Latest news with #TeenageKicks
BBC News
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Undertones: Teenage Kicks for Derry choir as recording hits the big screen
Teenage Kicks, so hard to beat - so the classic hit by The Undertones goes and so too it proved for choir members from a Londonderry special education school who have recorded a new version with the legendary punk members from Ardnashee School and College attended a special cinema screening of the performance on Wednesday, which was filmed last December at the home of Derry City FC, the Ryan McBride Brandywell regarded as one of the band's best-known songs, the 1978 hit has also become an unofficial anthem for Derry City recorded performance was part of the club's outreach initiative to promote inclusion through music and community engagement. About 50 pupils formed the choir to record the song, bringing new energy to a much-loved Candystripes anthem."It was very good. I'm very proud of myself," said pupil Logan after seeing himself on the big screen at the Brunswick school choir's rendition had previously caught the attention of the band after an earlier version was shared online, prompting The Undertones to want to collaborate on the special recording. Bass guitarist Mickey Bradley, who attended Tuesday's screening, praised the students' energy and musical ability. "To see all those children who are getting great pleasure out of singing a song that you were involved in, you know it's hard to beat," he said."The joy and the enthusiasm that they had for it, kind of reminded me of the way we were whenever we were teenagers—whenever we made the record, you know." Guitarist Damian O'Neill said it was a really enjoyable project to be a part of and praised the choir's performance."Watching the kids when they were singing it and the joy that they were getting, they were obviously having fun," he said. "We get that same feeling," he addedKaren Pyne, Derry City FC's supporters liaison officer, said this project has been a fantastic initiative, and everyone loves the new recording."Three years ago we set up Different Together in conjunction with Ardnashee School and College to bring inclusion and diversity to the club." Tuesday's event also included tributes to filmmaker Vinny Cunningham, who directed the original video in December and passed away in February at the age of 58. Mr Cunningham, a dedicated Derry City fan, was well known for his work on Mahon's Way, Lesser Spotted Ulster, and documentaries about both the Troubles and The Undertones. An encore due to popular demand Ardnashee principal Raymond McFeeters described the experience as "magnificent" for the children involved. "I think they thought that they were the stars," he appointed deputy mayor of Derry City and Strabane District Council, Niree McMorris, said the pupils should be incredibly proud of everything they have achieved. "It's wonderful to see this school being recognised for the special children that are within it. To be involved in the project with Teenage Kicks is amazing." The screening ended with loud applause and cheers — and an encore by popular demand from those in attendance. "It was so amazing that we had it on twice," said pupil Faye. Cian, another pupil and choir member, attended the screening with his parents and said he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw himself and his friends on the big screen. "I was like: 'No way, is that actually real?' I loved it."
Sunday World
24-05-2025
- Health
- Sunday World
Feargal Sharkey on being diagnosed with prostate cancer after sore throat complaints
'DOING WELL' | The Derry-born singer (66), who said the issue was resolved last year, revealed he is now doing 'very well' as he urged other men to get tested. The Derry-born singer (66), who said the issue was resolved last year, revealed he is now doing 'very well' as he urged other men to get tested. Had he not visited his GP, Sharkey believes there may have been 'a very different ending and a very different outcome to my life'. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men in Northern Ireland. Over 1,200 males here are diagnosed with the disease every year, and around 290 die from it. It usually develops slowly, so there may be no signs of it for many years. Most cases develop in men aged 50 or older. Sharkey, who grew up during the Troubles and is now a high-profile environmental campaigner, spoke out about his diagnosis in an interview with the Daily Express. He said: 'About a year and a half ago, I randomly went to see my GP with a sore throat. Now I've known him long enough but he goes, 'No no, you're that bloke that used to sing. So if you're telling me you've got a sore throat, there's something going on'. 'So my doctor, being the beautiful, wonderful, awkward, cantankerous old man that he is, went, 'Oh Feargal, by the way, you're 65 now, I'm going to run the full battery of tests'. 'Two days later, it turns out, I began a journey which led to the [diagnosis] of prostate cancer. 'Thankfully, that's all now been resolved a year ago. But here we are, had it not been for that random visit to my local GP, I would never have known that I was at that point carrying prostate cancer, and if it had not been seen to, it could have been a very different ending and a very different outcome to my life. 'The reason I'm very happy to talk about it is because if there's one man out there over the age of 45 go and see your GP. Go and get the blood test done.' Sharkey was the lead vocalist of The Undertones. Their most famed single was 'Teenage Kicks', which was released in 1978. 'We were deflated when we first got the record': The Undertones, from left, Michael Bradley, Damian O'Neill, Feargal Sharkey, John O'Neill and Billy Doherty. Photo: Fin Costello/Redferns Prostate cancer is back in the headlines after six-time Olympic cycling gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy (49) revealed his diagnosis, which is now terminal. Last weekend, former US President Joe Biden (82) said he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. A PSA test - a blood test that measures the amount of prostate specific antigen (PSA) in your blood - can detect the signs of the disease. Sharkey added: 'Now, for one in eight of you, you will be put in the same journey I've had and it's quite astonishing to think that in this country right now, one in eight men have prostate cancer. Most of them don't even know it. So go and have the blood test and if you're lucky, you'll walk away. "If you're lucky, like me hopefully, you'll have caught it early on and you can deal with it and get on top of it. 'But, and I have such unbelievable admiration for Chris Hoy over the last couple of months, if you end up where Chris is, well you're now looking for a very different outcome and not the one you were expecting for your life, my friend. So, for a blood test - go get it done right now.' According to the NHS website, symptoms of prostrate cancer include an increased need to pee, straining while you pee or a feeling that your bladder has not fully emptied.
