A quavering voice and an abundance of energy have always been Feargal Sharkey's trademarks, but he's moved on a bit since his days of teenage kicks

For those who remember the Feargal Sharkey of The Undertones as a petulant teenager dancing around stages in a mixture of impotent spoilt brat rage and emerging angry young manhood, his present level of accomplishment and control in the business of making and selling records may come as a surprise.

Still the spry, slightly built Irishman, and possessed of the same demonic energy, his emergence as a solo artist has brought out many talents that perhaps remained undeveloped in his Undertone years. His No 1 single A Good Heart and top selling album are a testament to these.

Unlike many solo singers, Feargal takes the role of musical director upon himself, and furthermore takes his direction beyond simply singing, arranging and playing on his records, into the realms of record sleeve design and even video direction. Does this mean the angry young man has fallen victim to megalomania?

"I was fully aware of my limitations, but the simple thing was I didn't want to just turn up at the studio after the producer had done all the backing tracks. I wanted it to be a Feargal Sharkey LP, and I wanted to put as much into it as I possibly could."

His background, beginning with the much loved Undertones, and subsequently working with Madness and Vince Clarke (the latter resulting in the No 1 hit. Never, Never) not only gave him valuable technical experience, but was no doubt the pedigree that enabled him to assume so much control, even though under the aegis of a major record label. With videos, however, there was a technical barrier to be overcome.

"I basically found myself in a video one day and there were all these people around me talking a strange language, so I basically decided to do something about it. I went to a place called the Actors Centre, read a lot of books and talked to a lot of people. To me video is all parallel with making records. When you're making a record you get all these ideas fortunes and sounds in your head and it's much less frustrating once you learn the technicalities behind them. The recording side wasn't too bad because I'd done four albums with The Undertones, and you have to learn something even if you're not paying attention all the time. It's the same with video; now I can go in and explain to people how to achieve the ideas I have in my head."

The exact demarcation of roles in the making of Feargal's album consisted of Feargal singing, playing keyboards, percussion, programming sequencers, and co-arranging the songs with none other than Dave Stewart of The Eurythmics, who also produced the album. Dave was also responsible for co-writing the five original songs on the album with Feargal, and the majority of the recording was done at The Church, the operational headquarters of the Eurythmics, using musicians like Olle Romo and Dean Garcia who played on their last LP Be Yourself Tonight. It's a relief, therefore, to find that the LP doesn't sound like a Eurythmics LP, although the musical character of Dave Stewart naturally comes through to a certain extent. The association with Dave, which began when Feargal and he became neighbours a while back, led to Feargal describing Dave as his 'Guru and Mentor'. But there were other reasons for his choice of recording location.

"The Church has a nice atmosphere. It's more like doing it at home. I think it's important to be excited by your environment and The Church is bloody chaos — that's why I like it. The main recording area definitely has a special sound because we did some strings in it and it was the best string sound I've heard in a long time. Dave bought the floor somewhere and had it layed in there and it really makes things like the cellos resonate a bit more, and makes the bottom end a bit tighter."

In making the album Feargal was trying to appeal to people on many levels. However, at the end of the day it had to be, as he put it, "a singer's record." The whole writing process from beginning to end reflected this.

"I don't actually put that much down on a Portastudio. I have a Tascam 246 because it's easier to handle than the older ones, and it saves time pissing around the back plugging things in. All I want to get down on a Portastudio is the basic chord structure and melody line, then once I feel like it's going in the right direction I'll leave it. I don't like the process of spending a grand doing demos, 'cause by the time I get round to actually doing things I'm bored stiff with them and there's nothing left for me to achieve."

When it came to beginning the recording the priorities were still the same.

"We started the tracks with simply a drum machine. Dave played a bit of guitar, I played a bit of keyboards and I just whacked in a vocal. At all times we used the vocal as a reference so that, unless we deliberately intended to, nothing overtook the vocals. The vocals were redone at the end. I personally find it infuriating going in to record the vocals after the band has made the backing track and you get put on track 23 in between the bass guitar and the SMPTE code, and you have to scream over the top of it all."

