![[Undertones]](/ub4.png)
thE UNDERTONES - who've just finished touring Europe had to make the journey with old Derry friend Keiron McLaughlin deputising for drummer Billy Doherty. It seems Billy was on his way to hospital for a check up on his gallstones when his bike came off second best in an argument with a car - leaving our Bill with a broken arm.
In fact The Undertones seem to have been in the wars generally of late. Dee is currently sporting an eye-patch after nearly blinding himself with a contact lens - while Feargal is said to be suffering from what we doctors call "a fluttering heart". Take it easy lads - we don't want you joining the immortals just yet!
UNDERTONES WEEKEND - Ace Cinema - Brixton
HERE IN the TV studio that is the Ace - we have two slightly off-centre pop consciousness bands playing for a slightly off-centre TV channel. "Four-" and we duck our heads as cameras pan round to a stage where an obvious television authority figure dutifully shouts - Ladies and gentlemen - please welcome from Weekend's crudely - kiddie style - painted backdrop of a couple out strolling in the park with a prancing dog in the green foreground - to sweet - demure vocalist Alison onto the sparse musical backing - it's clear that simplicity is their key. Theirs is truly a Sun sound; sonorous and hazy with subtle - submerged rhythmns and dozy harmonies.
After a while it becomes slightly insidious as their pop takes on a more tense - nervous-lullaby quality without which there would be a danger of tedium setting in. As it is - their sweetly shaded melancholia - with an odd rock-a-cha numberthrown in - is a fine sound track to dream the night away with.
But - from the balmy to the barmy as that well known actor Feargal Sharkey - and his merry men take to the stage. Young Feargal starts as he means to go on - he iestinatej
"bit of a disadvantage - it's like - when we were in London we'd do the work and once we got back to Derry - we'd forget we were in a band. That's gonna change from now on."
Dee's already moved to London - effectively terminating their wholesome but boring boys-next-door image and they've even started to smarterrup!
"It's something we felt we should do - " says John. "When you look at some of our early photographs - it's embarrassing."
But it's tunes - not trousers - that will sell the Undertones as they're only too proud to point out.
"I don't think there'll be a better LP than'Sin Of Pride' this year - " says John. "I don't think there'll be a better LP in a long time. I really think it's that good that somebody else starting up a group could use it -as a guide to writing songs - something to try and aim for and - maybe - better - the same as when I started - I listened to the Doors or the Velvet Underground. This LP should - and will - put us into the league of selling records with Duran Duran and ABC -'Positive Touch'should've too - but it took everyone a bit by surprise because most people were expecting another 'My Perfect Cousin'. Now they'll know and this one'll do it - we think it's rhatgood!"
I DO TOO - but I don't share their optimism. In an industry geared to technique and timing - the Undertones lack a crucial contemporaniety and while the Human League can plagiarise Motown classics - rework them into 'Don't You and make them sound modern - the Undertones are stuck with a distinct lack of sharpness.
Despite echoes of Tom Tom Club's "Genius Of Love" on the new album's "Chain Of Love" - and the two passionately reupholstered covers "GotTo Have You Back" (Isley Brothers) and "Save Me" (Smokey Robinson) - the K- ^ Undertones have steeped themselves in an aura of imaginative introversion - bitter melancholy usurping their 'once bright enthusiasm and leading them further than ever from mainstream pop.
Great as it is (Feargal's ethereal vocal on "Love Before Romance" is among the most thrilling ever recorded) "The Sin Of Pride" is basically one melancholy song in 12 Sixties suits; a traditional - bluesy lament running the gamut of reactions to lost love - the same album - in essence - as ABC's "Lexicon Of Love".
"That's right - " admits John - "I don't know why. Usually. if the words are good - you can make it say something even though - atthe time when lou're doing it - you don't know what's going on. It happens all the time - I don't know how it's just an instinctive thing. I suppose you could say that the girl represents the world and things like that - I could sit down and try to make things mean something but that's not really being honest because - when I wrote them - the words just came out."
