The Undertones Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

“... we would say, ‘Well, we’re appearing on ‘Top of the Pops’’, which is always a great answer to give a soldier!”

This month sees Derry’s legendary Pop-Punk outfit The Undertones head out on a nineteen-date tour in support of ‘Dig What You Need’, a thirteen-track compilation bringing together the band’s finest moments from their reformation in 1999 to present day. Original vocalist Feargal Sharkey may have long since gone in search of “a good heart”, but with this storming retrospective, rhythm guitarist and vocalist John O’Neill; lead guitarist, keyboardist and backing vocalist Damian O’Neill; bassist Michael “Mickey” Bradley and drummer Billy Doherty along with “new” vocalist Paul McLoone have proven that not even the loss of a key member could not diminish the appeal of Northern Ireland’s finest.

It has been an incredible forty-eight years since the five original members of The Undertones first started jamming in a garden shed and this September marks the forty-forth anniversary of the release of the ‘Teenage Kicks EP’ on the Good Vibrations label, the title track of which, of course, quickly became the favourite song of one Mr. John Peel. With the band having been picked up by Sire Records after label supremo Seymour Stein reportedly heard Peel enthusing about ‘Teenage Kicks’ over his car radio, the song was re-released as a single in its own right just a month later, reaching number 31 on the UK singles chart, kickstarting a five year career which saw The Undertones appear on ‘Top of the Pops’ thirteen times. However, despite such huge chart success, the band shunned the bright lights of London and remained in Derry all the way through that first run, which only added to their charm.

A few weeks ago, I rang Bradley, the co-writer of The Undertones biggest single success, 1980’s ‘My Perfect Cousin’ (UK#9, ‘Hypnotised’) no less, at home for a chat. As well as still regularly touring with The Undertones, the ever-talkative and endlessly charismatic bassist can also be heard spinning his favourite records on BBC Ulster every Friday night and in 2016, he wrote about his experiences as one-fifth of a band who, to this very day, remain one of the most enthralling draws on the Punk circuit in one of the greatest autobiographies ever penned, ‘Teenage Kicks: My Life As an Undertone’. In the following interview, as well as enlightening us as to just what that initial five years of the band was like for the Derry boys, to celebrate the release of ‘Dig What You Need’ and the upcoming tour, Bradley also discusses how middle-age kicks compare to “teenage kicks” and why, nearly half a century after their formation, The Undertones are still “hard to beat”. Firstly, hello Mickey and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. It is a forty-eight years since the groundwork was laid for what would evolve into The Undertones, so could we start we start by going right back to the beginning and asking how you and the other four original members, vocalist Feargal Sharkey; rhythm guitarist and vocalist John O’Neill; lead guitarist, keyboardist and backing vocalist Damian O’Neill and drummer Billy Doherty first came together to start playing music?

Well, it was a combination of school friends and family. I was at school with a fella called Vincent O’Neill [brother of John and Damian] and around about the age of fifteen, you start hanging around with different people, so I started hanging around with him. I started going around to his house to listen to records and down there, he told me that he was in a band with his brother [John] and their friends. In fact, we never called it ‘a band’ then, we called it ‘a group’. People used to

talk about it and they said ‘It’s a group’, you know? So, I started hanging around with them and then, that Summer, Summer 1974, there we were, away and camping somewhere and he said to me, ‘Do you want to join the group?’ And I said ‘Yeah, okay!’ And that was it, you know. So, that was me and Billy [Doherty] and John and Vincent as it was then, the four of us and we kind of attempted to play guitars. We could play chords. Billy always wanted to be the drummer, so we scraped up some money and we bought various microphones and amps, you know, and Billy bought bongos, a wee pair of bongos. So, we were struggling along for about another year and then Billy said, ‘Listen, we need a singer’. And up until this stage, Alice, we hadn’t played anywhere, we played in O’Neills’ front room trying to learn songs. He said, ‘We need a singer’, so Billy, who had just gone into his fifth year at school, you know, he said, ‘Listen, there’s a fella in my class and he’s a great singer, Feargal Sharkey’. And I had heard of Feargal, because Feargal was known as a boy soprano in Derry. There was a big Irish music scene in Derry and he was a regular winner at all these competitions that he went and entered as well. Oh aye, he was a proper singer! So, he got Feargal to come along and that kind of spirited us into attempting to take it serious and we got a loan from Provident. We called it the Provident cheque, which was a very high interest loan. We got that and we went to a shop in Donegal, just over the border, and we came back with a drum kit for Billy, a bass guitar and a bass amp for me and an amplifier for John and a microphone for Feargal [laughs]. So, we then struggled and started to learn how to play songs and then, about four or five months later, my friend Vincent, he was told to leave the band by his mother because he had O’Levels coming up, so we got his younger brother, Damian, instead. So, that was the five of us. So, you’re talking 1976 and in March 1976, we did a show in a school concert playing Rolling Stones songs and songs by Fleetwood Mac and Cream and we did six songs at this concert and it was good! And we just kept going and kept

