FEATURE:
A Great Heart
PHOTO CREDIT: Richard Cannon for Country Life
Saluting the Legendary Feargal Sharkey at Sixty-Five
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THIS is a music website….
PHOTO CREDIT: Adam Gerrard/Daily Mirror
so I will be dropping in a playlist featuring some of the classic Undertones songs Feargal Sharkey has sung on, in addition to some of his solo cuts. The Derry-born icon turns sixty-five on 13th August, so there were a few reasons I wanted to celebrate that. For one, he is someone who has influenced so many other artists. From his amazing work with The Undertones and his solo material, he has definitely drive and moved artists coming through. I have a special memory of hearing his solo hit, A Good Heart. Released in 1985 and written by Maria McKee, the chart-topping track first came to my ears in the '90s. The first time I heard it was when I was with the family and driving for dinner at a local pub. It may sound quite ordinary but this track instantly moved and excited me. I listen to it now – having heard it countless times – and I am transported. Sharkey’s soulful and beautiful voice is like no other. There is another reason why we need to celebrate his upcoming birthday extra hard. With the climate being in crisis, our rivers polluted, wildfires everywhere and the temperature rising, there are relatively few artists and public figures acting and calling for change. Sharkey is someone that is highlighting the devastating impact pollution is doing to our rivers and waterways. I am going to drop in a couple of interviews where he discusses his passion and calling for change.
This interview from The New Statesman is very interesting. There are parallels between Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the devastation being wrought on our rivers. Feargal Sharkey is someone who is always challenging the government and asking for action to be taken:
“Every time we were told we couldn’t do something, that just made us 50 times more likely to do it,” the punk star Feargal Sharkey said of beginning his career in Northern Ireland’s Derry. The city was severely affected by the country’s violent sectarian conflict, with “people saying bands from Derry don’t make records or write their own songs”. But in 1978, the Undertones defied the Troubles, releasing a punk classic, “Teenage Kicks”; a line from which the legendary DJ John Peel included as an epitaph on his grave.
Now living in London with his wife and children, the 63-year-old has stepped back from the music business, having received an OBE for his services to the industry in 2019. Far from a quiet retirement, however, the memory of his embattled Catholic upbringing is never far from Sharkey’s mind – and he has since become one of the UK’s most vocal campaigners for a different kind of underdog: the environment.
When we met last week at the Amwell Magna fishery in Hertfordshire, Sharkey’s disarming turns of phrase were in full flow. The scene at the country’s oldest fly-fishing club appeared bucolic: geese tended their chicks on riverbanks covered in forget-me-nots and weeping willows; but it is also a landscape of sex, death and Darwinian struggle, the lyricist reminded me. “All you get is a bit of a shag, then you’re dead,” he quipped of the darting, short-lived mayflies.
PHOTO CREDIT: Hanna-Katrina Jędrosz
He is equally direct about the wider fate of Britain’s rivers: “The simple truth is water companies have been profiteering at the expense of the environment,” he said with the fervour of a hardened activist.
There is even a parallel, Sharkey believes, in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cavalier approach to Northern Ireland post-Brexit and the perilous state of Britain’s rivers – with unscrupulous politicians failing to prioritise long-term well-being over “parochial politics” and immediate political gain. “When the boss thinks he can stand up in public and lie,” Sharkey said, “what do you think the rest of the middle management has been doing?”
According to the water industry regulator Ofwat, water companies have stemmed water losses and kept bills low, while delivering “excellent quality drinking water and bathing water”. Yet such self-congratulation doesn’t add up: in 2020 the UK was ranked last in Europe for bathing water quality, with rivers across the country home to dangerous amounts of chemicals and sewage.
This is partly due to the UK’s outdated sewer system, partly driven by run-off from agricultural fields and partly because water companies routinely release raw sewage into waterways, said Sharkey. Just 14 per cent of English rivers are in good ecological condition, show official figures, and none are of good chemical status. This has profound consequences for Britain’s already depleted biodiversity, with more than a tenth of UK freshwater and wetland species threatened with extinction, from water voles to kingfishers.
There is a growing movement calling for water management reform – ranging from national organisations such as Surfers Against Sewage to local campaigns. Amie Battams, a young urban fly-fisher and YouTuber, who Sharkey was hosting at the Amwell club on the day we met, often tweets about the sewage she witnesses being pumped into London’s River Wandle in an attempt to safeguard her beloved chalk stream.
