Consequences and Legacy of the Song

This is an iHeart Podcast, guaranteed human . On Christmas Eve 1995, author Miguel Ángel Hernandez's best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. Crime forgotten. Twenty years later, Miguel returns home in an attempt to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But revisiting the past will awaken personal ghosts. Based on true events, the pain of others is a raw and moving novel that fuses a police thriller with compelling reportage. Find the Pain of Others at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever you get your audiobooks. Hi everyone, it's Paul Muldoon. Before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin The organizers of this civil rights march promised that they would be on five This seemed to us to be a perfectly peaceful demonstration that had gone wrong and that our army boys had acted indiscriminately and had fired on The army have said throughout the day that they hope to use minimum force. But three hours after the procession began. This has ended up, as dusk comes onto the bog side, as the worst ever confrontation between the army and the Catholic people of the Kragen and Bogside . It just seemed so sort of wrong to me that even though I wasn't a writer of protest songs, I just felt I had to try and say something about this. Why don't you just give Ireland back? Give Ireland back to the Irish . I'm Paul Muldoon. For a while now I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of our era. And will you look at me? I'm going on tour. I'm actually a performer. That is Sir Paul McCartney. We work together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than 150 of his songs and we recorded many hours of our conversations. It was like going back to an old snapshot album, looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed. This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. In this episode, give Ireland back to the Irish . One might well ask who had taken Ireland from the Irish . When Ireland gained independence from England in 192 2, the Northern region of the island remained under British rule . Those who felt Northern Ireland should continue forever as a part of the United Kingdom were known as loyalists. And so for decades they were locked in conflict with Republicans, those who wished for a united Ireland with no tie to Great Britain . This was all further complicated by centuries of antagonism in the country between Catholics and Protest ants, and it burst into political violence in the late 1960s and 70s, a period called the Troubles . British soldiers were installed in border towns and the Northern Ireland capital of Belf ast. The mainly Catholic Irish Republicans who lived in Northern Ireland came to feel that they resided under a kind of occupation . On Sunday, the 30th of January 1972, British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians at a peaceful protest in the northern Irish city called Derry . Several of the victims were shot while fleeing from the soldiers, and others were shot while trying to help the wounded. There's an image from that day of a priest, Father Daly, moving through the crowd with this white handkerchief held out as a flag of truce that's absolutely seared on my mind's eye. Father, how many dead have you seen in the bogside? Appearing to be dead, there are the three in that Saracen car. There are two men laying at the end of this block of flats. There's another man at least very close to being dead. There's one. There are two others up there. Fourteen people died . The incident became known as the Bog side Massacre or Bloody Sunday. There was immediately a cover up. No they weren't innocent, they were at rifles or all that . But when you saw the footage of it all, it just looked ah they could have just left these people to be. And if the people had shot, then maybe, you know. But it seemed to me like it was a reasonable demonstration , the kind of which had been happening in the black communities and in all sorts of communities throughout recent history and throughout history . So I was kind of shocked by this whole idea, mainly that our soldiers had perpetrated this because up until that point I thought our boys were all great. I was a great support . Great brilliant . You are tremendous . And nobody knows like me But really I was just starting to think, wait a minute, you know , what if there were Irish soldiers behaving that way in Liverpool where I was growing up and you couldn't go here, you couldn't go there, because these soldiers with guns, armed soldiers were gonna stop you going down the street. Tell me how would you like it if on your way to work you would stop my Irish soldiers , would you lie down to nothing ? Would you give me the And so it just seemed so sort of wrong to me. Why don't you get a United Islander and get them sorted out? Tu di d'am ir es, tu te Even though the Beatles were writing in the 1960s during what seemed like a renaissance of protest music, they had never released a song that was overtly polit ical. After the dissolution of the Beatles, however, McCartney went to New York and paid a visit to John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Greenwich Village, where political art was very much part of the Zeitgeist . This song's called The Luck of the Irish and uh the proceeds from this song and record will go to the civil rights defence of North Ireland. Civil defense, whatever it's called. John and Yoko had written The Luck of the Irish at the end of nineteen seventy one, inspired by a protest they attended the year before in support of the Irish Republican army . If you had the luck of the Irish , you'd be sorry and wish you were dead . Irish and you'd wish you was English instead . In early nineteen seventy two in a furious response to the Bogside Massacre, John Ono co also wrote Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Just for people there . The cry the fair demon fills the free dairy air . Is there any one amongst you? Then the blame it upon the kids . Not a soldier, boy was bleeding when they nail the coffin lake. McCartney was similarly furious about the British soldiers unprovoked attack on Irish civilians, even though he's rarely found anger to be generative for his art. I realize this actually that sometimes I really want to sit down and write a song that sums up my dismay and anger at the political situation that I read about every bloody morning, you know, and I read about politicians saying this and this and this and this. And it's like, God, what a twerp. This guy is a complete idiot, you know. So I I'll sit down and think, okay, you are an idiot, but I can't do it. It doesn't really work. I wrote a song that was called Angry that was an attempt at that, but it's not angry. You know, I it seems to be something I can feel in myself, but I can't