Forget the Beach Boys – Good Vibrations is directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Lyburn’s great film about Terri Hooley’s Belfast Record Shop, label and the revolutionary culture and community that grew around it.
13 years in the making it has already, pre release, produced many validating and empowering moments – both on and offscreen.
Those moments come by the barrel load in a movie where Richard Dormer’s Hooley , a one eyed ex hippie mystic dreamer who knows COMMUNAL JOY is the secret of the universe, dismisses The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers as “showbands”.
There’s the key episode in Hooley’s Damascene Punk Revelation when he joins lost local legends Rudi – and the frenzied rush of an incensed audience – to chant the “SS RUC” introduction of their revolutionary classic ‘Cops’ . This in the face of a rapidly retreating officer of that now defunct armed police force.
This ACTUALLY HAPPENED – I saw the real thing with MY OWN EYES.
There’s the look of liberating wonder etched on Hooley’s face when he hears ,for the first time (Privately, on the studio headphones), The Undertones just recorded Teenage Kicks – a reinvocation of that Elysian pre Troubles joy relished by all of us.
Before MI6 dirty tricks and ‘cops with balaclavas” had their dominion.
And so on.
At the recent Galway film Fleadh validation came offscreen in the way the local audience responded to every nuance of the carefully layered script – right up to the spontaneous cheering that erupted when the onscreen Undertones are seen and heard to strike into THAT song.
The Galway screening was electrifying – a clear indication of the timeless and contemporary (Hooley trashing the record company offices) nature of the film, an object exercise in how audience participation can turn a screening into live theatre.
A clearer cinematic representation of the unifying and revolutionary power of music than Good Vibrations I’d find hard pushed to name.
Good Vibrations opens history up in a way that is energising democratizing and even handed. Through the prism of its central character, the collateral damage revolutionary movements have on family structures is shown, sure.
But how those same revolutionary explosions can create new families, bonded beyond blood, is also made clear.
No more so, for me, when, after the movie scooped the Best Irish Film (“By a mile,” said the Festival director) prize in Galway, I saw Lisa and the (excellent) young actor Ryan McPartland (from Newry, of all places!) who plays Fangs posing with the Galway Award.
Instrumental in introducing Terri to punk and appearing in several of the real life snap shots that feature in the film closing credits Fangs was and is Gordy Owens, the Barnado Kid who became a Clash fellow traveler, a staple of the Belfast scene , still well and healthy, so the indomitable Hooley tells me.
As the cameras flashed I couldn’t help recall the night when, back in my teens, circa 1978, Gordy came to stay in my house. Me ma and pa had gone away.A few drinks were taken and, in the morning, I woke to find he’d penned something rather unpleasant and certainly untrue about my preference for members of the porcine community – on the NEWLY PAINTED bannister.
It would have taken a leap of faith far beyond my, oh fuck how am I gonna get this orf a-here, mindset to imagine, years later, the wee skitter’d be featured in a movie.
So that scene was one of the personally weirdest yet still, strangely,
Terri Hooley (Richard Dormer) Hits The Big Time – aka First Good Vibes Label Release by Local Heroes Rudi
I don’t think it will be the last either.
2 Responses to Good Vibrations
Great review of a terrific screening. It was my highlight of my first visit to Galway. The DJ session by Terri at the after party at the Rowing Club down the lane from the festival was old school fun with people DANCING! We were even singing in the ladies loo (bathroom) to the songs while waiting in line for a stall! I am still wearing my Good Vibrations button on my black jacket from that night.
Last week I was in Belfast and I looked for the store. No listing for a website, yet I found a Yelp review with an address on Winetavern Road (or street?). My friends said they didn’t think it was there any more so lets check out the ‘arcade’. Not there, yet the woman in the small craft shop said it was nearby but now around the corner at Cafe Hero coffee shop. Well to my surprise, there it was by the staircase. Maybe shadows of its former glory, but in these days of fewer record shops, I would rather see a small record shop than none at all! Yet Terri’s paper business card said it all ‘Belfast’s Poorest Record Store’! On the back of the oversize paper card is a listing that Terri djs at Hudsons on a Thursday night. Still being a night warrior of music!
I emailed Terri and told him GOOD VIBRATIONS RECORD STORE MERCHANDISE will be your fortune as once this movie hits the bigger market (USA and elsewhere) there will be people looking for merchandise. His Facebook page under his name is full so he needs a Good Vibrations Record Store page. I see he has a book out as well which looks worth checking out. Record Store fans and music fans want a keepsake of their visit, like a concert tshirt. I worked at Tower Records and Wherehouse Records in Costa Mesa plus Fingerprints Records in Long Beach. Fans want to wear their interests on their chest to let others know what they support. Even Tower Records in Dublin should merchandise their store name as Tower Records is gone in the US. I still have former customers run into me and say how much they miss Tower Records and it has been closed for almost 6 years.
Back in So. California we have an assortment of record stores from Vinyl Solution in Huntington Beach with Drake at the helm and longtime record clerk (and label owners) Jeff Davis, plus Port of Sound Shoppe in Costa Mesa, PooBah’s Records in Pasadena, Berden Records in Monrovia (or is it Glendora?) Fingerprints Records in Long Beach, Sound Spectrum in Laguna Beach, Second Spin Records in Costa Mesa, and the mecca for music collectors Amoeba Records in Hollywood. Yes there is music at the ‘chain stores’ like Target, Walmart and Best Buy, but a record shop is a dedicated shop with music fan clerks who get to know their clientele so shoppers make it a weekly return to get their weekly copy of the OCWeekly or the LA Weekly to be in the know of all the local music events. God bless the indie record store shops around the world as they are a rare and brave breed!
The early days of punk in LA were as exciting as Belfast so there is a universal appeal to us ageless punks who remember back in the day. In LA, I saw X perform in 1978 at a bikers bar in Van Nuys and Exene was hestitate to come out and perform. Bands like the Germs and the Screamers performed in halls in Echo Park. Finally clubs like The Whiskey and the Starwood started letting bands like the Ramones, Stiv Bators, Fear and the Dead Kennedy perform at their venues. We had record shops like Rene’s All Ears on a small corner just down the road from Aron’s Records on Melrose in the Fairfax District near the high school, both shops are gone to the land of Record Store Memories (search at http://www.archive.org for Record Store Memories for some of the interviews I did with music fans during 2008/09 while at an Irvine radio station).
Another connection with the movie was seeing the Undertones perform at the Westport Music Festival in late June. They were under the big circus tent performing to a packed crowd and it was pouring rain outside. The energy onstage was as fresh and vibrate as could be all these years later and the rocking crowd was loving it. The ‘Teenage Kicks’ song is still in my head from that show and the movie. Love it! Rock on Good Vibrations Record Store and Terri Hooley, you are rich with your legacy and those you helped along the way.
What a beautiful comment Lorraine, a blog in itself.
Many memories stirred by it, used to love Fear and knew Derv Scratch a little. Saw him tell a very funny antagonistic joke to leery New York audience at New Music Seminar there, back in 1984.
Stay well!