Stephen Travers told David Hennessy about his new book The Bass Player: Surviving the Miami Showband Massacre.
Stephen Travers was the bass player of The Miami Showband.
The Miami Showband were beloved all over the island of Ireland and when they travelled north of the border audiences came together in love of music and despite their differences.
However it was at the height of their fame that three of the band’s members- Fran O’Toole, Tony Geraghty, and Brian McCoy- were murdered in one of the darkest moments of the Troubles.
On 30 July 1975 the band played The Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, Co. Down. The band were travelling back to Dublin by minibus when at around 2.30am 31 July they came to what they thought was a British army checkpoint on the A1 at Buskhill. It was an ambush with UVF men presenting themselves as British army.
While attempting to plant a bomb on their minibus, two of the bogus soldiers blew themselves up. In the chaos that followed the ‘soldiers’ started shooting.
Stephen Travers and Des McAlea were shot but survived while three of their bandmates perished.
Travers has always maintained there was collusion with the orders coming from a posh British army officer. For a long time this was denied and only in more recent years has it been accepted that Travers was correct.
Since the horrific events of 31 July 1975 Stephen Travers has set up Truth and Reconciliation Platform to help other survivors.
Stephen has previously written his story in a 2007 book, but a lot has happened since then.
I wanted to ask about the title. It’s called The Bass Player because it’s about you as a musician as well as you as a survivor, isn’t that right?
“I suppose the reason I called it The Bass Player was because this time it was definitely going to be my perspective, my view.
“That was very important.
“The last book that I did, I co-wrote with Neil Fetherstonhaugh, was really about what happened.
“It was autobiographical as well but when I mentioned to Alexandra Orton, the producer of the Netflix documentary, that I was going to do a second book, she said something that changed everything for me.
“Because up until then, the new book that I had in mind was really to update things that had happened since 2007, since the first book came out.
“So much had happened since 2007: You had the HET (Historical Enquiries Team) investigation.
“I wasn’t too happy with that but it gave us the smoking gun to take the court case and then the court case happened and instead of lasting, say 18 months to two years which we thought it would last, it lasted nine and a half years going on ten years.
“I had to write about that because obviously those things weren’t in the first book.
“The other thing was the Netflix documentary which was huge for us because, as I say rather grandiosely, it broke through the adamantine dome of censorship that covers these two islands. It brought our story to the world.
“There was huge interest around the world in that, especially since it was Emmy nominated so that really put it into the stratosphere.
“That and a number of other things had happened.
“TARP, Truth and Reconciliation Platform, was a real eye opener for me and an education because it helped me understand that I wasn’t the only one who was going through the process of looking for truth, justice and dealing with things.
“Alexandra Orton said, ‘I already know what happened. What I want to know now is how it affected you’.
“And that was huge because she’s a very, very bright lady and what she was telling me there was to look at things like mental health issues, psychological issues.
“It covers a completely bigger spectrum than I had envisaged.
“The other one was my friend Yvonne Watterson, who I give credit to on the front of the book as well.
“She said something fairly profound as well.
“She said, ‘At no stage must the reader forget or not be aware that you’re a musician’.
“Also these are things that I wasn’t really prepared to share until I saw where the arc went in the book.
“What I took from it when she said, ‘Don’t let anyone forget that you’re a musician’- whether she meant this or not but what I took from that was because I’m dealing with things like, as I say, psychological issues and perhaps legal issues, because I had become so familiar with these things over the course of 10 years of litigation and also putting these things into historical context, there was a danger that the reader might think that I’m some sort of an expert whereas I’m not but what I am expert at is my own story and how I feel myself.
“And, as I say, nobody else could write that so I have interspersed the book with stories of my musical adventures.
“What I did was I used the music and the fun things to keep the reader’s attention and in doing that, I knew then that I would also have to write in such a way that it wasn’t linear.
“So I’ve got the past talking to the present and the present considering the past.”
You have literally never been the same since the ambush..
“That’s right, I was diagnosed with enduring personality change.
“I had to go to be assessed psychologically for the court case to prove that there was psychological consequences to this.
“You’ve got to go and be assessed but in doing that, I discovered things about myself that I didn’t know.
“One, obviously, is Enduring Personality Change.
