The premise of Frank Shouldice’s film, Once We Were Punks might seem routine or clichéd, something we’ve seen a hundred times before; four lads who were in a band in the Eighties who get together again in middle age. Perhaps – up to a point – but this is a much richer and satisfying film than that brief sketch suggests.
Back in the 1980s, Justin Kelly the vocalist and lyricist, formed a band with his mates, David Meagher, Paddy Glackin, and Noel Larkin; The Panic Merchants. As the film opens, we see the former band members revisiting their old hometown, Baillieboro in County Cavan. Some fascinating archive footage shows how different rural Ireland was just forty-odd years ago.
The Panic Merchants never made the big time. Fame and fortune eluded them. Everyday life intervened. They went their separate ways. John moved to America. Paddy went to Australia. Then, 25 years later, they met up again at a funeral – common in Ireland – and decided to team up again.
The new band was named The Sons of South Ulster, taken from that marginalised part of Ireland, ‘the three counties the Brits didn’t want, and Ireland didn’t give a shit about’ as Justin puts it. The new band reaches audiences never dreamt of by the old one, with albums of raw unpolished songs deeply rooted in rural Co Cavan, songs referencing local places and characters, that capture a universal sense of loss.
As the calendar and the clock mark off the days and hours until a big live gig in the legendary Dublin music venue, Whelan’s, the lads and their family members open up in snatches of interviews with the producer. Justin was traumatised by the fate of his late father, a captain in the Irish Army who was thrown under the bus by senior politicians in a notorious arms dealing scandal in the early 1970s. Paddy moved to Australia to escape the homophobia then rampant in rural Ireland. Noel is quietly but defiantly living with cancer. Each of them is coming to terms with the reality of growing older. Their raging against the dying of the light packs a real emotional punch.
Noel’s cancer diagnosis gradually takes centre stage. He treats it bravely with a large measure of understatement, but his wife makes it clear to us that he is in the words of Irish singer Gloria, getting through it ‘one day at a time.’
This is a story of vulnerability, resilience, and endurance, Justin, David, Paddy and Noel are middle-aged men shaped by friendship, affection and love for one-another, shaped by their circumstances and most of all by their determination to complete their unfinished business.
Reviewed by David Kerr
Once We Were Punks
Director: Frank Shouldice
Runtime: 96 minutes. Ireland 2025.
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