The Undertones: ‘We never wanted to sing about the Troubles – we sang to get girls’

On September 20 1979, Damian O’Neill saw history being made. Three thousand miles from home, at the end of a concert at which his group, The Undertones, had supported The Clash, the guitarist saw an aggrieved Paul Simonon lift his Fender bass guitar above his head before smashing it to flinders on the stage of the New York Palladium. The headline musician’s act of aggression was captured by tour photographer Pennie Smith. Less than three months later, the picture became the iconic front cover of The Clash’s third LP, London Calling.

“First time in America for us, supporting The Clash, it doesn’t get any better than that,” O’Neill tells me. “It was one of the highlights of our career, to be honest. But [the campaign] was only two weeks. They offered us six weeks, a full tour of America, but certain members of the band didn’t want to be away from home for six weeks. I certainly wasn’t one of them. I was 18, I was up for anything.”

By the sounds of it, rejecting two-thirds of a potentially career-making live caravan was a very Undertones move indeed. While other groups hungered for success, the punkish quintet from Derry appeared only peckish. But as the five music makers toured America in a car driven by their manager, in the autumn of 1979 they were already in possession of a quality with which even The Clash were losing touch: economy. In precise and priceless songs such as Jimmy Jimmy, Billy’s Third, Here Comes The Summer and Girls Don’t Like It, the band wasted not a single note of music.

It remains the case. Last week saw the release of Dig What You Need, a compilation album featuring highlights from The Undertones’ feloniously overlooked second act. Now in the fourth decade of a fruitful comeback - just this Saturday, a crowd of more than a thousand people watched them at the Electric Ballroom in Camden - since 1999 the group have been much more than capably fronted by Paul McLoone, a 55-year old Derry born Dubliner whose rationale for accepting the post was that original singer Feargal Sharkey didn’t write his own lyrics. In words with which I’m minded to agree, McLoone describes this as “a subtle but important distinction”.

“Had it been the case that Feargal was the main songwriter in the band, I probably wouldn’t have done it,” he admits. “It would have felt like joining Johnny Marr as he tried to reform The Smiths without Morrissey. It just would have been, ‘Well that’s not going to f______ work’… [But] it wasn’t the songwriter being replaced, it was just the guy who sang and who, by definition, was interpreting the work of the songwriters.”

Right from the start, The Undertones were different from other punk bands. While Stiff Little Fingers, from Belfast, existed in a state of swivel-eyed rage, the kids from Creggan wrote about ostensibly mundane subjects such as girls, teenage anonymity and annoying relatives. Given the dysfunctional nature of their home city, the decision not to sing overtly political songs was itself political. In the years before they began playing at The Casbah, Derry’s lone punk club, none of the band’s members had ever knowingly met a Protestant. In the teeth of such extraordinary divisions, coveting a life more ordinary became an act of remarkable rebellion.

“You’ve got to remember, we’re from the Bogside,” O’Neill tells me. “We’ve experienced a lot. Bloody Sunday. Civil rights marches. I’m not saying that we had more of a reason to sing about the Troubles than Stiff Little Fingers, but we did have a front row view. Being Catholics from Northern Ireland, we were second-class citizens, or we felt that we were… if you were a Catholic male in Derry, you didn’t have much chance of getting a job, getting a house, getting a vote.

“I suppose we could easily have said, ‘Oh let’s sing about the Troubles’,” he says. “But it was too obvious to do that. It was too corny. All we knew about, really, was not being able to get girls. And at the time we also thought, ‘Oh, [the Troubles are] for adults; we’re teenagers, we don’t want to sing about that. It’s depressing. So we offered escapism, I suppose.”

These escapist desires were such that in 1979 The Undertones managed to persuade both The Clash and The Damned to cross the Irish Sea for an open-air punk festival they themselves had organised. “No f______ bands ever came to Derry, so we said… ‘we’re gonna get bands to come over’,” the guitarist recalls. It would have gone ahead, too, were it not for Joe Strummer receiving a letter from a loyalist paramilitary bearing the news that he would be murdered were he to set foot in the city.

“It was amateurish stuff, the letter,” O’Neill tells me. “It was misspelled and everything. Anyway, Strummer got scared stiff about this. He obviously thought it was genuine. He came to see us when we were recording in London and said, ‘Look, sorry, we can’t play’. We couldn’t really persuade him that it was probably bollocks - you know, we couldn’t tell him that. So we kind of said, ‘Okay Joe, we understand’. I mean, it was really nice of him to come to us and tell us in person. But we had to cancel the whole thing because The Clash pulled out. I think that’s the reason they offered us an American tour.”

Back then, Derry doled out “dog’s abuse” to The Undertones. “Even having short hair or straight jeans could mean that you’d get your f______ head kicked in,” the guitarist recalls. The band would be heckled in the street. Snorkel parka zipped high, Damian O’Neill used to run away; a tougher cookie, Feargal Sharkey got stuck in. Today the group sells t-shirts featuring an image that first appeared on the back sleeve of the original pressing of their debut single, the unimpeachable Teenage Kicks, of a wall in their home city bearing the words "The Undertones are s___ - pish count wankers".

