That Petrol Emotion

As surely everybody knows, The Undertones were a legendary punk band from Derry - most famous for Teenage Kicks. However in the 1980s two members of The Undertones were apparently living in Southwark - to be precise in Eastwell House, Tabard Gardens Estate, SE1. My source - a friend who used to live there - says that they were at that point members of That Petrol Emotion. So I assume that the people concerned were John/Sean and Damian O'Neill, who formed That Petrol Emotion when The Undertones split up. There's a (poorly transcribed) 1989 interview with Damian here, 'in the living room of his flat in South East London".

That Petrol Emotion were a great band in their own right ( I saw them once at Kilburn Irish Youth Festival), more overtly political than The Undertones and musically more daring.

Here they are from 1987 on The Tube performing Big Decision. I always assumed that the line 'You'd rather sail the ocean, Than make a big decision' referred to the Falklands War and the Irish conflict, i.e. the big decision was British withdrawal from N.Ireland. The song mentions plastic bullets, which at that point were frequently being used by British forces in Belfast and Derry.