Great Victoria Street, Belfast

yeah oh that's not a very dangerous job is it well well watching a load of cars being taken to well no

that was from that was from our office on great victoria street which is right in the corner so you were

constantly

dodging bullets

It's a much more social sort of atmosphere, you know.

And there we are.

But anyway, the point of my story is, so there's no traffic on Great Victoria Street.

All right.

In fact, that appears in the first poem of Written to be Read Quickly, which came out this year.

I was thinking of the streets between Dublin Road and Great Victoria Street that I told you about last week.

I was thinking

about

We had the video, we had the single, and the single was designed like the album and like every album until the compilation album by Caramel Crunch.

I've been posting some of her beautiful designs on Instagram.

So on the front of the single, I'm leaning on a lamppost outside the Crown Bar, just down from the PhonoCab office, funny enough, and very close to Great Victoria Street where I started this series off.

So you can see this is like a pretty important part of Belfast in all my life, really.

But in times past when the likes of Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin treaded its boards, they would have needed to climb to the top of the building.

In those times, the dressing rooms were near the famous round windows that look out over Great Victoria Street, and it is here that a particularly creepy experience was reported by several performers.

They described a face looking in at them through one of those windows as they made their way down to the stage.

Now these windows are high above street level, yet a face was seen pressed against the glass on more than one occasion.

I was asked if I would do an interview about Rave On, so I was going down to the BBC.

I got off the train at Botanic Station, took out my mobile phone [laughs] and looked up Rave on Andy White on one of the streaming services, pressed play, and walked down Great Victoria Street in the rain, amazed by this song.

The first song, "The Soldier's Sash." I just thought, "Wow, that was quite something to have done that then." Sounded kind of punk, and I was walking past where Good Vibrations, the record shop was, when I was listening to the album, and I suddenly thought, "Well, where is this album?" It's in a cloud somewhere.

It's beaming down to my phone, and I'm listening to the sound of Randalstown, County Antrim in 1985.

It's kind of a freak-out thing, right? Or in British Columbia.

There's so many places that the records have come out in, and you've no idea.

So I'm walking down Great Victoria Street thinking all these things.

I really enjoyed doing the Destination Beautiful podcast for the reissue last year.

I do remember after that going back to the hotel and there was a tip-off.

There was a bomb in Great Victoria Street further up by the square.

And we started walking up there and the police said, you must be mad.

We don't know where they are.