A keyboard/piano player since the age of 10, Feargal's abilities came to the fore in the making of this album as the principal means of giving a direction to the various musicians he used.

"I wanted to get fairly high calibre players so I wasn't going to tell them exactly what to play note for note. But at the sametime if they started wandering off too much they were quite rapidly dragged back. One of the problems with instrumentalists is that they tend to concentrate too much on their own instruments rather than the overall sound, so I keep having to restrain people. Drummers especially are one of my pet hates, I have to admit, because every time there'sa bit of space created there's a fucking tom or cymbal going in there. To me that's the real difference between a good musician, because these days with drop-ins and sampling you don't actually have to be that good a player, but that intuitive thing of knowing when you've played enough is still very important."

Although the main bulk of the keyboards were played by Pat Seymour, Feargal actually played keyboards on almost every track. A keen computer music enthusiast, he has a collection of keyboards including a Korg CX3, a recently acquired Emulator II, a Jupiter 8 and two Casios, the CZ101 and 5000.

"I quite happily sit on a bus when I'm travelling round, with a pair of headphones and a cartridge doing patches on the 101, and then when I get back I'll bung the cartridge into the 5000 and off I go. I find it depressing that week by week there's all this wonderful machinery coming out, but people have got no imagination in the way they use it. Buying a £9000 digital synth and then not doing anything with it is just a waste of money."

The sequencing on the album was also largely Feargal's domain.

"On most of the album we used the MSQ700. I haven't had time yet to get to grips with the sequencer in the Emulator. The only thing that bothers me is that there appears to be no step time programming on it. Obviously I prefer real time, but there are times when I want it to be so precise that I'll actually sit down and programme it in step time. Again, with the CZ5000, unless you have some idea of notation, you're going to be up shit creek because the display is in notation. So unless you know the difference between a semiquaver and a demi-semi-quaver you haven't even got a look in. But anyway Pat actually played most of the sequences except for really simple repetitive things. That way we got them right after about three takes instead of spending about 10 hours programming the things."

Using drum machines was the chosen way of getting rhythmical ideas across to Ulie Romo, and Martin Chambers (of the Pretenders) — the two drummers Feargal used on the album.

"I've been through all the Roland drum machines, you know, cheap and tacky. Now I've got the Yamaha RX11. The snare sounds on it are a bit naff, but one of the bass drum sounds can pass as a reasonable sound in the studio with a bit of compression and eq. On the album me and Dave would work out the basic pattern on the drum machine and then get Ulle or Martin Chambers to take that as a basis. But on A Good Heart, although Ulle plays on it, at one point there's a rim shot and a bit of shaker from the original drum pattern, so we do things like that for percussive effects."

When it came to recording the vocals and mixing the album Feargaland Dave headed out to LA, partly because it was a miserable summer in North London, but also because they wanted to work with Shelley Yakus at Village Recorders, who in addition to working with the likes of Chick Corea and Return to Forever back in the Seventies, also performed a like service on the last Eurythmics album.

The recording of the vocals was no easy task for any of them. Shelley Yakus was extremely rigorous in his approach, and also had his work cut out trying to capture the full range and depth of Sharkey's voice.

"Shelley was a bit at a loss to begin with, but in the end we just went right back to basics; just one bloody good microphone and a good sounding room, and we also did the thing of cutting a hole in the carpet and me standing in the hole."

The voice rises to monumental heights at some points on the album. However the vocal sound wasn't the result of using large amounts of processing on the voice.

"I like to think that I can do it well enough not to have to cover my voice in exciters and ADT and sink it into the obscure regions of the mix. Most of the effects are just quite short delays and damn good reverbs. As a singer, I feel that if I can't make it work with just quite a reasonable reverb then I'm doing something wrong somewhere."

The extensive range between loud and soft of Sharkey's voice also made monitoring a problem.

"I use compression in the headphones because my voice can get pretty loud, and if you have it low enough in the mix for the loud bits I can't hear myself when I go down to the quiet bits. Compression is the easiest way of solving that problem.

