That Petrol Emotion
The trailblazing band that rose from the ashes of The Undertones
Interview by Kurt Sayenga and Bert Queiroz.
Black & White photographs ©Bert Queiroz.
Color photographs ©Amy Pickering.
As arid as the landscape was for American post-punk bands in the late 1980s, things were arguably worse for British post-punk bands who dared to defy the orthodoxy of synthesized dance music. Even the hook-filled sound of That Petrol Emotion, the brainchild of onetime Undertones leader John O’Neill, struggled to find an audience in a music scene dominated by The Pet Shop Boys and Wham. Of course the band’s fiercely political stance might have had something to do with that, too. Instead of striking poses in Joshua Tree, they put their Irish Republican sympathies right on their record sleeves – something that did not endear them to English record labels or the general public at the time.
That Petrol Emotion’s first EPs and their first album, Manic Pop Thrill, were thrilling. Their second album, Babble, has solid tracks, but suffers a bit from budget and production issues, something the remarkably candid O’Neill freely admits during our lively interview. (It is difficult to imagine a musician being so unfiltered in today’s paranoid media universe.)
Though all seemed well at the time of this interview, John wound up leaving the band during the recording of That Petrol Emotion’s third album. Today, it’s generally conceded the group was several years ahead of its time, their singular mix of aggressive dueling guitars and solid grooves presaging both Britpop and the Manchester sound of the ‘90s.
Here is the original interview with John O’Neill from GREED Vol. 1, Issue #4.
That Petrol Emotion are: Lead guitarist John O’Neill, one-time rhythm guitarist and principal songwriter for the legendary Undertones; co-lead guitarist Raymond Gorman;1 John’s brother Damian O’Neill, the Undertones’ lead guitarist and now That Petrol Emotion’s bass player; drummer Ciaran McLaughlin; and singer Steve Mack. The band has released two albums, Manic Pop Thrill and Babble, as well as a handful of EPs worth seeking out, especially their second, V-2. Their latest (non-LP) single, “Genius Move,” is available now through Virgin Records. Radically varying their songs and their sound from track to track on their records (from raging guitar freakouts to funk to fragile ballads), the band keeps things fresh musically, avoiding the sonic monotony that many one-trick bands on the current scene fall prey to. They are also a terrific live band; many songs that don’t fully land on Babble blossom on stage.
Although they would prefer to be known for their music (they describe themselves as “just a pop group”), That Petrol Emotion’s Irish Republican politics are central to the band. The group’s songs are not overtly political, but all their record sleeves carry information about some aspect of the struggle for Irish independence, and songs like “Big Decision” are clearly about the Thatcher government.
That Petrol Emotion has yet to achieve the mass success they deserve, but they are doing relatively well. During the Washington stop of their long tour, stretching from April to November, the band stayed at the Mayflower Hotel, one of the better flophouses in the nation’s capital. Following is an interview with John O’Neill, a gracious fellow who tore himself away from his wife and child to chat over coffee at a local diner.
JUST AS UNDERGROUND
GREED: What’s the question you get asked most in interviews?
O’NEILL: Usually people want to know the history of the group, how we formed. Everybody always asks that even though we’ve said it so many times in our interviews. Most of the interviewers have heard of us and most have read interviews by us, and most have read how we started in the first place – I dunno. A lot of people seem to think it was me and Damian who formed the group after the Undertones broke up, which is ridiculous. When I went back to Ireland I was working in a factory for a while; I was done with music as far as I was concerned. It was me and Raymond formed the band. Everybody else came in afterward.
GREED: The Undertones moved from energetic, driving pop on the early records to soul on their last album. That Petrol Emotion seems closer to the spirit of the early Undertones records, but with much more of an edge and a denser sound.
O’NEILL: In the Undertones I wrote songs on guitar, too, and it’s hard to get away from that when you write songs on guitar to try and put it in some other context as well. When me and Raymond formed the band, we listened to Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart, the Cramps – all kinds of guitar-oriented things in the first place. Pop music can’t go on the way it was before punk happened, overproduced and bland and ultraslick. We just wanted to be an alternative to that.
GREED: Are you finding an audience in Europe?
