The Undertones are on the road again, 45 years after their first shows outside Ireland on the back of iconic debut EP, ‘Teenage Kicks’, with the second of three weekend jaunts this month coming up.
An initial three-dayer last weekend with special guests The Rezillos is followed by another this weekend with the Tom Robinson Band, before a further trio of dates a fortnight later with the Neville Staple Band.
The legendary Northern Irish five-piece’s latest nine-date sojourn comes 49 years after brothers John and Vinny O’Neill joined forces with fellow Derry schoolboy and budding guitarist Mickey Bradley, to the accompaniment of close friend Billy Doherty on bongos.
That following year, 1975, Billy managed to recruit 14-year-old classmate, second cousin (according to Mickey’s excellent Teenage Kicks: My Life as an Undertone (Omnibus Press, 2016), ‘Feargal’s aunt was Billy’s Granny Sharkey.’) and gifted singer Feargal Sharkey, and soon the band had – on tick – their own amps, electric guitars, and even a set of drums. And by early 1976 – younger brother Damian O’Neill having replaced Vinny as he looked to concentrate on his O-levels – they’d played their first show at the scout hall where Feargal, now an aerial installer by day, was a scout leader.
By the summer of ’78, alongside regular Derry dates, they’d played as far afield as Portrush – including supports with The Stranglers and XTC – and Dublin, before Terri Hooley, for the Belfast-based Good Vibrations record shop and label (having been badgered by a mutual friend into listening to their first demo tape), invited them to play a Battle of the Bands benefit alongside Rudi, The Outcasts, The Idiots, and Ruefrex at Queen’s University’s Students Union, then the following day record four songs at Wizard Studios for that first EP.
It was of course a copy of that record sent to John Peel that famously led to the legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ playing it, then again twice in a row one night on his show. And the rest is history, as the cliché goes. Peel’s widow Sheila Ravenscroft writes in the Margrave of the Marshes memoir (Bantam Press, 2005) she finished on his behalf, ‘It was on 12 September of that year that he played all four tracks from The Undertones’ True Confessions EP’ before remarking, ‘Isn’t that the most wonderful record you’ve ever heard?’’ Over the next fortnight, she adds, ‘John played ‘Teenage Kicks’ four times on air; for the rest of his life, it was the song that could be relied upon to give him a filip after a day of uninspiring new records.’
Sheila also reminds us that Peel ‘stumped up the cash for The Undertones to record a session in a Belfast studio, which he then broadcast on 16 October.’ That session was recorded 15 days earlier at Studio 1, Downtown Radio, and then they put down another four songs for him at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios in West London (recorded on 22nd January and first broadcast on 5th February 1979), by which time Sire Records – alerted by the debut record – had long since been in the picture, snapping the band up after seeing their final appearance at The Casbah in late September, a deal agreed in London on 2nd October, a momentous month that ended with the band’s Top of the Pops debut, the day before my 11th birthday, ‘Teenage Kicks’ spending three weeks in the UK Top-40 while ‘Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta’s ‘Summer Nights’ topped the pile. No accounting for taste.
Of course, there’s also that tale about Peelie pulling over to the side of the road on hearing a daytime colleague play ‘Teenage Kicks’ on his show, ‘so thrilled that he burst into tears,’ as Sheila puts it. Peel told The Guardian in 2001 he was ‘stuck in traffic on the M6 near Stoke-on-Trent on my way to the football,’ when he ‘heard Peter Powell play my copy of the EP on Radio 1.’ He added, ‘I had written, ‘Peter. This is the one’ on the inner sleeve. To my alarm, I found myself weeping uncontrollably and I still can’t play ‘Teenage Kicks’ without segueing another track in afterwards to give myself time to regain composure.’
There were no tears – far as I could tell – from Billy Doherty when I called him on the lead-up to these latest dates, although he did pull over his car to talk to me. But it was genuinely good to hear his voice, after a few recent health wobbles for Billy. I was unsure how open he’d be regarding that, but my enquiry as to how he was feeling was enough to stoke the conversation.
“Well, that’s a tricky one. I haven’t been touring for the past month, because I’m getting treated for suspected colorectal cancer. Thankfully, all the tests that are going through have been clear, but there’s a couple more I have to do. They found a growth on my colon. They think it’s okay, but they’re just doing a biopsy on it, then I have a CT colonography to be done for the next few weeks. But thankfully everything’s coming back clear, which is good.”
