Browse
In one sense we have never been more connected: numerous digital interfaces enable us to connect in real time over vast spaces (Baruah, 2012). Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram have become engines for connection and belonging, allowing people to share personal videos, photographs, memes, and forms of creative bricolage. Of course, empirical research suggests that social media increases one’s loneliness and feelings of anxiety and depression, particularly for young people (Woods and Scott, 2016). Bedroom Instagrammers, influencers, and Facebookers find that it often becomes their shrine to loneliness. In this chapter I explore this oxymoron – social loneliness – looking at the way these communal digital interfaces operate. The chapter will both narrate the empirical evidence on the relationship between social media and will textually analyse a range of sites where loneliness has been curated. It will draw upon the writings that participants submitted, revealing in their confessions the way loneliness gripped and released them.
In this chapter I explore the way sound is mobilised to capture and communicate what it feels like to be lonely. Engaging centrally with popular music, the sound design of screen media, and the conversational tone of podcasts, I look at the way the auditory values of loneliness mark people’s lives and powerfully shape the form and content of art forms. As our participants attest, popular songs very often carry narrative stories about loneliness, and they can be connected to rituals and events where in hearing ‘that song’ a lonely memory is elicited. These lonely songs are often encountered in spaces or places which come to embody and carry forth the melodies of loneliness, becoming auditory loneliness rooms. Individual biographies emerge when sounding loneliness, but this exists alongside the cultural ‘chatter’ that is found across aural forms, such as the radio and the podcast, in which experts and laypeople give their advice, and bare their lonely souls.
In this chapter I explore the way that everyday forms of creativity responded to the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. I argue that these creative responses did two things. First, they demonstrated the rich agency that ordinary people had in shaping and sharing their experience of lonely isolation. Second, through the creative works generated and circulated, a critical lens was placed on the way that the pandemic carried forward the inequalities inherent in modern systems of the governance of loneliness. The chapter is divided into two main sections: the first looks at a range of creative works made by ordinary people to reconnect them to the social world. The second section looks at the creative works that were explicitly politicised and activist in nature, turning loneliness into a political project.
As 1977 progressed, word was starting to seep across the Irish Sea that something cataclysmic might be stirring in London. It wasn't just a new kind of music or some fresh bands; it was a groundswell of discontent with the established order; it was a new movement, a new dispensation. The author believes the unique set of circumstances was the reason why punk rock meant more to youth in Belfast than in any other city in Britain or Ireland. By 1977 and following bruising scrapes with the law and the school authorities, the author and his gang friends had retired the Debs. To fill the vacuum left by the Debs, a new collective began to shape up, one that looked to drums, bass and guitar rather than boots, blades and belts. Kenny Anderson, Ivan Kelly and Barry Greene might sound like a firm of solicitors or undertakers.
Stiff Little Fingers, Roofwrecks arch-rivals, were moving on apace. Collectives and allegiances had already formed in the Belfast punk scene, and schisms were starting to appear. Revisionist musicologists and sociologists have often cited the apparently non-sectarian Belfast punk scene of the late 70s/early 80s as representing an alternative youth/cultural environment that transcended ethno-religious divisions. The film Good Vibrations (2013) tells the story of the Belfast impresario and his record store and the influence he had on youth culture at that time. The author's punk band's relationship with Terri Hooley and the Good Vibrations record shop and label was doomed to failure from the get-go. Hooley gave Ruefrex little or no credit or recognition for their successes. As they improved and tightened as a unit, the band's name began to seem inappropriate. However, English journalists, American musicologists and Japanese archivists all later came to embrace it enthusiastically.
By 1980, Stiff Little Fingers' star was truly in the ascendent. They had a successful first album via Rough Trade Records under their belt and, as Northern Ireland's sole ambassadors on the mainland, a place at the top table with the punk elite. So it was the stuff of dreams when Ruefrex were offered the support slot on their Irish tour featuring Dublin, Cork and Belfast. SLF would be assured of full houses all the way, so a captive audience was guaranteed. The Black Catholics band had a reputation for disrupting gigs and were in situ early that evening. The Black Catholics' behaviour grew worse, and one of the gang, noticing that Clarkey had reverted from his manic, all-action style to stand still and deliver a love song, saw his chance and attempted to set fire to his trouser bottoms.
It remains a conviction, that when Allan Clarke, infatuated by all things David Bowie, looks in the mirror, he sees Ziggy Stardust looking back. Over many years, as Bowie's look changed, so did Clarkey's alter-ego. The Cross the Line documentary made by BBC Northern Ireland in 1980 offers an insight into his thinking around. Clarkey's unshakeable belief that he is somehow hardwired into the Bowie psyche. In addition, his photogenic persona and strong stage presence, coupled with his highoctane performance came to be synonymous with the visceral musical signature of the band. So if manic, force-of-nature unpredictability with a fluid take on reality were prerequisites for a frontman, he had them in spades.
The author relates that he had taken to spending more and more time at the Brixton high-rise flat of Grimmo and Karen in the after hours. It was a small municipal flat on the 22nd floor that someone had somehow managed to get a grand piano up to. It overlooked the main Brixton railway junction, a jumble of intersecting tracks and signals. The furnishings were basic and the small kitchen less than sanitary. But the assembled bric-a-brac, reclaimed furniture, piano and the neon cityscape that stretched out below us gave the whole place something of a Blade Runner vibe. The author explains how his role as manager, led to him feeling the sting of the others' resentment, as well as hurt and lonely.
Around 1984, Kissed Air, the band from Maghera, were well ensconced in the leafy suburbs of North London. While struggling to command attention for their own music, like so many Irish exiles who went to London before them, each of the members had secured both accommodation and gainful employment, holding down sometimes quite menial jobs. The Kissed Air crew and Gareth Ryan expressed an interest in paying for the pressing, cover and distribution of 'The Wild Colonial Boy'. The author relates how he offered services as producer for Kissed Air's second single, 'Out of the Night'/'Change of Attention,' which added valuable studio craft to his steadily growing skill set. Kissed Air boys had been spending a lot of time socially with Cuthbertson who enjoyed the live music scene and quite fancied playing a role as indie record executive.
The whole 'legacy' debate on how people deal with the past continues to torment, pulling in one direction the urge to (perhaps) forgive but not forget the awful inhumanity of the recent history, hauling in the other, the generational and pragmatic tug to simply move on. Powerful actors in this drama find uncomfortable narratives, retroactive and limiting. For the orthodox narratives surrounding Belfast punk are entirely problematic. Yet Good Vibrations and the standard bearers of Belfast punk rarely cite the band in any official or historical context. Occasionally, the self-appointed keepers of the Belfast punk flame are compelled to give Ruefrex their due. The Ruefrex song 'The Perfect Crime' features a prolonged overdriven guitar introduction, loaning itself to use as film incidental music. It had been employed in John T. Davis's Shell Shock Rock in this way to great effect.