Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
The Undertones’ guitarist on where it all went wrong...and right
Damian O’neill tells how the Derry rockers are still getting their teenage kicks four decades later
He was a mere whippersnapper when offered the ultimate Teenage Kicks experience. During the backdrop of the Troubles, Damian O’neill was 15-years-old when he grabbed the chance of a lifetime to become the lead guitarist in what would become one of the most important bands to ever emerge from this small island.
And it only came about after his older brother Vincent was forced to leave The Undertones because the mammy wanted him to focus on his school exams.
No doubt Vincent has been kicking himself ever since.
“My mum basically said to my brother Vincent, ‘Look, you need to study for your O-levels. So I don’t want you in the band!” Damian told me, laughing.
“So I was brought in to replace him, not because of any musical prowess or talent, but for mercenary reasons because I actually had an electric guitar and an amplifier… and they didn’t! So, they only brought me in because of that. That’s the truth.”
It helped to take Damian’s mind off the Troubles in the early 1970s.
Asked about this dreadful period, he said: “It certainly wasn’t boring. There was always a riot going on, or bombs going off, or a shooting.
“I mean, you obviously get accustomed to it, and you don’t even blink anymore when you get stopped and searched by the army.
“And those days, in the early 70s, you couldn’t get into the town centre without being searched for obvious reasons.
“But once you get used to that, after a year or whatever, it’s like second nature.
“Even if you see a soldier pointing a rifle – obviously you don’t want to be shot and killed, but you just kind of take it for granted, ‘Well, he’s just checking what’s going on’, you know.
“It becomes second nature, you become accustomed to war, so to speak. But it was grim.
“Of course, it was quite grim for young people particularly. And there was not much to do.”
Even overseas bands didn’t want to visit the North on their European tours.
“Nobody ever played Derry, really, except for Rory (Gallagher) once. He always played Belfast. We always loved him for that,” he said.
“I have to praise Horseslips. They played every year.
“And that was the first live show I ever seen.
“It was at that show that I went, ‘I want to be a musician’. Because I loved Horseslips, as every teenager did back then in Derry, and Belfast, and all over Ireland.
“It was grim, but like I say, you got accustomed to it. Fortunately – like Paul Mcloone said in your interview (earlier in the year) as well – nobody close to us got killed, or joined the IRA and got killed, or whatever, or did jail time. But we knew people who did.
“So we weren’t affected, in that sense, where we lost somebody who was murdered by the army, or the IRA, or whatever. We were lucky.
“But it was around you all the blinking time. Yeah, it was depressing. It was quite depressing.”
Surprisingly, they never went over to live in London at the peak of their fame.
Instead, they decided to stay in their home town.
Getting to appear on Top Of The Pops and travelling the world, Damian was in flying form until The Undertones broke up in 1983.
“I was actually the most rock’n’roll one (of the band), I suppose, being the youngest. I had more musician friends in London. After we did tours, instead of going home with the others, I would hang on and stay,” he explained.
“I was good friends with Billy Hassett from this mod band called The Chords. He’s second generation Irish; his parents are Irish. And they would put me up in their counsel estate house, and I just had the greatest time.
“I’d stay for two weeks. I’d go to The Marquee and see all these bands, and stuff.
“So, I think out of all of them, I was the one that wanted to break away.
“I had no problems about leaving, you know. I could have gone over easily if the others had decided.
“Actually, I ended up moving to London before the band broke up in 1982, I think.”
What was it like when The Undertones called it a day?
“It was really difficult, like a marriage breaking up. It’s a shock at the start. And then you think, ‘What are you going to do?’ I was only 22, very young,” he admitted.
“And the money ran out of course very quickly. And then you go, ‘S**t! I better get a job.” He added that “that reality” hit him hard. “You’re so used to things being done for you. Just remember, I was useless at even phoning people because it was always done for you,” he said.
“So, it was a pretty grim time as well. I tried to get a band actually with Mickey Bradley (of The Undertones), who had moved over to London.
“Mickey and I wrote songs together in The Undertones. But that didn’t work out. It didn’t last; we didn’t really do anything.
“So, I was floundering for about a year and a half after that.
“And then, luckily, That Petrol Emotion came to my rescue.” His brother John O’neill and guitarist Raymond Gorman came over from Derry with some recorded demos.
“And they wanted to mix the demos on my little four track, and that’s when I first heard those Petrol songs. and I begged them, ‘Can I join the band please?’” he recalled. “But they didn’t need a guitar player. So I joined as a bass player. So, it rescued me.”
Petrol Emotion would go on to produce some of the best Irish albums of all time, despite not being as commercially successful as they deserved. Meanwhile, Damian’s old bandmate Feargal
I think Feargal was frustrated. He was more ambitious, put it that way, than the rest of us. We could have worked much harder, we could have done the U2 thing and gone to America.
