Youth Groups

Ultrasound

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 11:59:48 -0400

The other day, I received an email. This is not, in and of itself, news. Not bragging, but I get upwards of three emails a day. Jealous? But this particular email, the one that brought on this out-of-nowhere blog update, was surprising for a handful of reasons. Firstly, it was from Club Fandango, a cabal of indie promoters in London from whom I’ve not heard in over a decade, since I left the U.K. So it was kind of jarring to see that I’ve suddenly been added to their press list. More significantly, the email itself was to inform me that Ultrasound are playing the Scala in London on October 4th, and did I want to be on the press list. Now, you have to understand: Ultrasound released one insane album in 1999 and then broke up. So this was some unexpected news. Also, the email contained a link to a stream of the band’s new record, ‘Play For Today’, which is out in the U.K. this week. They’re back!

Let’s jump back. In 1997, I bought the band’s debut 7-inch, on Fierce Panda Records. I still have it, and pray that one day it’ll be worth millions. The lead track, ‘Same Band’, was an energetic call-to-arms. Now, I never felt like an outcast or particularly out-of-touch or anything as a high schooler, but this song still really spoke to me. The band was led by a giant man nicknamed Tiny, and they all looked like misfits. It seemed appropriate that their debut should be a rabble-rousing tribute to being an outsider. “We’re in the same band” goes the chorus, but it’s more like a gang. It’s okay, they’re saying. You’re one of us now.

On the other side of the vinyl, though, was something even better. ‘Floodlit World’ is just effortlessly gorgeous, anthemic and lovely. When bass player Vanessa Best joins in on the chorus it still gives me chills. Here’s a video of the band performing ‘Floodlit World’ on Jools Holland - there’s some seriously crap visual effects going on here.

If the band could put two fantastic songs on their first release, imagine the potential they had for the future. With this in mind, several labels jostled for their signatures, with Nude Records, the home of Suede and, um, Sharkboy, ultimately prevailing. Their first release for Nude was a single called ‘Best Wishes’, which was so-so, but goddamned if its b-side ‘Kurt Russell’ isn’t one of my all-time favourite songs by any band. Again, it has an unimpeachably uplifting and inspiring chorus. He sings “I want to be your hero; Kurt Russell, Eastwood and me” and everyone’s hearts break.

After this came yet another stunner. ‘Stay Young’, which used to open the band’s live shows, was a huge anthem. It’s about being young and having fun. There’s a part near the beginning where he sings “Hey, kids, rock and roll is here, so scream all you like” and then everyone in the crowd would scream. The chorus is massive. This band was on a roll.

The one and only time I saw Ultrasound live was supporting Pulp at Finsbury Park in July 1998. (Also playing: Add N To (X), Bentley Rhythm Ace, Bernard Butler, Catatonia). Ultrasound went on in the glorious early-afternoon sunshine and won most of the crowd over. I remember ‘Stay Young’ being incredible, and being annoyed that they didn’t play ‘Kurt Russell’. They did, however, play another b-side. This one is called ‘Football Meat’, is mental, and the chorus involves yelling the word “Fuckface.”

After that, there was a bit of a gap. They released ‘Floodlit World’ as a single and it followed ‘Stay Young’ into the Top 40. In April 1999, the band’s debut album ‘Everything Picture’ came out, and let’s just say, it was a piece of work. Two discs. The final, title track, lasted almost forty minutes. Not surprisingly, it was - and remains - tough to digest. In addition to the songs with which we were already familiar, there were a couple of new ones to admire. ‘Fame Thing’ addressed celebrity culture and obsession with impressive energy and noisiness…

…while ‘Suckle’ was proggy and meandering with fantastic sweeping guitarwork…

…but for the most part, the album kind of left fans a little cold. Credit the band for making the tripped-out album that they wanted to make, but it wasn’t a particularly fun listen. Mere months after the album’s release, the band called it a day. The keyboard player started a new band, and they released a single which got a decent amount of airplay on XFM.

And then, well, nothing. I didn’t really think of Ultrasound much in the aughts. I might have put ‘Kurt Russell’ on a mixtape or two. But then this email, and this new record, which, in a nice example of circularity, is being put out by Fierce Panda. I’ve not listened all the way through yet, but so far only the opening track, ‘Welfare State’, has really grabbed me. It’s more political than the band used to be, but that’s understandable given the times in which we now live. The transition from verse to chorus is huge. This video edit is a lot shorter than the album version, which has an annoying minute or so of feedback in the middle, suggesting that the band could still do with an editor. I love the lyric “We’ve been away for a while, but we were never in style”.

