Travers The Bass Player

Surviving the Miami Showband Massacre
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78885-782-6
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Stephen Travers has lived two lives. His first was as a young bass player, immersed in music, friendship, and the thrill of gigs on the road with The Miami Showband. But on July 31, 1975, that life shattered on the A1 road at Buskhill in County Down when a Loyalist gang ambushed the band, murdering three of his friends in an attack that would become one of the darkest moments of The Troubles. In the quiet aftermath, in a nearby field, Stephen awoke to his second life-as a survivor. This second life led him down unexpected paths: as an author, composer, producer, and international speaker on peace and reconciliation. Over decades, he worked to support other survivors, challenge suspected state collusion, and seek justice in a landmark case against the British Ministry of Defence. Yet, despite these achievements, Stephen found himself drawn back to that field, revisiting the young man he had been moments before the massacre-searching for closure, a reunion with his former self. Now, fifty years later, he has written The Bass Player, a love letter and eulogy for that first life. This book is both a deeply personal reckoning and a song for all those silenced by conflict, offering a path toward healing and, finally, peace.

Stephen Travers is an author, composer, producer and international speaker. In 2019, he co-founded Truth and Reconciliation Platform (TaRP) which provides a space for survivors of the Troubles, regardless of their social, religiousor political background, to speak about their experiences. He now lives in Cork, where he continues with his writing and music.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Travers, Stephen

Leseproben

Foreword

When Stephen Travers asked me to write the foreword to , I was both flattered and instantly nervous. Stephen and I have known each other since 2017 when we filmed the Netflix documentary . However, whereas Stephen is a world-class musician, and a peace advocate through his organisation, Truth and Reconciliation Platform (TaRP), and therefore perhaps a little more used to telling his story, I am a documentary filmmaker and documentary filmmaking is a communal activity. Many people, from the crew to the subjects themselves, work together to tell a story. It is strange to be asked to contribute my perspective alone, and plainly in my own words, when I have spent the past sixteen years of my life being a name in the credits of other people’s lives. Nevertheless, after the year we (and many others) spent making the film, I have both a profound respect and deep loyalty to Stephen. I have developed fulfilling working relationships with many of the subjects in the documentaries I’ve filmed, but Stephen is rare among them. To know Stephen Travers is to know someone who is somehow eternally youthful in his passion and dedication to music and also someone who is a shrewd, wise and committed political activist. It’s as if he is almost two separate people in one body: the innocent bass player of his youth and the relentless activist who emerged from the fiery wreckage of 31 July 1975. That duality is evident in .

In the spring of 2017 I received an email from a documentary production company called All Rise. Netflix was financing an eight-film documentary series investigating unknown political dramas in the music industry. The tagline was ‘The music you know; the stories you don’t.’ The production was staffing up in Burbank, California, just down the road from the iconic Warner Brothers Studios. They were curious if I wanted to produce. It was a tantalising offer and I signed on immediately.

The documentary series examined how, buried under the glitz and glamour of spectacle, some of our favourite entertainers have stumbled into injustice or scandal. While I had some familiarity with a few of the narratives – Bob Marley’s alleged brush with the CIA, for instance, or the murder of Sam Cooke – there was one story that was utterly foreign to me. It was the story of an Irish ‘showband’ counterintuitively called the Miami. (I was unfamiliar with the term ‘showband’ but I loved the film and figured it was something like that.) The members of the Miami Showband had been pulled over at an apparent military checkpoint in the summer of 1975 only to realise too late that it was an ambush by loyalist paramilitaries. After the loyalists’ bomb prematurely detonated, the paramilitaries massacred half the band in an attempt to cover their tracks. Since then, the survivors had been trying to piece together the truth of what happened to them and their quest was led by their dogged bass player, Stephen Travers.

I read Stephen Travers’ first memoir, , annotating along the way and, when I finished, I flipped right back to the front and began studying it again. The book had all the elements of my favourite stories: an international setting, government intrigue, rich history and, at the core, relatable, regular human beings who pushed through loss and disillusionment to better understand the world and perhaps change it for the better.

When I read Stephen Travers’ book, I leapt at the chance to learn more. I first spoke with Stephen during the summer of 2017. We arranged Skype calls so we could discuss his memories of the attack and his subsequent investigations. From the beginning, I noticed that Stephen had a few pronounced characteristics. The first was that he was very careful about security. He insisted on secure platforms and encrypted emails and text messages. His awareness of data protection was the first clue that he had become much savvier than the bass player I met in his book and that the massacre continued to profoundly shape his daily life.

