u/Jim__Bell

Since everyone's had a go suggesting a Trainwreckord, I'll throw one into the ring.

When the Sisters of Mercy went on strike against their record company in 1993, I don't think many saw the end result being this?

In Eldritch's own words:

>Could this possibly stand for "Screw Shareholder Value - not so much a band as another opportunity to waste money on drugs and ammunition, courtesy of the idiots at Time Warner"? Surely not. That would require a comma.

>SSV's only album ('Go Figure') features music by P.Bellendir and words by T.Schroeder. It was produced by P.Bellendir in 1997. It does not feature anything by Andrew Eldritch except some sampled vocals. Because of those sampled vocals, East West bought the record (without having heard it) and agreed to release Andrew from his recording contract. What led them to do such a strange thing, after years of intransigence?

>Despite their threats to sue Andrew for not delivering any Sisters records, they were perhaps more worried that a judge would regard a seven year strike as evidence that the contract was dead anyway. So they took what they could get. Andrew has neither the money nor the desire to spend years on a court case, and he was happy to accept immediate freedom on these particular terms. He was very happy for East West to get their SSV record.

>Unfortunately for East West, their SSV record is Not Very Good - to put it mildly. It's reasonable to assume that "techno without drums" is designed merely to bore and annoy. East West have not released the SSV album, but they did send tapes to the press. One copy landed on the internet, so you could pick the album up for free, in MP3 format. Maybe you still can, but of course we wouldn't be allowed to give you the URL if we knew it. We don't think the record's worth downloading, anyway.

>We gather that East West have remixed two tracks, but they're not allowed to remix any more. One day, East West may decide to release the SSV album. We can't recommend it.

My name is Christopher Owens and I'm a Belfast based writer who has had four books published: A Vortex of Securocrats, "dethrone god" (listed by cult author Dennis Cooper as one of the best books of 2024), Soineanta Maskirovka and my most recent work Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown.

A Vortex of Securocrats: In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement brought a new regime into Northern Ireland. One that would not tolerate dissent. As a result, the trauma and wounds of those who survived thirty years of conflict were brushed aside for the 'New Start'. The only way legacy could be discussed was through prose and poetry. Hence why they were banned. Declassified for the first time, this collection of voices trying to make sense of, and escape, their histories is an insightful, powerful and distinctive take on the power of the written word to confront trauma.

"dethrone god": Walking home from the pub can be hazardous at the best of times but, when you're middle aged and carrying a dirty secret, what journey do you take in order to get home safely? Recently profiled by David Vichnar at Charles University Prague

Soineanta Maskirovka: Freshly retired, Gilbert Hood fills his days by reminiscing about the past. But what happens whenever deeply held beliefs turn out to be contested. And why is there a desecrated skull in the nearby abandoned hospital? Recently profiled on the Social Yet Distanced podcast.

Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown: Set against the liminal no-man’s-land of two diverted flights into Dublin Airport, the book follows two strangers who never speak and never realise how closely their internal storms mirror one another. Each man confronts the shadows of his past: the wounds that shaped him, the choices that scarred him, and the future that awaits once they finally reach Belfast.

Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown explores how trauma lingers in the body, how cities carve themselves into their inhabitants, and how two lives can run parallel without ever intersecting, bound by the same unspoken ache.

Amazon Author Page

Posted on Divis Flats FB group by Marie Kelly.

https://belfastmedia.com/volunteers-john-bap-kelly-and-john-stone-remembered-on-50th-anniversary

With the discussion around films/programmes set here, it seemed appropriate to post this. A cult Belfast film written in the aftermath of the Lee Clegg affair by Graham Reid (Billy plays). Personally, I didn't rate it but plenty of others do.

Marc O'Shea is no longer with us. Bronagh Gallagher was in Star Wars and Pulp Fiction, and the actor who played Marley is a nonce.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/05/02/the-performance-of-irishness-for-outside-approval-is-finished/

The performance of Irishness for outside approval is finished

Kneecap, Sally Rooney and the comedian Vittorio Angelone ask a question the State has avoided for years: what is all of this for, if not for us?

