Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (2012)
Terri Hooley opened a record shop in Belfast in the early 1970s and, a few years later, was sponsoring punk bands in the city. The name of both the shop and the record label was Good Vibrations. Hooley’s big breakthrough came when, after he had hawked the Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’ all round London, John Peel played it – twice consecutively – on his Radio 1 show. Peel became a big supporter of Hooley’s stable’s output more generally – although the legends on the screen at the end of Good Vibrations inform us that the label never had a Top 40 singles hit. As the legends also explain, the shop has closed and re-opened more than once over the decades (it’s still going today). Hooley, now in his mid-sixties, has been called ‘the Godfather of Belfast punk’ and Good Vibrations is a celebration of his achievements.
Written by Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson, this is the second feature directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (the first was Cherrybomb in 2009). It’s a confident and interesting piece of work. The film-makers are very aware of the conventions of pop music rags-to-riches movies. (In Terri Hooley’s case, ‘rags-to-riches’ is not to be taken in its literal financial sense.) The characters are introduced and the narrative moves with an almost comic-strip vividness and simplicity. The persistent counterpoint to the film’s good humour is of course the Troubles. Barros D’Sa and Leyburn insert plenty of news archive. For a while, this material is not only startling in itself; it makes Hooley’s enterprise seem all the more amazing. But, once you get used to the technique, the newsreel footage becomes part of the design: Good Vibrations eventually verges on reducing Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence to the context for pop biopic – albeit a very distinctive context. In this kind of story, how much you like the type of music that’s at its centre is a factor, however much you try to ignore it; and I guess I’m more interested in punk rock as a socio-cultural phenomenon than in listening to it. In the climax to Good Vibrations, Terri Hooley proclaims from the stage of the Ulster Hall that, in the world of punk, ‘New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers but Belfast has the reason!’ The film doesn’t, however, explore what punk means to the bands, Protestant and Catholic, who play it.
Richard Dormer is Terri Hooley, under an unflattering 1970s hairdo and with a false glass eye. (Hooley lost his left eye in childhood – the moment when he changed from being, in his own punning words in voiceover, from ‘Terry with a ‘y’’ to ‘Terri with an ‘i’’.) Dormer is unrecognisably better here than in his supporting roles last year in Hyena and ’71: he’s full of energy and wit and really inhabits the character, although I found little that he did surprising. Jodie Whittaker is very beautiful: as Terri’s wife Ruth, she’s effective both as an image – Terri’s image – of ideal woman and, because she’s a straightforward, truthful actress, as a real woman too. I liked Karl Johnson as Terri’s old-time Socialist father, George (a Northern Englishman): the character looks set to be a caricature but Johnson gives it just the right extra – as a result, George cuts deeper. It’s a good joke that, although he deplores what he sees as Terri’s sellout to capitalism, the son’s lack of business nous means that he, in effect, stays faithful to the father’s principles. The one time I laughed out loud came when, after Ruth has left Terri, he talks with George, who warns that Terri’s mother (Ruth McCabe) ‘has strong views about marriage … or she wouldn’t have stayed with me all these years’. The cast also includes Liam Cunningham, Adrian Dunbar, Dylan Moran and David Wilmot.
8 March 2015
