May 2012
6 posts
1 tag
Kenickie
Once again, Youth Groups’ dearest friend John Hart provides this tribute to a band that largely passed me by, but meant a great deal to him. Follow him on Twitter, won’t you?
Kenickie, then. The indie Spice Girls, weren’t they? A giggly blur of Malibu and fake fur. Inconsequential, lightweight three chord teenage thrashing about snogging, shopping for mascara and Saturday nights in...
2 tags
Arab Strap
Plenty of today’s songs have been added to the YG Spotify playlist, which you can enjoy here. Subscribe to it, if you’d like. Or don’t. No pressure.
The last couple of entries in here have been focused on bands that I liked during the Youth Groups era but haven’t really paid much attention to in the decade since. I wanted to buck that trend, and today I’m writing...
2 tags
Reef
For a year or so, I used to sit next to a dude called Richard on the bus to and from school. He was into music too, and we’d often spend the 45 minute ride sharing earphones and listening to some new album. In January 1997, Richard said “I think I’m going to buy the new Reef album”. I was pretty excited, because (a) their single ‘Place Your Hands’ had been...
Straw
The internet has a lot to answer for. In 1998, I heard Straw’s debut single ‘Weird Superman’ on MTV2, thought it was great, and bought a promo copy in Camden. There was very little info to be found about them, so I thought, why not start a website for them? I knew a guy who’d done a similar thing for Mansun a few years earlier, and now that they were pretty big, his fansite...
Elsewhere
I wrote a little piece for Low Times about a handful of British boy bands that were around during the Youth Groups era. Read it if you’d like. And make sure you check out the Low Times podcast, which is one of the best in the business.
One of the bands I covered in that article is East 17. Here is the funniest video of theirs I could find. Make a list of all the goodness in this clip.
2 tags
The Wannadies
When I started making a Youth Groups shortlist a few months ago, a few trends became noticeable. Most of the bands weren’t around anymore. (Although a disconcerting number of them had reunited). Many of the bands had Greatest Hits compilations, sometimes more than one. And a few bands are best remembered, if at all, for their one super-giant smash hit, and not for anything else. I’m...
