Book of the Week: In Perfect Harmony

In this extract from his seventies pop history In Perfect Harmony, Will Hodgkinson tells how the Northern Ireland Troubles affected everyday teenagers, including pop’s man of mystery, Lawrence

In 1992 a singer from Birmingham called Lawrence, who had spent the 1980s embracing the exquisite seriousness and black-and-white art movie sensibility of alternative culture with his old band Felt, put out a single called “The Osmonds” under the name of Denim. This time around, Lawrence was returning to his pop-obsessed seventies childhood. Right down to its title, Denim’s new hoped-for hit seemed on first impression like a harmless, “I-remember-Spangles-style” journey through a kitsch and colourful recent past. Left-over hippies, skinheads, Oxford bags, Chopper bikes and kung-fu fights are duly listed, before a rather melancholic singalong chorus in which he recalls a cartoon pop landscape where there were: “lots of little Osmonds everywhere”. Then it all changes: “In the seventies there were lots of bombs,” states the singer, blankly. “They blew my hometown up and lots of people were killed. On the news, the relatives cried. Everyone knew someone who’d died.”

Lawrence grew up in the village of Water Orton near Birmingham, where on the evening of 21 November 1974, bombs attributed to the Provisional Irish Republican Army went off in two city pubs called the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town, killing 21 people and injuring 181. Among the fatalities were an 18-year-old girl called Maxine Hambleton, who had popped into the Tavern in the Town to hand out invitations to her housewarming party, a 17-year-old called Jane Davis, who had gone in to look at the holiday photographs she developed earlier that afternoon, and Neil Marsh and Paul Anthony Davies, 16- and 17-year-old friends with a shared love of Bruce Lee and kung-fu, who were killed by the blast as they walked past the Tavern in the Town. They were only in the city centre because they were at a loose end after the youth club they had planned to spend the evening at was closed.

Lawrence was 12 when the bombs went off: “It was a warm evening – a no-jacket affair – and we were in the next suburb along from ours, Castle Bromwich. I know I was very young coz we were still on bikes. We cycled about, meeting with girls, trying to make connections, when this older kid came up to us and said he’d just heard that bombs had gone off in the city centre. We were eight miles away and the news travelled by word of mouth within minutes of it taking place. Grown-ups began leaving their homes and congregating in the open air, poring over the meagre scraps of info. We knew straight away that this was the big one. The IRA threat was always there, we lived with it, and now this was a reality. It turned into the most atrocious mainland murders so far.”

It is almost certain that the deaths and life-altering injuries of so many ordinary people were unintended. The bombers followed established Provisional IRA protocol of making a 30-minute warning to security services before the attack, but the phone box chosen in advance to make the call from had been vandalised, leaving the caller to find another one, which meant that by the time the call came through, the police had nowhere near enough time to clear the pubs.

Nonetheless the unrelenting horror of the attacks, with reports of victims being blasted through walls, impaled by shattered wooden furniture and writhing in pools of blood with limbs blown off, set off a wave of anti-Irish sentiment in Birmingham and beyond.

Within two days of the bombings, loyalists in Northern Ireland shot dead five Catholic civilians. And the Birmingham attack was itself the climatic response to Bloody Sunday, when on 30 January 1972 what started out as a peaceful march by civil rights activists through the streets of Derry ended with British paratroopers firing at escaping marchers, killing seven teenagers and five adults. The first victim was 17-year-old Jackie Duddy, shot in the chest as he ran into the courtyard of the Rossville flats in Bogside. “Am I going to die?” he asked Father Edward Daly, a priest from Derry, whose waving of a white handkerchief as he and three other people tried to carry Duddy to a place of safety became a symbol of Bloody Sunday. “I said no, but I administered the last rites,” Daly remembered. “I can remember him holding my hand and squeezing it. We all wept.”

Teenagers, the demographic to whom the pop 45 was marketed more than any other, became the highest-profile victims of the conflict that defined seventies Britain and Ireland; a conflict that sank deep into the fabric of everyday life. Even if you weren’t witness to Belfast in 1971, which one arriving British officer described as a destroyed city of “roads that had been blocked and barricaded, fires from bonfires, burning cars or burning houses,” even if you weren’t a friend or relative to one of the countless civilian victims of both IRA and loyalist attacks, you were at one time or another evacuated from a high-street store on a bomb scare, or you heard your parents talking about the Troubles over your bowl of Weetabix, or you were wondering whether or not you agreed with Paul McCartney as he sang with glib good cheer about an IRA man who is sitting in prison and “feeling really bad” on Wings’ 1972 single, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”.

You might also be wondering if McCartney’s less than nuanced proposal would inspire the terrifying loyalist Protestant leader Ian Paisley to deliver on his warning, following Northern Irish PM Brian Faulkner’s attempts to broker peace through a power-sharing executive at the short-lived Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973: “Mr Faulkner says it will be hands across the border at Dublin. I say that if they do not behave themselves in the South, it will be shots across the border!”

This is an extract from In Perfect Harmony: Singalong Pop in ’70s Britain by Will Hodgkinson (Bonnier Books).

We’ll be chatting to Lawrence and Will Hodgkinson on “A Drink with the Idler”, Thursday 2 March at 6pm London time. Book your tickets here. Free to Idler magazine and Academy subscribers.

Our January/February issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.