Teenage Kicks – The Undertones

Veteran BBC Radio DJ John Peel takes his first visit to Derry and discovers for himself the band that forged his favourite pop song ‘Teenage Kicks’.The film, through the use of interviews and archive footage (of Derry and The Undertones), takes us back to 1975. To a time when it would have been normal, even expected, for five Derry teenagers to get together and have a riot. The Undertones got together, formed a band and created their own form of riot, bursting into a vigorous and joyous celibration of their own existence. The band was made up of former choirboy and distincti-vely voiced lead singer Feargal Sharkey, the O’Neill brothers, John and Damian, played guitars. Michael Bradley joined in with bass and Billy Doherty beat the drums.Peel takes us on a journey of discovery in which he expresses his amazement at the band’s innocence, the completely artless way in which they resisted all hype and packaging. The Undertones would play to packed houses of adoring fans and then go home to Derry, to parents who waited up for them. Reared in a town where the most abhorred social disgrace was to get above oneself, The Undertones refused to take any of it seriously. Not while it lasted. Nonetheless, despite their limited ambitions, or paradoxically because of them, they achieved a genuine cult status outside their hometown.