The other pre-release single is called ‘Beautiful Sadness’ and it might be a grower. Nice video, though.

Ultrasound, then. An insane hodgepodge of various parts that shouldn’t mesh together, and yet somehow they do. Good to have them back - hopefully version 2 will see them become world-conquering megastars and I’ll be to retire on the back of my ‘Same Band’ 7”.

What The Hell Happened?

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 12:07:53 -0400

Hey everyone,

Remember when this used to be an active site, with updates conscientiously posted every Thursday? No, me neither. As I alluded to the last time I wrote in here - I think it was during the Mesozoic Era - I just started a new job. Without wishing to bore anyone with details, I’m the Managing Director of a new not-for-profit legal education startup, and as you may imagine based on the combination of words that I just used, it’s pretty time-intensive. Setting up infrastructure, getting a functional website, raising money from sponsors, keeping an active blog, getting a D-U-N-S number, etc. etc. (If you don’t know what a D-U-N-S number is, I envy you. The process for getting one is an awful pain).

Around that, plus reading the newest Carlos Ruiz Zafon book, listening to most of the comedy podcasts out there, looking to buy a house, cheering for Team GB, bowling a lifetime-low of 56, making a pretty respectable Chinese dinner, being one of the only people in America who seems to enjoy ‘The Newsroom’, I’ve not really had the time to sit down and write extensively about a band a week as I used to. I wish I could! I’ve got some stories about Soulwax that would make your head explode. (Not true). So here are some bullets about music, both YG-oriented and otherwise.

Since we last spoke, I’ve seen a few live shows: Beach House, Best Coast and Los Campesinos! The latter are of special significance to both my life in general, and this site in particular. They’re probably my favourite British band currently doing the business, and their newest album ‘Hello Sadness’ is definitely their best yet. If LC! had been around when I was 16, they’d have been my religion, and I’d have already written about them in here a hundred times.
Blur released a couple of new songs! ‘The Puritan’ doesn’t do a whole lot for me, but ‘Under The Westway’ is gorgeous.
Recent YG-subjects Ash will be coming to Orlando later this year, supporting Weezer for two nights. I’ll see them at least once, and try and get an interview too. We’ll see how that goes.
I saw the LCD Soundsystem documentary. It was great.
Lately, I’ve been really enjoying the new Passion Pit record ‘Gossamer’, and of course ‘Channel Orange’. That song ‘Pyramids’ is just sensational.
Finally, enjoy this song. I had forgotten it existed. Two equally insane Welsh bands come together and Wayne Kramer gets a shout out.

As it won’t surprise you to hear, YG updates in the future will be equally sporadic, but I aim to do miscellaneous posts like this every so often to remind you that I’m still alive. I update my Twitter feed with more regularity, because a sentence and a half is a lot less of an undertaking than a thousand words about Hundred Reasons. (Note to self: Future post about Hundred Reasons).

No update this week

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 16:32:18 -0400

Again, it’s been a busy week, so I’m sorry to say that there’s no new YG update today. I will give you this music video by Welsh rockers The Crocketts, though. They were quite good.

Ash

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 12:59:56 -0400

I was inspired to write about the Northern Irish trio today because, (a) they are currently celebrating their 20th anniversary of existence, and (b) as part of such, my friend Suzi got to sing ‘Oh Yeah’ with them last weekend. Suzi is John’s wife. You know, John, who’s written about Symposium and Kenickie here before. Comedian Josie Long (perhaps you recently heard her on WTF or International Waters?) also sang with Ash, but she’s not (yet?) a friend of Youth Groups, so no embedded video for her. One day, I’ll get Suzi to write about Ash for this site, too, but for now, enjoy this clip of her proudest ever moment.

Even before the band’s album ‘1977’ shocked everyone by getting to number one, their single ‘Kung Fu’ had already made something of an impact on me. It began with sampled fighting noises, flew by at 100mph, had a gorgeous chorus, and was absolutely the sort of fuzzy, furious-but-tuneful song that a pre-teen like me lived for. And it namechecked Mr. Miyagi and Jackie Chan.

