and the death toll that there was and the likelihood if i walked out of my hotel on 42nd street, i d be mugged within seconds, and about half an hour in times square, my brain engaged and just went, sharkey, ten hours ago, you were standing in the bog side. there s nothing new york is ever going to throw you, my friend, that will ever put you off your beat. why did you quit so young? you formed the undertones with your mates in, i think, 75. yeah. you were out by 83. still, hugely popular. we were, but that s the simple truth of the matter is i then had a longing for other things and wanted to go in different directions. we were settling down. some people want to stay in derry, some people wanted to make different particular types of records, and you re dealing with any little group of friends that effectively met when we were teenagers. i just wonder if there s something about the music business you really didn t like, cos you said afterwards, not so long after you left, you
of the undertones! like every other healthy teenager on the planet, we were more obsessed with more songs about chocolate and girls. exactly. what you sang about was the usual teenage dreams, the longings, the girls, the frustrations with your family, it was.it was the stuff of ordinary life. correct. ..which in a funny sort of way was sort of avoiding the reality of what you were living through. well, it s not, because that was actually allowing us that moment of freedom and that head space and that moment of clarity, because the truth is nobody in northern ireland at the time sat around thinking, oh, this is dreadful, this is terrible. everybody, as best they could, was trying to get on with normal lives. and, in fact, that situation, like all forms of poverty and oppression and difficulty and suffrage, becomes normal. and i ll give you a very simple example. the first time we as the undertones went to new york, i had spent weeks reading articles and national newspapers about the c
were my parents fighters? probably. you were named after two ira men. that s very true. suggests your mum was a fighter. that clearly suggests my mum was a fighter. my dad was chairman of the labour party in derry when there was such a thing, he was branch secretary of his local union. both my parents were deeply involved in the civil rights movement and i have vivid recollections of being ten years old and being taken on civil rights marches all over ireland, all throughout northern ireland, my family were on burntollet the day that parade was attacked, my family were there at bloody sunday, and my family were deeply engaged in trying to change a corrupt political system in northern ireland. so, here s one of the fascinating things about you. i mean, here we see it, and you have a cause and are a fighter now for that cause, but what s fascinating about you as a musician because i want to talk about you as a musician is that you and your bandmates in the undertones, when you had th
you, despite your upbringing, chose not to sing political songs. here s the thing. the undertones developed a career because of a little bar called the casbah. it was the only pub in town that would actually entertain the fact that five kids with no idea what they were doing, and we were given a bit of space on a friday night. right outside the door of the casbah was a british army checkpoint. so, simply to get in and out of that pub, you basically would have to be searched, name checked, date of birth, run through computer all that kind of good stuff. do you really think the 50 people turning up to watch the undertones on a friday night needed us to give them a lecture about bombs, bullets and barricades? we, like every healthy. or was it that maybe you were intimidated to a certain extent? oh, no, good lord, not in the least. it wasn t that, it wasn t fear? i can absolutely assure you the last bunch of people you ever could possibly intimidate was the five members