YouSaid · the spoken record

Feargal Sharkey

lines on the record: 58
first: 2023-07-17
most recent: 2023-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, no, still listen. I'm just fascinated. I'm delighted and pleased and flattered that you even asked me to come and do this. And it's a huge privilege. And thank you very much.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go, and it left me completely traumatized. My family are probably hearing this for the first time. I was so traumatized by the whole thing. I actually ran out of the house and went to local telephone box and called one of my older sisters to go, you have to come quick. I think my dad, mum and dad are about to start falling out with each other. They're going to get divorced. You have to come quick, come quick. Listen, ultimately, I have my own family. I have my own children. I have my own creed and ambitions for them. And I suddenly thought, you know what? Might it provide some motivation to my own children to say you can go out in the world and you can't take on incredible challenges and you can't take on things that people will tell you are impossible and undoable and you can deliver it. And you can have the recognition for it. And I know it may sound like a bit of a cop-out, but I did sit there thinking, what a valuable lesson for my 18th.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An OBE. Now, where's this empire Policy, ironically enough, here's the weird thing. One of my earliest childhood memories, I spent a lot of time thinking about this, as you can probably understand. As it turned out, my father actually worked part-time for the British government. And when he retired, he was offered the British Empire Service Medal. And I can still remember, I must have been 12 or 13, this massive row going on at home. And it was the only time I really saw my parents fall out with each other.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, no, I was very genuinely asked this question by the chair of the EA about five years ago as to what was driving me, motivated me. And I guess it was back to that childhood and growing up in Northern Ireland. It's when I realised that this country is full of incredibly decent little community groups, full of incredibly decent committed local people. They're not militant. They're not campaigners. They're not activists. They're not entomologists or hydrologists. They're just decent local people that have known for decades that their river is slowly dying. They don't understand why. They will go and organise petitions outside the local supermarket. They'll present it to the environment agency. They'll present it to government. They put their trust in the system. And the bit that made me furious was the system took...”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm clearly depending on there being a change of administration in about 12 months' time that then I can go and hang out my sewage brutes and my sewage gloves”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, now they want me to talk about. I can say it now, they want me to talk to me about shit and rivers. Well, guess what? I'm really looking forward to it. I can go back to talking about music again and stop talking about shit and rivers.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You must love it. Yeah, but I was to the weird thing all of my adult life since I've been 20 years old. I can go all kinds of weird places in the world and if people do that and they want to talk about music and records and gigs and t-shirts and interviews and stuff they'd seen and heard and what a glorious, glorious life to lead and what in existence that these random people you've never met will never ever see again just want to talk to an enthusiastically and engagingly about music.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, funnily enough, I didn't. I find myself in the clutches of the Christian brothers. But if it helps, Alistair, many, many, many, many, many years later, you don't have to go to Eton because many decades later, I found myself standing in the middle of Catania, the capital city of Sicily, looking at the Roman ruins, thinking, bloody hell I can still translate that damn Latin inscription. So you don't have to go to Eton to do those things.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that there's a community in Northern Ireland right now resigned to the fact that change is going to happen but feeling desperately insecure and unsupported and isolated. And I think politicians on both sides of the border in the north and the republic will want to be very sensitive about that point and that community and their future. And let me remind you all thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, the people of Ireland get to have another referendum. So they get to have another decision and another bite of whether or not Northern Ireland wants to become part of United Ireland and by default rejoin the EU. There's a lot to play for.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, ironically enough, I never thought in my lifetime I would ever use the words unified Ireland and remotely be taken seriously thanks to Brexit. Has clearly put that down the table. I wasn't being particularly insightful about it, but at the time I did try to make it clear to as many people as possible if Brexit happened that was going to force a border down the middle of the Irish Sea and that invariably would make people in Northern Ireland socially, culturally economically look more towards the Republic than England. We're now in a situation where Sinn F ⁇ in is the largest party in Northern Ireland. There's a distinct likelihood at the next election in the Republic of Ireland, Sinn F ⁇ in will become the largest party in the Republic of Ireland. So here's the thing, thanks to Brexit, that chess piece is now out on the table. I think if everybody's been really clever, thanks to that Susan Mackay book that Rory mentioned, a couple of episodes back, it provides a remarkable insight.