After that, it was ‘Girl From Mars’, another insanely catchy tune that began quietly and wistfully but took off after fifteen seconds. I hadn’t yet experienced the thrills of falling in love (with a girl from Earth), but the song explained wonderfully those giddy moments, plus the inevitable heartbreak that comes with it. I still don’t know what Henry Winterman cigars are, but I think that’s besides the point. To this day, ‘Girl From Mars’ is one of those perfect little songs that will always remind me of the mid-90s and make me smile.

A couple of other singles followed, including the aforementioned ‘Oh Yeah’, and the superior ‘Goldfinger’, both of which made the top ten, before ‘1977’ came out. The album was a hit with my circle of friends. Here was a group of dudes (I’m talking about Ash, not us) that were just a few years older than us, who’d put together a simple, uncomplicated, record of perfectly crafted songs that we immediately fell in love with. Nowadays, ‘1977’ feels a little too top-heavy, especially with a one-two-three punch that holds up next to any of my favourite albums. ‘Lose Control’, ‘Goldfinger’, ‘Girl From Mars’. Boom. But nonetheless, it’s a great listen all the way through and as an old and grumpy man, I love listening back to it and jumping up and down.

After that, the band got a high-profile spot recording the title track to Danny Boyle’s much-anticipated ‘Trainspotting’ follow-up, ‘A Life Less Ordinary’. A lot of people are down on that film, because it’s not as dark and gritty as ‘Trainspotting’ (or ‘Shallow Grave’), but I’ve got a real soft spot for it. Part of that is down to the Ash tune, which already sounds like a band more grown up than the one that made ‘1977’. When they sing “Take me in your arms again”, it’s pretty irresistible. It’s sort of an orphan, as it doesn’t appear on any of their studio albums, so I was always delighted to hear it live.

After touring their tails off, the band was feeling burned out by the time they came to write their next album. They also added a new band member, Charlotte Hatherley, to play second guitar. The album, ‘Nu-Clear Sounds’, is markedly darker and there’s definitely less of the pop-driven fun that powered ‘1977’. First single ‘Jesus Says’ was pretty good, second single ‘Wild Surf’ wasn’t.

The album had a very mixed reaction, which didn’t do the band dynamics any good. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

In 1999, Tim Wheeler disappeared for a short while following the commercial and critical failure of Nu-Clear Sounds. He eventually emerged in New York making the self-deprecating, blood, drug and sex fueled video for Numbskull. A note for [manager] Stephen Taverner attached to the video said, “I’ve killed Bambi”.

That controversial ‘Numbskull’ video is pretty hard to find on this internet, but you can watch it here. It won’t let me embed it. Sorry.

They took a little longer to regroup, clear the cobwebs and plan their next month. The next album was recorded in the garage where their earliest material had come from. In early 2001, we heard their big comeback single ‘Shining Light’. It was upbeat, anthemic, sweet, and indicated that maybe the darkness was behind them. It put Ash back in the top ten. The song is so great, even Annie Lennox has covered it.

After that came ‘Burn Baby Burn’, another addition to the ever-growing list of all-time classic Ash singles. Beginning with a wave of feedback, then a simple chiming riff, huge drum fill and then every instrument turned up to 12, it’s just perfect. The Ash of old. They’d begin live sets with this and everyone would be delighted.

The album ‘Free All Angels’ came out in the spring, and put Ash back to #1 on the album charts. There were plenty of great moments on the record - ‘Pacific Palisades’, ‘There’s A Star’, ‘Cherry Bomb’ - but nothing touched the majesty of the opener. I talked before of ‘Girl From Mars’ and its description of young love and all its highs and lows. ‘Walking Barefoot’ opens the album with just Tim Wheeler and a guitar and the sentence “your beauty took my breath away”. A few lines later, Charlotte adds some backing vocals, before the drums thunder in. A huge, huge chorus eventually shows up and this becomes one of the all-time greats. Even the (frankly, bananas) lyric “Anointed by Apollo and his chariot” cannot harm this song.

I saw the band a couple of times that year. Headlining the second stage at Reading, I found them lacking in personality. For all the great songs, it felt workmanlike and I wasn’t too impressed. Then, I saw them at the Brixton Academy in December 2001, and my review opened like this:

You know how some people have relatives who are really quite distant, so much so that they’re called “twice removed” or something, a term nobody really understands? And when you see them once every six years, you never recognise them because they’ve changed so much? Tonight, the Ash that play Brixton are so unrecognisable from the Ash that played at this year’s Reading, that you begin to wonder how many times they’ve been removed. Man, they were awesome.

Even though my glasses got trampled, I had a great time. Ash = The kings of 2001.

