SNOW PATROLS SHITTY HOMECOMING
There is a town in the fair North Down, on the East Coast of the Province of Ulster, in the statelet known as Northern Ireland and Bangor is its name.
Bangor is the town where Larry Light weight and his band Snot Patrol came from.
This is not the town celebrated in the 1979 number 3 hit Daytrip To Bangor (Didn’t We Have A Lovely Time) by Fiddler’s Dram, that one referred to the Bangor in Wales.
Though it is almost certainly the same town featured to in the unreleased Van Morrison 2002 recording Going Down To Bangor.
Like many working class post war Belfast babes Van will have known Bangor well, the first seaside destination for those uns raised in the capitol’s industrial shadow.
Prior to the outbreak of the troubles at the end of the 60s - and the arrival of British troops 20 miles away on the streets of, saib capitol, Belfast - Bangor was a seaside haven, a magnet for daytrippers from Scotland, North of England and all over Ireland.
Crowds flocked there in the summer, strolling the promenades, eating ice creams and fried food, basking in the sun during the day, taking to the invariably italian owned - Delanos, Milanos, Capronis - amusement Arcades and dancehalls by night
(Dem wops may have mostly kicked wid da left fut but, boysadearsy, did they did know how to partay? Yessiree!).
The road to Snore Patrol’s 1st September 2007 Ward Park performance is one of a long, cold and sad cultural descent - a kind of victory march for bland complacency .
The band’s leader, Gray Nobody, is the biggest star to ever come out of Bangor, a perfect pin up boy for the Suburban Conservatism to which Bangor has always adhered.
25,000 folk may be scheduled to gather in the Park to admire Emperor Gray Lightweight’s aural finery.
But Kitebody’s warbling and his band’s sedative sweep will be a damp fart in the wind compared to the quantum leap signified by the arrival of Van’s Morrison’s Them, playing to barely a hundred souls in a Scout Hall at the park’s edge back in the mid 60s.
Or the Doubt’s Ballyholme Park guerilla gig in the 70s punk twilight.
OR Fruuup at Tonic Cinema a few years before.
Or The Bay City Rollers at the same place months earlier.
Or some version of The Foundations playing at Hamilton House.
Or Jon Anthony at The Coachman.
Or Derry’s Phil Coulter doing The Town I Loved So Well and his Jimmy Durante tribute at the Leisure centre.
Isolated drops in a sea of dullness these maybe…but..
There was , as JB says, a time.
A time when Rock n roll could have provided Bangor, hell, could have provided Northern Ireland, with a get out clause from the Sectarian strife and Colonial divide and rule that benighted the country in the decades after Van went into Astral exile.
Facts is facts - pre Roman times Bangor was a centre of international learning.
In the cloisters of the city’s abbey , surrounded by the same ground where, century’s later, copious supplies of magic pscilocibin mushrooms sprouted, Monks and such folk,yer actual Celtic Warriors in the setting sun of Olde Irelande, toiled.
Mythic fancy or definite continuity? Did those lutes in ancient times…?
Whatever - attentively nurtured, blues revivalists like Them and shaggy haired affronts to the pinched bluenosed establishment that came in their wake, could have presented a way out of the mire into which post 60s Nireland blundered.
Instead the district council insured that in Bangor live music was as heavily proscribed as in any Deep South Bible Belt backwater.
Musicians need to eat, so more exile beckoned.
Bangor was a cultural exclusion zone.
Its leisure facilities, perticularly youth oriented leisure facilities, minimal, its relative peacefulness never utilised for the betterment of a divided province.
The Bluenosed fat cats carved up the good earth and lucrative real estate - preparing to make a post Peace settlement killing.
An act of rape and plunder (how well they learnt from their Viking forbearers) which is now being duly effected.
North Down Council’s disregard for Bangor’s natural assets never knew no boundaries.
They saw off the magic mushrooms with weed killer long before the Blair government’s draconian 2006 legislation made said shrooms illegal.
And from the town they banished its greatest natural asset - the sea itself.
To smell the real rot and corruption in Bangor on September 1st Snowblind fans have to look away from Ward Park.
They have to head straight down Castle Street, take a right down High Street, follow the path of a river long buried underground.
Presently, where the sea once lapped up against the wall of Queens Parade, they’ll arrive at a tarmac’d carpark.
Further on, where the waves once roiled, in what was once a bay, you get to the Yachting Marina built in the 80s when the international free market rout was in overdrive .
The North Down Council, the greatest Conservative majority in the whole of the UK naturally joined in the trough feeding, nature ruining process.
Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s Bangor seemed to provide a natural respite a healing place for a divided community and society but outside of the standard Saturday night Sunday morning drinking, dancing and scrapping culture (there was always fights among the drunken pagan rabble who spilled out of the bars and discos in the fast food shops at weekends) precious little community healing thrived.
But the rich fuckers from out of town, the Johny Fucking Cunting Poshsock asswipes in their boats (what percentage of the NIrish population do you reckon THEY amount to, eh?) got a place to come and park their crafts and dump their shit.
The sons and daughters of the town rebelled, naturally.