Is all that involving a bit of travelling?
“Well, because it was in England, and I was very ill, I had to go to a local hospital. But they couldn’t find me on the system. It was a wee bit complicated. But it got examined, and the doctor said, ‘I suspect you have cancer.’ He gave me a red line referral, which meant I had to come home, and I’ve just gone through the system, very quick, and I’m dealing with the treatment, and as I say, everything’s been clear.”
Thank God for the NHS, eh. You’ve certainly been through it a fair bit in recent years.
“Well, I’ve had a heart attack and a stroke. They talk about the waiting list on the National Health Service, but I’ve been very, very fortunate to get treated very quickly and treated very, very well. From my experience, I couldn’t fault the Health Service one bit. It’s exceptionally good.
“So, hopefully I can get back touring now, we’ve got dates in October, and that’s what I want to do. I want to get stuck into the shows, and I can’t wait to get doing them.”
Without being too biological, isn’t it a bit uncomfortable back on that drum stool?
“That’s actually a good point. I was thinking exactly the same, as you’re kind of squatting, putting pressure on your tummy, but the fact that it’s coming back clear and they’re giving me medication to ease the pain, which has worked, I’m pretty confident it’ll be okay.
“It’s only the good that die young, anyway! Ha ha!”
Good point, well made, and we’re both here to tell the tales. And The Undertones have a super-sub on the bench, whenever he’s needed.
“Yeah, and it’s not Malcolm McDonald!”
I always think of Liverpool’s David Fairclough in that respect, rather than SuperMac.
“Ah, I never thought of that. It’s a guy called Kevin Sharkey, anyway. No relation to Feargal. He’s been very, very good. It’s been a real challenge for Kevin. He had to step in at the last minute. But it seems he’s coped quite well, and the guys kept on touring, which was great.”
I was there when Kevin sat in for Billy at Manchester’s Academy 2 in Spring 2022 (with my review here), his temporary replacement going on to play in Liverpool the following night too.
“Yeah, it was in Newcastle where I got really ill. That’s when I was taken to hospital.
“I had a heart attack and a stroke back in 2017, then I was back, but for whatever reason my blood pressure really spiked, and got alarmingly high. So they had to call the paramedics and I was taken to hospital. That was a year ago. But this episode happened recently, around April this time, in Malmo.
“I got very, very ill, couldn’t do the show. The next day I was fine though, and I was quite lucky that when I got ill that I had no shows, and when I was clear I could do the shows. But last month, that’s when I got really ill. That’s when alarm bells really started ringing.
“It got a bit complicated when I had to go to hospital, because my address is in Northern Ireland, and the guy checking me in couldn’t understand that was part of the United Kingdom. I couldn’t remember my national health service number, they couldn’t find me on the system, and that meant I couldn’t get treated. But it kind of worked out well in the end.”
Never mind ‘smart boy Kevin’, aka, ‘My Perfect Cousin’, how about ‘SuperSub Kevin’? Have you known him for a long time?
“Yeah, and drummers are like a band of brothers. That’s the thing. I’m exaggerating, but drummers tend to be the more social group. We all kind of gather together and we’re all quite supportive. Whereas guitar players may not have the same kind of traits. Kevin’s a very nice follow, and Damian knows Kevin…”
He’s featured on some of his records, hasn’t he.
“Yes, and John as well.”
Of course, he wasn’t the first Undertones super-sub. For one, there was a certain Ciaran McLaughlin, way before his days with That Petrol Emotion and The Everlasting Yeah.
“Oh, that’s going well back. That’s going back to 1980. I was cycling home, and I got knocked down by a car. I was getting married at the time. So Ciaran stepped in for a few French dates.”
One of which was recorded for French TV, so I’ve seen footage of him playing with The Undertones. Maybe it was his dress rehearsal for future employment.
“Yeah, Ciaran’s a very, very good drummer, as is That Petrol Emotion. They’re all terrific.”
This autumn marks some key 45th anniversaries, one being the first Undertones shows across the water, in England and Cardiff, supporting Sire labelmates The Rezillos. And that’s kind of pertinent seeing as the first of these tour dates feature The Rezillos. Do you remember much about those late 1978 dates?
