This is the second of a two part interview with legendary guitarist and songwriter John O’Neill from The Undertones, That Petrol Emotion and trip hop darlings Rare.
The man famous for writing ground breaking hit songs Jimmy Jimmy, Wednesday Week, Julie Ocean, Here Comes The Summer, Big Decision and of course John Peel’s favourite all time song and punk/new wave anthem Teenage Kicks.
Our expert music industry A&R man Richard Rogers asks the questions.
Richard Rogers: so they put a mural up on a huge wall in Derry of The Undertones recently, what did you think of that?
John O’Neill: that’s fantastic. I was against it at the time.
RR: why?
JON: we thought it would be too noticeable and stuff. But it turned out great. Really great.
RR: as we are in Düsseldorf, it was interesting to find out that Die Toten Hosen, the German group, were massive fans of yours. Are you still in touch with the guys?
JON: yeah they’re coming down tonight to the gig. They are lovely people. Genuinely nice people. We played with them three or four times. Die Artze are the other German band that are big fans of The Undertones too. We play a lot in Berlin and in Germany because our tour manager Barry is married to a girl from Berlin so we are always doing tours here. We played the Market Hall in Hamburg last night and it was brilliant.
RR: you mentioned before we started the interview but there was a possibility of the undertones going back into the studio to record a new album, can you tell us more please?
JON: well we keep saying we’re gonna go in the studio. The thing is, Damian is so prolific he’s already put out a couple of solo records. In fact Damian started up a new band with a couple of guys from That Petrol Emotion called The Everlasting Yeah who released a record four years ago but they just put out a new album which is absolutely fantastic, it’s as good as anything that the Petrols did. Damian can write stuff all the time and I’ve got tons of stuff but I am never that happy that it’s all that great. It seems the older you get it’s harder to write songs.
RR: do you find a lack of inspiration?
JON: well the thing is my daughter came back from London to Derry and she and her husband have the two kids now and they both work, so the grandparents such as me, end up looking after the grandchildren a lot of the time. So I never get time to get into the studio it’s fantastic having the grandkids you know, I don’t know if you’ve got any.
RR: not yet my son is only eight years old. (laughs).
JON: but it’s fantastic having grandkids I love having grandkids. But very exhausting. You’re up 3 times a night sometimes.
RR: so if you wanna blame there being no Undertones records blame the grandkids! Talking about David Bowie which we were earlier, I once licensed a Blondie track onto a Bowie album which had Robert Fripp playing guitar. This was the first time that Blondie’s version of Heroes was ever released on CD format.
JON: well talking about cover versions, Die Toten Hosen did a version of Teenage Kicks and Damian came over to Germany to play the guitar on that song by the group. That was on the Learning English album. Maybe it was recorded in London and all the promotional work and parties were in Germany. Damian is my brother of course and he’s a great guitar player and I’m just a meat and potatoes guy.
RR: but of course you are a fantastic songwriter. In the UK we had this amazing DJ no longer with us called John Peel who I got to know a little bit not much but a little bit when I worked at the BBC in London. The best DJ ever male and female probably Annie Nightingale. John was out on his own and phenomenal and his favourite record of all time was written by John here called Teenage Kicks. John was really God of all DJs. He epitomised the lone DJ out there on his own looking for new songs and new artists.
JON: without John Peel, we wouldn’t have done anything. We recorded the first EP and we were about to break up because there was a lot of tension about, we wanted to make a record so that we could prove that a band from Derry could make a record. And that will do us. But then with John Peel playing it, and finally Seymour Stein (at Sire Records) said I’ve got to sign these guys. So that led to us getting a record deal.
RR: so how did you get on with A&R guys? I mean at one of the companies I worked for I had on my roster as an A&R man, 55 separate songwriters. Okay some of those were with the same band but all in all there are only so many hours in the day and so many days in the year so it’s a hard job that people don’t always appreciate.
JON: well Andy, our manager, kept us away from them most of the time. I remember Positive Touch the third LP for the undertones hadn’t sold that much so the fourth album was Sin of Pride. With each album we made, we tried to make them different which probably wasn’t a very good commercial idea. The A&R guy would come in and get us to write in a commercial way and of course we ignored him.
RR: yes you should ignore them, unless they really have something to say. (laughs).
JON: really, I had no dealings with A&R except a little during the Undertones days.
RR: that’s incredible. I did an interview with Midge Ure last year and he said exactly the same thing. The record company just let Ultravox get on and do their own A&R.
JON: Andy was dealing with all the A&R people for the Undertones and the Petrols. For Rare we had a licensing deal with Pinnacle so there was no A&R there either. The guy at Pinnacle liked it so it was released and we sold about five copies and we did a tour and I can promise you we didn’t sell very many copies because we didn’t have very many people in the gigs which was so dispiriting. Andy managed both groups but to be honest, we didn’t take ourselves too seriously even though he was always trying to make us do more promotional stuff. I think this led to Fergal Sharkey leaving the band. He could see that he could probably do better as a solo artist. As far as people were concerned he was The Undertones.
RR: yet he only had one minor songwriting credit on one song on the entire creative writing output over six albums of The Undertones. Are you still in touch with him at all?
JON: no oh no. We had some horror stories that he was involved in, but we weren’t that surprised. The fact that he was an A&R man just makes us laugh. He had no interest whatsoever in any music, he never did. You can put that in the interview, I don’t care.
RR: moving swiftly on, let’s go back to John Peel.
JON: the year before he died I think, we made a documentary. He came over to Derry. That was the first time we had met him in years and we spent three or four days with him which was fantastic, you know. He also paid for the very first recording session we ever did.
RR: so what do your live gigs entail? Is it all the old stuff or a combination of this? The early stuff you did with Fergal plus the material you’ve done post Fergal?
JON: mostly the original stuff, you know we do all the singles. Then we mix it with various songs from the last two albums, we think there’s some great stuff on those albums. You know, the people want to hear the commercial stuff.
RR: well I really hope the grandkids will allow you to do some songwriting every now and again.
JON: well you know it was my own fault.
RR: Thanks for the honest, open interview John.
JON: Thank you and enjoy tonights show.
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