When A-ha played in Belfast last month, celebrating an album they first promoted in Northern Ireland in 1987, a great friend from then and now took Jenny McCullough with her to the SSE Arena. On the way home they talked about the difference more-than-30 years had made in Northern Ireland and in themselves, and about the power of pop music to take us back in time.

 

I reached inside myself today

Thinking there’s got to be some way

To keep my troubles distant

(a-ha, The Sun Always Shines on TV)

 

Are teenage dreams so hard to beat? All the harder for having been set to music. Philip Larkin, whose poetry of disillusionment was precision-tooled in Belfast, made this case when he wrote about popular music and its promise to young people of love as something that would “solve, and satisfy, And set unchangeably in order.” Those love songs were written on sheet music rather than recorded on cassette tape – but the promise will have been familiar to the audience at the SSE Arena where in 2019 A-ha revisited an album they last took on tour to Belfast in 1987.

Pop music of a certain age temporarily makes time travel possible, and then serves up the contrast of the present day with a shock. Anyone who first listened to the soundtrack of Derry Girls at the time of its 90s setting, or who is following the BBC series Pop Goes Northern Ireland knows the power of this effect, the triggering of a sort of emotional muscle memory belying the idea that disposable pop wasn’t built to last.

Many were the parents, siblings and friends who in 1985 would have recognised in “Take on Me” the description of an earlier love song that featured in Noel Coward’s play Private Lives – a “nasty, insistent little tune.” The Belfast Telegraph’s review of the date at the King’s Hall was as dismissive of “these Norwegian boys” as it was of their “their teenage worshippers”, conceding only that the “flight of the bumblebee keyboards” were “something new”, and concluding that “the mania that follows them is something to see.”

But Coward – a writer of hit singles himself and like Larkin a master of undercutting romantic illusion – had the other half of the broken couple listening to the song appreciate the time travel effect: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” To the (mostly) girls who packed the King’s Hall on 21 January 1987, if it was cheap music, it was dearly bought (in singles, albums, magazines and merchandise) and it had a potency beyond romantic notions.

The music in the charts was something to have in common with people the same age whether they lived down south, over the water or other worlds away. It held out the hope of normal life – we might have had to buy it from different shops after having had our bags searched but we could have the same music – at a time when, as the 1986 episode of Pop Goes Northern Ireland shows to quite shattering effect, the Northern Irish version of normal was anything but. To be dull would have been enthralling, and it was thrilling in 1987 when A-ha were reported to have walked around Belfast City Centre as though it were any other European city.

For an in-between generation whose post-war parents were traumatised by the early days of the Troubles and whose younger siblings and own children are the ceasefire babies, the music of that time was the soundtrack to a relentless cycle of republican and loyalist attack and retaliation that went unchecked by tribal politics and petty rhetoric. Only the most tentative too-much-to-hope-for beginnings of an end were in sight, on the other side of the usual problems that to young people could be bafflingly complicated one moment and horrifyingly simple the next. It seemed as likely that Morten Harket would emerge from a newspaper and offer a hand into another world as it would be for the any of the contemporary cast of political characters to shake hands and draw each other into a peace process.

But to be able to revisit the past is to be lucky, and to be confronted with “the sudden shut of loss”, in Larkin’s phrase, only at the point of going back, is to be very lucky. Some of that cohort of children and teenagers – now remembered for everyone by Joe Duffy and Freya McClements in the book Children of the Troubles – were robbed of the right to grow up, while others had family and friends wrenched from them in a way that all but stopped time. One of the most moving aspects of the news footage inPop Goes Northern Ireland is the sight of children at funerals, so familiar in their own clothes or their school uniforms, and the thought of the tape in a pocket or the poster on a wall.

It’s a long way in time from the King’s Hall to the Titanic Quarter. The Laganside redevelopment that started in 1989 represents a sort of normality that young people in Northern Ireland could only dream of in 1987, when the idea of a Belfast Hilton Hotel was just a joke at the City’s expense. But despite the Good Friday Agreement being well out of its teens and Generation Neither’s coming of age rejection of traditional identities reported by the NI Life and Times Survey, even quite modest notions of normality are still illusions prone to being shattered.

Dysfunctional politics still divides on tribal lines and there are areas still riven and ruled by factions with the thinnest of ideological veneers for criminality and intimidation. Paramilitarism “remains a stark reality”, according to the Independent Reporting Commission, and has set about recruiting the next generation. Perhaps the starkest reality of all is that the journalist Lyra McKee – a uniquely sparky incarnation of the dream of a new normal, who pointed out the unequal distribution of the peace dividend – could be shot dead with (as yet) impunity for her murderer. Meanwhile, faced with the humane but exacting analysis of Sam McBride’s book Burned, the children of 1980s Northern Ireland are tainted – and insulted – by the wholesale failure of institutions and systems of governance that collapsed on our peers’ watch.

It was a more reflective reception for A-ha in Belfast in 2019 than it had been in 1987, with a different sense of wonder among the audience who had been there the first time around. Maybe only the few faithful who waited at the stage door still believed that love songs stood for something or someone that could solve, and satisfy, and set in order. But with the Brexit General Election campaign in danger of being used to reinforce old divides even as it fosters new alignments, there could be no better time to relive the most reasonable of teenage dreams – normality – and ask what, and who, it will take to make it come true.