Trout confessions
Former Undertone Feargal Sharkey on his post-pop passion... fly-fishing
THEY’RE not the Teenage Kicks that Feargal Sharkey is most associated with — hopping on a bus to escape Troubles-torn Seventies Londonderry by spending a few tranquil hours fishing the waters of nearby rivers.
But the former Undertones lead singer is talking with just as much passion and excitement about his lifelong love of fly-fishing as he once sang the band’s famous punk anthem.
“The most beautiful trout you catch is your very first — and your very last one,” he says, his voice tremulous at the wonder of it all. “I caught my first little brown trout just above the bridge at Drumahoe in the Faughan and I dearly hope I’m nowhere near catching my last one just yet.
“There was a fly-fishing club and a fly-tying club at school, provided by the Christian Brothers. At 11 years old, you could catch a bus in the centre of Derry and be standing on the banks of the river 20 minutes later. Amazing. As you got older you could head to Campsie or Strabane.”
Sharkey, now 62, is better known today as an environmental campaigner and the energy force of those explosive early performances on stage has been transferred into strongly held opinions on protecting our natural world.
Today he’s one of the key speakers at The Honourable The Irish Society’s biannual Festival of Game Fishing which is being held “virtually” and is ostensibly the reason for our interview.
His campaigning zeal sees him fire out facts and dire warnings at breakneck speed in that still familiar Derry accent, though he claims to have “modified it 40 years ago, slowing down because you realise lots of people are just nodding and smiling incredibly kindly and engagingly and respectfully but they clearly don’t understand a bloody
word you are saying. I dialled it back a bit from 160mph a minute to 85mph a minute”.
Happily, he’s just as comfortable discussing a diverse range of subjects, from his music career, to the impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland and his ruminations on identity. This is a nice guy. Genuinely witty, his conversation even about complex issues is animated, persuasive and captivating.
Sharkey lives in north London and is now chairman of the Amwell Magna Fishery, Britain’s oldest angling club. It’s a two and a half mile pristine stretch of water on the River Lea, one of the chalk streams he’s on a mission to save, but keeping it in good condition has not been without a fight.
“I effectively retired 10 years ago and was quite looking forwardtoit,”headmits.
“But then we’d an issue around lack of water and loss of flow. The whole experience of having to take the Environment Agency to the doors of the High Court to get an issue resolved just left me with a big question in my mind.
“I say this with love and respect to my colleagues at the fishery, but if a bunch of ugly, cantankerous middle-aged old men like us, far too used to getting their own way in life, has to go to those kind of lengths just to gettheenvironmentalagencyto do the right thing, then what the
hell is going on? That, somewhat unfortunately, gave me an itch and rather stupidly I scratched that itch and now I realise that every time I scratch that itch I just end up with a bigger itch.”
Indeed, to his huge irritation Sharkey discovered there are only 225 chalk streams on the entire planet, 85% of which are in southern England “and we are destroying them”.
“Does that get me angry? Absolutely. It’s wrong, it’s immoral and it shouldn’t be happening. They are being over-extracted to supply public water by commercial companies and on many occasions they are also having raw sewage dumped into them. These precious little things are dying.”
There is now, he says, 10 times more coral reef than chalk streams. Or 100 times more tigers. Or 300 times more blue whales. “London is now on a list of the top 10 cities in the world most likely to run out of drinking water, along with the likes of Jakarta, Sao Paolo and Mexico City. Dealing with the chalk streams is one thing but I didn’t for one second think that 25 million people here are on the verge of running out of drinking water.”
Sharkey clearly finessed how to make points and win arguments when, in the early 1990s, he went into the management side of the music business, first with Polydor Records before heading UK Music, which represented all sectors of the industry.
In 2019 he was awarded an OBE for services to music and though his parents had been active in the civil rights movement in Derry, he saw no conflict in accepting it, evidently believing that identity can be fluid and multi-layered.
“I’ve lived here for 40 years,” he responds, when asked how he felt about the honour. “One of the truly remarkable things about the Good Friday Agreement that is constantly overlooked is that people who were born in, who lived in and who still live in and will live in the future in Northernirelandhavethisremarkable ability to be Northern Irish and Britishandtodosoatthesame time. I’m proud of that.”
The turmoil stirred up by Brexit concerns him. “I’m on record as having said it pre-brexit and certainly after the referendum — that it was going to put a border down the middle of the Irish Sea, and it was going to take enormous strength, courage and political leadership right across Northern Ireland, obviously in Belfast, but also in London and Dublin and indeed to a large extent possibly in Brussels, to ensure that Northern Ireland managed to transition through all of this disruption and to ensure that it comes out the other side of it buoyant, successful, confident and focussed on its future.
“There are still some of us old enough to remember what the past looked like and I don’t recommend it. For me, it’s like my career in the music industry — the future is over that way and it looks quite exciting.”
Sharkey was catapulted to stardom in 1978 when shortly after leaving school, a career delivering televisions for Radio Rentals was interrupted by a request from the BBC to appear on Top of the Pops to perform The Undertones first single, Teenage Kicks. As legend goes, he told his boss he was nipping out for lunch and never went back.
More hits followed, including My Perfect Cousin. When the band split, he’d a brief collaboration with Vince Clarke in The Assembly (Never, Never charted at number four) before enjoying a sharp-suited solo career that delivered a number one single with A Good Heart.
