Paper Boy

B-A-Y,

B-A-Y-C-I-T-Y,

With a R-O-L-L-E-R-S –

Bay City Rollers are the best!

Our day had come, so it had. We were a gaggle of excited teenagers in high-waisted parallels assembled at our neighbourhood bus stop at the top of the Shankill. Together we were waiting for a black taxi to take us down the Road into the much-abused city centre, so as to see the Bay City Rollers concert in the Ulster Hall. Bedecked in tartan from the berets on our heads to the Doc Martens on our toes, we were chanting Rollers’ classics non-stop. It was unreal, like a dream come true.

In the excitement of getting all our tartan regalia in place, we had missed the bus into town and the next one wasn’t due for ages – if it wasn’t hijacked in the meantime. As the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast, I had certain moral difficulties with using an illegal black taxi instead of the bus, because the taxi money would go to the paramilitaries – but this was an emergency. I justified my actions on this occasion with the thought that once the taxi driver had taken out a percentage for petrol and cigarettes from my 10p fare, there probably wouldn’t be enough left to buy a whole bomb. I had waited for this day for months, and nothing, not even being a blessed peacemaker, was going to stop me from getting to the Ulster Hall in time to see the Scottish superstars perform their greatest hits right there in front of me.

I have to admit that I had rushed my paper round that day. I had been careless with too many gates and had leapt over a number of fences and hedges that were not approved for jumping. Even the fear of disciplinary procedures from Oul’ Mac could not hold me back on this occasion. Every second was vital, and so I had to cut corners. I had intentionally skipped the final crucial stage of fully pushing the newspapers into expectant homes. Half the houses on the street had newspapers hanging out of their letterboxes. The semi-posted Belfast Telegraphs looked all droopy and forlorn, like Petra’s tail when she ran away up the street after you kicked her for trying to have sex with your leg like a boy dog.

All the gang was there. My big brother was the leader of the pack, in black parallels and with only a subtle hint of tartan in the lining of his black Harrington jacket. He was a fan, but he was determined not to express too much adoration of the Rollers, in case it made him sound homo – and he was careful not to overdo it with the tartan accessories. If any of us got too enthusiastic, he would command us to ‘Wise a bap!’ and we would dutifully obey.

If my big brother was the godfather of the gang, then Heather Mateer was the godmother. Heather was the most mature: she was sixteen, with breasts, and leaving school soon. She had feathered hair, done at His n’ Hers beside the Shankill graveyard, and she was wearing a long tweed coat over her white parallels with a tartan stripe up the side. (The same ones that had ripped at Corrymeela and which her ma had sewn back together again.) Heather was wearing the tweed coat just in case she got overexcited, because she knew if her parallels split again and we saw her knickers once more, we would laugh our heads off and she would be scundered in front of the whole of the Ulster Hall. She was also sporting five tartan scarves tied together which she had wrapped around her neck and flung over her shoulder: she looked like a tartan girl Doctor Who.

Heather had a bad Belfast habit of starting every sentence with the word ‘like’ for no apparent reason.

‘Like, when’s this bloody black taxi comin’?’ she asked.

‘Like, I hope my ma sewed these parallels tight enough,’ she fretted.

‘Like, I can’t wait to see that lovely Les McKeown in the flesh!’ she drooled.

Most of us talked this way at times, but Heather did it in every sentence. I noticed that fewer people at BRA began their sentences with ‘like’, so to fit in there, I had successfully tried to reduce my usage of the word. Like, I didn’t want to sound as if I came from up the Shankill or anything.

Heather Mateer’s best friend, Lynn McQuiston with the buck teeth, was there too. Lynn was the biggest Bay City Rollers fan in the world. She had all their singles, and her bedroom wall was covered with so many Rollers posters that you couldn’t even see the woodchip. Lynn was obsessed with the lead singer, Les McKeown. ‘I just love Les, so I do,’ she kept repeating as she gazed at a card with a picture of her idol which she had got free from a bubble-gum pack. Lynn knew his birthday and his height and the colour of his eyes and his favourite animal and everything. She wanted us to go straight to the stage door at the back of the Ulster Hall, where, she dreamed, she would meet Les and their relationship would begin: they would get married, and she would go on tour with him if he didn’t want to come and live in the Shankill because of the Troubles and all. At least Lynn had thought things through.