The next summer, somebody finally wised up to the fact that Ash are a peerless singles band and put out a Greatest Hits album. The artwork made it look like a comic book and I think it even came with a comic book. The compilation, ‘Intergalactic Sonic 7s’, came out just after I left for the U.S., but I was so eager to get a promo copy that I was checking with their press guy at least twice a day, the week before I left, to see if the promos were in yet. Thankfully, it arrived on literally the last day that we got post at our London address.

The album did come with one new song, which really didn’t do a whole lot for me, but it has a fun video. Andy Dick is in there apparently, as well as people dressed up as the Hives and the White Stripes.

Then I moved here, and Ash dropped off my radar a bit. Charlotte Hatherley went out with Edgar Wright for a while, so there are a couple of songs from the band’s next album ‘Meltdown’ featured in ‘Shaun of the Dead’. (Also, he directed the charming video for her solo single ‘Bastardo’). While the singles on ‘Meltdown’ were pretty good, especially ‘Orpheus’…

…the song I most latched onto was ‘Out of the Blue’, the greatest song Weezer never wrote. It’s like a European cousin to ‘Surfwax America’, and I put it on many a mixtape that summer.

I haven’t really kept up with Ash since then. They released another album called ‘Twilight of the Innocents’, and then said goodbye to the traditional distribution system. It was a ballsy move, to stop putting out formal albums anymore, but it seems to have paid off for them. They’ve put out a lot of standalone singles, and collected them onto full-length albums, but I confess I’ve not listened to their stuff in a long while.

As this ASH20 event affirms, though, there are still plenty of people who were teenagers in the late 90s for whom Ash will always be cool older brothers (and sister). Legends.

No update this week

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 15:46:07 -0400

Sorry, everyone, but I’ve recently started a new employment thing, plus the European Championship is happening, so I haven’t had time to write about a band today. There’ll be regular service next week, though, and until then, here’s the anthem to end all anthems.

Regular Fries

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:57:04 -0400

In my post about Ikara Colt, I mentioned a genre called The Scene with No Name, which a) did, in fact, have a name, and b) it was a fucking stupid name. Well, today to (almost) match the inanity of that title, let me tell you about Skunk Rock. The Lo-Fidelity Allstars (also former Youth Groups subjects) were the biggest names within this scene, and that ought to tell you something about it. Other bands in the bracket included Campag Velocet (starring the world’s most handsome man), and London heartthrobs Regular Fries.

Now, usually when you hear about bands with journalists in them, you think “oh, this probably won’t be good”, and that’s what I first thought about the Fries. It didn’t help that the responsibilities of said writer, Paul Moody, were “synthesizer, vibes” according to an early press release. Their ‘Free The Regular Fries’ EP was meandering, but its follow up ‘Fries Entertainment’ showed some more promise. Sounding a little like the Lo-Fis but also like a bad hangover, they delivered a lot of promise, but within a thick layer of “don’t give a fuck”-ness. Which of course meant that they were as shambolic as they were sublime.

Their live shows reflected this - there were grooves and beats and also camouflage netting and birdcages. The first time I saw them was that Lo-Fi Allstars I wrote about before, the one where their singer never showed up because he had in fact quit the band that very afternoon. We didn’t know this when the Fries went on, and they covered the stage with netting and camouflage gear. The singer spent a lot of time shaking a giant birdcage. One guy that wasn’t the singer yelled at the crowd for most of the show. They had promotional bank notes which rained over the crowd. ‘Dream Lottery’ began most of their live shows, and featured the drums fading in, and getting more and more psychedelic. There may have been a saxophone in there. It was a racket the kind of which you rarely find in nature, and though we mostly enjoyed it, plenty of people very adamantly did not.

My friend Nico would later write these rules for attending a Regular Fries live show:

When at a Regular Fries gig all individual(s) must be suitably off their Bill and Teds in one of the following way(s):

Take copious amounts of anything that sounds like a Japanese make of car.

If access to such things is denied because you are a) sad or b) have no f(r)iends, hit head against wall a lot.

If all else fails, pretend to be Pinocchio and do the Hamster Dance.

I always elected for option #3.

They had a single called ‘King Kong’ which might have been a love song but it was about the notorious celluloid monster. In the summer of 1999 came the album ‘Accept the Signal’, which paired some pretty great songs - ‘King Kong’, ‘Dust It’, ‘Dream Lottery’ - with some truly horrific lyrics. “Deep sea diver, dear Lady Godiva, lend us a fiver… the girls” went ‘The Girls’.