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult if not downright impossible for British artists to now go and work and tour in Europe and I've recently believed that this government actually was made several offers by the EU to try and find a resolution to this and flatly turn them all down to such an extent even the likes of Elton John who's just finishing off a global tour which according to the newspapers that one tour alone generated $700 million worth of income and even Elton was complaining he was finding a difficulty deal with the bureaucracy and the paperwork needed to go and actually do dates around the rest of Europe”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it certainly devastated the live music industry. There are two teams in the Premier League in the global music industry. There's the North Americans and the UK. And it's no disrespect to the rest of the planet. They're all playing Sunday League morning football and Hackney Marshes. It's nice you're there, you're having fun, but you're nowhere near the two big boys. And that Anglo-American catalogue, as we call it generically in the industry, loosely would account until Wright quite recently would loosely account for about 80% of the market in Europe. And now we've just gone and made it massively more difficult for ourselves that when the government should be sitting with UK music on behalf of the industry and going, we like this 80% stuff, do you think we could make it 85 or maybe even 90? And can we come up with a plan and a strategy that will deliver that on all the benefits that does to our GDP and income and joins and employment and VAT and everything else? Nope, we've actually made it more.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it was a valuable lesson for the music industry, and after that, the British music industry, there's any number of challenges. I'm not going to mention the B word, but I will.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was tasked by the industry to basically put the 12 warring sectors in a room to help them develop consensus, to help them create an ambition and a vision for their own future and help them to bring that to the structure that was used to achieve that is UK music. I'm pleased to say that 12 14 years, 15 years after I put the thing together, it's still there, still providing the heartbeat. I can still remember fawning a mutual friend of ours who I won't name who at the time was advisor at number 10 and telling him what had just been done and the voice on the other end of the phone slightly more colorfully and I'm about to say it simply went, oh my god, that's all the talent and all the money in the same room. Yes. And by God does that give you strength and power? Enormous.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way things The then Labour government had been making overtures for the music industry for a number of years going, you know what, we obviously think the creative industry is utterly fantastic. And we want to do everything we can to try and help them out because when it comes to music, film, fashion, design, writing, reading, the UK punches way above its own weight in the international stage and has glory recognised that admired for the contribution it makes. So as a government, we want to try and do something to help support make sure you're getting everything you need from a government. At the time, the music industry was full of its own warring parties, and I very loosely describe it as traditionally all of the recording artists hit the record companies and the record companies all hate the publishers and the publishers all hate the lawyers and the lawyers all hate the songwriters and the songwriters all hate the managers and everybody all hates the agents and on and on and on”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, again, it goes back to the Labour government. And this is not a kind of love in for the Labour government, by the way.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I became the one of the people that were responsible for regulating the commercial radio industry in the United Kingdom. So as it turns out, and it's a bit late now, early in my little... Challenges my little approach to the water industry and stuff. I clearly made quite a lot of effort to make sure that nobody actually vaguely knew I might actually know something about regulation, about how it worked, but it's now out there. So I would like to think that when I openly and furiously criticise the likes of what and the Environment Agency, I would like to think that I can do it from a position of some strength, knowledge and experience having done that kind of job myself in the past.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And still end up doing something reasonably be productive and interesting in life. So I went to work for record companies along the way because of my fly fishing thing I managed to contract Wild's disease, which nearly killed me, but not quite. That left me quite kind of debilitated in the mid-1990s. And again, I'm not blowing smoke in your direction, Alistair, but as it turned out while I was recuperating from all of that, incapable of going back to work full-time, just physically not capable of it. And at the time, there was a Labour government who had introduced and was beginning to implement a set of recommendations by a man called Lord Noland around the whole idea of propriety and public life and who tore apart”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And still deluding myself that I might be back on top of the pops this week and thinking it's not a good look, Sharky, it's really not. Grateful that I'd had the career I had. The undertones, the thing we Vince Clark and the Assembly, my solo career, there's three careers more than most people ever get close to. So I thought, again, naively, stupidly, arrogantly at 30 that I could make a whole career path choice jump.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ironically enough, I did go off into the music industry. I got to about 30, I think. And as I sometimes describe it, I began to have this reoccurring nightmare of waking up one day to discover I was the wrong side of 50 with a receding hairline and a ponytail.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to give you the wherewithal for it, section 18 of the Water Industries Act 1991. Whoever drafted it predicted this very situation, and it was a very insightful judgment. Theresa Coffee of the Secretary of State could fix most of this this afternoon with nothing more than a stroke of a pen she's had that power since the day she took office. The question actually becomes why hasn't she actually used that power and that authority?”