"Nelson hit" singer dies in Belfast
(by Claire Simpson, Irish News - June 2007)

One of the members of a chart-topping Irish showband has died in Belfast.

Gerry Burns (69), sang in Belfast group Go Lucky Four whose song Up Went Nelson topped the Irish charts for eight weeks in 1966.

The hit was a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the destruction of Nelson's Pillar in Dublin in Dublin's O'Connell Street by former members IRA members in March 1966, with lines such as, "They thought Horatio Nelson had overstayed a mite/So the helped him on his way with some sticks of gelignite".

The band was created by four Belfast schoolteachers, including Finbar Carolan, John Sullivan and Eamonn McGirr, who set a Guinness World Record for endurance singing in 1996.

They turned professional in 1966 and played hundreds of concerts across Ireland and Britain before disbanding a few years later. 

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