Sharkey had several mega hits. “I think for the first couple of years when we were together, it was brilliant because we were all kind of like ‘all for one, one for all’ kind of attitude,” he reflected on those early days in The Undertones.
“We only had problems mainly after the third record, Positive Touch.
“I think Feargal was frustrated. He was more ambitious, put it that way, than the rest of us.
“And we did lack ambition, you know. We could’ve worked much harder. We could have done the U2 thing and gone to America and all that.
“Feargal and I were probably the most ambitious, but the others definitely wouldn’t have (gone to America).
“I think Feargal, naturally just grew very frustrated that we should be bigger and he’d be better off if he went solo.
“So, it was inevitable after the fourth record, you know, that we were going to split. He wanted to do his own thing.”
The affable Damian certainly has one of those good hearts these days that are hard to find.
In other words, he’s not the type to badmouth anybody, but he admits he wasn’t the biggest fan of Feargal’s solo output.
“I wasn’t keen. I’ll tell you the truth, I didn’t like his solo career at all. I thought it was really bland,” he confessed.
“I thought Feargal should have gone down the more, like an Irish rootsy kind of way, because he’s a great singer. You should hear him sing Irish traditional songs; he’s amazing.
“Or, Feargal should have gone down the bluesy kind of way, as a raw blues kind of singer, because he’s got the pipes, he’s got the voice.
“I didn’t like the Rod Stewart way he went. I just thought, ‘Nah, it’s the complete antithesis of what The Undertones did, you know.”
Damian had a real bounce in his step after Paul Mcloone joined The Understones in 1999, some 15 years after they had originally decided to call it a day.
It was originally meant to be just for a one-off gig in their hometown of Derry, but the vibe on stage was so good they decided to keep the show on the road.
“I didn’t really know Paul, whereas the others did, because I don’t live in Derry, you see,” he said, pointing out that The Undertones’ drummer Billy Doherty had even been in a band with Paul, who up until then had been most famous for his radio work.
He’d made a name for himself as someone who could mimic practically anyone, most famously on Today FM’S Gift Grub.
When the British government banned the broadcast of the 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.
“It was Billy’s suggestion to get him. So when we turned up in the rehearsal studio – actually it was a lock up where we have our gear – Paul comes in and I’m still unsure, ‘Is this guy gonna be any good?’ Because I hadn’t heard any of his singing before,” he told me.
“And we go into the first song – I forget what the first song was, probably (She’s A) Runaround – and the hairs on the back of my neck were like, ‘Wow, this is great’.
“It had to be somebody from Derry. It couldn’t be anybody else. It had to be something from our hometown. He has the accent.
“And Paul is particularly good at mimicking, as you well know.
“So he probably sounded more like Feargal back in the early days, but now he’s found his own voice.
“But it was obvious it was going to work. And it also helped that he was younger, fitter and really good looking.
“So, yeah, he ticks all the right boxes.” Damian ticks all the right boxes himself on his superb new solo album “an crann”, which is his third solo offering.
When I asked why he decided to go instrumental on his latest opus, he modestly explained: “I just don’t enjoy singing. I’m an OK singer, but I’m not a lead singer. I don’t have a strong voice.”
After he felt the best two songs on his previous record were instrumental, Damian decided to take the bull by the horns and make the new album completely instrumental.
“I just didn’t enjoy singing the other songs, the ones that I did sing on,” he admitted.
“So I thought: ‘Next time I’m just going to keep it instrumental, keep it simple’.
“And to be honest, I’m not the greatest lyricist. I just struggle with lyrics.
“So I thought, ‘Make life easy for yourself. Keep it simple. Keep it instrumental.”
But when it came to words, Damian made a powerful statement with the album’s title.
“I tell you where I got the title from: I was reading this great memoir from this Northern Irish poet called Damien Gorman called ‘As If I cared’,” he said.
“And in it, he talks about back in the early 90s, how he tried to form a peace and reconciliation organisation in Derry and Belfast called An Crann, the tree.
“And I just liked the title: an crann. And I think he says the tree is a symbol of growth and inspiration.
“I just love that. So I thought, ‘Wow maybe this could be a good title for the album, because my stuff is quite mellow.
“And then, coincidentally, my daughter Rosa was doing her end of year degree in photography, and she took some photographs of this hawthorn tree in County Derry, of this burial place.”
The location in question, a few miles west of Garvagh, is the famous burial place of a diminutive evil magician named Abhartach, who was dubbed Ireland’s Vampire King.
“It’s basically, I suppose, this mythical Irish vampire dwarf buried upside down,” he concluded.
“So, she took a really nice picture and I thought, ‘OK, there’s my cover. I’ll keep it in the family, I’ll use my daughter’s shot’.”
It’s a beautiful photograph by a clearly talented artist, which just goes to prove that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
■ Damian O’neill’s new album an crann is out now via Dimple Discs.