Daily Mirror
23-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mirror
Feargal Sharkey diagnosed with cancer after visiting GP for sore throat
Water rights advocate Feargal Sharkey has opened up about his prostate cancer diagnosis, discovered inadvertently following a visit to his GP for an unrelated sore throat. The 66-year-old former Undertones frontman declared he's in good health and remains committed to the fight for cleaner waterways, having had the issue "resolved" a year ago. Speaking candidly on the state of UK rivers beside the River Lea in Hertfordshire, Sharkey recounted to the Express: "About a year and a half ago, I randomly went to see my GP with a sore throat." His long-trusted doctor, after a characteristic grumble, decided to run full tests, considering the singer's age. He continued: "Now I've known him long enough but he goes 'no no, you're that bloke that used to sing. So if you're telling me you've got a sore throat, there's something going on'. "So my doctor, being the beautiful, wonderful, awkward, cantankerous old man that is went 'oh Feargal, by the way, you're 65 now, I'm going to run the full battery of tests." Sharkey revealed: "Two days later, it turns out, I began a journey which led to the [diagnosis] of prostate cancer. "Fortunately, Sharkey reported that the issue was settled a year prior, and his life took a turn for the better. He shared this personal story to encourage other men to undergo cancer screenings and acknowledged the pivotal role his routine GP visit played in detecting his illness. "The reason I'm very happy to talk about it is because if there's one man out there over the age of 45 go and see your GP. Go and get the blood test done.", reports the Express. Making a heartfelt plea to men across the nation, the Teenage Kicks singer urged: "Now, for one in eight of you, you will be put in the same journey I've had and it's quite astonishing to think that in this country right now, one in eight men have prostate cancer. Most of them don't even know it. So go and have the blood test and if you're lucky, you'll walk away. If you're lucky, like me hopefully, you'll have caught it early on and you can deal with it and get on top of it. But, and I have such unbelievable admiration for Chris Hoy over the last couple of months, if you end up where Chris is, well you're now looking for a very different outcome and not the one you were expecting for your life, my friend. So, for a blood test - go get it done right now." Six-time Olympic gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy, aged 49, revealed in February 2024 that he was fighting prostate cancer. He delivered the gut-wrenching news that in October his prognosis had turned terminal after the cancer spread to his bones, with medics predicting a life expectancy of two to four more years. Speaking from the historic Amwell Magna Fishery, Feargal Sharkey remarked: "I'm very well. I'm still here and I'm still going to carry on this [clean water] fight until it's resolved and everybody can come down to beautiful places like this and get access to these kinds of rivers and go 'it's a hot day, I think I'll go take a dip in the river' without having to worry about the last time the local water company dumped poo into the river." 2024 has seen record pollution levels with a shocking 3.6 million hours of raw sewage discharged into England's rivers and the sea by water companies. Sharkey didn't mince words criticising the Labour government for indulging in "an awful lot of performative politics" since they took the reins last July. Environment Secretary Steve Reed is spearheading an initiative to clean up Britain's waterways, clamping down on water executives with measures that include a ban on bonuses and tough new penalties, potentially including imprisonment. The music legend expressed his frustration, saying: "There's an awful lot of people running around getting busy but actually nothing has changed." He quipped: "There's an awful lot of pantomime going on. I'll give you a couple of examples. 'We're going to send people to jail'. Actually, when I look at the detail, it's specifically only for obstructing an investigation, not for just being a crude, abominable, greedy, self-interested, profiteering monopoly. Only if you obstruct an investigation, but by the way that's actually been the law for the last 30 years anyways. So what have you done other than re-arrange the deck chairs?'Oh we're going to ban bonuses'. The chair of Thames Water seems to have made his view clear 'I'm just going to put the salaries up. You go right ahead'. "In terms of actually dealing with the issue, little if anything has changed and I think an awful lot of people, particularly in the environmental world, already use the word betrayal. And those people do feel that they have been betrayed - and perhaps they have." Feargal declared that Ofwat and the Environment Agency (EA) "have all the teeth they could ever want". Nonetheless, he added: "The fact they refuse to close their mouths and bite, that's a whole other story. "The simple truth of the matter is the whole regulatory system needs utter reform." In reminiscence, Feargal, who