In September 1978, Terri Hooley, the owner of Belfast's independent record label Good Vibrations, visited London with a box of seven inch records, specifically the fourth release from his label. Hooley considered Teenage Kicks, recorded by Derry punk band The Undertones in mid-June that same summer and released on Good Vibrations on August 31, "the greatest thing ever", and was convinced that the A&R departments of every London-based record label would be similarly enthused about the record. In this, he could not have been more wrong.
Hooley shares his memories of his ill-fated trip to whip up excitement around The Undertones' debut single in Terri Hooley: Seventy-Five Revolutions, a new biography of the Belfast-born punk champion written by Louder contributor Stuart Bailie, published to mark Hooley's 75th birthday.
"I went to Rough Trade, who were the biggest independent distributors in England at the time," Hooley recalls. "And they’d just signed up Stiff Little Fingers and I was sure they were going to sign up The Undertones and they told me it was the worst record they ever heard in their life. And I was broken-hearted and I nearly cried. I took it to EMI and CBS and everybody else that I could get a meeting with and they all told me the same thing.
"Then I came home on the Monday and broke down and cried to my wife and said, 'These people in England have no idea what real music’s all about. And they pay more for designing a record sleeve than what it actually cost us to record ‘Teenage Kicks’."
Trying to cheer up her husband, Hooley's wife told him, "Maybe John Peel will play it."
BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel was known as a champion of new music, and, accordingly, Hooley had left a couple of copies of the freshly-pressed vinyl single in Peel's pigeonhole at at the BBC's Broadcasting House building in London. And he did indeed play the record, first on September 9, then twice, back-to-back, on his September 25 show. "That was the first time in the history of the BBC that a record had been played back-to-back," Hooley recalls.
Sire Records boss Seymour Stein was listening to the show, and loved the record, which he subsequently re-issued on his label, giving the Derry band their first UK Top 40 hit. These days, Teenage Kicks is regarded as a classic punk single... even if the song's writer, Undertones guitarist John O'Neill, never considered it the band's best song.
"I still don’t," he told Classic Rock in 2016. "If you look at all the different cover versions of the song, they’ve never been that great. It’s a great record. I can see why John Peel loved the record. You can hear the energy, and the whole sound of it is fantastic. But if you break the song down, it’s not really that original lyrically or musically. But I thank God every day that I wrote it."
And The Undertones have always remained huge fans of Terri Hooley for the way he gave them their nudge into the spotlight.
"The great thing about Terri was that he had no intention of saying, 'I have a valuable property here'," The Undertones bassist Michael Bradley tells Stuart Bailie. "Anyone who knows Terri will know that making money is not at the heart of what he does. So, he really just introduced the record company guy to us. We then signed a record deal with Sire. Terri was there at the first meeting. Then Terri says, 'Bye bye'."
Terri Hooley: Seventy-Five Revolutions is published by Dig With It.
