by Used with kind permission by author Stephen Looney, a freelance journalist from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Anthony (Tony) O’Shaughnessy sadly passed away in October 2021. He was 63. Dexys Midnight Runners said they were saddened to hear of his death.
“(We) remember well the first time we met him, when he came marching up to us after our first Belfast show since the album release and told us who we was and how surprised he had been to see himself on the cover of the record!” the band said.
“We were all delighted to meet him and hear his story. We met with him a few times subsequently over the years and it was always a pleasure. A lovely man. Very best wishes to Tony’s family and friends.”
By Stephen Looney
IT’S one of the most iconic pictures from the early years of civil unrest in Northern Ireland – and it was taken almost 50 years ago hours after the British Government introduced Internment – a measure of arresting suspected terrorists without trial. It was a measure that literally backfired and helped organisations like the IRA recruit more members.
The image shows a young Catholic family fleeing their home as sectarian violence swept Belfast. The image is so dramatic it featured on the cover of Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ album ‘The Search For The Young Soul Rebels’.
Now, 40 years on from the album’s release, I tracked that 13-year-old boy whose haunting image made such an impact.
In an interview last year, Anthony (Tony) O’Shaughnessy said he had never seen the photo before Dexy’s Midnight Runners came to play a gig in Belfast’s Ulster Hall in 1980, and he recognised his mother in the shot to confirm it was indeed him and his family.
“Two or three weeks before Dexy’s played Belfast in 1980, a friend told me ‘there’s a photo of you on their album cover’, and I said ‘Aye, pull the other one’,” recalls Tony, a retired postal worker who later lived in Andersonstown in west Belfast.
“True enough, I looked at it, saw my mum in the background and we knew then it was me. My late mother Kathleen is in the background wearing glasses.
“On the left-hand side is a young boy in a dark coat which is my brother Kevin and on the right-hand side is my other younger brother Gerard carrying a plastic bag.
“We were starved of music because bands didn’t really come over to Belfast back then, so we decided to go to their concert in the Ulster Hall.
“We were waiting outside the Ulster Hall in the queue for the concert, and there were guys selling merchandise with my face on it!
Famously, the gig at the Ulster Hall is recalled in the history of the building because fans broke the solid oak floor which had been bought by the American Embassy during World War II.
“We went in to watch the gig, Keith Allen was the MC, and it was very good. There was a lot of tension in the city back then and the music was a great release for it.
Tony O’Shaughnessy
“I got speaking to one of the organisers to tell them it was me on the album cover, she told me to go around to the Europa Hotel where the band was staying.
“Guitarist Pete Williams introduced me to their manager, Bernie Rhodes, who also managed The Specials, and he introduced me to Kevin Rowland.
“He was great, and we chatted for a while, but I was working in the Post Office and had to be up at 5am, it was then midnight, so I had to go home.
“I have since met Kevin three times, in Belfast, Brighton and Birmingham, and he was always dead-on.”
The image is particularly iconic for those who loved Dexy’s Midnight Runners and remember the dark days of the early Troubles when the country was in a state of upheaval.
Whole communities were being intimidated out of districts as Belfast was carved up into sectarian ghettos and the scene in the photo depicts the O’Shaughnessy family shortly after they received a warning to leave Cranbrook Gardens in the north of the city.
Tony recalls vividly the unrest in the city and the country at the time and reveals the circumstances that led to him fleeing home with a suitcase under one arm and a plastic bag under the other.
“I was 13 in 1971. My parents were from west Belfast but moved to Ardoyne. There were seven of us in all in the family, I was in the middle.
“Up until the end of primary school, I didn’t know the difference between a Protestant and a Catholic, but when I went to secondary school, things changed.
“About two days before we had to leave our home, rumours began to fly about Catholics being burned out of their homes, and the (British) Army was sent in to make sure people were allowed to leave their homes safely.
“We lived in the last street to be set on fire. Firemen tried to get down the street but weren’t allowed because supposedly shots had been fired.
“It was August 9, 1971, just after 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and a squad of guys kicked our door in. We were pushed into the kitchen and these guys saw the Sacred Heart of Mary picture on the wall and said to us, ‘it’s up to yourselves’.
“They moved on to another couple of houses and my dad made the decision to move for our own protection. He and my older brother stayed behind as we left and they put things like the sofa and the washing machine out the front of the house so we could salvage them, but the next day everything was gone. I don’t know who took it all.
“We had no transport so we had to gather up what we could in bags. I had a plastic bag with two or three Subbuteo teams, clothes, a couple of toys and I had an electric heater in the suitcase under my right arm.
Tony O’Shaughnessy
“I remember being in a bit of a trance, thinking ‘this is not happening, this is a bad dream’ to myself. It didn’t sink in until the next morning.
“A friend of mine, Fred, went back the next day to see our house and told my dad that the photograph had been used in the London Evening Standard, but I never saw it.”
He added: “I never actually saw it until it was used on the front cover of the album.”
Dexy’s Midnight Runners would enjoy commercial success with two other tracks from Searching for the Young Soul Rebels – Burn It Down and There There My Dear – and would claim their second No.1 hit with Come On Eileen in 1981.
Lead singer and co-founder of the band Kevin Rowland grew up in Wolverhampton with parents originally from County Mayo and has enjoyed a highly acclaimed solo career since parting ways with Dexy’s Midnight Runners.
In a previous interview, Kevin Rowland said of the album cover: “I wanted a picture of unrest. It could have been from anywhere but I was secretly glad that it was from Ireland.”