On A Good Heart Dave and I did try using loads of effects — compression, graphic eq, exciters etc — on my voice, but we scrapped it in the end. But this effect did actually survive onto the 2-track master. When we made that, we also made a mono backing track at the same time for use on European TV shows. After that we decided to scrap the original vocal of A Good Heart, we couldn't be bothered to spend three days setting up the desk again to remix it, so what we did was I sang a live version over the backing track and bounced it down onto another 2-track, and then we edited the intro and the slide guitar solo which pans across the stereo onto it, so the track you actually hear is in mono when I'm singing!"

Speaking of effects, being in Los Angeles meant they had access to possibly the most excessive reverb system in the world.

"At The Church we basically just used reverbs for monitoring. We weren't that worried about them so we just used Yamaha and Roland reverbs. When we got to LA we used the Capital Plates, which are basically just a couple of plates set up in a building on the other side of Los Angeles. But it's the biggest plate you've ever heard in your life. On You Little Thief there's one part of it where the whole thing collapses down in a sort of explosion. That whole effect is the Capital Plates. What we did was send the ambience from the toms and the kit to it. It's done on the telephone. By the desk there's a little AD (analogue to digital) converter, and you plug your send and return into it, bung the signal down the telephone line, it reconverts at the other end, sends it to the plate, converts it back to digital, back up the telephone and you bring it backup on the desk. So the phone bills are a bit ridiculous! The echo itself on You Little Thief has to be going on for 30 seconds or so. There's no way anything digital is going to compare with that, although we did use the usual AMSs, and Lexicon Space Stations etc."

Shelley Yakus' method of mixing also proved to be typically American, although his approach resulted in some pretty unique mixes.

"Every night Shelley would take what we'd been working on, whether it was finished or not, and take it to the cutting room to make an acetate which he'd listen to at home. It's such an obvious thing to do; instead of doing the usual thing of mixing down then re-eqing the shit out of it in the cutting room, you change it at source; in the mix. But at one point it didn't look like it was going the way we wanted it. I wanted it to sound really big and aggressive and biting and it wasn't quite that way. But Shelley told me 'Don't worry, I know what you're talking about. You've got to trust me.' Then he took the 2-track masters which I still wasn't convinced about, and did about four cuts from the album, and each one sounded like a different record. On each successive cut he did, the top end just got brighter and the bottom end got tighter."

One name that crops upon the labyrinthine sleeve notes is that of Tim Daly. Not a musician or a technician, his name is next to Feargal's on the writing credits of songs like Bitter Man.

"I met Tim a few years back in Leeds, and now I work a lot with him. A lot of the time he'll just give me the lyrics and I'll write a tune to fit them. I don't have a fixed way of going about the lyrics, I just try to avoid routine. When we did Bitter Man the idea came to me because we'd been in the studio for six hours getting really pissed off because nothing was happening. I called Tim up and said I'd got this idea for a song, and it was going to be called Bitter Man, and what it was all about, and he said 'Hold on I'm having my dinner!' So I asked him to call me back in 15 minutes, because we were about to record the music for it, and he called back in 10 minutes with the first verse and the chorus."

No newcomer to the art of singing, Feargal goes much further into the realms of expression than he has ever done before, resulting in sounds from trembling tenderness to throat shredding desperation. Largely it seems, this assuredness is, for him, a matter of intuition and experience.

"I don't normally suffer from soreness of the throat although I smoke like a chimney. I do spare my voice, in that although I do generally really go for things, there are points where I know if I go too far I'll be hoarse for weeks, so I've learnt not to do that. I like to think I have the technique to sound good without going right over the top. I've never had lessons, but I'm going on tour next year for about nine months and there's no way that you can expect to go out and sing every night for two hours over nine months if you don't think about your voice and how it works — if you still want to be singing at the end of it."

With The Undertones, Feargal has already left a deep impression on one era and its generation. With this, his first fully fledged solo project, he looks likely to leave a stamp on the present Pop mainstream, and whilst it may appear to some to be a step in the direction of adult orientation, the original characteristics of the young Sharkey—energy, passion and just a touch of pig-headedness — are still present as ever.