O’NEILL: No, we’re just as underground. In London we can probably pull a couple thousand people, but anywhere else it’s an average of 400, 500 people. Babble hasn’t sold any more than Manic Pop Thrill has, even though Babble’s out on a major label. So we’re still pretty underground.
GREED: Then again, since the band jumped from Polydor to Virgin Records right after Babble was released, Polydor isn’t giving really Babble any support.
O’NEILL: That doesn’t help, but the “Genius Move” single [their first on Virgin] bombed in England – it sold, like, 10 copies. So we’re still unknown.
GREED: Well, that really stinks.
O’NEILL: That’s just the way things are. At least we’re lucky we’re signed to a major. We can get a wage out of it. Other bands we know on independents have to work as well, which is crazy. We’re a bit luckier than that.
GREED: You’re living off the band right now?
O’NEILL: Just a bit. But we’re doing what we enjoy, that’s the main thing for us.
SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN
GREED: How did you come to live in London, given that so many of your songs are about Ireland, its people and its politics?
O’NEILL: Well, me and Raymond played in Ireland for a while, just the two of us and a drum machine. We were also doing this club, an alternative disco we had every week. At the start it was okay, we were getting maybe a hundred people each time, and we were playing Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart, and tough pop and soul, a wide kind of alternative thing. That was during the summer. Then all the students went back to the University. It lasted another two months, and we were playing to 30 people. It was just frustrating, y’know, nobody gives a damn there. We were trying out various people, looking for singers and drummers, and there was nobody there we wanted, so we decided to just move over to London. We’d be closer to seeing bands and get ideas from that, and I would get more access to buy records as well. Also, maybe from an Irish point of view, I’d get more objective if I left. And that’s happened. The more we search for information to put on the sleeves – the more books we’ve read – the more extreme we’ve gotten, the more Irish Republican-oriented we’ve gotten…I’ve gotten, anyway.
GREED: Have you had problems being Irish living in England?
O’NEILL: As a group, never so far, although we write about the Troubles; so far it’s all been really positive things. The people whose addresses we’ve put on the sleeves have told us they’ve been getting barraged with people wanting information, so that’s good. But as an Irish person living in England, you’re treated as a second-class person. You’re a step above colored people, but every now and then racism does show itself in different forms. In a music group, the people you meet are usually more open to other people and ideas, so it’s not as bad as if we were working in an ordinary job, as some of our friends are. At work, they’ll have people talking down to them and treating them like shit. We don’t notice that individually ourselves so much.
BOTH OF THEM MIGHT SAY NO
GREED: There’s an obvious difference between Manic Pop Thrill and Babble. Manic Pop Thrill has more contrast between sweet pop songs and aggression.
O’NEILL: I would have liked to have had a bit more time to record Babble, to have a few more songs written. Like, for example, if we had had a bit more time, “Genius Move” would have been on Babble. We wanted to go for a harder, tougher sound. That’s why we picked Roli Mosimann (to produce Babble); we’d heard stuff he’s done the Young Gods and with Wiseblood, and that seemed perfect. And we wanted to learn how to use drum machines. We bought a sampler and wanted to get Roli to tape samples and things. As it turned out, Roli has a completely different way he approaches recording, say compared to (Manic Pop Thrill producer) Hugh Jones. It took about a week just to get the drum sounds; he’s really meticulous about things. That’s one of the reasons we don’t really want to use him for the next LP – it just took too long. We prefer to be a bit more spontaneous when we’re recording. We didn’t really have enough time when we were recording Babble, and a few songs suffered because of that. Next time we won’t make the same mistake.2 The next LP is going to be a lot more diverse than Babble is, closer to Manic Pop Thrill.
GREED: Did Roli have a lot of influence on the band aside from recording procedure?
O’NEILL: No, I don’t think so. He’s just far more technical. We want to use the sampler more anyway on the next LP. On Babble we were supposed to use it more, but we didn’t get enough time to think about ways to use it.
GREED: A lot of bands release great first albums and terrible second albums. How did you escape that curse?
O’NEILL: It’s probably because all the people in the group were writing songs after Manic Pop Thrill, and they are now, too. Ciaran has written nearly all the new songs, including “Genius Move,” and a really funk-oriented song we recorded at the same time but weren’t happy with called “Groove Check.” That’s a James Brown type of thing.
