This song is for my old mate Gavin Martin who died yesterday. My not-so-old mate. He was 60.

What I never knew until then was that it was Gav who coined the term Alternative Ulster: first for the punk fanzine he started in 1977 when he was only 16, charting the nascent Northern Ireland scene – and then for Stiff Little Fingers.

Jake Burns, the band’s lead singer and guitarist, wrote the song for a flexi-disc to be included in the fanzine. It ended up being released on Rough Trade at the back end of 1978 – a follow-up to their seminal single Suspect Device.

As for Gav, like many journalists (present company included), he was never short of an opinion about anything, and rarely stopped short of expressing it. He hated hypocrisy in any form, loathed the Royal Family with a passion, despised the Tories and adored Van Morrison, in roughly that order.

He was also a brilliant writer, with a brilliant mind, a keen sense of humour, on a lifelong mission to tell the truth as he saw it. That life was too short.

I first began running into him in the 1990s with his girlfriend Julia, a tabloid showbiz writer, when I worked on the Standard. We would meet regularly at gigs and on foreign trips to cover music events.

I didn’t know then that he had an illustrious history as a music writer, going back to the glory days of 1977 when he began reviewing and interviewing bands who came to Belfast, first for his fanzine and, soon afterwards, for the NME.

Nor did I know that he grew up in Bangor, on the coast south of Belfast in Co.Down, which is where I spent the first year or two of my own life; nor that we had both lost a brother early in our lives.

Scrolling through his work on Rock’s Back Pages, I find a brilliant interview with U2 from early 1981 – their first cover feature – filled with fascinating facts about the band members in their early days.

I seem to remember Gav grew to despise U2, and Bono in particular, as their fame grew. He was never averse to speaking or changing his mind if/when he was disappointed by an artist he had once admired.

But while he could (and would) argue for Northern Ireland, he was very kind and loyal to his friends, and by all accounts to other writers. He didn’t have the ego exhibited by many in his trade.

When I briefly tried my hand at PR, promoting an album for an artist I was managing, Gav was one of the very few fellow music writers to respond favourably to my request to listen to her album, and the only one to review it in a national newspaper.

He happily agreed to review it for The Mirror if I brought a copy over to his home, which I did, and he gave it a generous write-up. That, sadly, was the last time I saw Gav in the flesh, in the perfect Victorian terrace off Columbia Road where he lived before leaving the East End to become a full-time DFL in Hastings.

We stayed in touch on Facebook, invariably discussing, sometimes disagreeing, but always sharing our passions, about music. And I will miss him.

RIP Gavin Martin