Sinéad O'Sullivan

Sat May 02 2026 - 06:00•4 MIN READ

For the better part of three decades Ireland has run two industries that amount to the same thing. The first is a tax jurisdiction designed to attract American multinationals; the second is a cultural export operation designed to make Americans feel good about Ireland. Both require the same posture of facing outwards, being easily understood, being charming, and not complicating things.

This is because the Celtic Tiger needed foreign direct investment, and foreign direct investment needed a story; that Ireland is friendly, English-speaking, harmless and fun. Come build your European headquarters here, where the craic is mighty and the pints are fresh – just don’t look too hard at the housing.

And it worked, at least on paper. But behind the shop front, the country that this money was supposed to build has not been built. The International Institute for Management Development has found that Ireland’s basic infrastructure now ranks 44th out of 69 countries, down six places in a single year; the Fiscal Advisory Council puts the infrastructure stock at 25 per cent below the average of high-income European peers; and business electricity prices are the highest in the EU. A country that styled itself as the most efficient gateway to Europe cannot reliably power itself, house its workers, or provide them with a functioning public health service.

In the same footsteps, the cultural side of this bargain was no less transactional. The Ireland that counted, and was taken seriously, was always the Ireland that made sense somewhere else. The literary novels that translated for London and the prestige dramas commissioned for American audiences were all beautiful work, but they shared a persistent habit of facing outwards, and of explaining Irishness to people who were not Irish.

The trad session in the tourist pub and the Booker longlist were doing the same job of packaging a version of the country for external consumption. At some point, without having realised it, we decided that art made by an Irish person, like Irish-booked revenue, only counted when an outsider said it did.

Tax policy and cultural policy operated under the same assumption of orienting everything toward the Americans in the hope that the domestic economy sorts itself out. Of course, it never did. What was left behind was a country that could host Apple’s European headquarters but whose workers cannot afford to shop in one. While the Oscars piled up, we still could not say what we thought about ourselves in a room where no one from Los Angeles was listening.

Something in that arrangement is now breaking down, and the break is coming from a generation of artists who have simply stopped performing for the audience we spent 30 years trying to impress.

The comedian Vittorio Angelone is 29, Italian-Northern Irish, and a classically trained percussionist who gave up the BBC Proms for stand-up. His recent London and Irish shows moved through Ukraine, Gaza, the ethics of making money as an artist while refusing complicity, and the question his generation keeps circling: at what point do the Troubles become just the troubles? Is it still valid to be defined by something that didn’t happen to you?

The answer he provokes is the same one running through all of this – that Northern Ireland no longer needs American politicians to narrate its story any more than its artists need American audiences to validate their work.

What makes Angelone worth watching is not that he clears the bar for serious art, but that he does not care about clearing it. His comedy is unapologetically local, layered with references that do not travel, and with punchlines that reward a very specific post-Belfast Agreement, west Belfast sensibility. If you are not in on it, that is your problem, not his. A British reviewer gave the show two stars, admitted to knowing little about the Troubles, found the material confusing, and signed off by recommending the audience pair it with a Guinness. The work was penalised for being inaccessible, without the reviewer recognising that inaccessibility was the entire point.

He is not alone. Kneecap rap in Irish that they refuse to translate, a choice that by definition excludes the vast majority of a global audience and does not appear to trouble them in the slightest. Sally Rooney has made her position on Gaza a condition of who she will work with, accepting that this may cost her the global market she once dominated; a market that made her, and that she has decided she can live without. None of these are co-ordinated, but they share a generational instinct that the performance of Irishness for outside approval is finished. Their trade-off is explicit, in that they will exchange a smaller audience for the freedom to mean what you say in the place you actually live.