easily translate that into uh a song . Yeah, so uh that's not one of my genres. McCartney may not feel protest music is an easy genre to access, but Give Ireland back to the Irish is a passionate protest song. Instead of focusing on anger and accusations, though, the song is an appeal for empathy, asking the British to imagine themselves in Irish shoes. Tell me how would you like it ? If on your way to work , you would stop by Irish soldi ers Would you lie down As America marks its 250th anniversary, we're looking back at two and a half centuries of rebellion and liberty through the eyes of the heroes who defended it. The whole thing about this country is freed I'm J.R. Martinez, a U.S. Army veteran. On Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, we bring you the defining moments of valor that went above and beyond the call of duty. Listen to Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, wherever you get your podcast McCartney wrote Give Ireland back to the Irish from the British perspective. But the conflict in Ireland must have struck a personal chord due to his family's Irish roots. In fact, the two opposing sides represented in the troubles were replicated within McCartney's own household. My mum was Catholic , being more Irish than my dad. My dad was like Liverpool Irish went a few generations back. My mum was a bit more recent from Ireland. And um so she was Catholic, my dad was Protestant. All the people say the people must be free and be what back in Island That's a man who looks like Do you mean looks like me because I look Irish myself? Well it means he's no not really. I wasn't thinking that deeply into it. But I see that now as I'm kind of rereading it. No, I was more meaning that it could be me. Yes, it could be me. This guy, this could be me. If we're talking about England where we were, how would you like it if on your way to work? So there's a man who looks like me, um it's just a way of saying, you know, he's he's just like you, I could have said. Yeah. Or he's just like you and me. Yeah, he's not other . Right. And it's been the God and country . As I revisited this song, I couldn't help but think about my own childhood in County Armand, just one county over from County Monaghan, where Paul McCartney's family had lived. Were you involved in the troubles ? Not as an active participant. No . No. No . Yeah, I wish you were there round about that time. And was. Wouldn't be uh inconsumable. No, not at all. It could easily have happened, honestly. But my mother, I think very like your mother was a very protective person and you know she wanted us to do well in the world and she didn't want us to get involved in these guys who were down at the end of the lane plotting things. This period of history has of course crept into my own poetry. There's a poem, for example, called Ireland, which goes as follows. Ireland The Volkswagen parked in the gap, but gently ticking over . You wonder if it's lovers and not men hurrying back across two fields and a river . The river, of course, representing the separation of those two fields. So when you talk about that in your poems, you're recounting stuff. Just while I was there being a person on the street. Yes. With it all happening around you, yeah. Paul McCartney was still on his trip to New York when he heard news of Bloody Sunday. It was the first Wings recording that included the guitarist Henry McCullough, who was himself a Northern Irishman. So we made the record and then I sent it over to EMI , immediately got a phone call from Sir Joseph Lockwood, who was the head of EMI. But Sir Joe, he said, Paul, you can't put this record out of the Irish situation. I said, look, Sir Joe, he said, the thing is I not really a protest songwriter, but this has affected me deeply and I feel like I've gotta say something. He said, Oh no, you can't. He said, please don't put it out, reconsider. So I gave it a couple of days and I just rang back and said, no, you know, I've got to put it out. He said it'll be banned, it'll get banned on BBC and everything. He said, no good for you. Well I don't care. I've got to make a statement . This thing was big enough event in my history, in my country's history, to take some kind of a stand . Joseph Lockwood's concerns about the song were perhaps vindicated. When the song was released, the BBC, Radio Luxembourg and other organiz ations banned it from broadcast. It was too provocative, they said, too controversial. Most radio stations in the United States also avoided playing the song. The British Broadcasting Corporation won't play your song. What do you think about that? I think they're silly, you know, I think any kind of repression like that, you know, it always ends up in the uh the person who is being banned getting more out of it than the people who ban it. Witness this, you know, you want an interview about it, it's it's big news 'cause they ban On an ABC special report, McCartney was explicit in his support of the Irish nationalists. should uh should get out. Yeah, uh you know, eventually, that's what I think, yeah. I was brought up to be proud of it, you know, the British Empire owned most of the world at one time almost. Gradually had to sort of give it back 'cause people said, hey, listen, it's ours, you know, not yours and they wanted it back. Well I just see that's the same thing in Ireland, you know, it's a little bit of territory we've gained in the past. And I think this bloody Sunday, you know, where the British parachute regiment went in and sort of shot at the people. Me as a British citizen, I don't like my army going around shooting my Irish brothers. In a way, if people are shooting at them, they can't just sit there and not shoot back, you know. So whilst I don't dig it, it's inevitable, you know, that if they get shot at they'll shoot back. Give Ireland back to the Irish may have been banned in Britain and overlooked in America , but in Ireland, it hit number one on the charts. It also curiously hit number one in Spain, where McCartney believes it may have resonated with the Basque struggle for self-determination . Much of the violence surrounding the troubles came to an end with the nineteen ninety-eight Good Friday Agreement, which restored self-government to Northern Ireland. But the aftershocks of Bloody Sunday still reverberate . And they raise questions about what, if any, punishment should be faced by those involved in the killings . It was a moment where you know there was a sense that art could respond to that situation, which by the way is a situation still hasn't really been resolved. Let's only itself. No, no, no, I know. It's a very thorny issue. Give Ireland Back to the Irish a single released by Paul McCartney and Wings in february nineteen seventy two . In the next episode . John being older and at art school would go to art school parties, which