Remembering Geoff Harden

It was lovely to see Geoff Harden’s name pop up in the Belfast Telegraph this week amid all the Fleadh excitement. All the more poignant, because this September, it will be twenty years since our friend and colleague left us.

Twenty years. Hard to credit really.

For decades, anyone who had been to any folk or trad gig in the city had seen Geoff. He may even have booked the act. He would probably interview them or at the very least, have a pint or two with them after the gig. Many others of course knew him through community arts, although it was never really possible to separate the community arts man, the folk man, the broadcaster, the organiser, the archivist or the man trying to make the accounts reconcile at the end of the month.

He joined what was then the brand new New Belfast Community Arts Initiative as a Project Coordinator on the This Is Me programme in 2000. In 2003 he became our Finance Manager, and there was something wonderfully Geoff about watching this encyclopaedic folk music figure beavering away at reconciliations and spreadsheets while simultaneously quietly organising the Mid Ulster Folk Festival or preparing his radio programme, or plotting whatever musical adventure was next. And he thought I believed he was playing Solitaire! 

I recall Geoff’s excitement at attending a folk festival in Nova Scotia. Or indeed, watching him beam with joy as any artist took to the stage. He enjoyed taking photographs (always the archivist) and when the films got processed (remember them days) , he talked us through each pic over lunch. His enthusiasm for folk music and grass roots arts was infectious. 

He had a heart of corn. A great big sentimental streak allied to a formidable knowledge of music, an endless curiosity about folk (people and music), and an instinct for collecting and sharing stories. He could be wonderfully enthusiastic and in the next breath , sardonic. And enjoyed the craic as he’d poke fun and chuckle. Folk music wasn’t just a part of his life, it was threaded through everything.

And he had already lived a considerable part of the folk music story before he ever arrived at New Belfast Community Arts.
Coming here from England in the 1960s, he became one of those people who simply embedded themselves in the cultural fabric of the place. He had run the Medway Folk Club in his native Kent where he hosted the folk music stars of the day. Of course, along with others, he was synonymous with The Sunflower Folk Club here. He had a fascination for radio and had worked at the BBC in London as well, quietly archiving recordings of singer-songwriters and musicians that otherwise would today be lost. His music archive has allowed many well known artists from back in the day to recover recordings and have them released. 

For years, he had a folk column in the Newsletter and in sometime later, a radio show too... his plummy Home Counties tones only slightly tinged with an Belfast cadence. 

From those early days, Geoff helped create spaces for musicians and music to exist at a time when Belfast wasn’t exactly overflowing with easy opportunities for people to gather together. Even the darkest days of the Troubles didn’t hold him back… it undoubtedly spurred him on. Later he worked with the Folk Festival up at Queen’s University, aided at times by our own chairperson Sean McCann, a great friend of Geoff. I can recall seeing Geoff buzzing around the Staff Common Room at Queen’s one time, making last-minute adjustments and sorting tickets or something, resplendent in his Folk Festival sweatshirt - he loved a well-logoed sweatshirt did Geoff. He was, as they say, in his element.

Which is why the Fleadh fever feels all the more poignant … twenty years since his passing.
Watching Belfast absolutely heaving with music and audiences during the Fleadh — people playing on in huge stages and on streets, in bars, on corners,  I can’t help thinking about the generations who kept making, promoting and sharing music here when the city was a very different place. Along with his great counterpart Neil Johnston, they were in the heart of it.

Geoff Harden was true champion.

Not because he would ever have claimed some grand historical role for himself. He left that to his one-time flatmate and pal Terri Hooley. No, quite the opposite. He got on with things. Programmes needed made, musicians needed booked, recordings needed preserved, radio shows needed prepared, festivals needed organised.

New Belfast’s books got reconciled to the penny. 

And his wife and three kids were of course music fans too - well... they had to be! 

So amongst all the wonderful vibes around Belfast this week with the Fleadh, it has been good to have him wander back into our thoughts.

Twenty years this September.

Still missed. Still talked about. And, I’m glad to say, still part of the story. 

Our Unsung Hero, Geoff Harden  (8 July 1943 – 4 September 2006).

Fleadh-bergasted – and thinking about what comes next

It is difficult to overstate the scale and ambition of the Fleadh.

For eight days, until next Sunday, Belfast has become one big cultural stage. Music and songs spill from concert halls into pubs, venues, street corners, hotels and public spaces. Formal performances sit alongside impromptu sessions. Competitors arrive from across Ireland and around the world to take part in traditional music, song, dance and language competitions, while audiences wander through a programme of more than 200 events spread across venues and neighbourhoods.

