Miami Showband massacre survivor Stephen Travers has revealed how his new book out next year will be a deeper, more personal exploration of the impact of trauma and loss.
Travers, the bass player with the band when they were ambushed in the infamous 1975 incident, is due to release the book in the summer of 2025 in time for the 50th anniversary.
Having already written an account of the tragedy that was published in 2007, the new book will not only include his own story but those of others affected by events during the turbulent years of the Troubles.
Stephen was just 24 when one Ireland’s most popular cabaret acts, the Miami Showband, was targeted as they travelled home to Dublin following a gig in July 1975.
One of only two survivors, alongside Des McAlea, the Miami killings took the lives of singer Fran O’Toole (29), Tony Geraghty (25) and Brian McCoy (23).
The Miami Showband in 1975
Two of the terrorists were also killed in the premature explosion as they attempted to place a bomb on the band’s bus.
It later emerged that the bogus British army checkpoint outside Newry was made up of UDR soldiers and members of terrorist group the UVF.
“I was very nervous approaching this on my own,” Travers admits about writing the book, to be titled The Bass Player.
“When I did the last book it took so much out of me. I don’t think I realised at the time just how much it drained me.
“I embarked on this book but I didn’t know how to write it. I tried writing it with another person but you end up writing in the third person, referring to yourself as somebody else, so I decided to go back and start again myself.
“I was still struggling with it when I spoke to Alexandra Orton (the producer of the Netflix documentary of the massacre) and said, ‘I honestly don’t know how to do this’.
“She told me she had just read a book that was written as a series of essays and the second she said that the penny dropped.
“I wrote this series of essays but there’s a link right the way through them all. And what that allowed me to do was talk about other people that I had interacted with.
“So it isn’t just my story, it’s the story of somebody whose husband was an RUC officer who had been murdered by the IRA.
“They found themselves between two stools because as a Catholic and a police officer they would get little sympathy from either Loyalists or Republicans.
“So what the book does is show this was never a black and white conflict.”
Stephen revealed how it also tackles “thorny” subjects such as mental illness and PTSD and the impact of the Troubles on the people who found themselves caught up in them.
Stephen recently featured in the RTE documentary Ballroom Blitz hosted by US bass guitarist Adam Clayton that paid tribute to the legacy of the showbands.
In the documentary Stephen tells Adam about the night of the attack and how he dealt with the aftermath
In one powerful scene Stephen tells how he was “in denial for the best part of 30 years”.
“It wasn’t personal, that’s what I kept saying to myself. This is just something that that we were caught up in, in the Troubles you know, easy answers.”
He then explains how the more he looked into it and realised the collusion involved he felt “compelled to ensure that justice and truth comes out for everybody”.
“I’m going to fight for them,” he says about his fallen bandmates, “just the same as you would do if your mates were killed, because they had made me so welcome, into that band, I thought I’m not gonna let them down.
As a fellow musician, Adam tells Stephen how he was very conscious that this was “our tribe, these were our people”.
“I admire your resolve and your courage to take on the system,” he tells Stephen. “To come from a place of love rather than hate so much more powerful.”
“I think you are an amazing survivor and an amazing friend to those guys,” a clearly emotional Adam says, before Stephen replies: “Well, as you know yourself, there is a brotherhood, isn’t there?