A couple of years ago I went to Manchester to attend a spoken word music festival organised by the Louder Than War team. The discussions involved a broad selection of musicians and writers, mostly veterans from the Punk and Post Punk years. It was quite a gathering. Jah Wobble, Jordan, Rat Scabies, David Keenan, Robert Forster, Paul Morley and so on and so forth. On the Sunday morning I went to see a talk given by Michael Bradley, guitarist of Irish masters The Undertones, to publicise his memoirs, Teenage Kids.
At the end of it I asked a question about the last Undertones album The Sin of Pride, one of my own personal favourites and to my mind a much underrated record. Bradley clearly didn't agree with me but answered politely anyhow. I think mannered was the word he used to describe the record, said it wasn't really the direction they should really have been headed in and cited That Petrol Emotion, the band the O'Neill brothers formed after The Undertones demise, as a worthier next step.
That Petrol Emotion were a consistent feature of my memories of my first year at university. They released and furiously toured their first album Manic Pop Thrill during that time and I saw them play a number of times. They were a ferocious, engaged live proposition. Built around the same classic five piece set up as The Undertones. A twin guitar attack, pounding drums and bass and fronted by perky American singer Steve Mack, they never disappointed. I played the record to death during that time and listening to it now almost thirty five years on, stand fully behind my judgement. Still sounds great.
Perhaps the band were always destined to be a less immediately commercial proposition than The Undertones. Firstly, they were a Rock rather than a Pop band, (regardless of the name of their first album) although with John O'Neill as their principal songwriter they inevitably retained plenty of immediate Pop nous. But they were uncompromising, bruised and unapologetic too, and perhaps never likely to make the cover of Smash Hits or become fixtures on Top of the Pops as The Undertones had.
That doesn't negate what they did have going for them for a moment. But they were certainly always coming at the listener from the margins. Manic Pop Thrill is in many ways an underground record, an album that foregrounds the influences of a maturing musical palate. The kind of stuff you start getting into in your late teens and early twenties. Pere Ubu, Television, The Stooges, The Stones, Captain Beefheart, The 13th Floor Elevators, Sixties Nuggets Garage, the gentler Velvet Underground and more can all be heard in the mix. Also The Undertones too inevitably, though this is clearly quite a different band.
But the record is by no means derivative. It takes its ingredients, pops them in the pan, and heats them up to boiling point with great flair and evident relish. There isn't a weak song on here and it never lets up once during its twelve track run. The tunes and lyrics are great throughout. It has a momentum, a head of steam that builds and keeps building.
Most of all it's explicitly, and angrily political, in a way The Undertones had rarely allowed themselves to be, with the exception of the It's Going To Happen single and a few other moments. Here we see the other side of the coin and the whole Irish problem is consistently if often implicitly foregrounded. The band may not offer solutions, (what good political music does?), but they certainly ask all the right questions.
The record was not an enormous commercial success but it made That Petrol Emotion a lot of friends and set them on course for a fine five album run which kept them going until their split in 1993. They're certainly less widely remembered than The Undertones, who after all had a long run of classic Top 40 singles, and I'd say they were definitely the better band. One of the greats. But That Petrol Emotion were also highly capable, in their own way.
After all, The Stooges, Television, Captain Beefheart, 13th Floor Elevators and The Velvet Underground didn't have too many hit singles either. But they should have done and anyhow that doesn't make them any less wonderful. Manic Pop Thrill is a twisted, tense and tightly wound record. In the name of its fine hit single that never was, It's a Good Thing they do.
Anyhow, to get back to that Sunday morning a couple of years back, what exactly was Bradley getting at? I think he meant that The Sin of Pride was The Undertones attempt to make an adult record, and it didn't work. Manic Pop Thrill, what the O'Neill brothers did next, is certainly an adult record. And one that works. Anyhow, I like them both!
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