Their calling card, though, was always the lumbering, stoned ‘Dust It’, which never gets out of second gear, but is still perfect for head nodding.

In January 2000, they supported Asian Dub Foundation at the Astoria, and it was a severe mismatch between the bands, and I was one of the few who enjoyed both sets immensely. The drummer wore an Army helmet, and as well as favourites from ‘Signal’, they debuted a couple of new songs, including the more techno-influenced ‘Blown A Fuse’. It was fun to watch a roadie try to cut down all their netting to get the stage ready for ADF. Again, most people in the audience weren’t feeling it though.

By the time album #2, ‘War on Plastic Plants’ came out, only a year after the debut, people had already moved on from Skunk Rock, and it went unnoticed. A shame, because somehow it was MORE mental than its predecessor. For one thing, there was a song called ‘Africa Take Me Back, which was incongruous coming from the whitest, palest men you will ever look at. Legit superstar producers Jagz Kooner and Dave Fridmann were brought in. ‘Eclipse’ is a song that’s even sort of sweet, even if the vocals sound like they’re being delivered by a man in a cave. With a cold.

Best of all, there’s a track featuring their spiritual forefather Kool Keith, a man so nuts, he makes the Fries look like Dr. Stephen Hawking or something. And this was then remixed by James from the Manic Street Preachers! Nothing makes sense in the world of Regular Fries.

They drifted away after that, yet incredibly there exists a Best Of album which looks entirely unauthorized.

My buddy Sal once wrote of the band, “they’re what you get if an Ikea Store crashes into Cape Canaveral with 8 joyous, energetically manic Bez type people including a legionnaire, thrown in.” That covers it pretty well, I feel.

Kenickie

Thu, 31 May 2012 13:00:00 -0400

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 some place called “Sunderland”. Shampoo with guitars, right?

Everything you know about Kenickie is wrong.

I mean, for starters let’s just look at some of the cheerful lyrics to be found on debut album “At the Club”.

“Now her kisses - full at first - ache like blisters waiting to be burst. She is alone” (Millionaire Sweeper)

“I’m too young to feel so old” (In Your Car)

“The good Lord filled my veins up with silt from the river, that’s how my blood runs cold…. stretched my skin across a frame like canvas, that’s how my sense is numb…. drain my colour, leave me grey, there are too many moths around when I shine” (How I Was Made)

“I think that everyone looks better when they’re sad. It’s ok to be sad” (Brother John)

Well, that was profoundly depressing. And that’s before we get to “Robot Song”, which I’ve always taken to be about staying in an abusive relationship because you lack the self worth to leave. And that was their upbeat album.

*****

Let’s declare an interest: Kenickie are probably the most important thing to have ever happened to me.

Picture the scene: It’s 1998 and having set my heart on the London School of Economics, I’m just filling up my university application form with any old rubbish, and can afford to include the University of Durham, just because one of my favourite bands – Kenickie - appear as alumnus in the prospectus (drummer Johnny X was studying there at the time, while singer Lauren Laverne had deferred a place to be a pop star).

When it later transpired the London School of Economics did not have its heart set on me and I actually do have to go to Durham. Where I meet many important people in my life, including my wife and the mother of my child (who until reading this were unaware of each other’s existence), start an accidental career in words and for a time even live in this “Sunderland” place.

In fact, the decision to move to Sunderland at all was taken when X walked past me as I wandered around the city centre weighing up pros like “close to Newcastle” and cons like “not actually Newcastle”, inevitably interpreted by me as fate.

In a way which sounds quaint in 2012, I actually fell in love with Kenickie before I heard a note of their music, during in an interview in a magazine. Vox magazine! They were smart, they were irreverent, they were fearless, they were funny. They had more style, wit and verve than all the rest of the post-Britpop bloke rock landfill put together. They were kinda hot. It was love.

Between them - Laverne, guitarist Marie DuSantiago and bassist Emmy-Kate Montrose - they were a hilarious, unstoppable six-legged force of nature – which sadly it’s only really possible to showcase in this clip of them introducing the beyond-terrible video to the brilliant Motown-punk of Nightlife.

It was this charisma which gave the band a profile way in excess of their actual commercial success.

I mean, comedy show Smack the Pony even parodied their videos, which is a pretty odd thing to happen to a band whose biggest-selling single peaked at #24.