This matters beyond culture because the posture these artists are rejecting is the same posture that has governed Irish economic strategy for a generation. The country that packaged itself as a friendly American outpost in both its art and in its tax code, is now producing a cohort that no longer has any interest in that same package. They are making work that faces inward, that does not need to make sense in New York, and that implicitly asks a question the State has avoided for years: what is all of this for, if not for us?

A country cannot indefinitely sell itself abroad while neglecting what it is at home. The tax receipts will not last forever because windfalls never do. But when they slow, what remains will be whatever was built with them, which at present is very little. Irish artists seem to understand this before the politicians do. They are not waiting for permission to stop auditioning for outside audiences, they have simply stopped.

If that costs Ireland a few stars from a London reviewer and eventually a tech headquarters or two, it may be the cheapest lesson the country ever learns.

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/inside-the-civil-war-that-ripped-apart-the-dup-and-the-changing-fortunes-of-those-who-fought-it/a/150631871.html

Inside the civil war that ripped apart the DUP – and the changing fortunes of those who fought it

Edwin Poots may only have lasted a humiliating 21 days as leader after Arlene Foster was ousted five years ago, but the final script was far from written for all involved...

Suzanne Breen

Three leaders in 50 days. The DUP travelled to the edge of the political precipice five years ago on a journey that nobody could have ever imagined.

That self-portrait of the big happy family was never entirely true, yet nothing in the party’s history indicated that it would tear itself apart in the way it did.

Edwin Poots’ name might be the one most prominently associated with Arlene Foster’s political assassination, but there were many fingerprints on the dagger.

Some 22 MLAs and four MPs — 80% of the party’s Assembly and House of Commons representatives — signed a letter of no confidence in her.

It was impossible to survive and, on April 28, 2021, Foster announced she was stepping down.

A previous LucidTalk poll for the Belfast Telegraph had shown the DUP on 19% — its lowest rating in two decades. With an Assembly election due the following year, many MLAs were worried about their futures, but there was more to it.

There was a wave of public sympathy for the then First Minister, and some observers believed that misogyny was in play.

One MLA who had signed the letter hotly disputed that to me. He’d once been a big Foster fan, but said her communication with her Assembly colleagues had deteriorated.

They were treated “like something you’d scrape off your shoe”. He said they were sick of having their views either ignored or sidelined.

In the leadership race, Edwin Poots was first out of the stalls. He announced his leadership bid just a day after Foster said she was stepping down.

His team were confident, but not complacent. Their man had a significant advantage over Westminster-based Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. The party’s 28 MLAs made up the overwhelming majority of the DUP’s electoral college and, at Stormont, Poots was on home turf.

He knew what made his Assembly colleagues tick. He’d sat in their offices, had lunch with them countless times in the canteen and visited their constituencies. He was well-liked.

Along the corridors of Parliament Buildings, you’d rarely see Pootsie walking without a pal. It was hard for Donaldson to try to make up the ground in a short campaign.

In terms of deep roots in the party, he couldn’t compare with his rival. He’d joined at 41 after decades in the UUP. Poots had signed up at the age of 16.

At the heart of the latter’s campaign was a reform agenda: to return the power from the big beast and backroom staff to MLAs. Donaldson was seen as the continuity candidate.

His leadership bid centred on having a much wider electoral appeal than Poots. The DUP wasn’t just losing support to the TUV, it was haemorrhaging votes to Alliance and there was renewed competition from a Doug Beattie-led UUP.

Donaldson’s camp argued that he was the supremely experienced figure. He was tried and tested — the proverbial safe pair of hands.

But backbench MLAs chose to slay the big beasts and take back control. Donaldson was defeated by 19 votes to 17. The DUP establishment was beaten, but only just.

Poots’ first mistake in terms of party unity was in not paying tribute to his opponent in his first speech after his victory.

Some around him behaved like they’d secured a 10-nil victory in normal time, when it was really 5-4 on penalties.