"See - we don't really pay that much attention to what a song's about - we're more interested in the feel. Like all those Tamla Motown songs - nearly every one was about love but you don't really listen that much to the lyrics even though they're nearly always brilliant - the lyricswere just partof the song. The Clash may have to pay attention to what they're saying - which is fair enough - that's great if you can do that. But we pay as' much attention to the actual feel of the song as the Clash do to their lyrics."
What the Undertones should be telling you here is that they've not grown complacent or lazy - that they're not content just to be the best live band in Britain - that they're still venturing into new territories a and that - far from being a spent force - they still very much matter. Getting this out of them in a conversation can be a frustrating task so forget all this blarney - get "The Sin Of Pride" and discover for yourself.
UNDERTONES Guildford Civic Hall
thE CIVIC HalL is packed with exuberant noises and elated faces in a sea of intoxicated bopping heads. This is the acceptable face of live rock and there's none better at inspiring it than the Undertones even into their third encore!
The sound is heavier - the songs livelier - but there's never any mistaking the Undertones familiar demeanour. Feargal Sharkey takes the concert by it's lapels and stamps his persona along it's seams; just one reason why the adhered tightness of their gigs are always assured.
It's a phenomenon that challenges me to dislike their image their 'Songs About Chocolate And Girls' - their ease at attaining such devastating popularity and can I? Can I hell!
The Undertones go from strength to strength - with a new set that impossibly makes their catalogue of success to date obsolete. With the wavering rhythms of 'My Perfect Cousin' - and the tight thumping bass and percussion of 'Whizz Kids'' - the 'Hypnotised' album may not cause proverbial earthquakes in the rock 'n' roll history books - but performed with such excellence live - few can be immune to the quality of entertainment that this band perpetuate.
After the opening 'Hard Luck' - 'You Got My Number' follows - and even by that time Sharkey reveals a sweat soaked body as he pulls off his T-shirt - his white jeans merge with his pale skin and he nakedly opens his personality honestly onto the proceedings. After 'Boys Will Be Boys' - a harmonica Is spotted among the front liners and he promptly makes use of that as an integral part of the Undertones style of doing things.
In fact - one of the most optimistic values that the Undertones preach and - more importantly - practice - is that of enjoyment before everything. They are wholly aware of their own definition of the word entertainment and are devoted to that cause The oldies punctuate the set with a little too much regularity but predictably meet with gross approval - ' the vaguely melodic trivial 'Jimmy Jimmy' - 'Get Over You' - and 'Here Comes The Summer' among them. The obvious exclusion from the set 'Teenage Kicks' - which had been played as Feargal later told me "for the last time ever" - at Brighton the previous night for the 479th time - which sounds like the passing of a landmark in a career in which that must have been inceptive to its momentum.
It's the first time I've seen a treble encore since the last Undertones gig I went to. The blistering pace never drops below the zenith level of adrenalin flow - It has maintained throughout. Can you help but get involved? I tried!
DAVE JORDAN
made towards putting this label together? "Well - we're definitely starting our label but - aya well - it's all money - innit? As regards to packaging n'all - we've always done all that ourselves - anyway - y'know - even when we were at Sire. All the ideas for albums - singles - posters. Aww yeah - well there was no-one there who could do it properly. Not really. Can't really complain about Sire U.K. though - they never really pestered us about records. That's good."
Of the Sire albums - 'Hypnotised' - I mention - struck me as a far more cautious - dryly executed affair than its predecessor. They sounded as though they had much more fun recording the debut. "Aye well - we 'thought at the time that the second album was better - but now I like the first album best." Damian - who has remained fairly quiet during 'the interview up to now - looks up and barks agreement. John continues - "We sort of tried to do what we did on the first album but ;with better songs. Yet - with the second album - when I play it I skip some of the songs - y'know? Which in particular? "Whizz Kidz" - that's terrible - I think. I don't want to do that anymore - it's boring. 'Hard Luck' isn't too good either - too long. 'Under The Boardwalk'; that was just stuck in." (Apparently someone told them that 'Boardwalk' sounded not unlike Status Quo). "The Way Girls Talk" really BORES me - good song though. Some of the songs are - well - 'My Perfect Cousin' - a great single - wasn't it?" That was the single mooted myopic by the music weeklies - I point out. "Uhm - well - 'Jimmy Jimmy got slagged too - our biggest two hits." You've Got My Number?" "Yeah - that was a great single - but now that didn't do anything."