Why did he quit performing? “Looking back, I was doing it with enormous pride, thinking ‘bloody hell, mate look what you have managed to achieve!’ It was an extraordinary thing — that four kids from Derry could ever get into the Top 40 with a record. The musical bit of my career? I’m deeply grateful for every bit of it and hugely appreciative for the rest of my life.
“But, at 30, I had a recurring nightmare, about waking up to discover I was the wrong side of 50 with a receding hairline, a po
nytail, still hoping I was going to be back on Top of the Pops next week. It’s not really something you’d want to aspire to for midlife.
“So arrogantly, stupidly, naively I decided at 30 that you have done the thing with The Undertones, you did the thing with Vince Clarke in the Assembly, you did the whole kind of solo thing with A Good Heart and you still are only 30 years old... bloody hell man. I thought there’d still be enough time in my life to go off and do a whole bunch of other things.
“And as it turned out I found it incredibly stimulating and incredibly rewarding. I’m very proud of everything I’ve done and desperately grateful for being allowed the opportunity to do it all.”
The Undertones have since reformed, albeit without their lead singer.
What of those reports of tension between Sharkey and other band members?
“For me, it was always about looking forward and never looking back... that’s what life is all about. It’s the satisfaction of being able to say ‘wow that actually happened, how brilliant is that’.
“That no matter what you can think of or whatever crazy idea you can conjure up, that you can actually go out there with enough hard work and effort and achieve all kinds of things.”
He laughs good-naturedly before joking: “And I suppose, let’s face it, what grown-up adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom... that’s actually none of my business.”
Sharkey has several non-executive directorships and sits on a couple of advisory boards but two days a week are devoted to looking after the Amwell Magna Fishery and its livestock.
My query as to whether club members eat the trout they catch elicits a moment of what I now realise was appalled silence. “Look, I could bore you with the science of this,” he begins.
Fascinatingly, he explains how DNA tests on their trout revealed they date back 8,000 years to the trout that originated in the Dolomite mountains and at the last Ice Age swam down the Rhine, across Doggerland, the land bridge between Europe and Britain, and up the Thames, and the River Lea to his fishery.
“A bunch of extraordinary, wonderfully eccentric, beautiful scientists from Exeter University, one of whom hails from Belfast, have made it their lifetime’s work to study the DNA of brown trout.
“So, no, we don’t eat them. We tuck them into bed at night and read them a bedtime story.
“They are very, very looked after.”
Today’s angling festival is, he says, crammed with interesting speakers such as the TV presenter Jeremy Wade talking about his global adventures and “a young woman, Marina Gibson, a brilliant, salmon trouter”. There will also “be tales about the one that got away”.
Of course, Sharkey himself escaped to London but clearly this part of the world retains a special place in his heart.
With lyrical beauty, he rhapsodises about fishing adventures in Derry and Donegal, the rivers and characters, including one of his older sister’s friends, “a man known only as John the Bridge because his house was near the
well bridge, who lived over in the Gaeltacht near Gweedore”.
“Being the good Irish stock in the broader sense of the north of the island, John was always quite economical with the use of the England language and invariably would just mutter something about ‘the rain stopped’ and ‘fish in the harbour’ and for a salmon fisherman that’s code for ‘you need to get yourself over here in the next 24 hours, something quite exciting is going to be happening and if you are here in 72 hours that’s going to be too late and you’ll have missed it’.”
A keen reader, his favourite book is Seamus Heaney’s selection of William Butler Yeats’ poems. “I’ve given away so many copies of that over the years, going up to random strangers in the street, saying ‘here, you need this in your life’.”
The pandemic, he says, has afforded many people fresh perspective not only on the environment, but also life. “I used to work 80-100 hour weeks, now I think ‘you were completely mad Sharkey! What the hell were you doing’?”
He’s still a powerful advocate for the music industry though. “Remember the late Noughties and the endless stories about the death of the music industry? Twelve years later Adele’s just been identified as the most successful album selling artist of all time and that all happened in the last 10 years. Shall we just say the death of the British music industry has been greatly exaggerated?”
Sharkey’s looking forward to “spending time with family, friends and loved ones in a restaurant on Friday nights, looking at another glass of alcohol, thinking ‘I probably shouldn’t drink this’.”
The only subject off-limits — though in a typically friendly way — is his family. “I’ve a very simple rule, it’s not their fault what I’ve done in my life,” he jests.
The mention of how his father lived until the great age of 99 prompts more good humour: “I do threaten my family there’s a fine tradition in the male side of the Sharkeys of everybody living until at least their mid-90s so if they think they’re going to see the back of me any day soon they’re badly mistaken.”
Longevity, though, may not be his only strength.
He adds with discernible pride: “I have recently been described in The Salmon and Trout magazine as ‘a stroppy punk rocker disinclined to take no for an answer’. It’s probably quite true.”
‘I tell my family if they think they’re going to see the back of me any day soon they’re badly mistaken’
The Honourable The Irish Society biannual Festival of Game Fishing takes place today from noon to 8pm. VIPS talking at the event will include the Prince of Wales and Mayor of London. BT Sport presenter Rob Hughes will host a wide range of high-profile speakers. Free registration for attendees is at www.gamefishingfestival.com and further info can be found at www.honourableirishsociety.org. uk/home