Titch McCracken was there at the bus stop too, of course. He was wearing an old pair of white parallels almost up to his knees which he had clearly grown out of – even though he hadn’t grown very much at all. I thought they looked disturbingly tight around the region of his jimmy joe. ‘Like, them trousers must be cuttin’ the willy off ye, wee lad!’ said Heather Mateer sympathetically. Heather had a beautiful way with words.

Titch’s mother must have put the said trousers in the wash with his purple jumper, because they were also slightly pink. ‘What are ye doing in pink parallels, ya wee fruit?’ my big brother felt compelled to ask.

Titch also had a tartan scarf attached to his wrist, but as he had tied it round his smoking hand, he kept getting ash on his tartan, leading me to fear that his scarf would meet the same sad fate as his cindered paperbag in the telephone box. He was sharing drags of his cigarettes with Philip Ferris, who didn’t deserve to be there at all, in my view. He had made no effort whatsoever: there was not so much as a splash of tartan on the brown duffle coat he was wearing. Even I knew a duffle coat was not appropriate attire for a rock concert! Philip was more interested in playing five-a-side football with the Boys’ Brigade than anything remotely musical.

‘Like, could you not have borrowed a tartan scarf for the night?’ inquired Heather Mateer.

‘Bay City ballicks!’ Philip grunted in response.

Irene Maxwell was there too, smothered in every tartan accessory she had ever seen in Jackie. This included a denim and tartan Donny Osmond style beret, purple parallels with tartan stripes and tartan waistband and tartan pocket flaps and tartan turn-ups, as well as tartan scarves attached to most of her limbs. Irene was also wearing an Eric Faulkner T-shirt and a host of badges proclaiming ‘I love Eric’. Her brazen infidelity to David Cassidy that day was shocking.

‘I wonder if Big Jaunty will be there the night?’ she asked, irritatingly.

‘He liked the Bay City Rollers before he moved to Bangor and he was lovely, so he was, and he looked like David Cassidy, so he did,’ she gushed.

I had to tune her out or she would potentially spoil the whole evening.

The presence of Sharon Burgess, however, ensured that the evening could not be spoiled. She wore a brown tank top over a brown blouse with a big round brown collar, and brown parallels with a tartan stripe down the side. Sharon was a vision in brown. Of all the girls, her parallels went closest to her ankles, which only went to prove that she was the nicest girl there. She had got her mother to flick her brown hair like Farrah Fawcett-Majors especially for the occasion. She was lovely with her brown eyes, and she was my angel. She let me hold her hand at the bus stop without so much as a ‘wise up, wee lad!’ My big brother was paying no attention to her thus far, and it seemed to me that Sharon was most interested in Eric Faulkner anyway.

As for me, I was wearing my best green parallels from John Frazer’s, with Macaulay tartan stripes fresh from Princes Street in Edinburgh, professionally sewn down the sides on my mother’s sewing machine. I was also wearing my best brown-and-cream striped tank top and my Harrington jacket. I splashed some extra Brut all over it to mask any residual whiff of boke from my traumatic trip to get my teeth out and tomato sauce from the Geordie Best sausages at the jumble sale.

At last the black taxi arrived at the bus stop, and we all crammed inside. The smell of Brut aftershave and Charlie perfume was overwhelming. (Charlie was like Brut for girls, except they didn’t need to splash it all over.) The black-taxi driver was an Elvis fan with UVF tattoos and a beer belly. His glasses had a brown tint that went ever darker as the evening sun came out.

‘And where are yousens goin’?’ he asked.

‘We’re goin’ to see the Bay City Rollers at the Ulster Hall, and I just love Les, so I do,’ answered Lynn McQuiston, oblivious to the intended irony of the question.

