The Sin Of Pride

Nobody’s ever going to call the Undertones "kid’s stuff" again. The Sin Of Pride is certain to destroy prior easy pre-conceptions about the Undertones. Anyone, friend or foe, who’s characterized them as cheery Derry chappies and purveyors of provincial pop humour can apologetically withdraw those limiting definitions after this always atmospheric and sometimes sombre album.

On The Sin Of Pride, the Undertones serve notice both of their artistic ambitions and the abilities to entitle them to do so. Even though ‘The Positive Touch’ broke their early mould, it didn’t completely shake off their initial image as cheeky creators of sitcoms. But any lingering condescension must be erased after The Sin Of Pride where any remaining rags of junior clown’s costume are thrown aside and irrevocably so. They may not be frustrated comics wishing to play Hamlet but they’re certainly enlarged the emotional scope of their repertory.

In their beginnings, the Undertones proclaimed themselves as rooted in sixties beat but now they’re taking sixties notions of "progression" into the eighties through their own reshaping of both soul and psychedelia. Every reviewer is playing the comparison game with this album so I might as well add my own: the way they surround Feargal Sharkey on the slow songs like ‘Love Before Romance’, ‘Soul Seven’ and their cover of ‘Save Me’ – Sharkey takes on Smokey Robinson and survives! – remind me of nothing less than a roughened Roxy Music and that’s a certified compliment.

Still I can understand any rumours that its presentation may have caused unease at EMI. While it shouldn’t have set the S&R department to checking the company’s redundancy’s schemes, The Sin Of Pride isn’t an instantaneous ear-grabbing album. Besides needing patience for its undoubted merits to unfold, it doesn’t offer the type of quickfire singles that would send record pluggers to slavering outside Peter Powell’s office.

With no evidence to the contrary, I suspect the Undertones don’t mind that; I can’t see Mickey Bradley recommending his favourite shirts and cocktails to ‘The Face’. But even if the Undertones may be disenchanted with pop image-building, in future, they might pay more attention to the pop mechanics of the dance-floor.

Certainly the aforementioned slow songs work best. With Damien O’Neill’s newly-exhibited talents on keyboards the special added attraction, Feargal Sharkey has never received better settings for his vocals. ‘Save Me’ which rather than the other Tamla cover ‘Got To Have You Back’ might have made the superior 45 is just glorious, Sharkey’s reading of the song not trumpeting ersatz soul-power but somehow managing to mingle all the intangible qualities of delicacy, poignancy and humility that are at the core of the song.

There and elsewhere, the band with the obvious encouragement of new producer, Mike Hedges, surround Sharkey with filigrees of keyboard and guitar with other assists from the back-up vocals of Sylvia and the Sapphires and their horn associates. But as I said, The Undertones seem happiest working from the top down; they aren’t too fussed about what rhythm box, they’re slotted into.

The Sin Of Pride is an album about love but set against a background encrusted with jealousy and suffused with bitterness. Not the Undertones’ bitterness – they’re confessing sins, other love songs usually hide – The Sin Of Pride constantly presents love in a struggle with baser, and not necessarily straightforwardly sexual instincts. ‘Untouchable’ for instance is the type of examination of emotional conscience, rock normally avoids.

Even at its most immediately accessible The Sin Of Pride is, at best, semi-pop, it’s a substantial album that might be taken as the first chapter in a new Undertones career, almost indeed as a debut album from a new band. Hitherto even their most fervid champions wouldn’t have parked The Undertones on the same block as Van Morrison but The Sin of Pride presents them as a band intent on making their artistic mark on the remainder of the decade.

My message ends. But The Sin Of Pride, God, EMI, and all other future benefactors permitting (as they must), theirs is just beginning!