“I actually do, and it’s probably not to do with music. At the time, we had to share the dressing room with The Rezillos. I must have been maybe 19, and I had never in my life seen a woman undress, but there’s Fay Fife, who sings ‘Top of the Pops’. I was kind of a wee bit stunned – there’s this lady undressing in front of me. Of course, you look initially, because it’s so peculiar, but then you realise and think, ‘I better look elsewhere.’ I actually left the dressing room. So that’s my kind of memory of The Rezillos.”
That’s brilliant. Have you shared that memory with her since?
“Not at all! No way. I’d be embarrassed! I’m really old school. I would think that very forward, and I’d never know what she might say!
“Funnily enough, do you know who was chatting me up? This is a true story. Sire Records and Real Records shared the same building, in Floral Street in London. There was a flight of stairs, we were on the second floor, and Real Records the first floor. I came down the stairs and there was Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders. We’re chatting away and she was really… well, I love to exaggerate, but I thought Chrissie Hynde was chatting me up, and I started to feel a wee bit uncomfortable. But we actually got on quite well. She was talking about T Rex and ‘Get It On’.
“In The Undertones, we were big fans of glam rock – T Rex, David Bowie, and all that. So we’re engaged in conversation, but then the conversation changed slightly… ha ha! She was asking more personal things, like how you feel about travelling and stuff. And she was really quite surprised because me, being more of a homebird, she couldn’t really kind of grasp the fact that I would prefer to be – which I still am even now – at home rather than touring.”
That’s always the impression I got, not least from Mickey’s book. You were a band of homebirds in comparison to most, maybe you in particular.
“Well, I was bad, but John was even worse – he was on another planet, really extreme. But I would say there was – particularly with me, John, and maybe to some point Mickey – always a reluctance to do it. But unfortunately, I left it too late to realise – and this is going back to 1981 – it is a business.
“Actually, that’s an interesting story. Because when the band got a record deal and we signed to EMI, I decided I was leaving the band. I went over to England, but didn’t go to the signing of the record deal with EMI – which was a really, really good deal. Then I realised I’d made a dreadful mistake, phoned the hotel where the signing was being done to try to speak to my manager, and said to Andy {Ferguson}, ‘I want back in the band.’ He was livid. He said, ‘Billy, do you realise we’re signing a contract here? You’ve left the band, now you want to get back in?’ It got really silly. Anyway, thankfully they allowed me back in again, and the rest is history.
“Unfortunately, I found the whole kind of rock ‘n’ roll thing… I don’t sit well with it. I find it very uncomfortable. I realised you’ve got to tour and all that, and thankfully – now we’ve got bus passes and some of us are drawing down on the pension – we are exceptionally lucky that we get great support at shows. And I’m really humbled by it. It’s terrific.”
It’s a two-way street, mind. I think it’s your whole demeanour as a band, and I get the impression from a past conversation with John, in recent years, that he’s enjoying it far more now than he did first time around. Is that the case with you as well?
“Ha! That’s probably because it’s taken him 40 years to learn the guitar properly! I think that’s the reason why he’s enjoying it!
“I think that’s probably the reason for us all. We’re actually more comfortable with our musicianship, so to speak. We are not very confident in that regard. We tend to in some respects err on the negative side and we under-play it. I know it sounds dreadful and I don’t mean to be boastful, but you know, we are quite good, and sometimes I think we now realise that. Sometimes when we get on stage, it’s like a big diesel train. We’re unstoppable, we just keep going.
“That drive and that passion and commitment, I think still comes across. We’ve never lost that and never taken it for granted. When we come off, even back in the really early days, every time we do a show we’ll come off and are always critical. But it’s constructive criticism. We’ll say, ‘Look, you played this too fast,’ or ‘You played this too slow’, or ‘You came in at the wrong place.’ And we can all handle that. We all see it as being supportive to each other. And that’s terrific.
“That consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, has remained with us from day one. Even when we do a show now, and come off and say, ‘That wasn’t a great show,’ because of this or that, we’ll deal with it and it’s sorted, and taken on board. And there’s never a row, never an argument about it. So the next day we do a show, we’ve taken that on board.