The second thing I noticed was that he was a very accomplished storyteller. He would freely answer any question I asked. Ever since Stephen reported hearing a British officer’s voice on the night of the attack, certain people have questioned its credibility. He told me his story again and again over many months and the details never changed. Sometimes people alter the details every time they tell a story – it’s night instead of day, or events happened in a slightly different order, or someone’s parting line is different. Stephen’s story stayed the same. It was helpful on two fronts: it made it easier to check facts, and it also made it easier to anticipate what he would say during his on-camera interview. Stephen had a natural way of turning the corners of his story; you had to keep listening to find out what was going to happen next and, even more importantly, you didn’t just want to know what was going to happen, you wanted to know how it would affect . That’s when you know you’ve got a protagonist.

When I eventually met Stephen, I realised that he was far more than just a good documentary interview or a celebrity in the music world or a survivor of the Irish conflict. He was a man of deep integrity and compassion whose commitment to telling his story was fuelled by his intense desire to ensure that the violence of those years is never, ever repeated.

Those of us who live outside Ireland can’t appreciate the real, life-altering experiences of the Troubles. The survivors carry the trauma with them every day as invisible and present as a second soul. With all of that weight on their shoulders, even simply defining the Troubles – saying out loud what happened to them, what they lived through – becomes both an act of courage and a political high-wire act. Our crew learned this first-hand when we were filming an interview with Stephen and we asked him to explain, in one sentence, what the Irish Troubles were about. For the purposes of the documentary, international audiences needed a definition of the conflict that was simple to absorb and Irish and British audiences needed to feel the explanation was accurate. Of course, the reality is that you cannot explain the complicated conflict in a single sentence. It took an entire crew from America, Ireland and Northern Ireland, plus Stephen Travers and a couple of hotel visitors who wandered onto the set, a good couple of hours to debate all the different sentences Stephen could construct to explain the conflict and, in the end, no one felt confident they got it right.

Later, I wondered what Stephen thought of that request. Perhaps he found it silly or frustrating, but you would have never known. I realised that his many years of emotional TaRP events and heated political debates have uniquely prepared him to field every question and comment with equanimity and patience. Perhaps the best example of Stephen’s preternatural calm is his continued willingness to sit down with members of the paramilitary organisation responsible for the Miami attack. Despite losing his friends and bandmates, Brian McCoy, Fran O’Toole and Tony Geraghty, Stephen has repeatedly engaged with high-ranking members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. While he originally met with ‘the Craftsman’ because he was looking for answers to why the Miami was targeted and who specifically was colluding with an illegal paramilitary organisation, he largely seems to have moved past that. When we were filming the documentary, his primary interest seemed to be to bring the UVF into a public conversation where they would commit, on the record, to maintaining the peace despite rising tensions as a result of Brexit. It struck me that Stephen’s personal narrative fits the classic hero’s journey. Though he began his investigation to find answers for himself and his family, his journey soon broadened his mission. Now, he was working not for himself, but for a wider peace.

To do that, he was willing to break bread with the very people who had caused him, and so many others, immeasurable pain. It is not a choice everyone would make. As he writes in , many people have criticised him for it. Stephen’s approach is distinctly different from blatantly refusing to engage with the other side – any other side – in order to maintain moral and rhetorical purity. Instead, Stephen is uncommonly willing to extend compassion to everyone even when people in his own camp dislike it. As this memoir makes evident, Stephen throws himself on the proverbial tracks again and again for the democratic ideal that dialogue, no matter how painful or tedious, is the surest method of peace-making.

The reality is that human nature is chillingly alien to us. The primatologist Jane Goodall said that the question isn’t whether behaviour is ‘natural’ to a species. If it is possible, it is natural. The useful question is what circumstances and environments push a species toward pro-social behaviour instead of anti-social behaviour, toward community instead of conflict. I wonder about the changes in environment that push some people towards violence and others, like Stephen, towards an almost compulsive push for reconciliation and peace.

Stephen has met with several former and current members of the UVF in his activism. Whatever those men have done in the past, they too have met with Stephen to attempt peace. Whether or not...