In terms of policy goals, Sharkey and his fellow travellers would like to see “a piece of legislation making every single director of those water companies personally liable”; a better system to measure the volume of dumped sewage; and, added Ali Morse of the Wildlife Trusts, an overarching target on the health of our waters under the Environment Act.
There are signs of progress. In response to recommendations in a recent Environmental Audit Committee report, the government and Ofwat have accepted the need to prioritise long-term investment in the sewer network and nature-based solutions, paving the way for an upgrade to England’s crumbling Victorian infrastructure.
“At the end of the day, all people actually want from their f***ing politicians is hope,” summed up the “Teenage Kicks” singer, now a father of teenagers himself. “Hope that tomorrow will be a bit better than today”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Richard Saker/The Guardian
I am going to wrap things up with an interview from The Guardian. In Feargal Sharkey, here is someone whose passion and huge electricity fuelled The Undertones and made them such a phenomenal act, is now using that voice to make people aware of what water companies are doing. Or not doing. What our Government is or is not doing. In this interview, we learn more about his upbringing and when the fuse for activism was lit. His parents’ example of fighting against social injustice was instilled in Sharkey:
“In the past week, that anger found a new focus in the latest toothless “action plan” delivered by environment minister Thérèse Coffey. After a couple of days spent eviscerating that muddled speech to all-comers, Sharkey, when I meet him in central London on Thursday evening, is at peak flow. “This is the third water plan in six months! Coffey announced on Tuesday a £1.6bn investment. Does that overturn the £3.1bn her predecessor announced last August? Or the billions Michael Gove announced in 2018? It is,” he says, “just kids in a panic realising too late they are going get a hammering on this at the local elections, and again grasping at any straw.”
Listening to Sharkey, it is tempting to think that, at 64, he still channels his punk edge. In fact, he says, it goes back a bit further than that.
He grew up in a Catholic family in Derry, the second youngest of eight kids. His father was chairman of the local Labour party and branch secretary of the electricians’ union. “The lesson that my parents instilled in us was if we saw social injustice, we had a bloody obligation to confront it,” he says, “and what bigger injustice is there than that every single river in this country is polluted? And all to drive the shareholder dividends of the water companies?”
Sharkey’s first experience of protest came in April 1969 when his mother bundled the kids into the car to take part in an Easter civil rights march, walking between Belfast and Dublin. He would have been 10.
“There is a temptation to romanticise some of that stuff,” he says, “but it is true that frequently in my parents’ kitchen the locals all sat around discussing how they were going to bring down the national government of Northern Ireland. And in the years that followed, I watched them do exactly that. I grew up knowing that things change when you get enough decent people saying we have had enough.”
Sharkey’s awakening to the injustice of river pollution came seven years ago when he became chairman of the Amwell Magna fishery on the River Lea in London. He imagined it might be a retirement hobby, indulging a passion for fly-fishing at the oldest club in the country, on a stretch of river that Izaak Walton fished for trout 400 years ago. That’s not how it turned out.
“As part of the handover, my predecessor explained to me issues with the Environment Agency (EA) and Thames Water going back to the late 1990s,” he says. “Water was disappearing from the river from over-extraction to such an extent that it was turning into two-and-a-half miles of stagnant pond.”
Though the cause of the problem had been identified in 2003, the EA had commissioned further studies and reports without taking decisive action against Thames Water. “Meanwhile, the river was dying.”
After he gave up performing in 1991, Sharkey had worked in executive roles in the music industry. “In that world you don’t have 15 years to sit around debating something,” he says. “You better get your sorry ass together, come up with a plan, and deliver it on time and under budget.”
Working with a group called Fish Legal, he compelled the EA to fulfil its obligation to protect water quality. “My plan was not to stand on the steps of the high court,” he says, “but to bang furiously on the door. As a result, we got our problem fixed really quickly. And I’m pleased to report that there’s now more water going through the Amwell Magna fishery than there has been for decades”.
On 13th August, we will all wish Feargal Sharkey a very happy sixty-fifth birthday. Not just for his fight against pollution and the decimation of our rivers, waterways and coasts, but for his incredible music and its legacy. The news is very shocking. Images of sewage being dumped straight into the water, and the unbelievable loss to the fish and wildlife who rely on clean water. In 1985, he sang about good hearts being hard to find – treating gentle and kind hearts with care. The lionhearted Feargal Sharkey is fighting for us and future generations. For that, we all owe a salute and thanks to…
AN icon and legend.