They were all over the place – every TV show, every radio show, every magazine, even the Daily Star, wanted them to come on and be riotously hilarious, and if they had to, even to play on of their songs. “We’ve got our gang, I know we’ll always be friends” roared “Come out 2nite” (which by the way amnesiac snobs, topped John Peel’s Festive Fifty in 1996) and Kenickie were the coolest gang in down. And you wanted to be in that gang.

It’s not to say this endearing silliness which made their name and defined their image is totally absent from the band’s actual music - “PVC IS MY FAVORUTIE PLASTIC! COS IT’S NICE AND SHINY! AND COMPLETELY WATERPROOF!” runs the chorus to ‘PVC’ while b-side ‘Drag Race’ namechecks Gordon the Gopher before concluding “Tim from Ash is foxy!” – it’s just often overshadowed everything else they had to offer.

Despite its curiously flat production, debut album “At the Club” has stood the rest of time pretty well. Songs like ‘Nightlife’, ‘In Your Car’ and ‘Punka’ - a magnificent two-fingered salute to the puritans who ostracized the band for daring to sign to a major label - were and remain absolute belters, melding pop hooks, girl group vocals, buzzsaw guitars and deceptively thoughtful lyrics to impressive effect, while reflective moments like ‘Acetone’ are undeniably affecting.

It went top 10. And most of them were still only 19. What could possibly go wrong?

*****

“Worst thing that could happen to us? We stop making records and hate each other” (Emmy-Kate Montrose, 1997)

“‘Oh Kenickie, the bargain bins, why were they never successful?’ - No one fucking says that about Mogwai or Arab Strap. We were only judged that way because we were girls. We had a Top Ten album, all our singles went in the charts, we recouped - but it was like, ‘You’re girls, you’re like the Honeyz’” (Lauren Laverne, 2000)

I’d love to know what happened next. Certainly Kenickie have never said.

“If I was a Kenickie fan I’d want to know what happened, but I just feel, well… fuck off, really. I’m not a Spice Girl; I don’t have to say anything I don’t want to” bristled Laverne uncharacteristically shortly afterwards.

Whatever it was, it was messy.

As a tour video at the time shows, the band were by this time a very long way from the indestructible unit of old. They’re at best exhausted, and at worst downright dysfunctional.

Between albums, DuSantiago moved to second guitar to allow X to come out from the drum kit and take over lead. He, not her, was now joint principle songwriter alongside Laverne. Doubtless as a consequence, second album “Get In” isn’t just different from its predecessor - to all intents and purposes, it’s the work of an entirely different band. On the plus side, its attempt to redefine the group as a sophisticated pop group in the vein of St Etienne or Stereolab is the sound of a group refusing to be pigeon-holed as the band you think they are, a concerted attempt to make Kenickie into something more than “those daft girls from up North”.

On the down side, it was commercial suicide.

If you’re going to be quite so drastic, you’re going to have to do something pretty bloody spectacular to avoid your fanbase just going “huh?” and giving their money instead of shite like Suede and Mansun, and to win over people who think “Kenickie, fuck off, they’re just those daft girls from up North”.

Which is exactly what happened.

As X himself said in the aftermath of the inevitable split, “If this was about selling records, ‘Get In’ would sound like ‘At The Club’, only more refined and with bigger choruses. Maybe then the people who like shite like Suede and Mansun would have bought it, as they did the first album”

This doesn’t mean that soungs like, “I Would Fix You” and “Weeknights” aren’t brilliant, because they are - in fact the former is probably one of the greatest things anyone has ever done with sound – with the weird disco of ‘Magnatron’ and the plaintive ‘Lunch at Lassiters’ not far behind. But regrettably, ‘Get In’ is not pretty bloody spectacular.

The album peaked at 32. Second single “Stay in the Sun” died a death. And that’s all folks. How often have we heard that around here?

*****

A decade or more on, Johnny X continues to do all sorts across the North East music scene working with the likes of Field Music and Frankie and the Heartstrings as both a musician and producer, albeit under his real name; Emmy-Kate Montrose is in academia, and Marie DuSantiago is quite high up in the arts. In a weird continuation of Kenickie’s bewildering impact on my life, our paths used to cross professionally on the odd occasion and in my most pathetic ever boast we’re even connected on LinkedIn.

I’m not sure what happened to the other one. I think she did a dance record about one of Arab Strap, but not a lot since.