GREED: You use drum machine live at times, and at one show this summer Steve was playing keyboards.
O’NEILL: Yeah, through the sampler. We just use the drum machine on “Big Decision” and “Creeping to the Cross” so far. We want to use it more. The people we want to approach for the next LP are Curtis Mayfield and Brian Eno. We want to use both of them for different songs rather than stick to one producer. Both of them might say no, we don’t know yet. We want someone who will arrange the songs, who will have ideas for songs. Someone like Curtis Mayfield working on our dance-orientated songs would be perfect. Then for our weirder side – Ciaran’s got songs a bit like Sonic Youth, for example - someone like Eno would be perfect for ideas.
GREED: I wonder how much Eno charges?
O’NEILL: Well, one thing we want to make sure is that we don’t sound anything like U2. I’m thinking more of “Blank Frank” or anything off of Here Come the Warm Jets.3
TOTALLY BORING, REALLY
GREED: You’ve been touring so much that you must have seen a lot of opening bands – do you recommend any up and comers?
O’NEILL: Well, in America it’s been terrible. We really didn’t have any idea of who to pick, so every band we’ve had so far has been dreadful. But in England a group called Yargo from Manchester did our last tour with us, and they were fantastic. We played with the Young Gods a couple of times. Slab is a group with a single called “Smoke Rings” that I thought was a brilliant record. Stump have signed with a major; they played with us a year and a half ago and I thought they really fantastic. So there are a few bands, but not as many as there should be.
GREED: Is Salem 66 playing with you throughout the US?
O’NEILL: They’ve been playing on most of the tour. Steve really likes them – he’s actually been doing their sound for them. But I…they’re really nice people, and it’s terrible to slag them off, but they’re totally boring, really.
GREED: You were supposed to come around a year ago. Is it true that you couldn’t get into the country?
O’NEILL: No. It was more the promoters here, they kept fobbing us off, saying there would be no interest if we came over so there’s no point doing it. So we ended up touring Europe.
GREED: I read that you were barred from entering the country because of your politics.
O’NEILL: No, we’ve not had any trouble that way. I guess New Model Army had that trouble, and we would have been obvious choices, but no, there’s been nothing like that. Actually, not letting in New Model Army showed good taste, I think.4
IT’S EXCITING
(Sean flips through a copy of GREED #3.)
O’NEILL: Oh, you’ve met Sonic Youth. I’ve seen them three times, and the first time was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, and that was in a small club in London. The second time was at a country club, and I was really disappointed in them there. Then we played with them at a festival in Denmark, and it was just incredible.
GREED: How is this tour going for you?
O’NEILL: This tour so far, I’m having a great time when we play. Traveling a lot can be really tiring, but the fact that we’ve played for this long, and since Babble was released, we’ve played some of the best we’ve ever played. At this stage I thought we’d be so tired that we’d just go through the motions, but it’s been the opposite. We’re hoping to get a chance to play a new song by Ciaran tonight that we’ve never done before. It’s exciting.
JUST PERFECT
GREED: Is the British government giving you any problems because of the political messages on your sleeves?
O’NEILL: No, probably because we’re still not very well-known. England Radio One, which is the ultra-conservative BBC, devotes a regular 15-minute section of the news to pop music, and Steve and Damian were on it, and the whole thing was asking about the Diplock Courts.5 It was great for propaganda. They’re ignorant to what’s going on in the first place – that’s my theory anyway. They don’t have any idea. The fact that we can slip all these things in is just perfect, really. But at the same time, on “Genius Move” we’ve got a quote from Liam Mellows taken from Gerry Adams’ book The Politics of Irish Freedom, and everybody knows who Gerry Adams is; if they don’t know anything else they know who he is.6 The B-side of “Genius Move” is a session we did for Radio One, and [a BBC Radio One executive] wanted to get the sleeve, and we think that was the first time anyone at Radio One ever got the sleeves. And “Genius Move” wasn’t played at all. So we’re now wondering whether they’ve caught on to the fact that we’re doing this. Maybe we’re just getting paranoid, but...7
GREED: The politics don’t really shine overtly in the songs.
