BUZZCOCKS

John Maher (Buzzcocks) Quote © Spit Records August 2020. John pictured above at the Ulster Hall - Photograph © Alastair Graham I must confess that I don't remember an awful lot about our trip to Belfast. What I can remember is seeing the wire fences/barricade type affairs set up outside many of the shops. I'd seen them on the news of course, but it still came as a bit of a shock seeing the real thing. As for the venue, I picture that as quite a grand old building - high ceilings and lots of stonework. I don't remember anything specific about the actual show itself. I've had a look at Tony McGartland's book (Buzzcocks - The Complete History), to see if there's anything in there to jog my memory. Turns out we were in Belfast for less than 24 hours. We'd played Dublin the night before (Sep 27th), then got the train up to Belfast on the day of the Ulster Hall gig. Liam Mackey tagged along and interviewed Pete and Steve. Tony's book says Liam was from Record Mirror, but maybe it was Hot Press? When we got to the Ulster Hall, Pete did a short interview with Downtown Radio. We had two trucks carrying our gear, PA and lighting etc. One broke down near the border, unloaded, then went back to get everything else from the broken down truck. We flew back to Manchester the following day. We basically did little more than turn up in town, do the gig, head to the hotel and bugger off the next day - which probably explains why my memories of visiting Belfast are limited. Re our aborted trip, Jan 1978. I remember we spent 13 hours at Killington Lake services on the M6 waiting to be recovered.

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