David McWilliams Forgotten from Ballymena History - why?

The shop assistant behind the counter asked what seemed like an off-hand question as she put the CD into the bag.

-      Who did that song before him (Brian Houston)?

She just asked the wrong guy.

-      Well, David McWilliams - did you know he was from Ballymena, that he was number 1 all over Europe, front cover of NME twice in a row – in 1967, summer of love… yes, twice! – from Ballymena and you’d never heard of him. How can that be? I am from Ballymena and a mad music fan since I was eleven and was nearly 40 before someone told me about him. Isn’t that amazing?”

She said surprisingly still looking interested

-      Really; it was Number 1?

-      Well, nearly everywhere in Europe but not the UK. Due to his management he was getting a lot of play on Radio Caroline so the BBC wouldn’t play it. But you will remember the Marc Almond top 5 hit in the early nineties, never knowing that Pearly Spencer was a tramp from Cullybackey. Fascinating!?

 She wasn’t rushing me on.

-      I do remember the Marc Almond version but I had a bet on with a friend that I heard a Scott Walker version on the radio.

-      That would have been McWilliams’ version. There were those who saw great similarities between him and Scott Walker. Oh you can tell your friend that I can understand you mixing up Scott Walker and David McWilliams.

-      I knew it. I am going to phone him tonight. So is he dead?

-      About five years ago, in Ballycastle! “

-      Ballycastle? Really?

She really does still seem intrigued.

-      Yip, how can that be? David McWilliams, the great forgotten man of Northern Ireland rock history. You see what you get when you ask a customer a simple question.

As I left I hoped she immediately turned to the other staff and told them about the writer of Days Of Pearly Spencer. Someone needs to tell it. It is a story that has gripped me for about five years since Colin Agnew, who is a great ambassador for local artists, told me about David McWilliams in a conversation about another north Antrim songwriter Bob Speers. Colin continues to drop into my office from time to time, to give me a little more information about this mystery of my home town and the music business.

McWilliams was actually born in Belfast and his first home was in the Cregagh area, near a similarly aged George Best (for my American readers Best was perhaps the greatest soccer player who ever lived). He was only three when the family headed 30 miles north to Ballymena. There he excelled at the same sport as Best being a goalkeeper of considerable promise who played for Harryville Amateurs before signing for Northern Ireland’s biggest club, Linfield. Sadly an ankle injury slowed his progress and by the time it had healed he was off to London to make it as a singer; as one bus poster stated, America had Dylan, England had Donovan and Ireland had McWilliams. As he was spending Saturday mornings and afternoons between the pots his nights were spent with local showbands like The Corals and The Hurricans where McWilliams developed his gift.

When he came to the attention of pop impresario Mervyn Solomon, McWilliams was whisked away to London where he was churning out albums for Mervyn’s son Philip’s Major Minor label. McWilliams wrote and recorded 3 albums in not much more than a year and perhaps in hindsight it diluted his genius. Forty songs in such a short time is a big ask. As well as the over concentration in releases there was a hype campaign that would be more in keeping with a Pop Idol winner in the twenty first century. Front pages of the NME, literally weeks after Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had grace the cover, billboard and bus poster campaigns heralded the new star but in the end the company were writing cheques that David was simply never going to be able to cash.

It was not only the dubious handling of McWilliams career that was going against him. This was 1967. It was the pivotal year of modern music when pop turned to rock. Sgt Pepper, The Monterrey Festival and the launch of BBC Radio 1. It was the last of these that most effected McWilliams. With Days Of Pearly Spencer being the  most played song on the pirate station Radio Caroline, the BBC refused to play it at all and that is why the million sales it achieved saw it hit the top of the pop charts all across Europe without making any dent in the British charts. Solomon was again the culprit. He had the power to make McWilliams something but that power misused probably worked against McWilliams.

Days Of Pearly Spencer is an astonishing song. The lyrics compare more than favourably with anything else of its time and in the autumn of 1967 that is not common or garden! McWilliams had a flair for images cascading down through his songs and we get a graphic picture of Pearly’s world, the features of his face, the sky around him, the streets he has to walk barefoot upon and the hand that life’s hard edge has thrown him. The menace in the music and the catchiness of the melody, distorted through a megaphone in the chorus makes for a remarkable jam packed 2 minutes and thirty six seconds of hit record.

There are suggestions that Pearly was a tramp from Cullybackey, a village about 4 miles from Ballymena and McWilliams showed an attentive concern for the downtrodden in his work. 3 O’Clock Flamingo Street could be another song about Pearly as McWilliams sets the song on Williams Street as people are leaving Ballymena’s famous Flamingo Ballroom where all the Irish showbands of the sixties would have gigged; even the Beatles played there. There’s also Poverty Street, Redundancy Blues and North Side Of Town. He challenges war in My God and Country and is consistently challenging the authenticity of the Church’s claims. Elsewhere, In The Early Hours Of The Morning is a beautiful pastoral poem to music capturing the mystery of ocean and breeze, and Can I Get There By Candlelight is another stunning song with a gentle mystical feel.

I was in Nashville recently sharing thoughts on songwriting with a room full of songwriters and became acutely aware of the incredulousness of this story. Here I was in a city where there are literally thousands of musicians, some the most famous in the world and some still struggling to make it when only one songwriter ever really succeeded from my hometown and he had been forgotten about almost entirely. I was disturbed in the depth of my soul as to what this means about the source of my formative years. What is absent? What effect does it have growing up there? What effect does it have on the town’s social health? What menace is at work to neglect the arts in general and rock music in particular?

Ballymena is known as The City Of The Seven Towers as at one time there were seven towers of Church and mill and castle across the town. The Seven Towers have always been a potent theological symbol for me. I am thankful for the seven towers that made a strong core to my mind and heart and soul. I learned how to believe in God, about who Jesus was and what he did and how the Bible could be the cornerstone of life. I also learned to respect people and basic human manners that I believe gives a fabric in our Northern Irish society that I sometimes find lacking elsewhere in the world.

Yet, with all the strength of those towers they have also cast a shadow. For all the good Calvinist influences of the eight Presbyterian Churches in the town, there has been a tendency to miss one of Calvin’s greatest contributions, the life system that sees the Christian faith integrated with every nook and cranny of life. As a result creativity and imagination have been treated with suspicion, neglected and marginalised. It is this theological thread that runs through north Antrim life that has left David McWilliams obliterated from an important part of history. He was only a singer, an artist wasting his time. Reformed theologian Calvin Seerveld has said, any public which denies artistry its rightful place under the sun forfeits a rich source of imaginative knowledge. If the public is unwilling to learn the difference between, on the one hand, the visionary leader and the honest artisan and, on the other hand, the shyster, the opportunist and the trendy fellow traveller, that public will become colourless or a pastiche.” The forgetting of David McWilliams contribution to the most exciting year of rock n roll is a significant prophetic comment on my home town’s health.

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