I didn’t listen much to The Undertones when I was younger. I preferred my punk more political, even though I could understand why John Peel thought that Teenage Kicks was a perfect pop song. Watching a TV documentary on the band, re-screened by the BBC to mark St Patrick’s Day, made me think again.
They cared about what they were doing, they learned quickly, and they paid their dues in Derry’s tiny venue, the Casbah, writing or learning a new song every week. They also understood, when they heard The Ramones for the first time, that the rules of punk, or certainly its clockspeed, had just changed.
The Undertones, of course, were born and brought up in Derry, and grew up with the Troubles, a euphemism for the military occupation of the North, and in particular of Derry, by the British Army. To give an idea of the scale: 1972’s Operation Motorman, which cleared barricades from Catholic parts of the city, involved 22,000 troops, and was the largest British military action since Suez. This was sketched in lightly by the film, although it ran right through it.
The journalist Eamonn MacCabe, interviewed for the programme, caught the paradoxical tone of the place: a Catholic working class that was both the most oppressed in the North in terms of access to housing and work, and also the most confident, because it represented a majority population in the city, adjacent to the Republic. A mundane detail by Julien Temple, from the filming of the video for My Perfect Cousin in a band member’s house, caught the atmosphere well. He was running a cable for the shoot when a British army squaddie threw him up against the wall and pointed a gun at him.
So the interviewees pointed out the same thing: that in this environment the most political thing you could do was to write songs about an ordinary teenaged childhood, about summers and girls and hanging out with your friends. They were the Beach Boys of punk. And being the Beach Boys of punk, while living and playing in a war-torn Derry, was a truly radical gesture.
The image of The Undertones at the top of this post is from the John Peel Wiki, and is used with thanks.
Around the edges 