There are great performers and emerging talents; children carrying instruments as big as themselves and players whose mastery has been shaped across lifetimes. There are concerts, céilis, workshops, competitions, gigs on the street, seisiún and new musical connections that can only happen when musicians find one another. Friendships will be made and songs will be written. 

The range is truly breathtaking, almost overwhelming in fact.

Way more than a festival, the Fleadh is like a temporary cultural townland within a city: participatory, intergenerational, intercontinental and diverse. This week, the distinction between performer and audience starts to blur. The music isn’t confined to the main stage. It appears around the next corner, down an alley, or in venues, big and small. 

It is a remarkable logistical and cultural undertaking. Belfast City Council, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, Ards CCÉ and a network of partners, venues, performers, workers and volunteers have attempted something enormously ambitious. They have not simply brought a large event to Belfast; they have allowed the Fleadh to occupy the city, opening it to visitors while encouraging residents and communities to see themselves within it.

The emphasis upon accessibility, families, local activity and cross-community participation matters too. Belfast’s musical and cultural identity is complicated, rich and of course drawn from more than one tradition. The wider programme has sought to reflect that. Maith thú 

It is, in the fullest and most complimentary sense of the word, Fleadh-bergasting.

And the impact may be breathtaking as well.

According to Belfast City Council; around 800,000 visitors are expected to experience the event, with an estimated £53 million in economic benefit anticipated (says DfI in the Irish News).   Hotels, restaurants, pubs, shops, taxis and transport, will all enjoy the effect. The world is tuning in. My uncle contacted me this morning from Australia having watched the news  - he left Belfast decades ago and whilst he has visited regularly, to him, after seeing the Fleadh on his tv in Sydney,  “Belfast is unrecognisable”. I did reassure him that there was still plenty he would remember, but that powerful message is being broadcast to the globe. 

That is unquestionably something to celebrate.

But, (isn’t there always), amid all the music, bustle and entirely justified civic pride, it is worth sparing a thought for the arts organisations in the same city facing funding stagnation and, in some cases, substantial cuts.

The Fleadh does not arrive in a cultural vacuum. When civic cultural managers were bidding for the event, they understood that there was a supportive cultural environment in the city for just such an event. They were undoubtedly confident that sufficient infrastructure was there. And so they programmed accordingly. The wider programme surrounding the Fleadh offers a vibrant representation of not only Belfast but the region’s cultural life: artists, musicians, venues, community organisations, producers, technicians, teachers, volunteers and audiences. The programme draws upon relationships, knowledge and creative practices developed patiently over many years. It can represent and amplify that ecosystem wonderfully, but the Fleadh itself, for all its substantial presence, cannot create or invent it.

And that ecosystem is under considerable pressure.

Many arts organisations have been held in a funding limbo since 2010. Standstill government funding since then has translated into real term cuts, while the costs of salaries, utilities, insurance, buildings and artistic production have continued to rise. Some long-established Belfast organisations are now facing further substantial cuts from the Council at precisely the moment the city is celebrating the scale, vibrancy and economic power of culture.

That seems counterintuitive doesn’t it? 

Now, this is emphatically not an argument against the Fleadh. Belfast should host it. And indeed next year, it promises to be even better. We should enjoy it, support it and recognise the sheer effort involved in bringing an opportunity of this magnitude to the city. Nor should this become another wearisome contest between major events and year-round arts provision. A culturally confident city requires both.

The question is what happens next…

If culture can generate an estimated £53 million for the wider economy in a single extraordinary week, surely the time has come to consider how some of that value can flow back into the cultural ecosystem itself.

The economic benefit will not arrive as a single cheque in the City Hall postbox. It will be felt across hospitality, accommodation, transport, retail and the rest. But public policy can still recognise where that value begins and where it could be most impactful. A meaningful Fleadh legacy could include renewed and sustained investment in the artists, organisations, venues and communities that provide the platform for Belfast to be capable of hosting such events, but also supporting our diverse community of creativity and participation. 

The Fleadh will leave behind memories, friendships, inspiration, new musical discoveries and, very likely, more than a few sore heads!  But its legacy could be greater still. It could pinpoint another moment when Belfast more fully appreciates that cultural vibrancy does not suddenly appear when the banners go up, the stages arrive and the television cameras roll.

It is created and sustained throughout the year—often quietly, and on increasingly precarious resources—by an artistic community working in venues, meanwhile or temporary spaces, schools, studios, parish halls and neighbourhoods across the city.

So enjoy every minute of this extraordinary Fleadh.

But when the last seisiún finishes and the instrument cases finally close, let us ensure that the cultural life so magnificently represented throughout this week is supported to flourish long after the crowds have gone home.

The Arts Matter. Stop the Cuts. Fund the Arts.