Arab Strap

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:49:57 -0400

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 about a band that I still straight-up love. The story of me and Arab Strap took place almost exclusively after I moved to the States, so they’re technically a post-Youth group, but it’s still going to be fun to talk about, and I make the rules so there.

Before 2002, I was only vaguely aware of Aidan and Malcolm. Sure, I knew the Belle and Sebastian song that was named for them, and that they were on Chemikal Underground Records, but I’d only heard a couple of songs, over a couple of years, and they’d not really made much of an impression. I read that they were dour and lo-fi, and that didn’t sound like something I’d enjoy, so I left them alone.

During my first semester as an American college student, my friends Lindsey, Rachael and I went on a road trip from Tallahassee to New Orleans, to see my beloved Delgados. It was the first time I was seeing the Glasgow four-piece, and I could not have been more excited about the little getaway. (Admittedly, I did not do any of the driving, fifteen hours in total, else I’d have been less enthused). I’ll write about that gig more in the future when I talk about The Delgados, but by sheer coincidence, their label mates and real life mates Arab Strap were playing in the bigger room downstairs, that same night. The Strap were supporting Bright Eyes on tour at the time, and came upstairs when they were done. I used to have a recording of the Delgados gig, and there’s a very audible “Gentlemen, good evening!” from Alun Woodward when they walked in.

I knew a couple of the guys in the Delgados, so after their show, we stuck around and chatted, and I was introduced to Aidan and Malcolm. Their gig had gone horribly, and they were happy to laugh about it and drink. After that positive experience, I decided that I really ought to check them out again, and I’m glad I did. ‘The Shy Retirer’ was the first song on their fifth album, ‘Monday at the Hug and Pint’, and it hit me straight away. This wasn’t the band I’d previously dismissed as being too dour and lo-fi. Admittedly, the drum machine probably cost about a fiver, but listen to those sweeping strings! And the vocals weren’t obscure mumbles, but well-delivered. And the lyrics were poignant but funny. “You know I’m always moanin / But you jump-start my serotonin” was a favourite, and a regular away message of mine for a while. After seeing the video, with Aidan dancing and hula-hooping, I was hooked.

Not long afterwards, I picked up ‘Monday at the Hug and Pint’. Firstly, I was amazed at how dour it wasn’t. Yes, every song is cripplingly sad and reading the lyrics will make you want to cry into your chips, but the arrangements and orchestrations are just so lush. And Aidan Moffat just sings the shit out of it. Listen to the way ‘Act Of War’ starts in the clouds and only goes up from there.

Then there’s the bagpipes of ‘Loch Leven’, or the insistent bassline and menace of ‘Flirt’. ‘Serenade’ is imperial, as Moffat sings of “the kind of girl I want to bathe and dance with”. Or the way ‘Meanwhile, at the Bar, a Drunkard Muses…’ segues into ‘Fucking Little Bastards’, an incredible slab of feedback and rage. So so so great.

I spent most of summer ‘03 listening to ‘Monday…’ and its companion live album ‘The Cunted Circus’. The two saddest albums for my first American summer. I also went back a little and gave their 1998 album ‘Philophobia’ a listen, and that opening four-song salvo is still incredible. The band has a nice habit of opening each album with a striking first lyric, and ‘Packs of Three’ succeeds for sure. (Click here for the lyrics, or watch the video below). The song unfolds slowly, building only slightly, but the melancholy is palpable from the very beginning. I wonder if the thick Glaswegian accent just makes everything sound more sad by default.

The next song, though, is the one that will always leave me a blubbering mess. ‘Soaps’ begins so calmly, with a slow simple drum and some strummed guitar chords. “Where d’you go, when you go?” he asks. By the time the organ is in the party, and the vocals are at their most yearning, it’s devastating.

The other one from ‘Philohobia’ that I really love is ‘New Birds’, which is just a spoken word story which escalates and the song descends into a very un-Strap-like noisy outro. Excellent stuff.

In December, the band played my student union. It was incredibly convenient. I went down there early, and talked my way inside to say hello. Among their touring band was my pal Alan, who’d previously played with The Delgados. It was lovely to see him again, and I got to watch the band sound check. They played an incredible version of ‘Fucking Little Bastards’ - don’t forget, this had been one of my favourite songs over the past eight months or so - for an audience of just me and the sound guy. This is what it looked like.