We got to talking about the 'You've Got My Number' single - not for any particular reason other than the tact that I like it - and conversation turns to its flip; a cover of the Chocolate Watch Band cameo 'Let's Talk About Girls' featuring a distraught Feargal Sharkey intoning one of the most inane leers of a lyric - I've come across in many a witching hour. A guitar solo - too! I blush to think of it. The bisto kids bring it a certain degree of panache and re-emphasis - for sure; nontheless it's an odd song to have lifted from such a trenchant twin pack as 'Nuggets'. It transpires - however - that in the early - pre-Teenage Kicks days. The Undertones were wont to cover some ten songs from that very same album. Ten! The Mojos! The Vagrants! Farmer John - Frat Rock! But what about now; is there much around that you've liked just lately?
"Well - there's still a lot of good new groups getting together. Orange Juice - they're good. John Peel plays some great records that our group have never heard of. "They didn't seem too interested - though - in weighing the latter-day merits of such pristine popsters as Strummer - Lydon - and Brooklyn's aging baseball brats. As tor their old stomping ground back home - there still seems to be very little happening. Nah - not really.
There's a couple: a group called 'The Set' (Sect?) and another called The Idle Threats. The main thing is that there still isn't really anywhere for groups to play in Derry - y'know? However - talk of Paul Raven - who broke his lowish profile last year when - as the resurrect Gary Glitter - he descended upon London's Rainbow theatre - quickly perks them up. "Yeah - we would LOVE to have seen him."
Our song ('Hard Luck') wasn't nearly as good or anything. I saw Slade the other day though - and they were good. Great band. "What about your spiritual halt-brothers - The Moondogs - see much of them?" "Yeah. They've got the same sort of deal with Sire that we first had: two singles and an album - they're doing the album now."
One of the more unusual aspects of The Undertones divorce from the Sire stable was that they were able to depart the fold - back catalogue in pocket; rather than Sire having a two year hold on the old material - as tends to be more common practice. "Well - that's because we were never in debt or anything." They go on to point out - quite correctly - that the biggest mistake a young band can make is to mount up massive debts with their record company - initial advances; the full ramifications of which - being only too well exemplified in the Joe Strummer/ NME interview a few weeks back.
"On the American tour it was WE who lost money - not Sire. Whatever we lost we split halfway. On the British tour - mind - we always make money. Yeah - we get a lot of people to come to see us - great - but we don't get a lot of people buying our records". Pardon? "Aye well - "Hypnotised" was - I forget - about number nine or something. It's just that it was the hyping. Everything was being hyped at that time. 'Perfect Cousin' was hyped and 'Wed Week' was hyped - so - 'Hypnotised' - didn't really sell that many. You know - stupid. Sold about thirty or forty thousand copies - something like that altogether." Now - even allowing for the fact that their debut set was released into a slightly healthier climate and indeed was to appear in two editions; the simple truth that it managed to sell over one hundred thousand copies - some sixty thousand more than its acclaimed successor - is understand- ably disturbing. The second album's accompanying tour was an All-Sold-Out affair - right enough though? "That's right and that was the thing - see. W.E.A. weren't prepared to do anything with it until our manager went in and had a go at them." In America the 'Hypnotised' album sold "a couple of thousand or something" - which is like - well - should the Iranian students decide to release a record - as opposed to a hostage - they could comfortably expect to lift more American dollars than that.