“We’ll probably end up making the same mistake, but we are aware of it! And we are very, very supportive of each other. Which is terrific. It must be dreadful to be in any employment where you’re constantly under pressure. We don’t have that. It’s above board and it’s constructive. And we support each other in that regard.”
I didn’t get to see you in the early days, catching you first on the Positive Touch tour at Guildford Civic Hall on 21st June 1981, when I was barely 13 and a half. But I was there at the end of the first coming in 1983, at the Civic Hall again (26th March) then The Lyceum (29th May) and Crystal Palace FC (9th July). And now, somehow, you’re barely a year away from having Paul McLoone out front for 25 years.
“I never thought about it like that. That’s interesting.”
Particularly when you bear in mind it was barely five years together as a proper touring act, first time around. And now you’ve done it for five times as much as that.
“Yeah, that’s interesting. Unfortunately, when we got the opportunity to reform, Feargal wasn’t keen on it. We actually got John Peel to try and persuade him, and that actually made things worse. Feargal dug in even further.”
It’s worked so well with Paul McLoone though, and you had a previous link, being involved with his previous band, The Carrellines.
“That’s correct. That’s how I knew Paul, and that’s how Paul became involved in the band. It’s a long story, but I was one of the street performers for the Galway Arts Festival, and that’s how I got my introduction to the Saw Doctors, and they asked if I’d come up on stage and play with them. We did a couple of songs, maybe ‘Teenage Kicks’ and ‘Jimmy Jimmy’, and it went down exceptionally well. I then I managed to persuade Mickey to come on board as well and we ended up doing some of the bigger shows, like a New Year’s Eve show at The Point in Dublin, sold out, a huge thing.
“I then managed to persuade John and Damian during the summer, must have been 1990 maybe, to come down and play with me and Mickey. And that show went down exceptionally well. I then went on down to Dublin, and at an REM concert, a guy called Denis Desmond – a promoter who runs MCD, that does Springsteen, U2, REM… – who I vaguely knew heard the band had reformed, came over and asked me about it. I said, ‘That’s right, Denis, but we don’t have a singer.’ And his exact words were, ‘Why don’t you get a young buck to sing, then head off on a tour of America?’ I said, ‘But we don’t have Feargal,’ and he said, ‘They don’t care. Get a singer!’ And that’s how it came about. I said to John, Mickey and Damian, ‘Look, there’s a guy I know, Paul McLoone, he’s in The Carrellines, why don’t we try him out?’ That’s what happened, and Paul’s been with us ever since.”
And he was a natural from the start.
“He’s a real frontman, and singers are like that. That’s what they do. I don’t know where he gets his energy from! He’s a bloody dynamo, just keeps going. I don’t know how he does it. Smokes and drinks, which he shouldn’t do, gets up on the stage, and I don’t know how he does it. He’ll probably die on stage, do a Tommy Cooper at some stage!”
Which of the band will drag him back behind the curtain, I wonder.
“That’s exactly right… with an arrow on his head.”
With that rather morbid thought in mind, we move on, me telling Billy how I was struggling to work out the initial release date of ‘Teenage Kicks’. It entered the charts just after mid-October, but that was with Sire Records’ backing. Does he recall the actual date it came out on Good Vibrations?
“That’s a good question. I think it may be right now. The person to check on that is Mickey. He’s the historian. Maybe September. But when we got Top of the Pops with ‘Teenage Kicks’, it was so peculiar. Feargal was still working at Radio Rentals, and I vaguely remember walking – it may have been myself, John and Mickey – walking from our house up the town, into Radio Rentals, saying, ‘Feargal, we’ve got Top of the Pops, we’re flying over tomorrow.’ And because it was such a big deal, my auntie’s bought me pyjamas. I have every kind of pyjama. I’ve got striped pyjamas, those stupid draylon pyjamas… I must have got at least half a dozen brand new pyjamas for going away. Ha ha!”
That doting love seems to have carried on too, and while Billy has no children of his own – ‘one of my biggest regrets’ – he has nieces and nephews ‘who I absolutely adore, and I treat them as I would my own kids.’
Back to June 1978 though, when they were at Wizard Studios recording the ‘Teenage Kicks’ EP, was that whole environment new to them, or had they done the occasional demo here and there?
