The Great White Sharkey

Rip It Up, Issue 103, 1 February 1986, Page 14

The Great White Sharkey

From the Undertones to the Top of the Pops

“So you think you're so clever, never in doubt,” (Family Entertainment’) was the first line | ever heard Feargal Sharkey sing. It was the first song off the first Undertones’ album, 13 songs that weightlessly and innocently lifted the pop crown from the Ramones and the Buzzcocks. That was in 1979, and even then it was obvious that Sharkey’s rasping vocal was the ideal means for conveying the pathos and sense of tragedy that lay beneath the surface of many of the O'Neills’ songs. This perfect marriage lasted for four. albums and 13 singles, each record being more serious and more ambitious

than its predecessor, an evolution Sharkey was more than happy with: “I think The Sin of Pride was the best album the Undertones ever made. It came as a great disappointment that it wasn't as successful as its predecessors. | felt that we had done a helluva good job on it and | can remember vividly that it was very hard work. We deliberately tried to go off on a completely different direction by writing deeper songs and we set ourselves a long list of tasks and | felt we achieved all of them. But not everyone seemed to agree with it” Salad Days : The release of Sharkey’s first solo album prompted this phone interview a week before Christmas. Entitled simply Feargal Sharkey, the

album leaves his Undertones’ past well and truly behind, not only in styles, but in the fact that he's co-written half the songs with the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart. Didn't you have the desire to write songs with the Undertones? ~ “No, it was something that didn't fascinate me at all at the time. Plus there were a couple of guys in the Undertones who were doing quite well for themselves without me interfering. At that stage | was more interested in learning about production and that sort of thing. So what influence did you have on the Undertones’ music?

“Quite a big bit. The Undertones were unique, five very different characters and if you'd taken away any one of them it wouldn't have been the same. - : :

“What we did was we would go into the rehearsal room and someone would come in with a chord structure or an idea for a chorus and wed battle it out for days on end and produce a finished song.” Being Irish, the Undertones were often compared to Stiff Little Fingers, whose ham-fisted barbed wire descriptions of the Irish troubles contrasted with the more subtle personal politics of the O'Neills at their best, as in ‘Life’s Too Easy, ‘You're Welcome’ and the title track from The Sin of Pride.

“Politically, | don't think it does any good trying to ram things down peoples’ throats,” explains Sharkey. “l think it's more important that people make their own decision on a particular subject as then it has a more lasting effect. If | get up and start shouting that this and that are wrong people may listen but in a short space of time they're gonna turn around and say ‘Who the hell are you,

telling me what to do?’ | would prefer to open peoples’ minds and make them more aware and maybe then theyd try to find out for themselves” Since the Undertones split in May 1983, the O'Neills have formed the more explicitly political That Petrol Emotion and Sharkey has gone the other way, into the vast mid-Atlantic marketplace. Was this division a reason why the Undertones “No, sorry to disappoint you. | left as there were other things | wanted to try and | felt | had done as much with the Undertones as | possibly could. And in actual fact ‘Ghost Train’ (on the solo album) is about politics but in a very subtle sense” After leaving the band did you find it difficult settling on a musical direction? “Yeah, that's why | haven't. | decided | didn't want to write just one good song and then carry on and do 12 different variations on that and call it an album. | try very hard not to have one musical style and that's why the album covers such a broad range of material” So with the Undertones you felt you were being trapped in one style? “Yeah, | felt a little bit like that” And that was probably because you weren't writing any of the songs? “Yeah, probably.” Testing the Water :

Feargal (pronounced Fur-gul) Sharkey was born into a large working class family in Derry, Northern Ireland, 27 years ago. He was blessed with a voice that could strip paint and the stereotyped Irish temper that | was to be on the receiving end of before the end of the interview. So he's sensitive and sometimes garrulous and some-

times clipped and abrupt in his answers. It's tough getting to the top and that's why he's taken two and a half years to release his album: “| decided | wanted to be able to do as much of the album as possible, and that meant not only making the record itself, but doing the cover, the videos, ads and t-shirts. Everything. And there were a lot of things | didn't know anything about, like directing videos, lighting video sets and the difference between a red-head and a blondehead. | felt | had to go and learn about these and that’s what I've spent the two years doing’” And this meant you had to move to London three years ago? ~ “Yeah, there's not too many graphic design schools in Ireland, and because I'd made a list of stuff | wanted to learn about it ruled out staying in Ireland. | could've moved to New York as easy as London. It just had to be a big media centre” Despite this careful planning, Sharkey's first record was an accident. “Vince (Clarke) had left Yazoo just after I'd left the Undertones and in the gossip column in one of the music papers it said we were working in the studio together and at that stage that was complete and utter lies, as I'd never even met Vince Clarke. But Daniel Miller, who runs Vince's record company, Mute Records, and who was a big Undertones fan, read it and thought bloody hell, that's a good idea. The next day Vince rang me up and said hed written this song and hed send me a tape of it and if | liked it we could do something in the studio. It was all fairly easy. Timewise | got the phone call from Vince on a Thursday, the tape on Friday, | worked on it over the weekend, | flew into London on Monday and we did it on Tuesday.” ‘Never Never’ is a typical quality Vince Clarke ballad, spare, melodic and genuinely moving. A song ideally suited to Sharkey's vocal style. “It’'s a terrific song. To be honest, at the beginning | was a bit suspicious about the whole thing until | heard the song. It’s brilliant, | hate him for it (laughs). I'm jealous. The record was good for both of us as it was enjoyable because there was no pressure to do a follow-up single or album. I've a lot of fond memories of that period.” Before he tackled his album Sharkey had two further warm-ups, the first with Madness on ‘Listen To Your Father’ and the second the mawkish ‘Loving You’ with Queen’s Roger Taylor producing and Sharkey sharing the writing credits with the Human League’s Jo Callis (who, incidentally, wrote his best songs with the Rezillos, a band who had more than a passing influence on the Undertones). So, three singles of no fixed approach paved the way for an album that is the result of whim and meticulous deliberation, contradictory qualities inherent in Sharkey’s character.

