra Orton and fore word by Yvonne Watterson 
• New Island Books, €17.95

As part of a civil action in 2021 against the PSNI and Britain’s Ministry of defence, Stephen Travers undertook a psychiatric evaluation.

The Tipperary-born musician was a member of the Miami Showband and had witnessed the brutal murders of three of his bandmates by the UVF following a performance in Banbridge, Co Down, in July 1975. 

Five decades on, a consultant’s assessment found that Travers was suffering “chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, hyper-vigilance, intrusive recollections, mood lability, and survivor guilt”.

In attempting to understand an act so utterly senseless, he has regularly returned — emotionally, mentally, and physically — to the scene of the Miami massacre.

  The Bass Player — a series of short essays and personal reflections — is another step towards catharsis.

The Miami murders loom large in the history of popular culture in modern Ireland and the callous slaying of Fran O’Toole, Brian McCoy, and Tony Geraghty will forever cast a long shadow across it. 

But the pointless loss of three young lives notwithstanding, the appalling episode in a remote field also meant that those who survived — Travers and Des Lee [McAlea], the band’s leader — were never again seen as mere musicians. 

Despite numerous efforts at re-invention in the years since, the survivors have been defined far more by events off-stage than on it.

Moving from band to band was commonplace during the showband era when, at its peak, 4,000 professional musicians were actively carving livings from Ireland’s lucrative live circuit. 

Then 24 years old, Stephen Travers joined the Miami — then the country’s most popular showband — in May 1975, at an interesting junction in the band’s career. 

Fran O’Toole, it’s charismatic lead singer whose original material and boyish good looks were generating interest from record companies overseas, was actively considering fresher pastures.

Like most of those working the domestic beat, the Miami were all excellent musicians who sucked up a wide range of sounds and styles and faithfully re-produced them. 

That the showbands have long been regarded as just travelling jukeboxes shouldn’t dilute the manner in which they so effectively mobilised Ireland’s youth. 

It’s a point that’s often forgotten in the telling of their nuanced history and Travers underscores it again here.

Indeed, it’s his quest for legitimacy — as a musician and, latterly, as an advocate for social justice — that back-bones the book. 

The last photo of the Miami Showband taken before the massacre in 1975, from left: Tony Geraghty, Fran O'Toole, Ray Miller, Des Lee, Brian McCoy and Stephen Travers

“The Innocent” in the book’s original working sub-title refers not just to Travers’s lost band mates but to all those unwittingly affected by the terrorism and violence in Northern Ireland that claimed 4,600 lives and whose aftershocks are still being felt today.

As imported popular culture — music, media, film, and literature — was extending its influence across Ireland, then a country barely 50 years old, it was doing so against a backdrop of what was often random brutality.

“They had guns, and we had guitars,” Travers writes, a reference to the trap set for the Miami by Loyalist paramilitaries in collusion with forces of the British state.

The Bass Player is based on the same similar structural dynamic, lurching from political history [guns] to cultural history [guitars] and speckled throughout personal biography. 

When Travers isn’t affectionately recalling his love of music, his numerous studio sessions and the power of his instrument, he’s making an eloquent declaration for the importance of truth and the preservation of memory in the telling of those histories. 

But “the truth” — whose truth? — has never been a more contested space, and this much becomes clear to him as the book unravels.

The framing of the innocent, often through black operations and state-sponsored collusion, is a recurring theme in the history of ‘the Troubles’ period in Northern Ireland.

Over the last 25 years, and with the release of various state papers, personal archives, and confessionals, it’s also become a fertile terrain for journalists and documentarians. 

Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent book, Say Nothing [2018] is among the highlights of a body of fine recent work in this space.

The Miami’s story also features significantly here. A previous Travers book, 2007’s The Miami Showband Massacre: A Survivor’s Search for the Truth, co-authored with Neil Fetherstonhaugh, is a powerful, journalism-led read that provided the editorial spine for the 2019 Netflix documentary, Re-Mastered: The Miami Showband Massacre.

By then, Travers had spent 20 years in London, working in journalism and entertainment but, in effect just on the run emotionally. 

By which time the words of Elie Wiesel, the Romanian-born writer and Holocaust-survivor he quotes — “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time” — were determining the direction of the next phase of his life.

Travers is a founder of TaRP — Truth and Reconciliation Platform — a volunteer group which, since 2016, has aspired to give a voice to every single victim of the Troubles. 

His work around post-trauma and redress has been all-consuming and, to this end, his essay here about Kate Carroll, the widow of murdered RUC Constable Stephen Carroll is one of the book’s most impactful.

So too, his portrait of Rosemary Campbell, the wife of Sergeant Joseph Campbell, a Catholic member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary who was murdered in Cushendall in 1977.

But in giving so intensely and so freely of himself for the purpose of reconciling the experiences of others, Travers finds his own emotional wellbeing badly compromised.

One suspects that The Bass Player is just another part of a wider reckoning and that the road there has been far from easy to navigate.

On a drive back to his adopted home in Cork from an appointment with a psychiatrist in Belfast, he loses himself in time and finds himself diverted back to the scene of the Miami massacre in Banbridge decades previously.

“Just as I’ve done on many occasions when I can find no peace, I had returned to the holding cell between my two realities,” he writes, starkly.

Stephen Travers has dedicated years of his life to supporting many of those who, like himself, became unwitting casualties: a cohort of the innocent still dealing with the consequences of a range of traumatic and gruesome experiences.

The emotional toll that work has taken on him is clear and a weariness seeps into his voice the further into the book he gets.

Hinting that as a society we’re really only scratching the surface when it comes to truth and reconciliation. 

And that we’re maybe unprepared — still — for where that journey might take us.

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