Before she was a music journalist, Carol Clerk was a teenage music fanatic in Belfast, navigating the local scene, or what was left of it, as the Troubles intensified in the early 1970s. Carol wrote her first article for Melody Maker, published May 23, 1973, when she was just 18. Ultimately, she became News Editor of the music paper in London.
In ‘Bombs, Boredom and No Bands’ she chronicled a week in her life in a music scene too barren to contemplate: a teenage Carol and her friends sorely reminisce on the days when bands actually came to Belfast, bands who at the time the article was written became deterred by increasingly frequent, indiscriminate bombings in a dirty conflict. Between exhausting day trips to Dublin where bands did play and the odd sub-par, overpriced disco, the kids rarely got a chance to go to a gig to escape what the world was coming to around them.
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