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Punk was fast, loud, and short-lived. Some bands made it in the charts, but the vast majority were just ephemeral and are now forgotten. In Northern Ireland, the punk movement thrived, to the extent that its leading band members and followers came to view it as a way of life, as an identity. It was this cultural and musical phenomenon that a director from County Down, John T. Davis, decided to put on record in 1978. He started filming bands that were either emerging or who had already made it in the international charts. With the help of the Belfast Arts Council, who provided a grant of L2500, John Davis carried out a project on a shoestring budget. The idea was born after he had the opportunity to film Stiff Little Fingers in Coleraine, and then the Undertones in Portrush. But the end product, Shell Shock Rock [1], released in 1979, also documented less well-known bands who were shown playing live in venues such as the Harp Bar in Belfast. After 2 weeks of intense shooting, Davis and his crew of nine were then left with the difficult task of editing down more than 15 hours of footage into a 50-minute documentary. The result was a fast and raw film, fuelled with energy. Without adopting the documentary or testimony approach, its main achievement was to translate onto celluloid the very essence of punk. It thus became a cult film not only within the punk community at the time, but within Irish cultural documents. Davis' film was the very image of the music it portrayed, which, in his own words, was `rough and reactionary and is all Punk, but contains a certain quality that speaks volumes on contemporary life in Northern Ireland' [2].
Indeed, the relevance of punk was not essentially due to the creativeness of its musicians, but to the scene it created and the atmosphere that ensued and which Davis succeeded in capturing in Shell Shock Rock. Punk bands and followers in Northern Ireland somehow managed to retain the ethos that had characterized the movement at its early stages in Britain. Indeed, whereas punk music in the rest of the UK was being rapidly co-opted by the music industry and becoming a successful and...