Poots didn’t appoint a single MLA from the losing side to the four big ministries the party occupied. Paul Frew, who had been his campaign manager, replaced Diane Dodds in the economy.

In education, Peter Weir was shown the door and Michelle McIlveen was ushered in. Poots wasn’t helped by claims from Donaldson supporters of bullying at the DUP executive meeting at which he was ratified.

The brutish nature of Foster’s ousting had already damaged the party’s new leader in the public eye. A male politician toppling a female is always on potentially dangerous ground.

Boris Johnson’s easy charm helped him get away with it regarding Theresa May. Poots didn’t enjoy that advantage, and he wasn’t media savvy.

The day after he got the job, the new DUP leader was pictured at his home with his Rottweiler Tyson in his first media interview. Given the negative public perception that often surrounds the breed, a press officer — if consulted — would surely have advised against it.

As Poots took over the reins, some wrongly viewed him as a fundamentalist and hardliner. In reality, political pragmatism had long marked his career. The idea that he was going to be belting out the Sash and shouting No Surrender was wrong.

Poots had been the first DUP minister to attend a GAA match officially. He was among a packed crowd at Pairc Esler for a McKenna cup tie between Donegal and Down in January 2008 — 10 years before Foster went to Clones for the Ulster final.

In 2017, he had told the MacGill summer school in Glenties, Co Donegal: “Anyone who speaks and loves the Irish language is as much a part of Northern Ireland life as a collarette-wearing Orangeman.

“I want them to feel at home, to feel respected, and a part of society.” Poots was by no means the bogeyman that some portrayed him.

Yet he took up the leadership with low public buy-in. In a LucidTalk poll, two-thirds of DUP voters said they preferred Donaldson. That meant he had to hit the ground running, which he failed to do.

He may have plotted a successful path to secure the top job, but he failed to articulate a vision for unionism. With no apparent policy change on the protocol, it increasingly looked — as TUV leader Jim Allister said — like a pure power grab.

It was a deal with Sinn Féin and the British government over the Irish language which proved Poots undoing. His decision to press ahead with the nomination of Paul Givan as First Minister in defiance of the overwhelming majority of MLAs and MPs was the final straw.

He had won the leadership on a pledge to put ‘democracy’ back into the DUP and give his elected representatives a greater say. With greater patience and tactical guile, he could have plotted a way through.

Hours after that nomination in the Assembly, Poots was forced to resign and the way was cleared for Donaldson to assume the top job.

It was a very public humiliation. Paisley had lasted almost four decades as leader. Peter Robinson held the reins for seven years and Foster for five, while Poots lasted 21 days. He had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

To say he was a footnote in the history of DUP leaders seemed like an over-exaggeration. He looked more like a typo.

It must have hurt badly. He didn’t indulge in public self-pity: there would have been scant sympathy if he had.

Yet the final script was far from written. Poots may have massively mishandled the leadership, but he now played a clever game and proved himself a canny strategist.

Three years later, Donaldson needed his support to get his deal to restore power-sharing across the line. With party officers split down the middle, Poots was the king-maker.

When the Assembly returned, he became Speaker. Just weeks later, Donaldson resigned after being charged with historical sex offences. which he denies.

The Poots’ camp was far from finished in the DUP. Givan is the party’s most high-profile and combative minister. Jonny Buckley is its rising star and the most popular MLA with the grassroots.

Paul Frew is chair of the Assembly’s justice committee and beat Communities Minister Gordon Lyons for the role of party secretary at last year’s AGM.

The changing fortunes of those who did battle in the DUP is a story about life as much as it is about politics. It shows how quickly things move: how winners can become losers overnight, and vice versa. Even those role reversals aren’t permanent. The wheel turns, and it changes all over again.

I was a little too young for the glory days of Dr. Roberts, so my first indie record shop was Hector's House in North Street.

I've heard Bruce has been firing a few quips at Ozzy's way through the tour but I'm sure it's all in good jest.