On Sunday 25 May, I was counted as one of the privileged few. I was chosen along with a selection of film-makers, writers, old punks and even older 68ers to the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast. We were being shown a sneak preview of Good Vibrations, a new movie about the life and times of Ulster punk impressario Terri Hooley. The film focuses on how this one-eyed anarchist and Belfast eccentric established a DIY record label in the late 70s and in the process discovered the Undertones, helping to release their brilliant debut single, Teenage Kicks – the song John Peel chose as his favourite track of all time.

In that brief flowering of rock'n'roll creativity between 1978 to 1981 the Ulster punk scene threw up a host of angry young bands who captured a generation's yearning to escape the Troubles and the tribal placards placed around their necks at birth. Stiff Little Fingers' Alternative Ulster became a kind of musical manifesto for Ulster punk in its rejection of the forces of the state and the paramiltiaries on either side. SLF's Wasted Life is a brilliant warning to the young about the dangers of joining republican and loyalist paramilitary forces and losing your life as well as wasting others in the process of persuing political dreams. But the one record that resonates still, that reverberates in the brain, that immediately brings me back to 1978, when I designed my own tartan bondage trousers, wore upside crosses on torn-up school blazers and yomped around Belfast city centre with a gang of young punks (who came from every background, loyalist, republican, Catholic, Protestant, anarchist, socialist) all the way up to Terri's Good Vibrations store on Saturdays.

Rudi's Big Time was an early protest song against reality pop programmes. In the 70s the BBC made a prototype of the horrors that are Pop Idol, The X-Factor and The Voice. It was called The Big Time and involved plucking wannabe stars off the streets and catapulting them to fame. The show was responsible for Sheena Easton's rise, for instance. The concept, however, was completely counter to the punk philosophy of DIY creative autonomy.

Rudi never made it to their own big time, unlike the Undertones or SLF. But no one should forget the string of memorable, simply constructed and powerful songs Rudi produced in those years. It's good to see the band acknowledged in this forthcoming film. And it's right and proper I chose Big Time as the anthem of my formative years in Belfast.