I recently watched The Best Years of Our Lives, a 45-minute documentary made for BBC2 television in 1974 about the Nevada showband. It is shot in a cinéma vérité style; no voices are heard apart from the band members and their manager, and there are no captions.
There is a conversation where they discuss playing in Northern Ireland; this feels like a set-up, confirmed to me by the filmmaker, Peter Carr. Ireland, for a British audience then, would have been synonymous with the Troubles, and it would have been inconceivable not to address the issue. The band go back and forth between affirming the enthusiasm of Northern audiences to concerns about the stresses of the journeys there and back – in particular, the hassle of RUC checkpoints – “or worse”.
“Worse” is very definitely what happened a little over a year later to the Nevada’s contemporaries and rivals, the Miami. Driving back to Dublin from a gig in Banbridge, Co Down, their VW van was flagged down at what appeared to be an army checkpoint, but was, in fact, manned by members of the paramilitary UVF, including off-duty Ulster Defence Regiment troops. Two members of that gang attempted to attach a bomb to the van, which was intended to explode later, but blew themselves and the van up in the process. Panicked, the rest of the gang opened fire on the members of the band, killing three and wounding two, including the bass player, Stephen Travers, the author of this sometimes riveting if uneven book.
Travers’s story up to that night was one replicated across Ireland during the showband era. A versatile and talented musician, self-taught, playing first in local bands, he was headhunted to fill in at short notice by the Royal – then perhaps the biggest name on the circuit. After a break, and a regular job in London, he auditioned for the Miami at the age of 24.
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The showband scene was management-led; while hardly as regimented as the K-pop “idol” system now, there were similarities. Bands were businesses and musicians employees; hired and fired, recruited through audition, and styled to order. Travers’s own musical preferences were far from the pop and country he played six nights a week – he was a rocker, with a developing interest in jazz – but there was a mortgage to pay. It was, says Travers, “an era that saw more musicians in full-time employment than before or since”. The very fact that a gigging musician could even get a mortgage will seem fantastic to many successful artists now.
The book moves rather disconcertingly, often in alternate chapters, from reflections on his musical life to discussions of the aftermath of that defining night in 1975. Each part suffers a little from contrasting levels of detail. For this (academic) music nerd, accounts of what he played, and when, and where, could do with more detail; conversely, the chapters dealing with his search for answers regarding what exactly happened that night are sometimes too dense.
I suspect a younger reader, with no more than a basic grasp of the history of the Northern conflict, might struggle. Nevertheless, in these chapters, Travers is often at his sharpest; a half century’s engagement with conflict resolution has left him impatient with easy answers and inviting paths to “reconciliation” – a concept he is less than comfortable with.
He notes, at a reception in Stormont in 2007 where Ian Paisley was launching a book by Dana/Rosemary Scallon, how “the Chuckle Brothers”, Paisley and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, had each floated free of the people who elected them, still exactly where they were in 1998, minus the army on the streets. He is most sceptical about the good intentions of the UK government and the PSNI.
It is Travers’s settled conviction, 50 years later, that this bungled operation by loyalist paramilitaries had the fingerprints of MI5 all over it; it was intended to force the Dublin government into closing or at least significantly tightening the Border. He takes the eventual willingness of the UK government to settle his civil case against them, and the PSNI, as proof of this.
He is appalled at the NI Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill (2023), pushed through by the last Tory government, and a crucial factor in the decision to accept the settlement, since the action would be impossible thereafter. It now looks as if a framework document, agreed in recent weeks by Tánaiste Simon Harris and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn, will address most of what was objectionable in that Bill, and will, I would imagine, give Travers some satisfaction in showing that sustained engagement with politics and politicians will, in the end, get us some way towards processes leading to lasting resolution – a suggestively musical term he prefers to “reconciliation”, with its intimation of books balanced rather than justice done.
Stan Erraught is a lecturer in Popular Music and Music Management at the University of Leeds, with research interests in music and political economy. He is the author of Rebel Notes: Popular Music and Conflict in Ireland (Beyond the Pale 2025)