going and two years later, we made a record, ‘Teenage Kicks’.

By March 1976, you were playing gigs performing cover versions and were briefly known as both The Hot Rods and Little Feat (both names were given to the band by Sharkey), before Doherty proposed the name The Undertones. In late-’76, Punk arrived and you changed tact musically and began writing and performing your own songs. Can you remember a particular moment when you and the other members of the band decided to take the Punk route and write your own material or was it more just a natural progression?

Yeah, we had a place we used to practice in, like a sort of a shed type place, you know, and there was something about and we started writing short songs like the Ramones. When I say ‘we’, it was John that was writing them and, you know, we just played them like Ramones songs, which, if you’ve ever played in a band, it’s quite easy and very satisfying, you know, if you have a fast drummer and everyone else just plays fast chords and the bass is very simple and, you know, the tunes are usually simple as well. So yeah, I do remember ... whenever John brought some songs along and we all just played them and even doing cover versions of old songs, but doing them like the Ramones, I remember thinking ‘this is great!’ And no one else was doing that in Derry at the time, you know. And this was like early 1977, late-’76 and we were playing like The Stooges and New York Dolls, and it was just a great feeling being able to do that. So yeah, I do remember it well!

A key attribute of The Undertones has always been a strong Pop songwriting sensibility within that Punk sound. Do you perhaps feel that starting out playing cover versions of songs by ‘60s bands such as The Beatles and the Small Faces might have given you a good grounding in how to construct songs that, whilst fitting into the Punk sound, also had a strong Pop appeal?

Yeah! Oh, it did! More so, it helped us to keep things short as well. Even the subject matter ... I said John wrote most of the songs, you know, and later on, some of the others did it as well, but John always says he was inspired to write songs, lyrically, like the Brill Building songs, you know, like the girl groups, The Sherelles and so on, that kind of thing, you know. Even ‘Teenage Kicks’, a girl walking down the street, that’s just from so many other songs. So, definitely, that inspired us and I think that’s a great thing too, because it’s [the ‘60s] still one of my favourite eras in music, you know.

Definitely! Well, writing a Pop song is such an art, isn’t it? To be able to fit everything into three, or even two-and-a-half minutes, is incredible!

Yeah! But sometimes, whenever I was writing songs, I would think ‘right, that’s it done’ and then you play it and it’s only a minute-and-a-half long, you know! ‘Oh! So, let’s do the chorus again and maybe do a wee instrumental bit and then maybe repeat the first verse’ and you get it up to about two-and-a-half minutes! It is, to get things in and neat and wrapped up within two-and-a-half to three minutes is definitely a skill. But, you know, people have been doing it for many years and so we can all learn from all the people.

