O’Neill’s house at 22 Beechwood Avenue was the centre of my teenage universe. Almost every evening I would walk down our street, turn right past the pensioners’ bungalows and go down the steep hill of Beechwood Avenue, overlooking the Bogside. I would then spend the next three hours sitting in The Kitchen watching television with the rest of the O’Neill family and Billy and Feargal. The Kitchen wasn’t a kitchen where the sink and cooker was. They were in the scullery. I don’t know why they called the small back room The Kitchen but I knew not to ask.
I don’t know how Mr and Mrs O’Neill had the patience. It wasn’t a big house. The kitchen had a small sofa, two armchairs and a couple of stools, all squeezed in front of a gas fire, with the TV in the corner. The two armchairs, of a sixties design which had wooden arms, were side by side facing the TV. Prime spots, usually occupied by Vincent and Damian. Being brothers, they often fought, and sometimes fought while sitting beside each other in these chairs. Not wanting to miss the TV, they developed the skill of the sideways scrap, a quick burst of flailing arms and fists. It meant you could hit your brother while still watching Cannon on TV.
My usual spot was on a stool just behind the sofa, with Billy beside me.
It never occurred to either of us that we were intruding in the daily life of the O’Neills. We made tea when it was our turn, ate their toast, and nothing was ever said. Apart from the odd occasion when Patsy Duffy would come in. Patsy was a friend of Mr O’Neill, who also fixed his car. (The O’Neills had a series of cars, which always needed fixed. Still, they had a car.)
When Patsy came in, he’d always say
“Full house tonight, Louis?”
To which Mr O’Neill would say
“Aye, it’s like a bloody youth club.”
Except it was better, of course.
We’d sit and watch TV and drink tea and eat toast and be sixteen.
Then, at some undetermined stage in the evening John or Vinny would say “Will we go in the room?”
This meant the front room. This was where the talk about music and the band and records would happen. There was a small bay window, where a glass-topped wrought-iron table stood with a Fidelity record player on top.
Every time I hear certain records – In The City by The Jam, Strange Days by The Doors or The White Album – I think of that record player and that room.
It wasn’t as if we didn’t have a record player in our house. My sister Bernadette bought a stereo (from Freeman’s catalogue, of course) and we all had use of it.
But it was a different experience listening to music with friends who talked about how great that music was. Forty years later I can still remember Billy talking about Strange Days.
Not in any great analytical way – just “That’s class, that”.
And when Vincent bought the Jam’s first single on a Saturday in the spring of 1977, then played it for me when I got down to their house, I thought that was “class” as well.
Nearly every night I would flick through the LPs which John had propped up along the walls of the bay window. Probably not the best place to file them if you had worries about keeping them pristine and perfectly unwarped. The Flying Burrito Brothers, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Steely Dan. John had good taste for a seventeen year old in 1974. Taste acquired through reading the NME every week and listening to John Peel.
Of course, there were some records lying against the bay window which are definitely of their place and time, and maybe not as highly regarded forty years later as the artists would have hoped.
Home? Greenslade? Fred Frith?
The name Fred Frith still gets a laugh among the band today. The cover showed him standing in a field wearing the weirdest shaped trousers. Weird even for a man standing in a field. Don’t ask me what the music was like. I never got past the cover.
It was asking a bit much, even of a family with the patience of the O’Neills, to set up our drums and amplifiers in their front room – the good room, like most houses. After a few weeks in John’s small back bedroom, we finally set everything up in Vinny and Damian’s bedroom. The same bedroom that later acquired the name The Pit. It wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds, although on occasion you would find the remains of an apple that Damian had left under the bed the week before. Storage solutions weren’t exactly a big part of life in Derry. If you reached under to remove that apple stump, you ran the risk of touching an old pair of Vinny’s socks instead.
The Pit was actually an attic bedroom, so there was at least some distance for the noise to travel before it got too loud for the TV downstairs. But there was no way of getting round the fact that a drum kit and two amplifiers make a lot of loud noise, and not a noise that would be recognisable as an actual song. So to preserve family life in the O’Neill household, we looked for somewhere else to practice in. And Feargal had the place.
When we met Feargal, he was about to embark on a career as an aerial installer with Radio Rentals. This would later come in handy when he earned the trust of the boss and got the keys to a Ford Escort van. He was also a scout leader in the 3rd Derry Scouts Group, part of the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland. I say scout leader, but he seemed to be second in command to a man called Mickey Fahy, who was in charge of a small group of 10-year-olds from Creggan. Mickey would have been in his fifties, and in a certain light bore a resemblance to Private Duane Doberman, from Sgt Bilko’s Motor Pool.
The only other thing I know, and this is via Feargal, is that when they made toast in the Fahey house, they only toasted one side of the bread. As that was the same method used in our house, I knew Mickey was a good man.
The scouts were based in a hall at the bottom of my street, in what used to be St Mary’s Boys Club. Creggan was a big housing estate built in the late 1940s on farm land, and the original farm house was used as a parochial house for the local priests. Behind it was a small stone barn and a low wooden hut. After the boys club moved to a new centre, the scouts had use of both buildings.
