Early in Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, Gerry Devlin asks Cushla to accompany him to a friend’s house in Belfast for a party. On their way to the house, they encounter a checkpoint manned by young British soldiers. The young soldiers, one of whose “complexion was cratered with acne scars and his mouth smelled of Juicy Fruit,” interrogate and accost Gerry, taking him out of the car and rouging him up as they also verbally accost Cushla. They act as an occupying force, and their mistreatment of Cushla and Gerry remind her of a British military recruitment advertisement she once saw that read, “If you’ve got it in you, the army will bring it out.” When they arrive at the party and tell the others what happened, another teacher, Joe, tells them that at his school “[t]he soldiers lie in front gardens training gus on the boys when theur going home from school,” thus acting as an occupying and intimidation force.

Cushla, Gerry, and others exist within an occupied space in Belfast and Northern Ireland, looked at as terrorists and a threat partly because of their religious affiliation and their “perceived” ideologies. Within this milieu, everyone tries to live a normal life, going about their day-to-day business as best they can. In order to do this, they rely, in part, upon music to both alleviate the pain and trauma and also as a form of resistance to British occupation. Each of these aspects meld together at the party as the people gathered there call out to sing “Give Peace a Chance!” and Harry, another teacher, tells Gerry to get his guitar so he can sing The Dubliners’ “The Town I Loved So Well,” a song that appeared in 1973, a year after the January 1972 Bloody Sunday attacks in Derry where to British military and loyalists killed 14 unarmed civilians during a protest.

Born and raised in Derry, Phil Coulter’s song reflects back upon his time growing up in Derry and the Troubles impacting the community and town during that period in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first three verses relate the narrator’s formative years growing up in Derry playing “ball by the gasyard wall,” as him and his friends laughed and ran home in the rain. He recalls the music “in the Derry air like a language” everyone could understand and enjoy. While these verses can come across as a rose-colored nostalgia, as the reflections of a young man in his twenties looking back on his childhood, they set the stage for the violence and military occupation of the final two verses that sever that idyllic thread.

After leaving Derry, the narrator relates his return to the town of his youth and what awaited him there as he entered its walls. Upon his return, the narrator’s “eyes have burned” due to the smoke and debris filling the air from recent altercations between different groups. He walks past “the armoured cars and the bombed-out bars” as the gas from the gasyard and tear gas and other ordinances hangs heavy in the air, wafting over “the damned barbed wire [that] gets higher and higher” separating individuals from one another. The tanks, guns, and military presence have silenced the music that once hung over Derry. The past, where the narrator played with Catholic and Protestant friends, where he played with republicans and loyalists, has come to ruins. He concludes by proclaiming that “what’s lost is lost and gone forever,” yet even amongst the wreckage and loss he will “pray for a bright brand new day in the town [he] loved so well.”

At the party, as Harry concludes his rendition of “The Town I Loved So Well,” he “lowered his voice for emphasis,”raising the final line as a plaintive cry to the heavens, “a cry of hope for better times.” I envision his voice quivering and cracking as he, miles away from Derry in a home in Belfast near Cave Hill, prays “for a bright brand new day” in the twon where he resides, a town, like Derry, ravaged by military occupation and sectarian violence. Harry’s singing brings cheers from those at the party as he tells them, “Fuck this . . . I’m depressing myself.” The song serves as catharsis and as an emotional reminder of the present situation. It serves as an expression of the trauma they inhabit and the desire to return to a time when the violence did not engulf them.

Harry wanted to sing the song because of what Cushla and Gerry experienced on the their way to the party. The psychological and physical violence they endured at the checkpoint served as a reminder that all of them at the party, due to their religious and political affiliations, could have been in Cushla and Gerry’s shoes. In fact, they probably had been at some point or another, as Jerry’s comments about the soldiers outside his school indicate. The song becomes palliative, not curing the atrocities but helping to relieve some of the symptoms and pain enacted by the atrocities, calling upon them to think back to better days and to a better future, devoid of all of the violence that envelops their daily existence.

Following Gerry and Harry’s cathartic version, the music returns to joyous accompaniment to the gathering. A couple heads over the stereo and places the soundtrack to Disney’s Pinocchio on the turntable, leading them “to do a marionette dance.” The encounter at the checkpoint still lingers heavy in the air, irritating the participants’ eyes, but they also know that in order to survive they must engage in joy and revelry, allowing themselves to, if only for a moment, forget the violence and oppression around them. The music provides this space for them. It does not end the Troubles. It doesn’t remove the British military from Belfast or Derry. It doesn’t end the sectarian violence. It does, however, provide relief, a momentary balm.

This thread is something that I want to pick up on in the next post as I look at some more artists and music originating from Northern Ireland both during the Troubles and more recently. Until then, what are some of your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.