“Well, we did the odd demo at Magee College, so it wasn’t too daunting, because we had more control. It really wasn’t until we went on to record the LP properly. I found that very difficult, because nothing really prepares you for that. There’s a lot of things you have to deal with. You know, just tuning your drum kit, getting your drum kit set up, having microphones surround it… It’s such a strange environment, so different to playing live. A whole different approach.
“And there’s no school you can go to, to prep you for it. You’ve just got to do it. And to be honest, I don’t particularly like the first LP. It’s too processed, and doesn’t really capture the way we were. We are very raw. I think we’re more butch when we play live, and that doesn’t really come across on the first record. It doesn’t come across on any of the LPs. I was never happy with the recording. You make a comparison between records or LPs you like and us, and it doesn’t necessarily sound the way I thought it should.”
That’s interesting, because while I saw you first time around, I only caught the back end of the first coming, so I felt I’d never get to hear so many of those songs from the first two LPs and early singles live, so it was such a thrill to be at the Mean Fiddler in June 2000 and beyond, when you were delving deep into that amazing back-catalogue. And that’s made me think, perhaps you should have a crack at releasing a live album.
“Well, there’s talk about that. In fact, we’ve recorded tracks from various shows and are in the process of compiling a live LP.”
Ah, nice one.
“The thing is, I’d always have to keep comparing it to Get Your Ya-Yas Out! by the Rolling Stones.”
Ah, I gather that was a big influence right from the start.
“Ah, huge! We literally tried to learn every track on that. You know, that’s the thing about The Undertones – everything that we did, we did with a passion and conviction, purely for the music. It’s not the attitude or the clothes or the gimmickry. It’s, ‘Right, let’s knuckle down, let’s figure this one out.’ And we actually take it a stage further. Say for instance, Charlie Watts. I would go back and… not do my research, because that sounds like you’re compelled to do it, and we did it willingly… I’d look at Charlie Watts, ask, ‘Why did he drum that way?’ and ‘Where did they get that sound?’ Then I’d look out records that he liked. So, we kind of look at the whole holistic approach. I think all of us did that.
“John, Mickey and Damian – and Paul does this as well – really do their research. And I don’t like to. I know I’m kind of contradicting myself, but I tend to look at why people did particular things, while they’d read everything about a particular person – good points and bad points. I don’t like the bad points. I really don’t want to know. I want to keep it very Walt Disney. I don’t want to know anything bad about Marc Bolan or Charlie Watts or anybody. I just want to listen to the music, because that gives me a great lift, it gives me inspiration, and a kind of purpose and direction. And I don’t want that spoiled by somebody saying, ‘In actual fact, he was really like…’ this or that.”
Well, you’ve given me a perfect excuse to talk about Slade. As you were struggling with your health at the time, I missed out on speaking to you about the band while working on my book, but Damian – who did contribute – told me you were the biggest Slade fan in The Undertones.
“Oh, well, I lifted a lot of Don Powell’s riffs. In fact, why are there no drummers like that anymore? There’s a guy called Neal Wilkinson. I met him maybe five months ago, and he drums with Paul McCartney, a level way beyond me. He’s actually drumming for the new Mission Impossible film. But we were talking about glam rock and that style of music and why there’s no kind of ‘riffy’ drummers. Even though my drumming may appear very strict, there are a lot of wee licks and a lot of nods to particular styles of drumming. Neal was saying, ‘When you go in the studio, the engineer wants you to keep it very simple, four on the floor, and basically keep it like that. And I’m generalising but they want to keep it to some extent fairly basic. There are loads of records with a lot of complicated patterns, but they kind of overcomplicate it.
“But people like Charlie Watts kind of make it approachable, that’s what I like about him. It was manageable, and you think, ‘I could maybe have a crack at that.’ That’s why I like Don Powell, and these are unbelievable drummers. The drummer of Mud {Dave Mount} as well, and guys like Mick Tucker of Sweet. These are the kind of guys I loved. I just love the sound, love the playing, and I ask, ‘Why did they come up with that, and what made them do this?’
“Ainsley Dunbar, who drummed on ‘Sorrow’ for David Bowie, does this little thing, and I lifted that kind of style and put it into ‘Wednesday Week’. The same too for ‘My Perfect Cousin’. I know it’s not like ‘Ballroom Blitz’ but I thought, ‘Why don’t I try and do a pattern where it’s on the snare drum,’ kind of like Mick Tucker too. And there’s a mixture of Don Powell and Jerry Nolan, the drummer of the New York Dolls, for ‘Get Over You’. That’s the kind of guys I look to for inspiration.