The gilted pngt thing with W.E.A. UK. has even - at times - proven counter-productive for the band. Indeed - Undertones allege that the reason 'You've Got My Number' didn't get anywhere was that the full force of the record company's hyping muscle was concentrating its collective energies on keeping Chrissie Hynde's 'Kid' respectably afloat. "We heard too - that 'Wed Week' had sold more copies in one week than what was number one that week - which was also under WEA (Miss Crawford's 'One Day' - presumably) - then suddenly we went up eleven places to number ten in one week in which we hadn't sold any!- Which is all rather sad and not a little disquietening; not so much the fact that they found themselves locked amid the whole wretched display of marketing inadequacy that is Payola - even now - this seems an inevitability for any band working in tandem with majors - but - more pointedly - that genuine record sales were apt to fall by so large and so swift a descent. Twelve short months - sixty thousand less sales."
It must be said that The Undertones don't appear unduly worried. Indeed they seem to relish the prospect of searching out and regaining those atheists and abstainers who might have wandered. As Feargal is reported to have said: "We could have sat on our arses in Derry for the next two years and made a couple of albums and a lot of money from advances. But maybe no one wants to by our records - which is OK - but I'd rather know." As for John O'Neill - his biorhythms don't seem to be playing him up too much these days. Even his dealings with Sire were reiterated to me with remarkable matter-of-fact tolerance. All those little things he so loathed in the early days - touring - record companies - journalists - London - America - now seem - for the most part - to be a constant joy. "I love London now - s'great. Same with New York - I love it - s'great. The first time I went to New York I hated it. S'great now. The atmosphere there is just- " See what I mean?
So then - back they come - back they come. Direct from the Wizzard studios in Holland - where producer Roger Bechirian ("Aww well - we could produce ourselves but we won't do that tor a long time.") has just helped the Bisto kids mint another tine fistful of "wee pop songs". Songs like 'Good Looking Girlfriend' - 'Positive Touch' and 'When Sat Comes' - that quickly dispense of the chichi arrangements that plagued the somewhat torpit 'Hypnotised' playpen - whilst preserving that same vital rush and flourish that characturises their live shows. 'You're Welcome' - too - is shaping up as being much more than just 'Paint It Black' with a facelift and a new front tooth. This business of a business decline - well it could just be that most ancient malaise - a simple shifting of trends - yet to witness the size and fanaticism of their live audience - I shouldn't think so. More likely - the cause is something like two parts bad Sire salesmanship - two parts an inferior second album and several parts the product of that ever-handy get-pit - the near-legendary 'recession'. The Undertones certainly think so - and they've been busy remedying the first two just lately. The next few months should certainly prove interesting.
"been on the front page of a paper and we've had a record and this - that and the other - right? And they come with a more cynical view of the whole thing and you've still got to impress them. It's finding a balance between the two that's the crucial point."
An adult - aware summing up of their situation - right? But it seems to be part of this popular misconception about The Undertones that in their little boy innocence - simple songs come naturally to them and the group coast by on a wave of some sort of natural charm and that's all there is to it.
Not so. The Undertones work hard at their craft - because a craft is what it is.
"We really envy people like Elvis Costello and Paul Weller and all who say they panic if they don't write a song in two days or whatever - " Feargal says. "We go in spells - like for the last LP in one week we wrote seven songs - but for the past two months we've written maybe two songs and we've dumped the both of them."
The band - however - do good naturedly admit that laziness might have something to do with this - but it's also quite clear from their discussions and arguments that they take their music very seriously Great care is taken that their songs don't sound alike and the band insist they can still do better than "Hypnotised".
Mickey even voices the fear that "the success and comforts of this headlining tour might make them "soft" - though this point is immediately challenged by an indignant Damian."
Neither are the band under any illusions about the great reception at their gig tonight - putting it down to the success of "My Perfect Cousin" and saying the crowd would still have cheered even if they'd played badly. Damian even goes so far as to suggest that The Undertones' success is not so much due to their being anything special but because there's not much around. Talk about picky!