Your big break came when you sent John Peel a copy of a demo tape recorded at Magee University in March 1978, requesting that he played the songs on his BBC Radio 1 show. Peel replied and offered to pay for a recording session in Belfast. The four song ‘Teenage Kicks’ EP, produced by Davy Shannon, was recorded at Wizard Studios in Belfast on 15th June of that year on a budget of just £200 and released on the Good Vibrations record label. What are your memories of recording that first demo and writing to Peel in those early days?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right! And, do you know what? At the time, I

remember doing that [recording the demo] and we didn’t like it! Because it was the first time we’d ever heard ourselves, you know. I remember, at the time, thinking I didn’t like it and years later, I heard it again and it basically just sounded like the first LP [‘The Undertones’, 1979]. The recording wouldn’t have been as good, but the songs were all there, you know and Feargal’s singing was all there. So, we sent that to him [Peel]and he ... well, no, we sent it off to record companies and they weren’t interested at all, you know. Stiff [Records] and Radar Records, they weren’t interested. So, he [Peel] got the tape, I think, just before he heard the record [‘Teenage Kicks’], around about the same time, you know, but he then paid for us to do a session for his show, but it wasn’t great. It was [laughs] very, very short songs and the sound wasn’t great, you know. But, yeah, he was very encouraging and, you know, he didn’t have to be, because like, there were a hundred bands looking for his attention, but there was something about us that he cottoned onto and thought ‘Oh!’ Because we used to ring him and we used to put in requests for his show and say ‘Could you play a record for, you know, Eddie McGinley’ and he would do it and we would tape the show and we would play the recording of his show on the speakers whenever we were playing in The Casbah, so it was circular. Yeah, it was a great time!

As you were saying earlier, the title track of the ‘Teenage Kicks’ EP was the song that, to coin a phrase, kickstarted The Undertones career and the song that Peel instantly loved so much that he played it twice in a row (the first time this had ever been done on BBC radio). After you signed to Sire Records on 2nd October 1978, ‘Teenage Kicks’ was of course released as a single in its own right, reaching number 31 on the UK singles chart just two weeks later. Despite Top of the Pops calling and all the other things that come with having chart success that continued through four albums (‘The Undertones’, 1979, UK#13;

‘Hypnotised’, 1980, UK#6; ‘Positive Touch’, 1981, UK#17 and ‘The Sin of Pride’, 1983, UK#46) and six UK top forty hits: the aforementioned ‘Teenage Kicks’; ‘Jimmy Jimmy’ (1979, UK#16, ‘The Undertones’); ‘Here Comes the Summer’ (1979, UK#34, ‘The Undertones’); ‘You’ve Got My Number (Why Don’t You Use It!)’ (1979, UK#32); ‘My Perfect Cousin’ (1980, UK#9, ‘Hypnotised’); ‘Wednesday Week’ (1980, UK#11, ‘Hypnotised’) and ‘It’s Going to Happen!’ (1981, UK#18, ‘Positive Touch’), you actually remained based in Derry right through that first run of The Undertones, didn’t you?

Yeah, yeah, we did, we lived in Derry. That was a couple of practical things. [Laughs] We were still living with our parents, you know, which is always a great thing! We’d started going out with some girls in Derry as well, so we had girlfriends in Derry, some of us. But also, after a while, we realised that it’s actually a good thing that you’re back in Derry and you’re not in London with people saying ‘Oh, you’re brilliant!’ It kept you grounded and so on, you know, so that was good and also, it meant for John anyway, and for the rest of us, that we were writing songs. You were able to go home and just think about writing songs and that was it. And also, because you were getting a wage, you were getting £30 a week from the band, you didn’t have to work! Even better! You were in Derry and you could get up, take a wee walk down, look through record shops, you know, go back home, get your tea, and it was great! [Laughs]. There’s always something to be said for that, not having to work!

Definitely! Because I always got the feeling that it would have been such a different band if you had actually moved away from Derry.

Yeah, that’s a good point! I think it would have been, yes. It would have been maybe better, or worse, I don’t know. Derry was very important to us and we were always talking about it and suppose people were always asking about it because of the situation in

Derry at that time. We liked the fact that we managed to have hit records and also still live in Derry and, you know, not be part of any kind of scene. I always remember, in 1980, we released a single called ‘Wednesday Week’ [UK#11, ‘Hypnotised’] and it got to number eleven, I think. We didn’t realise that it would be as successful as that, but at that stage, ‘Top of the Pops’ was off because of some kind of technician strike, so there was no TV. But I remember we used to play indoor football on some mornings down in a local sports hall and I remember coming back from that, coming back up to the house and my younger sister, whenever I went in, she would say ‘’Wednesday Week’ is number eleven!’ and I would say, ‘Oh, that’s great!’ And that’s how you found out your record was in the charts back then. You didn’t get a phone call from the record company or anything! Well, we didn’t have a phone to be honest with you! So, I’ll always remember that and I think that’s a good thing to be able to do, you know, so you’re not kind of just in the music business, but you’re still a part of it.