O’NEILL: Yeah, that’s true. It’s not that intentional. We write the songs just the way they come out. I can’t sit down and say, “I have to write about this specific thing.” “Genius Move” might not be about anything political, but we can put something on the sleeves just to inform people and, if they’re interested, let them find out about it, rather than ram it down their throats all the time. We try and keep that balanced. The music comes first. As to whether it can change anything, we don’t know, but we feel obliged at least to mention what’s going on in Ireland. That’s really important. I was talking to some people at a bookstore in Detroit who were really disappointed that I didn’t mention anything over the mike at the show about the IRA, that we just played songs. It was hard to explain that most people are there to enjoy themselves; they don’t really want someone to rant and rave about what the British are doing in Ireland. If they like us and enjoy us they’ll buy the records, and then they’ll read about this. That seems a more intelligent way of doing it.
GREED: Do you notice Americans picking up your record and finding out more about what’s going on in Ireland? A lot of us are pretty ignorant about what’s happening.
O’NEILL: Well, a lot of interviews we’ve done, all they’ve asked about is the politics. We’re getting so fed up just talking about the politics and not the music, but obviously we have to. Most people I’ve talked to after shows just talk about the music.
IT JUST COMES OUT THAT WAY
GREED: I was wondering how you get your sound – it’s so hot and thunderous.
O’NEILL: We just turn the amps up, y’know? I guess it’s just the fact that we’ve been playing for so long together. It’s not something we’ve worked at; it just happened.
GREED: So you don’t owe it all to one magic effects pedal.
O’NEILL: Naw, it just comes out that way. We try to keep things as spontaneous as possible. And everybody has a wide taste in music as well; we’re all similar that way. We’re always wanting to hear something, somebody new. We’re still like fans that way, and that’s one of the things that got us in the group. We were looking for a harder, harsher sound than the Undertones, a response to the way music has totally regressed. It’s probably worse than it was before punk came along. As fans of music, we’re disgusted by that.
GREED: Your songs are very catchy but always have an edge to them. Your choice of covers is interesting, too. Like Bohannon’s “Dance Your Ass Off.”
O’NEILL: Well, we weren’t really happy with that, but it was such a great song....We ran out of time with that. We should have done that better. It took us three weeks to do Manic Pop Thrill, and we thought we could do Babble in five weeks, and in actual fact it took us seven weeks. We could have used another three weeks. I think it’s a great LP overall, though. We’ll see how I feel in a few year’s time. That’s always a test, if a record sounds good three or four years later. “Big Decision” is probably the best song on it – the most time was spent on that song, and I think it shows.8
GREED: Did you intend for that to be the single when you recorded it?
O’NEILL: We knew it was an obvious candidate, kind of catchy. “Creeping to the Cross” is something that Roli helped with the drum machines and all the effects, and we thought he would have been able to do that with two or three other songs, but as it turned out there wasn’t the time. Songs like “Static” we never do live now, and that could have been better if we had time. But for its faults, it’s a good record anyway.
TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT
GREED: You’re going in to record next Spring?
O’NEILL: I hope we are, but at the same time we don’t want to be rushed into doing it. The next LP is really important.
GREED: The record company must be pressing you, especially since you just signed…
O’NEILL: I don’t feel any pressure at all. And the fact that we want to use Eno and Curtis Mayfield, that’s probably going to cost a lot of money, too. I don’t think we’re going to get any hassle there. Maybe the fact that there’s nothing going on now, there’s nothing new, and if they can get Curtis Mayfield and us it could be really interesting. I think the record company sees that. That’s why we signed to Virgin – they seem really open to ideas and want to try something different.
GREED: How did it happen that you’ve been bouncing off all these labels?