blasted the privatisation of water as "an utterly failed experiment", recounted how throughout his "remarkable" life, individuals would often engage him in chats about music and gigs. The former frontman spoke out, "For the last four or five years, people now want to talk to me about shite in rivers. So can we fix this as quickly as possible? Cause I'd quite like to go back to talking about music and nice things again as opposed to other people's poo." Feargal, who hails from Derry, Northern Ireland, grew up amidst the Troubles, influenced by his trade unionist father Jim - chair of the Old Derry Labour Party - and Sibeal, his mother, a key figure in the civil rights movement. Reflecting on his childhood activism, Feargal recalled as a 10 year old boy attending the People's Democracy march in January 1969, carrying what he later learned was an anarchist flag. He shared how his background fuelled his environmental crusade: "When I realised the injustice that was being perpetrated on water bill payers and the great British public and the environment, and in the world I grew up in, if you saw what you perceived to be an injustice, it was demanded of you that you actually confronted it and did something about it. So once I'd worked that out, I had no choice. It's in my DNA. I was going to have to stand up and do something." Officials at the Government have been solicited for their take on the matter.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ireland's hip-hop rebels: How three Belfast bros became Fox News villains
It's almost surprising that a hip-hop band from the perennially troubled, still-British province of Northern Ireland hasn't emerged until now: It's the right kind of place. Admittedly, 'race,' in the 21st-century meaning of the word, is not a major consideration on the island of Ireland, despite some discomfort with recent immigration from Eastern Europe, Syria, North Africa and elsewhere. Belfast and Dublin still don't possess the kind of high-friction cultural ferment found in London, Paris or Berlin, and Ireland's best-known musical exports can clearly be classified along the spectrum that includes rock, pop, folk and punk: Van Morrison, U2, Sinéad O'Connor, the Pogues. Indeed, if there's a track that defines pop music in Northern Ireland before the rise of the Irish-language hip-hop trio Kneecap — now the focus of international controversy and incoherent Fox News attacks after their Coachella performance on April 18 — it would be the exquisite punk-pop single 'Teenage Kicks' by the Undertones, released in 1978 during the worst years of the vicious low-intensity civil conflict known as the Troubles. There's an instructive parallel at work here that strikes me as distinctively Irish. A punk band from Derry — a city where violent riots occurred nearly every night, and whose residents couldn't even agree on its name (to Protestants and the British government, it was and is Londonderry) — crafted a completely out-of-context pop record that carried the influence of the Ramones and the Beach Boys but zero hint of social conflict or cultural trauma. That could be construed as willful escapism or youthful irresponsibility; it strikes me as more like storytelling, an area where the Irish are known to excel. Kneecap might appear, at first, to be the exact opposite: A hip-hop trio from predominantly Catholic communities in Belfast and Derry, all born during the latter stages of the Troubles (which gradually petered out between 1998 and 2004), the band embraced a highly performative brand of radical politics from the get-go: anti-British, sure, but also anti-cop, anti-Israel, anti-old-school Irish nationalism and anti-authority figure, just for starters. All of which is abundantly captured in their highly entertaining mock-biopic (available on Netflix), which was Oscar-shortlisted in 2024 and built a global audience for Kneecap well before their recent tours of the U.S., U.K. and Australia. You don't need to claim that Kneecap's politics are insincere to understand that they constitute just one element of a brand that includes highly conventional hip-hop braggadocio about sex, drug use and other forms of extralegal activity, along with what made the band stand out in the first place: a Google Translate-defeating mixture of imported rap argot, Belfast Hiberno-English and the Irish language. The title of their 2018 debut album, "3CAG," requires a decoder ring: That stands for "trí chonsan agus guta" or "three consonants and a vowel," a reference to the street drug MDMA, whose consumption Kneecap's members have frequently celebrated. One of their biggest hits in Ireland, "Get Your Brits Out," combines IRA-style political slogans with a refrain meant to encourage young women in the audience to, um ... I think you get it. I could devote this whole article to unpacking the tangled politics around the Irish language, but you wouldn't read it, so this will have to do: Since virtually no one in Ireland, north or south, now exclusively speaks Irish as a daily language, fluency has become a distinctive cultural and political signifier. For decades, the language revival was associated