Well, it must be more fun doing it that way!

Oh aye, absolutely! Aye, oh, it was great and playing in local places. We used to play in a wee art gallery in Derry at that stage as well and that was fantastic, along with five or six other bands that were starting up that year [1979]. I think they were inspired by us, just teenagers, children really. So, it was a good scene to be in, in Derry in 1979.

Along with Damian O’Neill, you co-wrote The Undertones’ biggest UK top 40 singles success, ‘My Perfect Cousin’, the first release from 1980’s ‘Hypnotised’, which reached number 9. Is it true that the protagonist of ‘My Perfect Cousin’, Kevin, is a real person and what are your memories of writing that song?

Oh yes, thank you for mentioning that! [Laughs]. It kind of is a real person, although, like most songs, you would

kind of change a lot of things. It might be inspired by somebody ... but there is a real Kevin, it’s John and Damian’s cousin, yeah. And, you know, he was a very smart young man and he did very well and so on, but, you know, there was nothing really that I could say that he was like this or that that correlates to the song, but the song, ‘I’ve got a cousin called Kevin, He’s sure to go to heaven’, I think that everyone can admit to being compared to your cousins! In my house, I remember that my mother would have been with her sisters and would have said about our cousins who helped clean the house and were very good and all this, you know, and you kind of go, ‘FFFFF!’, grumbling and that! So, those things kind of came together and Damian and I just basically made up this story, you know. He [Kevin] never had a synthesizer and he didn’t have a fur-lined sheepskin jacket and I don’t think he even played subbuteo! [Laughs]. We completely made all that up! The funny thing is, he became quite a successful solicitor, a lawyer, you know, and I think, on occasion, people would mention, ‘Oh yeah, ‘My Perfect Cousin’, The Undertones!’ I don’t think he was amused, but I think after a while, he saw the funny side of it, you know! I’m so proud [of ‘My Perfect Cousin’] and I always enjoy playing it, because I always think ‘this a great song!’ [Laughs].

That first run of The Undertones came to an end in July 1983 following the release of your fourth album ‘The Sin of Pride’ in April of the same year, which featured the singles ‘The Love Parade’ (UK#97); ‘Got to Have You Back’ (UK#82) and ‘Chain of Love’, and fulfilling tour commitments. How much of the decision to end The Undertones at that point was perhaps to do with ‘Sin of Pride’ and its single releases not performing as well as previous releases and was it a mutual decision between the five of you?

It kind of was. I remember in the couple of months before that, before we made that decision, as you say, the records weren’t selling as much and I

remember Damian saying to me, ‘What are you going to do after the band breaks up?’ You know, because we were talking in that kind of way. But we weren’t talking officially, we were talking between ourselves. But then, we were in Sweden, we were doing a short European tour and we were getting photographs taken and Feargal said, ‘Right, I want to leave the band, I’m going to stop it now’ and the rest of us kind of just went ‘YESSSSS!’ Relief! I was just glad that he was the one who decided ‘Right, I’m going to stop this now’, because he was right, you know. I think the reason he wanted to stop was that we weren’t selling any records and he thought he could do better and as I’ve often said, he was right! [Laughs]. He had much bigger [solo] hit records than The Undertones ever had, so he was completely justified and it was just a great break. At the time, you kind of go ‘Is that it now?’, but it was coming to an end anyway, you know.

So it was a relief more than anything? 11th March sees you release ‘Dig What You Need’ on Damian O’Neill’s Dimple Discs label. This is a best of compilation covering the second act of The Undertones story from your reformation in 1999 to present day. Incredibly, you have actually now been back together, minus Sharkey but with ‘new’ vocalist Paul McLoone, nearly three times as long as you were together the first time around, but how did you come to reform?