Drugs, sex, a life of ribald excess, hardly a fightback, but at least an affront to the pinched Protestant values which Bangor held dear, took a hold.
Even as tame and as vacuous an entity as Lightbody had to move from there to get something started.
Head in the sand, feathering their nests, da city father and mudders would - in the fullness of time - find accomodation with their dreaded Republican political neighbours. Bidness is, after all, bidness.
In the meantime they let the shit come down, with ever increasing velocity, on their precious natural assets.
Oh yeah and the town’s grand educational centre Bangor Grammar School harboured for some 25 years, a paedophile Protestant Priest type, brother of a Church Moderator, RE and Sex Education teacher Lydsey Pogul Brown, jailed only after he had beneffited for progressive promotions by the school governors after several invesitigations failed to bring his widely known transgressions to justice.
A right nice little town (provided you like your burgs all festering and maggoty like a way past ripe cheese)!
Pogul’s preteen victim’s werent the only examples of Bangor’s innocence being soiled.
Ballyholme Bay, once the the jewel on the North Down coast, a gorgeous swimming spot, became increasingly polluted also.
Now the combined effects of nuclear waste from Sellafield, sewage from the ever expanding (gotta keep that real estate ticking over) population, the shifting sand shelf caused by shipping have turned it lifeless.
The teeming aquatic life of yesteryear is long gone.
For those without nautical transport, whether living in Belfast’s industrial shadow, or Bangor’s leafy avenues, the sea is out of bounds, its the graveyard no one mentions.
Before Gary Lightbody and co play in Ward Park they will be one of several big draws beseeching us all to save the planet at the Al Gore (how hard is it to saw THAT fat egregious chump’s name without spitting teeth?) organized Live Earth concert.
I don’t expect North Down Council’s Ecological Record will be put too closely under the mircroscope in Uncle Al’s backslapping charade.
Any ability to join the dots. to point out exactly what has gone on and is going on, is just not the Mister Shitebody and Smug Patrol way.
Much better to grab an international publicity opportunity where matters of importance are swept up into a catch all charade where the primary aim is to service ballooning rockstar egos.
(The latest sickness in the Bangor story? Aforementioned Marina adjacent car park is being sold off to developers to pay the fines levied on the council by the European Community for pollution brought about by the council failure to build sewage system that prevents current horrendous - and illegal - levels of waste in the sea. I don’t expect this will overly exercise Gary, whose recent audience partcipation slot at Isle of Wight involved berating Islanders who had taken to the bay to - how jolly dare they! - watch the Snooze Control performance for free, either)
This is after all the same Gary Lightbody who ,when asked what his hometown council’s bigger crime was - removing the sea from its centre or banning drinking in public places - plumped for the latter because, as the ever whimsical Gaz put it, “everyone likes a wee drink”.
So… now, having proved himself a doughty say nothing, do nothing, stand for nothing, fall for anything, Bangorian, Gazza gets to fill his hometown’s cultural vaccuum.
Mine’s a pint of Apathy Gazza.
Oh and an Amnesia Chaser.
Drink it down, all the way from Al Gore to Bangore.
Look out kids here they are a-soaking up any native dissent or healthy antipathy its… Sponge Patrol.
Given Snooze Patrol’s clammy all conquering success, bringing a characterless torpor wherever their grey coddled muzak rolls out, it seems ludicrous that Lightbody claims the scarring across the face of conformity effect of Nirvana as a key factor in precipitating his journey into rock.
It would be hard to think that a figure as incensed by outrages around him - and as engaged with music’s cauterising power - as Kurt Cobain could, had he been raised in Bangor Co Down rather than Aberdeen Washington State, ignored the stultifying effects, the backwardness, the all pervasive whiff of corruption as comprehensively as Just Say No Patrol.
Ok maybe there is coded messages that I am missing out on, maybe Lightbody is playing the long game.
Maybe his career has been leading up to this Ward Park moment and a grand gesture is at hand.
Maybewe’re gonna find that there is something more rebellious, more meaningful, about Gary’s band than a name that suggests a cue for a toilet seat in a locked cubicle, paper wrap of powder in sweaty palms.
Aye and maybe the Big feller is gonna climb through the Pearly Gates and, in the words of the great Merle Haggard (a man who always knew how to tell it like it was and is), offer us all a vat of free bubble up and a pot of rainbow stew.
But I very much doubt it.
Get over it, you say?
Music was never meant to change the world, only Bono’s bank balance?
Get off Snort patrol’s case, why don’t ya, its only rock n roll?
Huh, its not EVEN rock nroll.
If they had, for instance, released one song with the wit, the invective, with the righteous morality of Vie Fall’s local classic “Queen’s Queen’s Queens Parade what a bloody escapade” then I’d bite my tongue and let the Snow fall.
But, from rock n roll I dont think its too much to expect, nay, DEMAND, more.
Why defer to the blank blindness of Smug Patrol when a new generation of Bangoreenies awaits to recover the town’s dark heart and secret power?
Those folk will be more determined, more compelling, more driven, their Eyes Opened wider than Gary Blinkers Lightweight’s ever have been .