Ten minutes and dozens of choruses of ‘We love you, Rollers’ later we were down the Shankill Road and in the town. Once we had emerged from the black taxi, my big brother expressed his disgust that we boys had been joining in the chants of ‘We love you, Rollers’. He gave us a brief lecture, explaining that boys should refrain from singing along with anything that referred to loving the Rollers, because boys shouldn’t sing about loving other boys, or everyone would think we were ‘f**kin’ fruits’. And so henceforth, we clapped or stamped our feet aggressively along to any mantras that used the word ‘love’ in appreciation of our heroes, and we contented ourselves with shouting ‘Yo!’ manfully every so often instead of joining in with the singing.

As we arrived in Bedford Street, we were greeted by the queue outside the Ulster Hall – a seething mass of tartan and parallels, singing:

Woody, Eric, Alan, Leslie and Derek –

We love you, Rollers

Rollers, we love you!

I had never seen such a large crowd on a Belfast street without the presence of petrol bombs. I was so enthralled that I joined in with the singing immediately – until my big brother kicked me in the shins and I remembered the Love Rule. The atmosphere was amazing.

We were about to join the end of the longest queue I had ever seen, when Lynn McQuiston reminded us of her plans to begin a relationship with Les McKeown at the stage door.

‘Like, I don’t even know where the stage door is,’ said Heather.

‘Wise a bap!’ said my big brother.

‘Ballicks!’ said Philip Ferris, of course.

It was at this moment that my experience of the School of Music came in handy in a most unexpected way. I had played my violin in the back row of the second violins in the School of Music Orchestra concert in the Ulster Hall the previous year. It was such a big occasion that even Patrick Walsh had played in the orchestra that day, despite the fact that he generally said the Ulster Hall was just for Protestants. On the day itself, I had in fact nearly fallen off the stage, when I dropped my chin rest and one leg of my chair teetered perilously over the edge of the podium towards an audience that was heavy with gold jewelry and whispered ‘ings’. Anyway, as a performing artiste, I had entered the Ulster Hall that day by the aforementioned stage door. So I knew exactly where the stage door was. It was in the next street at the back of the hall itself.

‘Follow me!’ I said triumphantly, much to my big brother’s disgust. For once, I was the leader, and he would have to follow.

I led the gang down a side street of shops that were boarded up from the latest car bomb. In less than a minute there we were, standing at the stage door at the rear of the Ulster Hall. Amazingly, there was hardly anyone else there apart from a few other tartan-clad girls sobbing and screaming, and a couple of RUC men who were clearly more used to policing angry rioters than hysterical teenagers.

‘They’re already inside, so yousens may as well go back round and get into the queue, kids,’ said one of the RUC men with a moustache when he saw us.

I turned around immediately to obediently return to our place in the queue.

‘Houl’ yer horses!’ said my big brother. ‘They’re not here yet!’ I was shocked at this remark. It had never occurred to me that the RUC would tell lies.

‘Like, the peelers wouldn’t still be here if the Rollers was already inside!’ said Heather, excitedly.

‘Oh my God, my Les is gonna be right here any minute nigh!’ shrieked Lynn.

‘Ballicks,’ said Philip.

No sooner had he yet again demonstrated just how limited his vocabulary was than a long black limousine with the windows blacked out like a police car pulled up in front of us. What happened next was like a dream. It seemed to happen in slow motion, like the Six Million Dollar Man running. Right before our very eyes, five young men dressed in parallels and tartan emerged from the limousine in quick succession. Alan and Derek, the two brothers, got out first and escaped through the stage door before we had fully grasped the reality of what was happening in front of us. Eric Faulkner was next.

‘Eric!!’ screamed Irene Maxwell, as she ran forward and grabbed his jacket. It was like a sick woman touching Jesus in a story in Sunday school. Eric turned briefly and smiled at her. His face was mirrored in the T-shirt Irene was wearing. She fainted. As Titch McCracken and Sharon Burgess knelt down to see if she was all right, and before we had a chance to take all of this in, the real, live Les McKeown from off Top of the Pops was suddenly running straight past us.

‘I loooove you Les!’ screamed Lynn McQuiston repeatedly, the tears streaming down her face onto her buck teeth, as she reached out and grabbed at a tuft of hair on the back of his head. Les just looked scared and kept running.