Oh, absolutely! Well, me and Billy, the drummer, used to be asked on occasion by a band called The Saw Doctors, who were from Galway ... I didn’t realise until, you know, I heard it that they were fans of the bands, so they would ask Billy and myself to go along and play the drums and bass at some of their shows in Galway and Dublin and in Glasgow and they were big, big concerts, you know and we used to go along because, well, we weren’t doing anything else and it’s a bit of fun and we could hang around with these great guys. So, we would go on and they

would do maybe ‘Teenage Kicks’ ... they would always do ‘Teenage Kicks’ and sometimes do ‘Get Over You’ [The Undertones’ second single, released in 1979, reaching number 57] or something and we would play along with it, so we just enjoyed it. And then one year, they [The Saw Doctors] were doing The Galway Arts Festival and That Petrol Emotion [John and Damian O’Neill’s post-Undertones band, which ran from 1984 to 1994] had broken up by 1999 and they asked Billy, ‘Do you think John or Damian would be interested in coming along?’ And Billy asked and John said, ‘Yeah, why not!’ and Damian said, ‘Yeah!’ So, it turned out that the four of us went down to Galway and we played on the same stage as The Saw Doctors and we did, yeah, a couple of songs. But, when we knew we were doing that, we decided to learn some of the older songs and the four of us, then, we played a smaller show in a wee hotel in Galway and one of the singers, one of the fellas in the band, came along to sing with us, but the rest of the times we went, we asked other people in the audience, there was maybe about sixty, seventy people there, ‘Does anybody know any Undertones songs?’ And a couple of guys came up and sang songs [laughs]. So, obviously, we decided ‘Right, are we going to do this anymore?’ and we said, ‘Yeah, this is good!’ and we thought ‘well, we need a singer’, so three of us, John, Billy and myself, we individually came up with the idea of asking Paul McLoone, because we knew him and I knew Paul through radio and Billy was in a band with him. So, we decided, ‘Yeah, let’s ask Paul’ and we asked him and he said ‘Aye’ and we got together and we started practicing. And, in the meantime, we’d been asked to officially open a place called The Nerve Centre in Derry, which is like an arts performance kind of thing for younger people. So, we did that and it was great! And, you know, it could have been horrible! But, you know, it was just really good and we asked some people that we trusted, ‘Was that any good?’ and they said, ‘Yeah, it was!’ So, we decided to kind of see if anybody would be interested in us, so we got a couple of offers for

the next year and they were great too! And ever since then, it’s just on a year by year basis. There’s no great plan, you know, there’s no sitting down and working out what we’re going to be doing in a year’s time because, you know, obviously now, you know that you can’t plan things! But we were never planners anyway! So, that’s how it came about and it’s very much a part time thing and it’s better for that, you know. Well, for me, it’s better for that.

Yes, because you have a radio show as well, don’t you?

Yes, I have a show on BBC Radio Ulster and I enjoy doing that as well. You know, I play old records, play new records, try and be vaguely entertaining between records! And, yeah, so that’s good! I’ve been doing it for a long time now, since about 1986, and up until last Christmas, I was a producer at the station too. It’s a day job, you know. You can listen in on BBC Sounds. Do that and that means I have another listener! [Laughs]. Friday night at half seven!

Obviously, the line-up of the band has changed slightly, although we must say that retaining four members of an original line-up that dates back nearly half a century is quite incredible, particularly in comparison to many other bands from the Punk era. How have you found the experience of being a member of The Undertones this time around in comparison to the first time around?

It feels almost the same, you know, because even the first time around, the four of us, myself and Damian and Billy and John, we were there and we kind of got Feargal, so we were closer than Feargal would have been to the rest of us. You know, we all got on great, but, you know, it’s the same kind of four friends, and brothers of course, from that time, so ... occasionally, when Billy hasn’t been well, we’ve had a different drummer and that’s okay, but it’s just not the same and I always think that if it wasn’t the four of us, and now the five of us with Paul, and if John or Damian or Billy or myself decided not

