Primeval punk recordings from Northern Ireland — #1 ‘Big City’ by Speed on IT records
The very first punk record from Northern Ireland was Big City by Speed, a band that nobody had ever heard of, and who broke up shortly after the recording was made. No surprise then that it didn’t exactly storm the charts; it was as popular as a sheep-killing dog when it first came out and subsequent events just increased its obscurity.
Big City was released on IT records, a microscopic label from Portadown, formed by the owner of a chain of local record stores of the same name. The record was released in October 1977, part of the wave of independents inspired by Stiff and Spiral Scratch and punk’s DIY ethic. There were still only a few punk records available — the genre was still very much a novelty.
This was well before the Undertones or Stiff Little Fingers or Good Vibrations — this was a real outlier. IT records were later to sign infamous Belfast punks the Outcasts and release that band’s first single Frustration.
The lack of success IT records had with the release was later compounded by a car-bomb attack which damaged their Portadown headquarters and completely destroyed their stock, including all the spare copies of Big City.
In those days Northern Ireland was in the midst of a nasty little civil war. The town where I went to school, Armagh, which was close to IT Records headquarters in Portadown, had been bombed relentlessly, till much of the city-centre lay fenced off behind corrugated-iron screens, in piles of rubble. Security was very tight. Police and army patrols would stop, frisk and search me, maybe four or five times as I moved from one side of town to the other. That was just normal life; it didn’t stop me from getting to the record shop in Scotch street where I used to hang out.
I went there with my pocket-money one Friday in 1978 and I was amazed to find that they had local punk rock records for sale.
Like, wow, maan.
I had, of course, been following the punk rock revolution through the pages of the NME and Sounds, and I had even got a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks from my sister for Christmas 1977; but I had never realized something was happening right here. Right here in our very own bomb-blasted Norn Iron.
There in the record shop window were two 45s from a record company I had never heard of before, from bands that I had never heard of before. One was by The Outcasts and the other was Big City by Speed, and that was the one I bought.
Big City sounded pretty good to me. It rocked along much like the tunes I heard every night on the John Peel show. It was just as good, as raw and unpolished, as the Cortinas or Slaughter and the Dogs, or the Desperate Bicycles. And the B side, a cover version of the Kinks’ All Day and All of the Night sounded really great, like they could even play their instruments.
The cover looked dog-rough, rude and amateur, like it had been completed at short notice by someone with no artistic talent and a cheap felt-tip pen — but that was just right too. A complete binary opposite of the hippy-dippy Roger Dean Typographic Oceans artwork of the time. And on my copy there was a modest price-tag sticker over the IT girl’s breasts; when I tried to take the sticker off later, the cover ripped.
Details about this record on Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/Speed-Big-City/release/2248084
And recording and band personnel details: https://www.irishrock.org/irodb/bands/speed1.html
I’m selling two classic early Northern Ireland punk recordings — this one, which has been travelling around the world with me for forty years — and also Big Time by Rudi (Good Vibrations first ever release) and I’m donating the proceeds to the homeless, here in Australia.
Why?
Well (apart from being a great big notice-box / virtue-signalling lefty) I was very moved recently to hear how three squatters died in a fire in Melbourne. As an old (London) squatter myself, I wondered what I could do to help. Was there a fund I could donate to, to help their friends and families? I couldn’t find anything.
And I knew Rudi — one of the very best punk bands of all time — had been squatters, too. I thought about Rudi and those early punk records. If those records had any sort of value, maybe I could use them to help real people? It seemed to fit with the ethos of the bands and the ethos of the records and the ethos of that time.
Rather than just letting the records sit there, literally gathering dust, maybe I could actually put them to good use? Some people might view them as historical artefacts and put them on a silver platter— and if they want to do that, that’s fine; but, in my mind, if they help someone get a bite to eat, or a roof over their heads, that’s even better.
Keep rocking.