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, for me, it's very simple. Right now, it's all about the campaign, and right now we have the situation where Thameswater is now teaching on the Bank of Bankruptcy. There are four other companies to my certain knowledge are not that far behind. We now have the opportunity to now start dictating the shape and future of those companies. And personally speaking, I think the legislation's already there. Government already has the power. The regulators already have the power. We need now to sit down with these companies and the shareholders and the bond managers and go, here's how this works. You're going to feel a lot of pain for the next 5, 10, 15 years. But if you agree to what we're going to suggest, you will end up with successful debt-free companies facing a profitable future and a bunch of cost to taxpayer a penny.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, no, listen. I think we can assume right now, and since we probably share a number of acquaintances, I think that if there is a change of administration at the next election, there's one certainty we can actually all depend upon. The economy is just in such a catastrophic state that government will be utterly focused and just trying to maintain some basic public services and functions like education in the NHS. And by the way, that nurse that needs a pay rise. Are you really going to explain to that nurse that you've just given several more tens, if not hundreds of billions of pounds of the public's money?”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, I'm happy to admit it, and I know some people in Whitehall find that I feel I've been disruptive, but I'm genuinely not. I've lost control of this. Government's lost control of this. The water industry's lost control of this. If you're not aware three weeks ago, UCOV did a poll 69% of voters think that the water company should now be nationalized. And if I remember correctly,”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's because we've got this Victorian sewed system. I'm really sorry. We may as well blame the bloody Romans for traffic jams on the M2 and the M25. We don't have a Victorian system. Oh, but government's going to spend £56 billion fixing this. Okay, that's over 28 years. That's amongst 11 water companies. That works out at 181 million pounds per company per year to give your listeners a bit of context just before Christmas. Thames water declared 493.5 million pound profit in six months. Now compare the supposed government grand scheme investment of $181 million a year against Thames Waters half a billion pound profit in six months just to put it into context.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, listen, I had one brief mate in four or five years ago with Rebecca Pie. And Alistair, you'd ask about Killamai Encyclopedic Knowledge of these things. I very quickly realized from my early interactions going back four, maybe five years ago, every time I spoke to somebody from government, spoke to somebody from the Environment Agency of what, or the industry. And I'm trying to say this as diplomatically as I should, and maybe not as diplomatically I really should. I quickly realized that at best I was being given a half-truth, if not a downright fabrication of what the reality of the event and situation was. And that's why I had to go and spend hours digging the stuff out by instinct and just replicating the instinct you have as a journalist and many others. You just know there's something going on here and you're just going to have to keep pushing until you find it. So whenever I sit down and people go, oh,”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, listen to the best deception I can give you is, and I did it, it's a badge I wear with honour and pride. If you go and do have a look at my Twitter profile, you see I've actually quoted on there Hunter's on Twitter, quote, in quotation marks Theresa Coffee, Secretary of State for the Environment UK 2023. So that's clearly what Therese thinks of me and my little effort of life.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, listen, personally speaking, no. But then, as you know, I come from a socialist background, where here's the thing, 30 years later, England, so far as I'm aware, England is still unique in that we're the only country in the world that has an absolutely 100% privatised water system. And what does that tell you that there's not a single country anywhere else in the planet that went for that model? Clearly there may be some kind of inherent flaw to the whole design and application of it. There's any amount of joint partnerships with local authorities, national governments, private sector that England is the only country 30 years later with a completely 100% private sector, and clearly it's an experiment that has catastrophically failed.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ensure that you can, as I know, is a passion of yours, walk into the nearest river and go swimming in it without being confronted with the ugly underbelly of our sewage system. And I do mean wet wipes and sanitary products and contraceptives. Then we now have another even bigger amount of money to be spent. And all of it is now probably directly and indirectly going to be picked up.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you have listened, you have to start for me. There's a very simple thing, and I'm very happy I can mentalize things quite quickly and simply the water companies make an awful lot of money and was an awful lot of corporate greed involved. Or is Jonathan Ford from the FT refers to as the water industry is used to legalize rip-off? Absolutely. But that's why the regulators were there. And we've not got one, but we've got two regulators overseeing the water industry off watt and the environment agency. And both of them, and I say this as a former regulator, both of them have been the most catastrophic failure I can think of. The impact that we're now going to be faced as society is there is a catastrophic amount of money that now needs to be spent repairing the sewage system, securing London's water supply. I suspect we taxpayers and customers are going to end up picking up the tab for that incompetence. And if we have any kind of will at all to...”