These are a series of pen and inks of Rock Stars well… Irish rock stars, well… Irish rock stars that meant a lot to anyone who was young during the 1970s in Derry, N.Ireland, which was actually a bad place to be as it was a war zone at the time. It was the height of the Northern Irish “Troubles”. We did our best to ignore all that. In the midst of that mayhem we choose to listen to music instead and tried to be “young”

These particular performers meant more than most. They represented something akin to normality and notions of free-thought. Not just that, they had also made it out of Ireland and on to a world stage. What they expressed at that time was the antithesis of the Republican and Loyalist doctrines that swallowed up so many vulnerable minds.These are actually pen and ink illustrations to accompany new (as yet unpublished) poems. So I’ll include the poetry here as well:

Philo

Phil, vagabond and rocker

Playboy of the Western World

Poet, holder of our dreams

M16 rock

Machine-gun blues

Drilling a bore-hole

Through walls of indifference

Through the Northern Taliban pall

Through our hearts and through the wall

Lizzy – loud, live and dangerous

Twin-guitared, guttural

Over-driven purveyors of precision

Rat-tatted, staccato riffs

Razor edged and riven

Driven through our heads

A delicious distortion

Of all that was holy