Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would become the lead singer of The Undertones...
Former Today FM star Paul on his journey to fronting iconic band
It was literally a case of opportunity knocks. As a young teenager growing up in Derry, Paul Mcloone was left dumbfounded when radio legend Gerry Anderson unexpectedly arrived at his front door with an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“I was about 17 and I used to do impersonations of people like Geldof, Prince Charles and Ronald Reagan,” said Paul, who would later go on to co-write Gift Grub with Mario Rosenstock on The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show.
The “accidental radio star” – who would go on to have his own shows on RTE and Newstalk, as well as presenting the Choice Music Awards between 2012-16 – had recorded a “silly tape of tomfoolery with funny voices” for an older mate who happened to be a journalist.
“And completely unbeknownst to me,” he continued, “he gave it to
Gerry Anderson and didn’t tell me.
“And out-of-the-blue, it must’ve been a Saturday afternoon, Gerry came walking up to the front door. My dad was a huge fan. And there he was knocking on the front door to see me. My parents were completely surprised: ‘What’s Gerry Anderson doing here!’
“He said, ‘I heard your tape. Your material’s a bit weak, but, sure, come up on Monday’.
“And I thought he just meant, ‘Come up to have a chat’.
“At that stage, I was doing A Levels. It actually meant you didn’t really have to go into school; they didn’t come looking for you if you didn’t show. So I didn’t go.
“Instead, I went up to Radio Foyle and Gerry came out and took me to the studio.
“I still, at this stage, didn’t realise what was going on. I thought he’d go, ‘You sit there and I’ll finish the show and then we’ll talk’.
“But he said, ‘I’m going to start talking and you just be Prince Charles, and we’ll just have a chat’.
“I was like, ‘Whoa!’ But before I could say anything the red light was on and Gerry goes, ‘I’m delighted this morning to be joined by the Prince of Wales’.
“So we just started doing this chat and he would feed me lines. I tweaked that the way to be funny would be to have Prince Charles talking Derry colloquialisms. People loved it. That’s the way I started in radio.”
On a much more serious note, when the British government banned the broadcast of voices of representatives from Sinn Fein and certain loyalist groups circa 1988-1994, it was Paul’s job to dub the voices of Martin Mcguinness and Mitchel Mclaughlin and “occasionally” even Gerry Adams for the news. “I would talk like them,” explained Paul, as he then proceeded to crack me up with perfect impersonations of Mcguinness and Adams.
“I thought it was such a bizarre and stupid law. It was just f***ing farcical. So, I would make it sound as much like they really sounded.
“I thought that was only fair, just journalistically because nuance is everything, and tone and how someone says it and how someone emphasises one word, as opposed to another, can change the whole meaning.
“Your tone of voice is inherently part of the meaning of what you’re saying. So, I would emulate the tone of voice as accurately as possible.”
Even Martin Mcguinness was singing his praises. “So, Mcguiness picked up on this,” Paul said. “And then when Radio Foyle would ring him at the house and go, ‘Martin, would you come in and chat about blah blah blah’.
“Martin would ask, ‘Would you see if that fella Mcloone is available to do me?’
“They’d go, ‘Yeah, Paul will do you’. So Martin would say, ‘OK, I’ll be over at 11 o’clock’. I began to get more and more of the gigs because they were actually asking for me to do it.
“And then when [ John] Major stood up and said ‘we’re lifting the ban on Sinn Fein’ my heart sank. I said, ‘F**k! That’s me out of some nice paying work there.” Did Paul, who grew up only a stone’s throw away from the iconic Free Derry Corner, ever consider getting involved in Republicanism?
“I was too young, really, when it all kicked off,” explained Paul, who was the only band member of The Undertones to grow up in the actual Bogside itself.
“I’m always grateful for the fact that I wasn’t a little older around that time, around Bloody Sunday and the immediate aftermath of that. I think if I had been in my teens then life could’ve taken a very different path for me. I’m a little frightened at the thought of what might’ve happened there.
“I’d be a liar if I were to say, ‘No, there’s just no way that would’ve happened to me’. But I was too young. And by the time I got a little older I’d seen enough of it to know that it wasn’t for me. So, I avoided it.
“But, inadvertently, yes, we were all caught up in it. We all got stopped and searched every day. We all got intimidated and harassed by British soldiers and police on a daily basis. Houses searched on an almost weekly basis. It was just an ugly time. It was a harrowing time for everybody.
“You were grateful that you were only touched by it in the ways that I’ve described – general harassment from the so-called security forces – and not in a more fundamental way, like losing a parent, or losing a brother or a sister, which thankfully didn’t happen to me. But I am one of the lucky ones.”