to do it, that would be the end of it, you know. But it’s so lacking in any pressure. You know, whenever we get to get together again, we almost make the same jokes, we have the same references, [laughs] we all behave exactly the same way, you know, and sometimes we say things and start annoying each other, but, you know, we’re now old enough to realise that’s what friends do. I always remember, my mother used to say, ‘Don’t be living in each other’s pockets’, which is what we used to do back in the early days whenever we were doing like six week tours. We were all very penned together and after a while, that got to you a bit, but now, we only do about three or four shows and then we take a break and we all go home, basically and we get back together the next week and do another three or four shows. So, it’s a good pace for us because we don’t spend too much time in each other’s pockets, as my mother would say! And there’s no big career plan, so it’s great! I just feel sorry for Billy because drums are really hard. Drums take a lot out of you, whereas the bass, the bass is nothing, bass is so easy! [Laughs]. Drums, that’s real work! That’s hitting things for like an hour and a half, whereas all I do is play the bass and think about what I’m going to eat afterwards! Whether there’s going to be a pizza place open! [Laughs].

Since your reformation, you have released two albums of new material, ‘Get What You Need’ (2003) and ‘Dig Yourself Deep’ (2007). Are you planning any more new albums at some point?

That’s a long time ago! [Laughs]. We’ve stopped thinking about it [making new music]. Yeah, I think if something comes up, it’ll come up, but at the moment, well, we’ve nothing planned, but every so often, I get a notion that ‘come on, this is ridiculous, I really should start trying to write a couple of songs, even if they’re no good!’ So, every so often, usually every new year, I have a resolution, so I’m still working on this year’s resolution! I’d like to, because, you know, there’s nothing wrong with it

and you might come up with something good, but at the same time, you know, we’ve got a good number of great songs and we’re not fed up playing them and people aren’t fed up of hearing them, so I don’t know!

You are about to head out on a nine-date UK tour in March and April with support from Hugh Cornwell and Neville Staple (at The Leadmill in Sheffield on 10th March only), before heading over to Europe for ten further dates in Germany, Sweden and Denmark. How do you find that the Undertones material from this phase of your career sits alongside what would be considered the ‘classic material’ in a live setting?

Yeah! Some of them, obviously there are songs that work really well live and we enjoy playing them and so on. We didn’t change dramatically, you know, so it works well.

Finally, your autobiography, ‘Teenage Kicks: My Life As an Undertone’, was published by Omnibus Press in 2016. Having had that experience of being able to look back over the band’s career and your life, what would you consider to be your proudest achievement as a member?

Hhhhmmmm, that’s a good question! Being on ‘Top of the Pops’ and being from Derry at the same time. Being on ‘Top of the Pops’, while still playing in a pub in Derry. Whenever we played ‘Teenage Kicks’ on ‘Top of the Pops’, the next day, we came back to Derry and we played in a pub and that was great! So, yeah, making it on ‘Top of the Pops’ and making an appearance on ‘Top of the Pops’ without moving to London, without living in London.

That is brilliant, I love that answer! Because you did ‘Top of the Pops’ quite a few times, didn’t you?

I think about twelve or thirteen times, yep! And every time, we would just come over from Derry! [Laughs]. Back in those days, we would drive up to ... the airport was at Antram, which is

about twenty miles outside Belfast and there was always an army checkpoint on the way to the airport, so they would stop you. We used to get taxis up and they would stop you and you would have to fill out forms and they would say, ‘What’s the purpose of your visit?’ and all this and we would say, ‘Well, we’re appearing on ‘Top of the Pops’, which is always a great answer to give to a soldier! ‘Where are you going?’’ ‘We’re going to London’; ‘Why are you going to London?’; ‘We’re appearing on ‘Top of the Pops’ and they just look at you and go, ‘Right, I’ll let you go’ [laughs]. That’s a good story, isn’t it?!

Thank you so incredibly much for such a great interview, it has been such a pleasure talking to you! We wish you all the best with the upcoming tour and for the future.

You’re very welcome! Alright Alice, thank you very much and I hope you get a good article out of it.

‘Get What You Need’ is out now on Dimple Discs, whilst the band are currently touring the UK with a European tour to follow. For all dates and other Undertones news, visit the links below:

www.theundertones.com

www.facebook.com/ OfficialTheUndertones