“And interestingly enough, Noddy Holder wanted to produce The Undertones back in the day.”
Really? I didn’t know that. That’s not come out before, I don’t think.
“Yeah, he came to one of the shows, said he was interested in working with the band. I don’t know why we didn’t do it, but we should have. He would have been perfect.”
Was that in the early Sire days?
“Ah yeah, that’s going back, maybe shortly after The Rezillos tour.”
I know Noddy and Jim Lea ended up producing Girlschool and a few more rocky bands.
“Well, it would have fitted, because Feargal has that kind of wobbly apex, Noddy Holder voice anyway. And we’re very guitar-oriented. A lot of Slade stuff sounds very similar to the New York Dolls. Maybe I’m wrong, but…”
It only struck me after the event – following a chat with Rob Kerford at Sonic PR – that Billy may have said ‘warbly apex’ there, but I listened back and it certainly sounded like ‘wobbly’… and both work. Meanwhile, I can add some gravitas re Billy’s thoughts from an interview I did in 2018 with Jim Lea, who said when he first heard ‘Teenage Kicks’, he thought it sounded very much like he remembered The ‘N Betweens when he went to see them ahead of joining that band, who in time became Slade.
Jim said, “They were really fantastic, and… the backing sounded like The Undertones. I always felt when ‘Teenage Kicks’ came on the radio, it sounded like the early ‘N Betweens. It was really pushed forward … it’s difficult to explain, but it was exciting, and the sound was really great.”
We could have talked glam rock and Slade all day, but I was conscious that Billy was sat in a layby somewhere, so I moved on. Is there still a day job or has he left all that behind now?
“I’m retired. One of the good things about Covid is that it allowed me to work from home, and that kind of eased me into thinking about this. So it wasn’t like I was working right up until Friday then left work with no job. I could organise my time better, and then came to the conclusion because of my ill health, ‘What’s the point of working for a couple of years, go out and enjoy,’ and that’s what I decided to do. And thankfully, I could manage and afford to retire.”
It also helped that The Undertones sold their back-catalogue around then, as Billy also acknowledged. And are there dates in the diary for 2024, or are you doing this one tour at a time now, seeing how it goes?
“Oh no, there’s dates coming up for next year? I think we’re going to be concentrating probably more on Europe, around Germany and France perhaps. So yeah, I think as long as we’re above ground I think we’ll keep going! And as long as the guys will have me there, I want to keep going as well!”
I couldn’t see them carrying on without you behind them. The odd date here and there, yes, but…
“It must have been hard on the fellas, you know. I feel for them, and it’s a lot of pressure for Mickey. He’s kind of like the Glenn Miller of the band. He keeps everyone in check. Particularly me. Sometimes you’d be thinking what you’re going to have for your tea when you’re doing a song. Your mind kind of wanders. So Mickey’s my barometer. He keeps me kind of right.
“The only downside about Mickey is that during a soundcheck he’ll just play the guitar nice and easily, but if you see him playing live, my God, it’s like night and day. He really thunders into it. And he speeds up as well. He’s just so excited. And I’m kind of thinking, ‘Mickey, slow down!’”
I’ve seen that look in your eyes up there on the stage. ‘For God’s sake, wait for me, fellas!’
“Well, I can go quicker than them if I wanted to. Without question!”
I’m sure you can. And I know you’ve been beating the drum, so to speak, with Northern Ireland’s Chest, Heart and Stroke charity, raising awareness. Doing that little bit that you can really, yeah?
“Of course, yeah. Well, Mickey does a similar thing. He had bowel cancer. But it’s funny you say that. There’s a consultant here in Derry, a guy called Aaron Peace. He phoned me today to ask if I’d be interested in taking part in something. Because you have to go through cardio rehab, and because medical science is getting better and better, I forget the name of the protein, but they found this particular thing in blood samples and are making comparisons which suggests people who generally exercise more tend to remain younger – trying to work out why certain people age very quickly and some don’t.
