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Bill Graham meets the Undertones on the first Irish tour of the 1980's.
Bill Graham, 07 Feb 1980
Good evening and welcome to the Downtown Kampus at the Cork Arcadia where the road crew are winding up the audience, parodying the pompous and flabby overture tapes favoured by bands of inflated self-importance. It isn't The Undertones' idea. They don't even know what gonzoid tape their soundmen will spring each night but it compliments their own self-deprecatory attitudes.
So in swift and anti-climatic sequence, we get the Portsmouth Sinfonia's debasement of the William Tell Overture, Black and German funnies, David Johansen bawling 'Detroit' like he was addressing the United Nations of rock fans and, less unnaturally, also 'Sprach' and 'Blue Danube'. But there are no smoke bombs, no dry ice and The Undertones don't drive on stage on Harley Davidson's. And here they come, just watch them now.
From the first song, it is apparent that The Undertones are now a tuff and tested touring band. They are tight, they are determined and no perceptible cues are missed, nor intros muffed. These Undertones are no longer altar-boy upstarts from beside the Foyle.
Just a scintilla of that early naif magic has thereby been lost. It was the primary source of their early unique attraction as the best youth-club band this island has produced but everybody must grow up and The Undertones can't be shackled with the role of playing and re-playing Peter Pan for ageing rock fans. They can't always be the boys they write stories for. The Undertones have visibly matured; so can their audience.
But most essentially, they still haven't lost the knack of communicating almost one-to-one with their audience. The Undertones are still their fans, still "us", not rebellious older-brother substitutes imposing from a pedestal. They're hardly more lustrously dressed, they could have clumsily fallen off the scooters on their way to the concert, they must have sneaked on stage through the back door.
Damien O Neill does wear a Ramones T-shirt but that's their one concession to rock coutour. (And besides Damien is an avid Ramoniac.) Otherwise, The Undertones' only possible fashion leader is Mickey Bradley, as the O'Neills and drummer Billy Doherty keep their heads down and concentrate on their roles as power sources.
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