Feargal Sharkey seems to be American in character? “I shouldn't think so. (Pause) I'm not American so how can | make an American record?” I must ask Costello that. But your covers are mainly American and there's an R&B feel to the songs you've written with Dave Stewart: “For me a good song must have a little bit of blues or emotion in it but on my songs it's subconscious blues on my part if it is, it's purely accidental. | make records purely by instinct, | don't sit down with a little piece of paper and contrive a song or anything. | go into the studio and make noises on tape and when | get a bunch of noises that are interesting or pleasing to listen to | turn them into a song. After | left the Undertones my eventual aim was to write songs and | felt that if | managed to write one or two for the album I'd be quite happy. A long term aim was to have a Feargal Sharkey album written by Feargal Sharkey. So there's six songs (five by my count Feargal) on this album and I've beaten my own target. So that's alright” The Americanization of Feargal is further enhanced by the fact that the album was mixed by Tom Petty’s engineer, Shelly Yakus, in LA. Miles from Derry.

“Dave (Stewart) and | had been doing the backing tracks up in North London and we decided that it would be nice just to go away somewhere to to do the mixes. And, quite honestly, we got a map and we picked.a place where wed both been and liked and that place was LA. It was purely because we felt that we would have a pretty good time there so there's no deep, meaningful musical reasons for the choice, it was just a whim on our part” The reason we used Shelly was that once we got him there we wanted the best engineer and a lot of people recommended him and as it turned out he was totally brilliant. He's an amazing guy.”’

The Little Thief “To be perfectly honest | pinched ‘You Little Thief’ and ‘Good Heart. Dave had been in LA finishing the last Eurthymics' album and hed gone around to to visit Maria McKee (Lone Justice) and shed just about finished writing ‘Good Heart’ and so she played it to Dave on piano and he recorded it on his walkman. A few months later Dave and | were just sitting around talking and he played it just to get a second opinion and the basic song just knocked me out. It was a big challenge for me to take a song that | essentially loved and take it in a direction that Maria could never imagine it could have gone in. Originally it was a very C&W or bluegrass type of song and Dave and | just wanted to turn it into a great pop single.” : By no stretch of the imagination is ‘Good Heart’ a great pop single, unless great means successful as it spent two weeks at the top of the British charts. Believe me, neither Stewart, Sharkey or McKee are capable of creating a Great Pop Single. Yet Tom Petty’s keyboard player Benmont Tench comes closest with ‘“You Little Thief”:

“Ben has been a very good friend of Dave's and mine for some time and he's been getting into songwriting and so he sent us this tape with three or four songs on it. When Dave and | got ‘You Little Thief’ it was a slow, melodic ballad, but we felt that the basic song was good enough to turn it into what it is now, much to Ben's horror. It's a really clever lyric too.” With “You Little Thief’ you get the impression that the singer is only as good as the song, an old cliche that might cause Sharkey to send Christmas cards to the O’Neills.

A Chrissie Hynde song, ‘Made To Measure, also gets the Sharkey treatment: “I've known Chrissie for donkeys and every so often Dave, me and Chrissie and a few others get together and mess around playing songs. It was during one of these sessions that she played ‘Made To Measure, a song she had written a while back but forgot she had. Again, it just knocked

me out, so | said ‘give it to me Chrissie, | want it;” Sharkey concludes with mock lewdness. Feargal Sharkey signs out with a respectful version of Womack’s ‘lt's All Over Now, a song so well known that it's become a standard. So why do another version?

“A pure accident. My basic motto in the studio’is anything can happen, and a record isn't finished until it becomes a piece of plastic and then | can't do anymore to it. Dave was playing some chords and it reminded me of ‘lt’s All Over Now’ and they weren't even the right chords and started singing it and it started to sound interesting. So then we had to go out and buy the record to work out the proper chords and lyrics. And we did it literally within 40 minutes. The verification of that is at the beginning of the song there’s a thunderstorm that's well mixed in as at the time of recording there was a thunderstorm and we stuck the mike out the window””

Jaws When Sharkey was in LA galavanting around town and waiting for the album to be mixed, NME's Gavin Martin made the pertinent observation that when “his jaws stop chopping like a speedy railway barber ... it becomes obvious that he's credibility conscious.” Credibility turns out to be a touchy topic with Sharkey, probably because he's been critically. roasted since the release of his album. With the Undertones he enjoyed endless press raves and the band didn’t go hungry. Now, with an album as safe as milk and a single that spent two weeks at the top of the UK charts, he's commercially entered the Young-Moyet league. “I hope not. (Silence) For fuck’s sake, if what you're getting at is the fact that I've gone and copped out and made a commercial album then you're talking complete and utter crap, okay? For the songs on this album are as good as any songs the Undertones have ever done. A song like ‘Love and Hate' is as left of centre as you're gonna get. This copping out is complete and utter bullshit and I'm getting really fed up with hearing it. Why don't you go and have a listen to it and just open your ears?” Sharkey is a-mite pissed off, obviously provoked by the unfavourable comparisons between his past and present and by being categorised alongside Young and Moyet: “I would find it very narrow-minded of people if they did, | would object to being categorised with them. | don't want to be regarded as an ‘entertainer”. | write damn good songs and | want to gain respect for what | do. Can | help it that people actually like what I've done and have gone out and bought it? Should | be ashamed of that? But | don't want to be a singer. If | wanted an evening chat show on TV | would go and do it”

George Kay