“The thing is, I sit on a committee now, dealing with professors and people totally removed from me, but what they’re trying to do through research is find this particular gene that all of us have, and you can tap into this particular gene that can predict your likelihood of getting ill and gives you a lot of information about you. Say, for instance, you took ill and went to hospital, you’re going to get bombarded with every medication. That’s what they do – hit them hard. But with this particular stance, they’re saying it’s a waste of resources, medicines, hospital resources and staff, when – for instance – they could look at your record and say, ‘Well, this particular medicine won’t work.’ So they target you specifically.
“It’s real Star Trek science fiction, but it does make sense, and what they’re trying to do – sorry I’m going off on a tangent here, when you want to talk about music! – is target a particular individual and treat them accordingly. And they can, to some extent, predict when that particular person is going to have an episode like, say, a heart attack, or their chances of getting cancer. It’s phenomenal. Technology is incredible.”
Away from your Undertones commitments, are you still sitting in with your ceilidh band now and again?
“No, that’s too difficult. Those guys are full time, and I can’t really that in. I love working with the guys, but again I’m out of my depth. These guys are proper players. The guy that plays flute, Ciaran, he’s an all-Ireland champion, twice. And Robert is a classically trained violin player. They really know their stuff.”
Before I know it, Billy’s ‘head’s ticking over here’ and he’s off on a fresh tangent, directing me towards a documentary on Netflix about ancient species, going back 300,000 years or so, and how this species buried their dead deep down in caves, and they’ve discovered etchings on the walls, comparing them to far later civilisation, with my interviewee now in full flow, in awe, fascinated by that ancient history.
I agree with him that it’s amazing, marvelling at how this prehistoric age even predated The Undertones’ first live show at St Mary’s Scout Hall, Beechwood Crescent, Derry, in February 1976.
“Ha! That wasn’t quite 250,000 years ago. Sometimes it can feel like it though! We are getting into that era. When we were young teens, and I’m going back to the ‘70s, those in their 40s were born back in the Thirties. And sometimes I’ll make that same comparison now – can you imagine a kid now, at 20, looking back 40 years? What would their take on it be?”
That’s something that always amazes me. We like to put things in boxes, and I tend to think of punk rock and that ‘ground zero’ back to basics era, but it came together barely six years after The Beatles split. So it would be the equivalent of kids today writing off something that happened in 2017 as ancient history. And yet The Undertones’ ‘rookie’ young singer has now been with you for 24 years.
“Of course, but – unlike the press and media – we’ve never pigeon-holed ourselves or categorised ourselves. We just do music that we like doing. When you talk about an audience, you’ve got to differentiate between that and the public. When you go to a show you’re playing to the public, and some shows that you go to, you’re playing to an audience, and in that respect an audience is really tuned into what we do.
“Of 100% at the show, maybe 70% of the public just want to check you out, and maybe the other 30% is your audience – they get the message. And thankfully, that core element has stayed with us, no matter where we go. Maybe there’s 10 of them, maybe 30 or 100, or 1,000. Regardless, we still have that, and that’s great.”
Well, my eldest daughter, now 23, came along last time I saw you, at Lytham’s Lowther Pavilion this time last year, and she loved it, knowing far more songs than she realised she would, from ’78 to ’83 and again from ‘Thrill Me’ onwards. I’ve clearly subjected her to your music down the years, and she was looking at me now and again, as if to say, ‘I know this one as well!’
“Oh well, bring her along again!”
For this website’s October 2016 feature/interview with Billy Doherty, head here. And for a look back at the last time The Undertones and the Neville Staple Band played in Manchester, in 2019, head here.
The Undertones’ Autumn 2023 tour kicked off in Brighton, Bristol and Cardiff last weekend, with support from The Rezillos, with further three-date stints coming next with two other special guest outfits.
Remaining dates: London, Camden Electric Ballroom (with the Tom Robinson Band, October 5th); Cambridge Junction (with the Tom Robinson Band, October 6th); Leamington Assembly (with the Tom Robinson Band, October 7th); Leeds Stylus (with special guests the Neville Staple Band, October 19th); Newcastle Boiler Shop (with special guests the Neville Staple Band, October 20th); Manchester Academy (with special guests the Neville Staple Band, October 21st).
For full ticket details, head here. And for more information, check out The Undertones’ website Facebook , Twitter and Instagram addresses.
