There's a particular test a legacy band either passes or fails: do they play the hits as museum pieces, or do they still mean them? The Undertones, on this anniversary tour, answer the question in the first four bars. Teenage Kicks — 'the first record we ever made,' bassist Mickey Bradley says with deliberate understatement — lands hard and unceremoniously, not bronzed. That it now carries the weight of almost 50 years of nostalgia without collapsing under it is the night's first surprise. The set is structured as a sprint, not a victory lap. Thirty songs in 90 minutes means roughly three minutes per song, which is exactly how long these songs were always supposed to be. Drummer Billy Doherty flies throughout, holding the band to a breathless pace that refuses to let the crowd settle into comfortable memory. The punk humour, new-wave surrealism and open vulnerability of those first two albums arrive in a rush — You've Got My Number (Why Don't You Use It!), Male Model, (She's a) Runaround — and they sound like they were written last Tuesday. The Feargal Sharkey question is the honest complication here. His quivery, brittle voice was the instrument these songs were cut for, and when the band returned in 1999 they needed someone who could carry that specificity without becoming an impersonator. Paul McLoone is, by the review's own account, a savvy solution: he pulls off the shaky registers the classics demand, then steps decisively away from imitation on tracks like Get Over You and the 2003 cut Thrill Me, where his richer voice finds the hip-shaking, glam undertow that Sharkey's register might have obscured. The unreleased new track Time is Terminal earns its place — and that's not nothing. A new song dropped into a catalogue anniversary show is usually either an obligation or an embarrassment. This one accelerates, as if the band are playing against the clock of their own legacy rather than cashing it in. The title's morbidity is real, and the tempo answers it honestly. What the review captures, and what the show apparently delivered, is something rarer than a good gig: a crowd of silver-haired fans hugging during Teenage Kicks not because they're drowning in nostalgia but because the song still has something to say about longing, and about how longing ages. That's the difference between a legacy act coasting and a legacy act that has remained in genuine relationship with its own work. The Undertones, at this distance, are clearly the latter.