That old chestnut about “opportunity never knocks twice at any man’s door” was certainly not true for our Paul. He grew up listening to The Undertones, never in his wildest dreams imagined he would one day end up becoming their lead singer.
“I was very excited by their success because, without saying the old cliches, it was a grim time,” he reflected.
“They stayed in Derry. They didn’t do the whole moving to London thing. So they’d be on Top of the Pops on Thursday and then you’d see a couple of them at mass on the Sunday, or you’d see them up the town buying shoes. It was surreal.
“Apart from Dana a few years before, it wasn’t the norm to see boys from Derry on Top of the Pops. So
Martin Mcguinness would say, is that fella Mcloone available?
that was mad anyway. And then to see the boys in real life, getting the bus or whatever, it was great. I loved it. I didn’t idolise them, but I really thought what they had achieved was great.”
Paul’s first band “that was in any way kind of good” was actually with one of the lads from The Undertones. They were called The Carrellines.
He said: “I’ve no idea where that weird spelling came from. It’s lost in the midst of time. But I think it had something to do with the drummer Billy [Doherty], who had been in The Undertones. The Carrellines made a
bit of headway in Ireland, but we never really had the breakthrough. We had a couple of near misses with record companies. We just didn’t get lucky. I always felt we were the one band that they just didn’t sign. They seemed to sign just about everybody else!
“Anyway, it ended up that Billy and I got involved in a recording studio together and then we got involved in a wee label to launch a couple of bands we fell into managing. That was through the ‘90s. And then at the end of ‘90s I hadn’t long moved to Dublin and I got a phone call from
Billy. I think he said, ‘We’re reforming, but we want you to sing’.
“I thought he meant The Carrellines and I was going, ‘Of course you’d want me to sing: I’m the singer!’ And he said, ‘No, it’s The Undertones’. I went, ‘What!’
“So, I immediately said yes and then immediately went, ‘S***e! What have I just got myself into’.”
The reunion happened when the band members were approached to perform a special gig at The Nerve Centre’s then new premises in 1999.
Paul will never forget the first time he got to sing Teenage Kicks in front of a live audience. “The crowd had been up for it, right from the kick off. It was quite a lift, the energy in the room. But, yeah, there was a slight baptism of fire moment when we went into Teenage Kicks,” he said.
“It was kind of, ‘This is it. This is the one’. And obviously the place just went berserk. I remember feeling it was a baptismal moment.”
As Paul surveyed the enthusiastic crowd he thought to himself, “You’ve gone over the Rubicon now. You’ve sung Teenage Kicks in Derry with
The Undertones. So that’s a moment”. He added: “It was only ever meant to be for one night and then it became two nights, and then we just kept doing it. So, it’s kind of a one-night stand that led to a 23-year marriage, I suppose, you could say. It was one of those weird things. It really was as kind of non-planned as that.”
The Undertones then started introducing new songs, written by guitarist John O’neill, into the live set and then decided to go into the recording studio to put them all down on tape.
Paul said: “It was a real acid test to put a record out there, because there’s a sort of permanence about that then. You really are adding to the canon and that’s a big deal, too.
“You were sort of used to the inevitable comparison with Feargal [Sharkey] who I absolutely hugely respected and still do as a vocalist. I think he’s a tremendous singer.
“But if I hadn’t thought a record couldn’t hold against the first couple of Undertones’ albums I probably would’ve not been so happy to do it.
“But, by that stage, I thought we’d enough songs to do a pretty solid record. And obviously then I was
The crowd was up for it, right from the kick-off..it was quite a lift, the energy
thinking, ‘Will the fans like it?’ Not so much will they buy it, because we knew it was going to be giving Robbie Williams any headaches!”
Has Paul ever had a chinwag with Mr Sharkey about it all? He revealed: “No, I’ve never met Feargal. I don’t know him. And from what I understand, he’s OK with everything, as far as I know.”
Will the band, who are playing Glastonbury and the Stiff Little Fingers annual Putting The Fast in Belfast fest at Custom House Square on August 20, record another album?
Paul said: “I really hope so. About a year ago I would’ve said probably not when things were looking really grim. But we’ve the new ‘Dig What You Need’ compilation, where we’ve remixed the best songs of the two albums that I did with the band.
“I think re-introducing those new-er songs to the set has given us a certain impetus in terms of wanting to maybe make a new record.”
■ The Undertones compilation album Dig What You Need is out now on vinyl and CD via Dimple Discs.