O’NEILL: When first went to England, Creation said they’d give us the money to record a single. Then when we actually got over there they started getting cold feet. At that time Pink came in and put out “Keen,” which didn’t do very well. Pink wasn’t sure if they wanted to give us more money for another single, so we decided, fuck it, we’ll spend the money we’ve saved and put it on our own label through Rough Trade – that was V2. We sent the singles and a demo to major companies and they were all turning us down, giving us half-hour lectures on why we’ll never make it. The guy who’d been getting us bookings in London knew the people at Demon, and they really liked us, so they gave us the money to record Manic Pop Thrill, which was all they could afford. There were three singles off of that, but they couldn’t afford to promote them. We felt we were a singles group as well, and we wanted a chance to get airplay if we could, so we knew we had to get a major label. Manic Pop Thrill sold about 30,000, which was a lot for an independent label, and it was number one in the independent charts for about six weeks and got fantastic press. So the majors had to take notice, reluctantly. After that we were approached by nearly every major. Polydor at that time seemed the best; the managing director was really enthusiastic and said he’d give us four lps or whatever it takes to grow. Then after we recorded Babble the managing director got an offer and left the company, and a guy from EMI replaced him, a real typical businessman, the sort of person who plays Whitesnake B-sides, y’know?9 We had a meeting and he started giving us bullshit about how Babble was selling and how we had to justify being in his company and all this crap. It was like the same old business crap the Undertones had with Warner Brothers and EMI. Then luckily enough Polydor’s legal department slipped up on the contract. They were supposed to pick up the option for the next lp and they forgot to, so legally we could leave the company when we wanted to. So we went to Virgin. The managing director owns shares of Virgin, so he’s always going to be there, and he’s a nice guy, like the guy we met originally at Polydor, and he really wanted to sign us. The people at Virgin are younger, and they’re music fans for a change as well, not ‘60s hippies like most record company people seem to be, old men their shoulders pretending they’re 25.
I HAVEN’T LISTENED
GREED: Do you mind talking about the Undertones?
O’NEILL: I don’t mind now. Originally it wasn’t fair to the other people in the group; we always try to play that down.
GREED: You can see some similarities between the Undertones and That Petrol Emotion. Since you were their principal songwriter that could be expected.
O’NEILL: I wrote “Natural Kind of Joy” before the Undertones broke up, and some of the songs I’ve written since then could have been Undertones songs.
GREED: What’s your favorite Undertones record?
O’NEILL: My favorite LP is Positive Touch, which has the best songs I’d ever written up to that time. A lot of the early stuff, I can’t even listen to some of the words. I haven’t listened to the records in years and years.
GREED: How old were you when the Undertones started?
O’NEILL: 18, and I’m 30 now. Pretty old.10
Around the time of That Petrol Emotion, John O’Neill was going by the stage name “Seán Ó'Néill” and Raymond Gorman was “Raemann O’Gormann,” but they later reverted back to their given names. I use the names that suit their current preferences.
Mosimann wound up producing the band’s third album, End of Millennium Psychosis Blues.
Eno is a genius, but has he done anything weird and clever and fun since the amazing run of Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain, After the Green World, and Before and After Science? Much of his later work seems to be about process, which I imagine is fun for him but is less enjoyable for his audience. His ambient music is, however, great to put on if you have to leave your dog home alone for a few hours.
Interviewees, particularly musicians from the UK, used to be this honest and funny all the time.
The Diplock court system in Northern Ireland was introduced in 1973, during The Troubles. It permits the British government to try serious criminal offenses without a trial by jury. The stated reason was that the Irish Republican Army intimidated so many jurors that terrorists were going free. Unsurprisingly, when you allow one person to be prosecutor, judge, and jury, you get what one report dryly describes as “a conviction rate greatly exceeding that of ‘ordinary’ criminal courts.” The system was technically abolished in 2007, but not really – the director of public prosecutions in Northern Ireland still has the power to decide that exceptional cases should be tried without jury.
Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin from 1983 to 2018. Admired in Northern Ireland and despised in England. Frequently imprisoned by the UK government in the 1970s for suspected involvement with the IRA (always denied, never proven), Adams led hunger strikes by political prisoners in the 1980s and came forward declaring that a political solution, not violence, would ultimately resolve The Troubles. Adams eventually became a key figure in bringing about a peaceful settlement, but at the time of this interview he was considered a dangerous terrorist throughout the UK, which at the time was in the thrall of Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government and the right-wing tabloids owned by reptilian arch-fiend Rupert Murdoch.
As it turns out, they weren’t being paranoid. The record was indeed suppressed by the BBC for political reasons, but the ban was executed without publicity, as the BBC had finally learned that calling attention to a ban had the unwanted effect of increasing the sales of the records they disliked.
It does.
If I didn’t already love this guy, this quote sealed the deal.
Ha.