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will listen to the simple truth of the matter is we have a regulatory system that is failed. And you are right, that makes me quite furious within the next 24 hours. There will be yet another hearing and another select committee in Parliament calling in the chair and chief executive of the regulator, the leaders of Thameswater and Hold in another inquiry. My argument is why are we calling in the chair and chief executive of Offwood? We need the board in there. They're the public appointees. They're the ones appointed by the Secretary of State to act on behalf of government and therefore parliament and indeed to the end act on behalf of the general public. They're the ones that set the policy, they're the ones that set the strategy. Why are we not holding those people to account for the decisions they've made on our behalf and not some helpless chief executive?”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't believe I'm saying it. London is now number nine on global cities most likely to run out of drinking water were now on a list along with the likes of Cape Town, San Paulo, Mexico City and Jakarta.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, simple fact at the national scale, there is not a single river in England that is in good overall environmental health. Every single river in England is polluted, and it's our fault. And you scale that back. Most of that, or at least a large deal of it, is being driven by the water industry. And this is an industry that is supposed to provide water, supposed to collect and dispense with an appropriate manner our sewage. But as we have now discovered, and I hope I may have made some small meagre contribution to help the public understand this is an industry that has made off with $72 billion worth of our money from our pockets, have left these companies in £60 billion worth of debt, now spent £7.5 million over the last three years dumping sewage into our rivers, decimating whole landscapes and ecologies, and has now created a situation where believe it or not,”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They short version is. I ended up working with a charity, taking the environment agency pretty much to the steps of the High Court, simply to get him to do the right thing. Now, I will admit that at this point we've resolved our issues with the Environment Agency. There is more water and plentiful water going down that river than we've seen in decades. But that experience of having to put the very government agency charged and given responsibility and the legal power to oversee and protect those rivers, having to take them to court just to get them to do their job, that kind of pricked my curiosity. And as I sometimes explain it, that gave me a niche and foolishly, stupidly, naively I scratched the bloody itch, and every time I scratched that itch, I just end up with an even bigger itch.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That seems like a silly thing to say, but let me put it this way I suspect we might come on to it. There are within them 25 about 200 miles of river, all tributaries of the Thames. I have walked every single mile of every single one of those rivers not that long ago they would have been full of hundreds of not thousands of populations of salmon, sea trout. We've decimated all of them. We've killed them all off. We've brought them to the eggs of extinction. Apart from one little two and a half mile stretch in Hertfordshire. Rather curiously, I thought that might be worth saving.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, to give you a little indication of this. Southern England is unique. There are about 225 chalk streams on the planet. They're a complete freak of geology. And think 50 to 75 million years ago when London was sitting somewhere off the equator and we were still joined in northern France. There are 225 85% of them are here in southern England and most of them right now are teetering on the brink of extinction because of the way we've treated them, abused them and exploited them. And the one that the Ammo Magna looks after, we have been in charge of for 185 years. It is one of the last remaining places on the very age of London where you can still find a breeding sustainable population of wild brown trout.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A grip of men and women with an interest in fly fishing had looked after and preserved an hundred and eighty five years later that river was about to die. It was suffering from eutrophication. It had become nothing more than a stagnant pond. And this is a chalk stream, one of the rarest ecosystems on the planet. I, like a lot of people, thought, well, this is easy because there's a big regulator out there called Environment Agency and Parliament set them up and give them all these powers and control. And I'll just toddle off and have a quick meeting with the Environment Agency and go, this is dreadful. You need to do something about it. And I could then get on with my life. And I think I was about 10 minutes into that first meeting when my BS detector went off and went, oh my God. And then I realized that I was going to have to go and pick a big fight.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In reality, I actually had retired from life 10 years ago, and that, by the way, is an extraordinary thing for a man to be able to say that at 55, I kind of just went, that's it. I'm happy to hang off my boots and I've made my contribution to life, and I'm going to retire.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once upon a time in Northern Ireland, the first episode there is a clear lesson and reminder. That's where we've come from under no circumstances. Should we have any ambition to go back there? But equally, I'm afraid I have to say it, Alistair, you end up tracing the world back to Whitehall at number 10 and the complete disregard and scant regard that number 10 and this government has shown towards Northern Ireland and the people of Ireland and the future of Northern Ireland, whether as part of United Ireland or not, that they have just shown little, if any, interest, if not utter disdain and disregard. And again, a plague of locusts in all of the houses for that. Northern Ireland's possibly on the age of going quite through a few difficult years. And I would be really resentful to see that happen.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is an outrageous situation, and it's one that needs to be resolved. I will point the finger both at politicians in Northern Ireland. But I might add, Alistair, if you haven't seen it, and in fact, I think at this point it should be compulsory viewing for every single politician, certainly in Northern Ireland, if not most definitely in Whitehall.