“Some wee f_____, some wee Derry scumbag wrote that,” the guitarist says. “The thing is, though, that he couldn’t even spell… [But people there] kind of thought, ‘Oh, you’re getting too big for your boots, are you? Who do you think you are? You’ve got a bit money, have you?’ There was definitely a bit of that. And it got to me, which was one of the reasons I left. It’s why I f_____ off.”

Truth is, The Undertones didn’t have much money at all. As the band imploded, in 1983 Damian O’Neill moved to London; when he wasn’t working as a painter and decorator, he signed on the dole. On Saturdays he watched Chelsea from the Shed End for a fiver. (Given that his interest in the team faded when Roman Abramovich rode into town, the events of the last week make him one of the club’s luckier supporters.) Meeting me on the first Friday of spring at the Elephant & Castle, our interview takes place at a spit’n’sawdust pub at which noontime drinkers are already queuing six-deep at the bar. Three hours later, we’re still there, chatting away.

In his absence, the people of Derry at last came to appreciate The Undertones as one of Northern Ireland’s great bands. After being asked to re-form for two concerts celebrating the opening of the city’s multimedia Nerve Centre, in 1999, the musicians - whose songs are mostly written by O’Neill’s older brother, John, with whom he would also play in That Petrol Emotion - decided to keep on trucking. Knowing full well that Feargal Sharkey would reject their entreaties, instead an invitation was extended to Paul McLoone. In South London, the guitarist tells me I should “definitely” speak to the singer, “because no one ever wants to talk to Paul”. It’s a shame, he says, “because Paul is great”.

Appearing on Zoom in front of a backdrop of neatly filed vinyl LPs, three days later The Undertones’ ‘new’ front man tells me that “in a selfish kind of a way” his tenure with the group “felt like a short cut” to a degree of success after “a lifetime of struggling with bands who weren’t really getting anywhere”. Described by Dublin magazine as "one of the most instantly recognisable voices on Ireland’s airwaves", McLoone was also known in his capacity as a DJ on the nationwide broadcaster Today FM. His late-night show came to an end when Bauer Media bought the station in 2021.

“They made changes and unfortunately for me one of those changes was that they didn’t want me anymore,” he says. Listening between the lines, it seems likely that age was a factor in the decision. “It’s tough,” he says, “but it’s just the way it happens.” Even before he was shown the road, “A bit like John Peel, they kept moving me down the schedule.”

How very fitting. As is well known, Teenage Kicks was Peel’s favourite ever song, a composition so beloved that he once played it twice in a row live on air. Following the broadcaster’s death, in the autumn of 2004 The Undertones took their place among a thousand mourners at a funeral in Bury St Edmunds at which the 65-year old was laid to rest beneath a gravestone bearing the track’s opening line, “Teenage dreams, so hard to beat”.

“It was very moving, and kind of surreal,” O’Neill recalls. “We weren’t even sure if we were on the guest list, but of course we were. In the pew in front of us there was Jack and Meg White, from the White Stripes; we looked behind us and there was Robert Plant and Billy Bragg… it was, like, ‘Woah, proper A-list!’ [But] what really caught us up was at the end when they played Teenage Kicks as they were carrying his coffin out. That was hard. The entire [congregation] started clapping.”

At the time of its writing, no one in the band thought particularly highly of what would become John Peel’s desert island disc. The fact that Damian O’Neill doesn’t much rate the entirely exquisite Jimmy Jimmy, either, adds further credence to the notion that artists can’t always be trusted to evaluate the worth of their own work. Then again, when the run of hit singles and albums came to an end even the group’s oldest members were barely 26. Forget bad blood; the reason The Undertones haven’t spoken to Feargal Sharkey in the past 18 years is because there’s no blood at all. (“I saw Feargal at John Peel’s funeral and I shook his hand,” O’Neill explains. “And that was the last time I saw him.”)

But there is the music, both new and old, a canon of subtly subversive songs the influence of which is in no small part attributable to the multiplatinum success of a group such as Green Day. On the day after the election of Donald Trump, I asked that band’s singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, why he was no longer writing the kind of political songs with which he’d greeted the era of George W. Bush. Mentioning The Undertones by name, Armstrong answered that by that point even the smallest things were political.

“Instead of going downhill, I’m so pleased that The Undertones have gone up over the years,” says O’Neill. “And it’s because of those f______ songs. They’re timeless. But it took us f______ years to realise how good they are. At the time, we didn’t really rate them. We just thought, ‘Ah, they’re okay’.”

At least these days the group has time to enjoy the view. The 42 concerts The Undertones will undertake this year are the result of past Covid-cancellations; normally the figure is somewhere around the dozen mark. Their current live campaign sees them playing only at weekends, an increasingly common trend among older bands for whom music is no longer the primary occupation. Travelling in a van, instead the band share laughs on a part-time basis. Forget the apparent incongruity of men in late middle-age singing Teenage Kicks, theirs is an arrangement to which the musicians, and their music, is well suited.

“What’s great about the band re-forming is that we have a good bond,” says Damian O’Neill. “I missed them all when we weren’t together. And we have a good laugh now that we are again… And the way we work these days, you never get jaded. You never think, ‘Oh no, we’re not doing this again are we?’ But the way we do things now, well it’s just better this way.”

The Undertones' new album Dig What You Need is out now on Dimple Discs. The band are currently touring the UK and Europe