But in typically level headed fashion. The Undertones are also aware of their own strengths and are not afraid to state them. Damian - who's obviously in the mood for shattering false illusions - says he hates the "modest little boys putting themselves down" bit as well and ventures the suggestion that "Hypnotised" is a brilliant LP (a fair point - I think).
He also reckons the group are good at arranging their songs because they know what they want.
"That's the best bit about it - I think - " Mickey chips in - ' "Arranging the songs - cut that - cut that - cut that!"
thE BAND are - however - somewhat peeved at the condescending - simplistic view that the music press (them again) have taken of their work: the strong - well presented song with honest - well written lyric - the kind of song that's the hardest to write - after all.
"They keep on saying that it's pure and simple - " complains Mickey.
"Pure pop - " adds drummer Billy Doherty.
"That's like saying it's good for pop but it's not really good - " Mickey continues.
"Abba are pop and The Dooleys are pop - we're not like that there - " Billy puts his finger on the crucial difference. "I still don't know why they call us pop. What do they call The Skids? They don't call The Skids pop - do they? It's a sixties term - about sixties groups."
"I don't mind being compared to a sixties group - " Mickey offers - "As long as we're not revivalists."
"'Hypnotised' reminds me of 'The Who Sell Out' LP - there's stories in it and all - " says Damian. "Brilliant - I don't mind being compared to that at all. That's a great compliment."
"You know 'Beggars Banquet' - the Rolling Stones LP?" he asks - "I think that's the best LP they've done - most of it's acoustics and slide guitars. That's the way I want our next album to be - like that."
"You can do something different - " Billy offers - "But you make it simple so that if anybody wants to cover the record - they wouldn't find it hard to do. They would have said - I could have thought of that there - and done it instead. That's the way I'd like to go."
"It's not that we deliberately keep things simple - " Mickey concludes - "It's just whatever we think is good."
SO LET'S hope that from here on in - it's goodbye to The Undertones' schoolboys image. But if they lose that one - what are they going to put in its place?
"God knows!" Feargal answers cheerfully. "The whole thing - the original idea of having no image was so that people would accept us for the standard or non-standard of our music. That's what we wanted to stand up on - not what we looked like or what we did or what we behaved like - just what was on the original piece of plastic."
"At the end of the day it boils down to that - that is the basis of everything else: how good your song is and how good your record is."
And that - in a nutshell - is why The Undertones are going to be with us for a very long time. That they happen to be such nice people as well is simply an unlocked for bonus.
paradise -. continued
nothing good ever starts "Julie Ocean - always on fire. "'Julie Ocean' is a swirling sway of a song with a beautiful yearning melody somewhere between lack and desire - possibly - the highpoints of the whole album. Just under two minutes of indefinable magic written by. John O'Neill - it's sentiment and longing mirrored by younger brother Damian's 'Sigh ; and Explode' on side two.
Separated from the gaudy excesses and superficial trappings of London - The Undertones keep refreshing because they still have the natural fervour of a music fan. absorbing a whole range of influences and approaching their songs from sharp new angles. On 'When Sat Comes' they go over what is familiar ground but fill in the spaces with a dense - fully realised sound which shows echoes of The Bunnymen and has an older and wiser lyrical slant.
The Undertones 'life in Derry-new marriages - new ambitions and new perspectives - puts them in a position where they can create a music and a world which is like a Coronation Street for the record deck: well crafted - very accessible and highly entertaining.
The Undertones know no time for pointless fantasies or toeing the line set by their own history. They've matched their instinctive sensibility with astute maturity and Feargal boxes quaver clever around swooping and whooping street Choir harmonies - the quills of Bradley - J & D O'Neill have never been sharper. Opposite the modern hieroglyphics on the inside sleeve are four lollypop sticks with a sticky slap of orange ice en one - a green muffler; on the next - a bar of pink lathered soap on the next and a cake slice on the last.
What does it all mean - a sweet and warm lubricated pop lovingly crafted and presented? Or just some playful and colourful shapes to mess around with? Whatever - the last track on the album provides an answer of sorts. "Another time in a difficult place - Forever paradise." Well - what else?
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