with obligatory schoolbook lessons, traditional folk culture and an increasingly dreary version of nationalism; Kneecap's rise can be understood as the leading edge of a general pop-culture trend: Speaking Irish is cool again. In the uneasy and remarkably small-minded politics of Northern Ireland — which remains about evenly divided between Catholics who identify as Irish and Protestants who identify as British — the Irish language is still perceived as a political provocation. That's exactly why Kneecap's two principal rappers, who go by the in-joke names Mo Chara and Móglai Bap, grew up in Irish-speaking families. But it was the band's more overt political discourse that has gotten them in trouble — if you actually believe that making headlines around the world amounts to trouble for a deliberately confrontational rap act. Toward the end of Kneecap's second Coachella performance last month, which by all accounts was packed and enthusiastically received, the band projected a series of three slides on a screen above the stage. Here's the BBC report: The first message said: "Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people," followed by: "It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes," and a final screen added: "[Expletive] Israel. Free Palestine." Lead rapper Mo Chara (a conventional greeting that literally means 'my friend'), then told the crowd, "The Irish not so long ago were persecuted at the hands of the Brits, but we were never bombed from the f**king skies with nowhere to go. The Palestinians have nowhere to go." That might not be the most historically nuanced or deeply considered comparison of the two conflicts, but I can't say I detect any lies. Kneecap were already known villains to the right-wing British media and politicians like embattled Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, so you might have expected the MAGA-fied American right to be ready. You would be wrong: The ensuing storm of manufactured outrage was comically inept, with Sharon Osbourne, for some reason, stepping forward as the alleged voice of pop-culture responsibility (or something?) to urge that Kneecap's U.S. visas be revoked. That was followed by a bewildering Fox News segment about the Coachella 'F**k Israel' incident, in which former NCAA swimmer turned right-wing influencer Riley Gaines, while admitting she'd never heard of the band, appeared to conflate three Irish rappers with 'rogue activist judges' and concluded, 'No, this didn't happen in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. This was in 2025 in America. Beyond, beyond staggering.' I doubt many people would find it 'beyond staggering' for a hip-hop band from an odd, hyperlocal background that wants to attract a global left-leaning youth-culture audience to say bad things about Israel. You could argue, in fact, that it's a bit lazy and not especially well thought-out, or that the members of Kneecap are cashing in on what has been called Irish privilege, where you get to be regular white people in some contexts (such as American society in general) and part of the world's oppressed classes in others. That privilege is no doubt why Kneecap's members were admitted to the U.S. in the first place; if anyone at Kristi Noem's DHS had bothered to check out their backgrounds, they might be in ICE detention right double standard is no doubt at work here, but so is the double standard among Kneecap's critics on both sides of the Atlantic, dutifully playing their roles as finger-wagging scolds lamenting the moral collapse of Today's Youth. Of course it's offensive that Kneecap members apparently chanted 'Up Hamas, up Hezbollah' at a concert last November, or that they suggested a year earlier that right-wing members of the British Parliament deserved to die. It's supposed to be offensive. This band was equally shaped by 'F**k tha Police'-era gangsta rap and early Beastie Boys; they named themselves for the IRA's notoriously gruesome punishment tactic: a shotgun blast to the back of the knee. (As for their chant of 'Maggie's in a box' in tribute to Margaret Thatcher, a political leader none of them is old enough to remember — I'm sorry, that's hilarious.) If it's impossible to tell where the radical politics end and the bad-boy shtick begins with Kneecap, I would say that's pretty much the point, and gently insist that's not exactly a new phenomenon in pop culture, or in culture, period. Elvis Presley once described 'Hound Dog' as a protest song, which leads one to conclude he wasn't half as dumb as he sometimes appeared. To circle all the way back to the Undertones and 'Teenage Kicks,' if that miraculous pop anthem was a fantasy narrative constructed to escape from the grim reality of Northern Ireland in the late '70s, what Kneecap are doing is categorically similar. Yeah, the context has shifted immensely, so much so that Kneecap can use the iconography and sloganeering of the Irish Troubles as ironic or melodramatic background effects. (That would have literally gotten you kneecapped in the '70s.) But the essential Irish paradox is unchanged: We remain true to this claustrophobic little place, and also we want out.