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, ironically enough, Ireland's kind of an extraordinary place where the Republic of Ireland 30 years ago, 85% of the population of the Republic of Ireland go to mass on a Sunday and pray to get up in pulpits and tell 85% of the population what to do. We would all do it. So here's the thing. In 30 years, the Republic of Ireland became the first country in the world at a national referendum to pass a quality of marriage legislation, has amended the Constitution not once, but twice to legalise aborse and contraception. And as we speak at this very moment in time, it's been governed by the openly gay son of an Indian immigrant and an atheist poet who was re-elected for second term as present. What the hell were you people doing? I left you alone for five minutes and that would happen. So it's true and it's part of where politics fails and it brings us back to Westminster is it divisive and is it an affront to democracy in the modern world that there is not an assembly in Northern Ireland? Yes, there is.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without question, unfortunately, in Irish history, it was just repeating a game that had been played out any number of times before. So was it a monumental moment in Irish history? Yes, it was. And that's invariably you get into those conversations of, well, we cannot do it. Would that be a protest? They'll just put somebody else on. And by the way, for a three-minute slot and pop of the pops, there'll be 50,000 other people out there. They'll take that, in which case nobody even knows you've done it. Or do we do it? And without mentioning anything to the BBC, do a couple of the band, turn up wearing black armbands, and the BBC just filament and broadcast it. They'd no idea what was going on until it was explained to them several days later.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know, listen completely, and that if you now go back and look at the footage, you'll see that some of the band were wearing black arm The way you say her”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Haven't good vibrations in movie. It's about Terry. Yes, that did happen. We're there in the studio and everybody else. We're just doing our thing and everybody else in the studio sitting there listening to teenage kicks being recorded for the first time just going, oh my God, we've never heard anything like this. And we're just going, yeah, but we're five kids from Derry and this is what we do.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is just one of those random acts of creativity you've been around it enough, Alistair. You can put five people from creative backgrounds in a rim and nothing will happen. It'll be the most boring hour you've ever spent of your life. But you just put five different personalities in and for some wrong reason, the way they interact and relate to each other, suddenly this magic occurs. And suddenly we the original idea was thanks to Geckl and Belfast called Terry Huli, who ran a little record shop who let us borrow 100 quid to pay for eight hour studio time. So one week we went and spent four hours in the studio recording. We went back a week later and spent another four hours mixing it. Oh, by the way, we'd no idea what we're doing. And I still to this day think I was standing there going, well, a bit more of the blue knob, please, but I've no idea what the blue knob actually bloody will do. And if you've ever seen the movie and if you...”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was literally people just sitting around going, Well, I've got this chin. I've got this idea for something. What do you think? And ironically enough, we were always driven curiously at the time by criticism and by people going, you can't do that. See, there's more Freud, and it's just occurred to me. At the time in Ireland and around where we grew up, there were kind of tribute banned. So there was a local band that could play the whole of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. Absolutely note perfect. And that's what they would do every Friday night, was get up on a pub and they would play dark side of the moon by Pike Floyd. Absolutely no perfect. They looked at us and gone and went, well, you can't play. Yeah, well, you're rubbish. And that would just kind of make us go and practice even more. And then we realized, well, they can't play their own songs, so you know what? We're going to write songs. Now, we'd no idea what we were doing. So we just made it up as we went along.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's a completely random act of coming together where there was literally two brothers and a couple of their friends, 15, 16, 17. Oh, let's be in a band. Okay, but we've got no gear. And by the way, it doesn't matter because nobody can play anything anyway. Well, we need somebody to can sing because we're not good, any good at it. Oh, well, I know this broken school called Sharky. He's on all these feshes and all these Irish singing competitions. He wins loads of medals. I'll ask him. And maybe he'll come and sing. And the first time I turned up and met the other guys that were to become the undertones, little did I know that all that kit they had, the guitars, the amplifiers, the drums, they actually owned none of it. They completely borrowed every bit of it. And as it turned out, nobody could play a thing. So what are the chances in the big universe we all live in that five random kids with no outward time?”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dump was the early 1980s, I think 83, 84. It'll come as no surprise that the early undertones, we tried quite hard to kind of still live there. I think we were incredibly conscious that, oh God, are we going to be that classic little band? Has a bit of a hit, and that's it. You're out of there within five minutes, and the next people see of you, you're in some national newspaper surrounded by champagne bottles, a lot of cash. And we tried really hard to just be those kids back in Derry.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will listen without exception. There's no way around that whatsoever, and I still have this very simple belief that society has an obligation to protect the vulnerable. And that's kind of my opening game in any game of politics whatsoever.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just go on an extraordinary household and have an extraordinary opportunity to grow up in. I'm an extraordinary life they've led.”
2023-07-17 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source