And so did the (as yet un-named) Undertones.
We moved our gear in to the upstairs of the barn one Sunday afternoon, and started the first practice. It was freezing and cold hands aren’t helpful when you’re trying to pick out the guitar chords for Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
But progress was made during that winter of 1975 (sounds like a military campaign, doesn’t it?) and early in the New Year, we had word that we were going to be playing whatever songs we knew in front of an audience. An audience of boy scouts. Feargal’s troop. Before that, though, we had our first major drama. In fact we had two major dramas within a matter of weeks. We lost an amplifier and we lost a guitar player.
The amplifier was the Shin-Ei which was part of the Great Raphoe Purchase. Someone broke into the scout hall and took it away. They didn’t do any damage to anything else – drums were left untouched – so maybe it was a struggling musician who needed it more than we did. About as likely as it being Keith Richards himself who burgled the barn and took the amp away to stop his songs being mangled.
We put it down to the wee shites that are part of the International Brotherhood of Wee Shites that steal things all around the world.
“Whatever happened to the Shin-ei?” is another part of band folklore. By the way, if you know anything about it we would still like it back.
We do know who was responsible for the loss of our guitar player. Vincent’s own mother, who told him that with his O-Levels coming up he would need to start concentrating on his school work and not on playing guitar.
He told me this as we were coming home from school one dinner time. He kind of embarrassingly broke the news walking down Iniscarn Road.
“Ehm, I cannae be in the band any more……me ma says I have to start studying for me O-levels”.
This was about fifty yards from where I usually left him to go home, so there was near silence the rest of the journey as it sunk in to me. I was so angry, you would have thought it was me that was getting thrown out. Wait till the rest of the band hear about this, I thought. There’s no way Vincent can’t be in the band, no way at all. We’ll persuade Mrs O’Neill to allow him to go on with the guitar and do his O Levels.
That night down at Beechwood Avenue, the revolution failed to take off. John didn’t seem to be that bothered. I suppose as it was his mother’s decision, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. Billy didn’t say much either – he probably never even told his mother and father that he was in a band – while Feargal, only involved a wet weekend, didn’t care one way or the other. I remember I did a bit of blustering and grumping with the rest of the band but that was about all. I huffed for about two days as well. A completely pointless and childish tactic that always makes me feel better about not being able to actually do something to change any given situation.
After the huff had subsided, we were left with the problem of getting a guitar player.
The real problem was that we didn’t actually know any.
Derry had plenty of showbands at the time but I couldn’t imagine any of them wanting to play with four school boys who barely knew three songs. Of course, we wouldn’t have wanted them anyway.
There was also a circuit of bands that played cover versions of rock songs but we didn’t know them and we didn’t want to know them. We’d later meet them and discover that most of them were really “dead on” to use the Derry expression for all-round soundness of character. Even at that stage of the band, at the ages of 16 and 17, we instinctively saw ourselves as being in a different situation from other bands in the town. It was more shyness than arrogance, though.
I would never talk about the band outside that small circle of John, Vincent, Billy and Feargal. I would almost deny that I could even play the guitar if I was ever asked. (OK, I was rarely asked and, yes, it was debatable whether I could actually play it. Get your wise cracks in early).
When we did get around to playing regularly, I would dread anyone asking the question “what kind of music do you play?”
In our house one night, a man who’d come to give my father a lift to one of his playing engagements asked that question when he saw an amplifier in the front room. To fill the silence caused by the not so forthcoming answer, he volunteered “Heavy?”
I kind of nodded and shook my head at the same time and squirmed out the door.
The cliche about learning to play the guitar to improve your chances with girls never entered our heads. We never talked about it anyway – we never really went out to the usual dances, discos, hops, whatever you want to call them. We spent the years from 1974 to 1976 in the front room at Beechwood Avenue. Unhealthy, I know. We really should have got out more. Or at least opened the window from time to time.
When I said we didn’t know any guitar players, that’s not quite accurate. We knew one through another of Billy’s family connections. He has a cousin on his mother’s side called Austin Barrett. A great name, a great fella, and a future Moondog. That was ahead of him, though. In late 1975, Austin played drums in a band along with, spookily enough, two brothers. Eamon and Martin Fegan specialised in Status Quo songs. I think they knew three of them altogether, including Paper Plane.
We asked Martin (or was it Eamon?) to come up to the scout hall one Sunday and play along with us. He arrived with his own amp, which was fortunate for us, as we were still one short, and we attempted to play along with him. It didn’t work. I can’t remember the discussion after he left the scout hall but we spoke no more of it.
In other stories about bands, there’s usually a member recruited who saw a note stuck up in a record shop or in a school noticeboard. They usually include the phrase “must be into New York Dolls, Stooges, Velvets.....” and end with the words ‘no time wasters’.
I have to say that the time wasters would have been us, at the rate we were going.
There wasn’t really anywhere we could put up a note like that in Derry. No other musicians, no other scene, existed for us. Not in our wee world, which centred around O’Neill’s front room.
Extract from Teenage Kicks: My Life as an Undertone by Michael Bradley, published by Omnibus Press
