“I never really liked the title Teenage Kicks. It’s the ‘kicks’ bit that still jars with me – not a word that we ever used and one I thought a bit too corny to put in a song. But then we never really expected much of it when John [O’Neill] played it for us in The Pit. The only bit of the creative process I remember was Billy [Doherty]’s drum intro, the ‘doot-n-doot-n’ which I am sure he nicked from another song we were trying to learn. Come on, what do you expect when some songs leave their intros lying around, not even locked? They’re just asking to be taken and stuck at the front of punk songs. The first time anyone outside the band mentioned Teenage Kicks was in the Casbah [in Derry], when someone standing at the bar named it as our ‘big song’. This was at least three months before we were in Wizard [Sound Studios, Belfast] so obviously someone spotted its potential. I was surprised that anyone could even work out what our songs were called, the way we sometimes introduced them. …”
Guardian: The story of Teenage Kicks: how a punk classic was born (Video/Audio)
SOS
W – Teenage Kicks
Genius (Audio)
YouTube: Teenage Kicks, True Confessions, Smarter Than U, Emergency Cases