Belfast Music Tour

Belfast Music Tour - rock around the blockOn a music tour of Belfast, Christopher Middleton follows in the footsteps of legends and discovers the power of rock 'n' roll. It's all very rock 'n' roll. Usually the Belfast Music Tour starts at the Ulster Hall with a live performance, but today's band hasn't shown up yet. "More time for you all to look around," says guide Damien Murray.

And to step onto the stage once trodden by U2, the Smiths, Thin Lizzy, the Boomtown Rats and the Rolling Stones. This is also the place where Led Zeppelin played Stairway To Heaven in public for the first time.

"Until that point, they'd been playing so loud, I don't know how we'd survived," says Murray, who was there on the night, in 1971. "Suddenly, they began this lovely, gentle song and everyone just looked at each other open-mouthed. For Zeppelin fans, it was a historic moment."

So much so that people regularly fly from as far as Australia to pay homage to the place where it all happened. And with the Belfast Music Tour, they can visit not just the Ulster Hall, but a host of other musical landmarks relating to bands such as Snow Patrol, Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones. What's more, you get to hear their songs played as part of the tour commentary. And no one's music gets played more during the journey than Van Morrison, whose songs represent something of a tour of Belfast in their own right.

"See that wall?" asks Stuart Baillie, who takes over the microphone once we board the bus. "That was where the Maritime Hotel used to stand. Legend has it that, in 1964, they were looking for an r & b act to play there and this taciturn chap came in, said he could sing r & b, and although he didn't have a band, he knew a good one called The Gamblers, which rehearsed in a bicycle repair shop round the corner. That young man was Van Morrison. The band changed its name to Them and in three weeks they had queues around the block."

Sure enough, tickets to these gigs are among the most prized exhibits at the Oh Yeah Music Centre, which forms the last point of the tour. Before that, though, we're going to drive around several Van landmarks: City Hall, then Hyndford Street (the singer was brought up there and wrote a whole song about the street), and finally Cyprus Avenue, a leafy and prosperous avenue in East Belfast (best-known resident, the Reverend Ian Paisley), which was celebrated in the song Cyprus Avenue, on Morrison's 1968 album Astral Weeks. 

"This is a place where he found some sort of rhapsody," Baillie says as our coach trundles past the red-brick mansions. "He often refers to it as a place where he could come and think. It's certainly very different from Hyndford Street."

Absolutely. Van the Man's old home is a humble, two-up, two-down terraced house, in a street so small our coach has trouble squeezing down it. Instead of a big, blue plaque on the wall of No 125, there's a tiny brass plate.

Mind you, it turns out there are plenty of other Belfast-born stars who come from unglamorous beginnings. We pass the early York Street stamping ground of flautist James Galway (who played with the 39th Old Boys Flute Band) and Benburb Street, home of Fifties singer Ruby Murray (biggest hit Softly, Softly). She is commemorated in a mural collage of local children's pictures that combine to form her face.

But it's by no means just the internationally known stars on whose lives the tour shines a light. Pressed to name the most powerful song ever to have come out of Belfast, Baillie chooses the punk anthem Alternative Ulster, recorded by Stiff Little Fingers. "It came out at a very dark time, during the Troubles, when bands just weren't coming to Belfast because it was impossible for them to get insurance," he recalls. "Suddenly, we got this song all about what a drag and a thrill it was to be a punk in Belfast. Northern Ireland is one of those places where you ask someone where they live, what school they went to and within four questions, you've got them pegged as Protestant or Catholic. The great thing about punk was that it was nonsectarian."

What's more, Baillie has first-hand experience of the power of music, when it comes to healing painful differences. He was MC on the night in May 1998, when U2 and Ash played at the Waterfront Hall, in the course of which U2's singer Bono got rival politicians John Hume and David Trimble to shake hands on stage.

"They say that handshake helped swing the Good Friday Referendum vote three points in favour of peace," Baillie says proudly. "Now that is the power of music."

via: telegraph