Released: 1978
Just imagine for a minute that every country gets to have one entry into a winner-takes-all final Eurovision. Picking an entrant for some places would be next to impossible, but with all due respect to Girl From Mars, Moondance, Alternative Ulster or even Things Can Only Get Better, for Northern Ireland as they say, there can be only one.
John O’ Neill formed The Undertones with a group of schoolfriends in Londonderry/Derry; Feargal Sharkey had already been something of a minor local celebrity on the Catholic school singing circuit, but by then crucially also had a job and a van. After getting regular live work at local venue The Casbah in 1977, O’Neill was determined to write some new material to bolster a repertoire that included mostly Ramones and Stooges covers. Despite reading about the fevered anti-Jubilee sentiments on the mainland, his chief inspirations though had more surprising origins in the Brill Building pop classicists, along with Phil Spector, The Shangri-Las and The Ronettes, of whom he spotted a similarly elemental approach in structure as to some early punk.
Interviewed in 2016 about how this translated into Teenage Kicks, O’Neill told Songwriting that the process from was simple “As with most of my songs I first had a title..once I had the first line of, ’A teenage dream’s so hard to beat,’..the rest of the song just literally wrote itself.” He went to describe the final product as “cliched” and “not very original”, but recorded pretty much as live and released on Belfast’s tiny Good Vibrations label, it famously provoked John Peel into playing it honorifically twice in a row, before he later declared it was his favourite song of all time.
Meanwhile back at the fantasy Eurovision Masters, it’s the final round of voting, with Teenage Kicks narrowly ahead of Je t’aime. From somewhere way up in the clouds, a grumpy Liverpudlian prepares to pick up the phone…
The Voice Of Unreason 