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).
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