Overview

This book is an oral history of punk in Belfast from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. It reads a small number of interviews in close detail to place them in the context of the Troubles and to draw out the imaginative ways that interviewees evoke the experience of growing up in Northern Ireland and punk’s intervention in that complex conjuncture. -- .

This book is an oral history of the punk scene in Belfast from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s. It explores what it was like to be a punk in a city shaped by the violence of the Troubles, and how this differed from being a punk elsewhere. It also asks what it means to have been a punk how punk unravels as a thread throughout the lives of the people interviewed, and what that unravelling means in the context of post-peace-process Northern Ireland. In doing so, it suggests a critical understanding of sectarianism, subjectivity and memory politics in the North, and argues for the importance of placing punk within the segregated structures of everyday life described by the interviewees.

Belfast punk and the Troubles is an intervention in Northern Irish historiography stressing the importance of history from below, and will be compelling reading for historians of Ireland and of punk, as well as those interested in innovative approaches to oral history.