“If I’m looking for a fulcrum, if I’m looking for a centre, where did this change happen? I can say for certain.
“I can even give a date and a time, about two o’clock, half two in the morning on 31 July, that’s when it happened.
“There is a pre-Stephen Travers, the young bass player, and then there’s a post but the one thing that joins both of those separate lives is the fact that playing the bass exists in both of those lives and I don’t think it’s changed that much.
“I’m still the same bass player musically but not the same person.”
I was struck in you recounting the moments that led up to the murder of several of your friends and bandmates. It seems you had no inkling of anything, let alone something so awful, being about to happen. In fact you, as a band, even felt ‘immune’, feeling safe that, as musicians, you were not a target..
“I suppose what gives this book and gives me a rare- I won’t say unique because I’m not the only person from the South that was impacted by the Troubles but it does give me a very rare perspective on this.
“Because at the time, even though the conflict was raging and there was terrible, terrible things that happened even before our incident but it’s true to say that I thought that musicians were immune and most of us did.
“But also in the south, The Troubles in the North may as well have been in the North Pole.
“Because we were separated from them, we knew nothing about them.
“And sadly it’s still the case with even incidents that happened in the south.
“For instance, and I’ve often said this in the talks that I give, if you were to take a clipboard and go to the top of Grafton Street tomorrow morning and ask the people walking up and down that busy street, from any age group, to name one person who was murdered in the Dublin bombings of 1974, you would be hard pressed to find a handful of people that would know even one person even though there’s a monument to them on Talbot street.
“If it’s that difficult to know what happened on the greatest loss of life in any one day which happened in our capital city, can you imagine the apathy and the indifference that there is to what happened north of the border?
“So until it visited my home, until it visited me, until I was impacted, I was exactly like these people who wouldn’t have been able to name anyone.
“So I suppose, in a way, it’s a warning from history as well, this book, because you have to say to yourself, ‘Unless we’re aware that these things can happen, unless we know our history, unless we can understand it, we can’t avoid it.”
You speak about the names of victims there. In fact that has been a big part of what you have been doing for more than 50 years now, keeping the names of your bandmates and friends out there, their memory alive and to give them some voice too, isn’t that right?
“Yeah but it’s become more because it’s an ongoing process.
“The subtitle of the book is, Surviving the Miami Showband Massacre.
“It’s very important that that’s in the present tense ‘surviving’ as opposed to ‘a survivor’ of the Miami Showband Massacre because surviving is an ongoing process.
“For people that say, ‘Well these things are in the past’, they’re not. Not for me, not for the people that I mention in the book or for any of the other victims.
“I chose two ladies’ stories to highlight, Rosemary Campbell and our friend Kate Carroll.
“I also mentioned the Reaveys and Alice Devlin and people like that.
“They lost 21 people in Birmingham on one particular night as well.
“It’s important to understand that we can’t just tell the victims to move on because it’s like telling somebody with terminal cancer, ‘Look, forget it. Just get on with your life’.
“You can’t.
“This is something that affects them all the time.
“The book is specifically tailored to help people understand not just my story.
“And you’re right, I’ve been reminding people but here’s something important as well.
“At the end of the book when I felt I had it finished, I read the whole thing and I asked myself a number of questions.
“Bands come and go.
“That’s a natural thing.
“They just fade off into the past so the question I had to ask myself is, ‘Why am I reminding the world who the Miami Showband is? Is it some sort of a vanity project, something like that?’
“But the answer is that it’s not for the music.
“The legacy of the Miami Showband is not the music.
“The music is frivolous.
“But the reason that the Miami Showband must never be forgotten is the legacy of the band is that during the darkest days on these islands, showbands brought respite.
“They were a special force for good.
“They didn’t know it at the time.
“They didn’t say, ‘I’m going to go up north and I’m going to play and I’m going to do something really good historically’.
“But what happened was they were bringing people together during a time when the violence and the politics and everything were being used to cause a rift between the communities and drive them against each other.
“There were 650 showbands at one stage, fully professional bands.
“And when they played in the north, especially north of the border, sectarianism was left outside the door.
“People saw each other when they came in and they danced with each other and they saw each other as human beings and they fell in love and in many cases, they got married.
