The real Terri Hooley and the man who portrays him in the movie, Good Vibrations, Richard Dormer.
NOT all subjects of biopics are happy with how they’re portrayed, but Belfast’s legendary Terri Hooley says Richard Dormer (Game of Thrones) got him just right.
“Richard does me better than I do myself, but he can’t drink as much as me,” the genial Hooley tells the Irish Echo.
“He had me down to a T – the way he walks and the way he talks and his mannerisms. Richard did a fabulous job, I’m so proud of him.”
Good Vibrations the film is about Good Vibrations the record shop and record label. But more than anything it’s about Hooley who, in his mid-20s, in the mid-1970s, survives a paramilitary murder bid and responds by opening a record shop in the middle of a civil war, in the most bombed half-mile in Europe.
In a further act of defiance against the bad vibes all around him, he names the shop Good Vibrations.
“We were so jealous of Dublin back then. We used to go down and there would be gigs in McGonagles and the Baggott. We were living up the road in hell and they were down there in heaven. Nobody gave a shit about the North really. We used to ask Dublin punk bands to come up to the North, but none of them ever came. It was like the Berlin Wall dividing the North and the South,” he says.
But Hooley did more than anyone else to break down that musical Berlin Wall.
The son of a radical socialist father and believer in the revolutionary power of the sevenn–inch single, he was the one who saw The Undertones’ potential and released the classic Teenage Kicks.
“They recreated the original shop for the film based on pictures we had. I went down there with my ex-wife Ruth and she couldn’t believe it, she said it was like walking back in time the way they’d done it.”
The film took a long time to go from pub conversation to the screen. But after years of ups
and downs, it got there eventually, “I started to realise ‘This is happening for real’. Then I went down [to the production office] with my girlfriend and my son and I saw all these photographs of myself and my mum and dad on the wall. Every sin I’d ever committed was on that wall,” Hooley says.
Appropriately for a film in which personal relationships are front and centre, Good Vibrations was a family affair.
“My daughter is in the film. She plays the nurse who delivered her, which I thought was a bit weird,” Hooley says. “And my 14-year-old son was in the film as a truant. He’s going to be a future Richard Branson. He insisted on getting a fee. He’s a real-bread head, not like me at all. A lot of my friends were in the film as extras too.
“I got on great with Karl Johnson, who played my father. We’re both big rockabilly fans. I got on better with Karl than I did with my real father. He was a great man, but I don’t think he was a great father.”
The film has had an enthusiastic response from both audiences and critics. “I went to Moscow last year for the Irish Film Festival and that was the best reaction I saw,” Hooley says.
“Mark Kermode, who is the film critic for the BBC, said it was his film of the year, which was unbelievable. He said after he saw the film he went up to his attic, unpacked his Outcasts records and played them again, and that he cried twice during the film. The press has been great. I thought there might be a bit of a backlash, but it hasn’t happened.”
And just like Hooley himself has done so often, Good Vibrations is motivating the next generation. “The film has inspired a lot of people to lift a guitar and it has also inspired a lot of young people to take an interest in making movies as well,” he says.
Hooley has travelled a lot to the Republic to promote the film.
“We showed it at the Sugar Club in Dublin and I did a question-and-answer thing afterwards, which was a bit mad. A lot of people were afraid to ask me questions, so I asked questions and answered them myself.”
Against all odds, Hooley’s record shop is still going strong, though there have been a few hiccups over the years. “We’ve had 13 reincarnations of the shop,” he says, “which is ridiculous for any business. We have a settled home at the moment and I try to be there as often as possible.”
He also, at the age of 65, still does gigs. “I DJ in a bar on the Ormeau Road in Belfast on a Sunday night and one night nobody showed up. It’s a bit like the scene in the Harp bar in the film. I said to the manager, ‘You can get rid of me anytime’. He said ‘Terri, get a grip’. Then I looked around and there were about 20 people. So we’re building it up slowly.”