While the girls in our gang had known instinctively how to approach this situation – by screaming and attempting to touch their idols, the boys didn’t know what to do. We didn’t want to scream or touch our heroes, but we did want to make some more masculine kind of connection with them. So we did what came most naturally to us – we kicked them.

My big brother led the way, and just managed to land a boot on Les McKeown’s backside, leaving a dirty boot print on the lead singer’s white parallels. It was then that fate intervened once again in my favour. The last Roller to get out of the car was Woody, and I found myself standing right beside him. So what did I do? Did I ask him for his autograph? No – he was moving much too fast for such niceties. Did I shout, ‘We love you Woody!’? Of course not – my big brother had forbidden such expressions. So I did what I knew best: I kicked him. In the heat of the moment, I abandoned my pacifist principles for the second time that day and expressed my adoration of a pop idol in the only way I knew how. I kicked him in the shins. Yes, I kicked Woody!

Once the Rollers were safely inside the Ulster Hall, we looked at each other in excited silence. We had seen all the Rollers in real life! We had screamed at them, touched them and kicked them. As we rejoined the queue, we relived those precious moments – something we would continue to do for the next six months afterwards.

‘I touched Eric and he smiled at me and I fainted!’ said Irene. ‘I’ll never wash my hand again!’

‘I touched Les and he knows I love him and I think he loves me back,’ said Lynn sadly, looking down in awe at a clump of Les’s hair in her hand. ‘I’ll never wash my hand again!’

‘I kicked yer man Les!’ boasted my big brother. ‘That’ll harden him!’

‘I kicked Woody!’ I rejoined guiltily. ‘I’ll never, er … wash my foot again!’

Titch McCracken looked up at me, stubbed out his cigarette on the pavement and then followed it up by spitting contemptuously and rolling his eyes.

My heart was now beating very quickly with the excitement of it all. For a second I wondered if God was going to let my bad heart kill me before the beginning of the show – as a punishment for using violence on a pop star. But mercifully, He spared me and I got to see the whole concert in its full glory.

Once inside the historic building, the chants of ‘We Love You, Rollers’ were deafening. I had never heard so many girls screaming, even after a bomb, and neither had the Ulster Hall, I’m sure. We made our way to our prime seats, up in the balcony. Looking down on the stalls below, teeming with tartan teenagers, I felt slightly dizzy.

It seemed like we had to wait for ever for the concert to begin. The longer we waited, the more the tension grew and the more the screams intensified. I began to get fed up with all this stupid screaming and passed the time by counting the number of pipes on the big organ at the back of the stage.

It felt as if the whole crowd was about to explode, when suddenly the lights went out. At first I thought the Provos had blown up an electricity transformer again, but then I realised that this was what Miss Baron would have called ‘dramatic effect’. One minute there was complete darkness and the next there were five spotlights on five figures. I recognised them of course from Top of the Pops and also from up close at the stage door. The Bay City Rollers were here, now. They were live! The screaming reached an even higher pitch. It was so piercing that I had to put my hands over my ears. The concert began. I couldn’t actually hear the Rollers, what with all the screaming and with my ears covered. Heather, Irene, Lynn and even Sharon Burgess screamed and cried through the classic ballad ‘Give a Little Love’. I put my arm round Sharon Burgess and she didn’t tell me to wise up, but she wouldn’t turn her lips towards me either, because that would have meant taking her eyes off Eric Faulkner.

Every so often, if the screams began to calm down, Les would turn his back to the audience and shake his bum. For some reason, this made the girls go wild, but every time he did it, I was sure I could see the boot mark from my big brother’s Doc Martens on the backside of Les’s white parallels. Philip Ferris watched carefully through every guitar solo, and kept accusing the Rollers of miming. We all sang along to ‘Summer Love Sensation’, and I noted that my big brother knew every word – even though he was supposed to be an Alice Cooper fan who hated teenyboppers. Meanwhile, Heather Mateer started to dance up too close to him, but he was playing it cool because he preferred girls who did gymnastics. I noted with some relief that Heather’s flirtations with my big brother did not appear to be upsetting Sharon Burgess.