“So of all the showbands who were doing this, we were just one but the Miami Showband paid the ultimate price.
“So to look historically at the legacy of the showbands, the Miami Showband is very, very important because there was a danger, although we didn’t know, and the Miami Showband paid the ultimate price for bringing communities together.”
The Miami Showband was made up of Protestants and Catholics. You only learned of any of their religions after the massacre, isn’t that right?
“Yeah, I never asked anyone.
“They never asked me.
“I didn’t know what religion any of them were until they were dead and that only came about because of newspaper articles and stuff like that.
“The only currency in the band was, ‘Can this guy play?’
“And that was it, that was the criteria.”
You write in the book about your meeting with then Prince Charles. You were disappointed by your meeting with the man who is now King, weren’t you?
“I was.
“I had no real interest in meeting these people.
“My heroes were these people that I got to know who were battling through awful psychological and historical problems and not getting justice.
“I couldn’t wait to meet people like John Teggart from Ballymurphy or Michael Gallagher from Omagh or any of those people.
“It’s great to be with them because they help you understand yourself as well, we all help each other.
“I had met lots of pop stars in my time, some of the biggest in the world and I played with some of them but royalty wasn’t on my wish list or my bucket list.
“But then when they said that he was on a journey as well, because somebody in his family had been murdered (Lord Mountbatten was murdered in Sligo in 1979 by an IRA bomb) I said, ‘Well, I’ll meet him’ because you don’t turn down somebody who’s on a journey like that.
“I was disappointed that he didn’t appear to be concerned.
“When I offered my condolences to him for his family, he didn’t offer condolences for our lads and. that to me, was a disappointment.
“I wasn’t disappointed for me, I was disappointed for him that this is something that is lacking and it was almost a massive echo of the accusation that’s often laid at the foot of investigations and things like that: That there’s a hierarchy of victims.
“Well certainly that appeared to be on the day.
“But I gave him my book and I said, ‘If you get time to read this…’
“I hope he did.”
As you say you and other victims have been fighting for answers for so long. The Legacy and Reconciliation Act 2023, which has been blasted by all sides, just undermines the rights of any victims to get answers, doesn’t it?
“This new government has promised to repeal it.
“Our case was settled under duress.
“I didn’t want to settle but they threatened us with the legacy act.
“They said that it would be shut down.
“What the Legacy Act does is it shuts down access to the courts even if you’ve got all of the information and all of the proof that you need to take an action against them especially somebody that’s being protected and there are murderers out there that are being protected.
“So to say to people that, ‘We’re shutting down all Troubles related inquests, we’re shutting down access to the courts’, that’s wrong.
“I mean it goes against every human right that civilised people and civilised countries should have.
“Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve never wanted anybody to go to jail unless somebody is a direct threat to society, psychopaths or whatever.
“But you cannot build a peace without justice and you can’t have justice without truth.
“So the only way that I know of is to go into court with your evidence but of course then they’ve got these mechanisms to deny you evidence.
“They’ve got things like the public interest immunity certs which they hide vital evidence behind.
“This is one of the problems.
“They’ve come out with this thing called the ICRIR (Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery), the information retrieval thing.
“I asked Hillary Ben (Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) when I met him last year and I said, ‘Well, you seem to be pushing this idea that people can use the ICRIR as opposed to going into court’.
“But I asked him, ‘You’re promising these people who engage with the ICRIR that they’ll get the same type of truth and justice that they would if they go to court’.
“So I asked him, ‘Will the people who are running this ICRIR have access to the files that are currently hidden behind public interest immunity certs?’
“And he said, ‘Absolutely not’.
“So I said, ‘Well what you’re telling them then is untrue because if the people who are supposedly helping them to get justice and truth, especially truth, don’t have access to these hidden files, how can they expect to get them through the ICRIR process?’
“So it’s a contradiction in terms.
“If somebody wants to engage with that, that’s fine but it just doesn’t work.
“I hope that this book will give people hope and I hope it will encourage them to get out there and to write their own stories.
“And I hope there will be justice but unless the legacy act is repealed, they won’t get it.”
The Bass Player: Surviving the Miami Showband Massacre by Stephen Travers is out now.
