What's an old punk rocker like Feargal Sharkey doing on a British government forum? Trying to give music back to the kids, he tells Alexis Petridis
Feargal Sharkey considers his sudden reappearance in the media and emits a wheezy chuckle. "I can see," he says, "how people might be sitting there scratching their heads a bit." This is something of an understatement. The last the public heard of the 45-year-old former Undertones singer was in 1991, when his single, I've Got News for You, struggled to number 12 in the UK charts; after that, he vanished from view. But last Monday that changed, when Sharkey re-emerged, not on a TV nostalgia show or announcing a reunion tour, as you might expect from a 1980s pop star, but sharing a platform with British arts minister Estelle Morris.
Sharkey has been appointed chairman of the Live Music Forum, a British government task force formed to promote live music and monitor the introduction of the controversial new Licensing Act, due to become law next year and under which every live performance would need licensing. Musicians claimed it would have a devastating impact on the number of venues where they could perform, and that it threatens to prevent small venues from putting on live music through sheer bureaucracy.
"What we have to do," he says, "is to find out what's going on out there in terms of live music: how many venues, how many people, rehearsal rooms, all of it. Then we keep an eye on it when the act becomes law, see if it has an impact, either positive or negative. On the basis of that, we put forward some recommendations to the government as to ways that the live scene can be further expanded, enhanced and promoted - it could be anything from ensuring there's some viable rehearsal space."
This is fair enough, but there is something incongruous about a government-funded body headed by a former punk musician, especially one whose most celebrated song - the effervescent 1978 single, Teenage Kicks - allegedly concerned itself with masturbation. But then Sharkey was always rather an incongruous figure, even in the anything-goes post-punk atmosphere: there were plenty of pasty-faced 20-year-olds knocking about, but few chose to take to the stage as the Undertones did, clad in half-mast trousers, workmen's boots and snorkel parkas. And that was before he opened his mouth and started singing. No one else in rock ever sang like Feargal Sharkey. His high-pitched, thickly-accented quaver added a bizarre poignancy even to My Perfect Cousin, the 1980 hit that bemoaned a relative who "always beat me at Subbuteo".
What also set Sharkey apart was that, at a time when his peers were shouting about overthrowing capitalism, he was possessed of a sharp business brain: it was he who brokered the band's five-year record deal. This stood him in good stead when his solo career - which began strongly with the top 10 hit, Never Never, and the 1985 number one, A Good Heart - dried up in the late 1980s.
"It was something at the back of my mind throughout my musical career: what are you going to do when you're 45, mate?"
He became first a record company A&R man, then a label boss. In 1998, he moved to the UK's Radio Authority. "That contract ran out in December, and this job conveniently overlapped. I think one of the reasons they thought I was suitable was because I'd spent five years dealing with the government at the radio authority. And you're also talking to a man who began his musical career rehearsing in a neighbour's garden shed, because there was nothing else in Belfast at the time. I think that gives me some right to do this job."
Sharkey is big on a kind of Geldof-style belligerence ("I warn people in advance, if you don't want an opinion, don't ask for one"), which is probably just as well: for all its noble intentions, the Live Music Forum is something of a sticky wicket. For a start, it seems to imply live music is a dying art that needs protecting, like clog dancing. (Sharkey protests at this: "No, not by any means. It is going on out there.") Secondly, there's the issue of the British government getting involved in rock and pop music. New Labour seems rather keen on it - as Sharkey points out, "the music industry contributes about £4.5 billion (€6.4 billion) a year to the UK economy". But thanks in part to remarks, such as those by the British tourism minister Kim Howells, who said So Solid Crew were "idiots glorifying gun culture and violence", the British public tend to roll their eyes when the government tries to meddle in rock and pop. Music is meant to be fuelled by rebellion, not a government-funded leg-up.
Sharkey takes the point. "It's a very strange situation, particularly when you think about Bob Dylan in the 1960s or somebody like that. I'd like to think there is someone sitting in a bedroom in Scunthorpe [northern England] who is going to become the most rebellious, amazing talent we've seen in the last 40 years. But by the same token, you have to wake up to the fact that we live in a big world and it is important that kids like that are given the opportunity. It's a balancing act, a very difficult one, but you just have to try it." And so he ploughs on, worrying about the decline in the number of live venues during the 1990s clubbing boom, noting that American guitar acts "have dominated Britain for years, and that's because over there it's an automatic assumption that you'll spend eight months a year playing live", fantasising about "allowing a few more people to have access to and be able to do what I did".
He famously turned down the opportunity to reform The Undertones a few years ago. Does he not worry that all this contact with live music will bring back the performing bug? "It would be dishonest of me to say that on occasion, I don't miss it. I do. It is the most incredible thing walking out on stage in front of 100,000 people who stand up and applaud. But you never know. I could end up on stage in a pub in Scunthorpe - strictly as part of my research." And he lets forth another wheezy chuckle.