Woody didn’t attempt to dance much, so I wasn’t able to ascertain whether he had developed a limp due to my recent attack. So I reassured myself that I had done no lasting damage to his shins or his musical career.

As the concert continued, the volume of the screaming and the pitch of the temperature in the Ulster Hall went ever upwards. The hall was full of the smell of the sweat and cigarettes and the spearmint chewing gum of a thousand teenagers. There was a powerful crescendo of hormones, heat and noise. We were happy, we were alive, and, for a few hours, we didn’t think or care about homework or gunmen or bomb scares or there being no jobs.

‘The Belfast crowd are the best audience in the world!’ proclaimed Les between hits, and we loved him even more.

Of course it couldn’t last for ever, and when at last it came to the final encore of ‘Shang-a-Lang’, the whole of the Ulster Hall erupted into a new level of frenzy. Unfortunately the crowds on the balcony surged forward so fast that the front panel of the balcony began to give way, as if it might fall on the fans below. There was a serious danger that Rollers fans from above might rain down upon the unsuspecting crowd below in the stalls.

Luckily, the security men noticed the impending disaster immediately and sprang into action. With the assistance of several RUC men with moustaches, they dutifully spent the last verse of ‘Shang-a-Lang’ clinging onto the front panel of the balcony with all their might. When the concert finally ended and we began to leave the Ulster Hall in our droves, the security men stayed where they were, holding onto the front of the balcony to stop it collapsing onto the rows below. They were sweating more than us.

Our gang had to walk home in the rain that night because there weren’t enough black taxis for everyone – we clearly had overwhelmed the paramilitary public-transport system. We didn’t care, though. We sang ‘Shang-a-Lang’ as we ran with the gang the whole way home up the Shankill. When I finally got into my bed that night, I kept waking up, trying to figure out what had been real and what had been a dream.

The next day at school, I swapped my usual grammar-school scarf with a tartan scarf, even though this was against the rules and it clearly didn’t go with my duffle coat. When I arrived in the playground that morning, I noticed Ian, formerly of the TITS, standing against the wall sullenly reading his NME. I couldn’t resist deliberately walking past him, whistling ‘Shang-a-Lang’ loudly and flaunting my tartan scarf. Ian pretended not to hear or see me, but I knew I had provoked a response when he aggressively turned the pages of the Status Quo feature he was reading and spat on the ground disgustedly. At that moment, Miss Baron was walking past and told him off for spitting in the playground. ‘We are not hooligans at this school!’ she scolded. ‘We are civilised here.’

Ian got detention, and stuck a ‘Kick Me’ sign on the back of my blazer with chewing gum at lunchtime for revenge. I drifted through every class that day in a daze, retaining even less knowledge than usual, apart from in French when the teacher nipped me under the arm until I got my verbs right.

However, when I picked up my forty-eight Belfast Telegraphs from Oul’ Mac’s van that night, I was shocked by the reports about the Bay City Rollers concert on their pages. Old men were saying that the Rollers fans were uncivilised hooligans, even worse than spitting schoolboys. Instead of rave reviews of the happiest night in Belfast for years, there were angry people claiming that teenagers at the pop-music concert in the Ulster Hall the previous night had vandalised the balcony. There were allegations that the concert had turned into a riot that could have ended in tragedy. There were cross baldy men demanding that there should be no more pop concerts in the Ulster Hall ever again, because we couldn’t be trusted not to wreck it. This was unfair! We were being misrepresented. This was what John Hume called injustice.

I delivered my papers reluctantly and angrily that night. It felt like I was personally delivering untruths about myself to my own customers. It was the first time ever that I had hated doing my papers. I began to wonder if there were other career opportunities that I could pursue in the future. As I wandered home that night humming ‘Give a Little Love’, I considered my potential for delivering milk or bread, neither of which could tell lies. Or perhaps becoming an international spy like James Bond, or an astronaut who got lost in an anomaly in time and space. I was growing up, so I was.