After that, I chatted a bit with Malcolm, who remembered me from New Orleans, and Aidan, who gave me a massive hug and was incredibly charming. After doors opened, Malcolm played a few songs from his solo album ‘5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine’. I was mostly chatting with Alan at the merch table during this, but I remember the final song, ‘Devil and the Angel’, being particularly affecting, and ending with the lyric “your songs are all shite”.

Four songs into Arab Strap’s set, the venue’s fire alarm went off, and everyone had to go outside for a bit. “It must be lunch time” quipped Aidan. After ten minutes outside, they came back and continued as if nothing had happened. They did a wonderful low-key cover of ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ by Van Halen. Everyone danced to ‘The Shy Retirer’. The strings on ‘Serenade’ were majestic. ‘Here We Go’ got a big cheer. I remember thinking “Who are all these Arab Strap fans in Tallahassee? How are they all not my best friends?” It was a great show, and afterwards I was happy to stick around and help at the merch table. I even bought this t-shirt, which as an adult, I never get to wear, but I got a lot of mileage out of it before graduating college.

Charming, right? The drawing’s by Aidan. I’m very proud of this photo, too, of myself, Alan and Aidan. We’re rebels.

In 2005, the band released what would end up being their final album, ‘The Last Romance’. The album wasn’t quite as immediate as ‘Monday’, but a few moments really stood out. (Also, check out the album’s opening lyric). ‘(If There’s) No Hope For Us’ was more uptempo than most Strap songs, an even had a bona fide chorus, as well as duelling female vocals. Very nice.

And then there’s ‘There Is No Ending’. As upbeat a song as they’ll ever write. Brassy. Triumphant. Emphatic. The band didn’t break up for another year, but this serves as a perfect “Goodnight and Fuck You” from Britain’s saddest, yet most glorious, band.

Since then, both members have done solo work. Malcolm’s put out a few albums, the best of which, ‘A Brighter Beat’, is absolutely tremendous. The single ‘We’re All Going To Die’ was an unlikely contender for Christmas Number One in 2007, but not surprisingly, didn’t quite make it. The album’s title track is even better. Most recently, he put out a mostly instrumental album under the name Human Don’t Be Angry.

Mr. Moffat, meanwhile, formed Aidan Moffat and the Best-Ofs, and released an album in 2009 called ‘How To Get To Heaven From Scotland’. The single, ‘Big Blonde’, is charming, and has a fun video.

Arab Strap, then. I don’t think they would’ve fit my tastes when I was 15, but they were the perfect musical accompaniment for my next stage of growing up. There is no ending.

Reef

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:59:00 -0400

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 massive that previous autumn, and (b) Richard buying it meant that I could make a copy for myself. The week it came out, though, he said “I bought this other album instead” and I was horrified. What about Reef? What about me?! The other record was ‘Beautiful Freak’ by an American band I’d never heard of before called eels. I was very annoyed, but ended up enjoying that eels album all the same.

Reef had already put out one album at that stage, which had sort of passed me by. They were from the west country, and had achieved a small level of fame on the back of a song that was in a TV advert for MiniDiscs. (Kids, ask your weird, tech-savvy uncles). That song, ‘Naked’, hadn’t done a lot for me, though it was clear that Reef didn’t sound like most of their peers. Their brand of rock and roll was pretty heavily influenced by funk - crunchy guitars but with jammy basslines and irregular, scat-inspired vocals. They were not exactly Cast or Dodgy, but sounded more like a British Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that I didn’t know at the time.

The song ‘Place Your Hands’ really made them famous, though. Built over a simple guitar riff, it was an instant anthem. It doesn’t hurt when the chorus is basically the phrase “Put your hands up” again and again. (I am aware that the lyric is actually “put your hands on”, but that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense). The single cracked the top ten, was absolutely ubiquitous, and was adapted for use on Chris Evans’ TFI Friday, a TV series that has been mentioned on Youth Groups surprisingly frequently.

In January of 1997, they followed it up with the equally great single ‘Come Back Brighter’, which also made the top ten singles chart. I don’t know what appealed to me so much about them. As I said before, I think it had to do with them being slightly out of touch with the rest of the burgeoning Britpop scene. These dudes had long hair, were surfers, sang loose songs that were meant for parties, weren’t London-centric.

Whatever they were doing was working. Despite Richard’s neglect, the band’s second album, ‘Glow’, went straight in at number one when it was released at the end of January ‘97, replacing the ‘Evita’ OST at the summit. I got the album from somewhere, and my abiding memory of it is my friend Robin - another passenger on the Oakwood coach - singing the song ‘Summer’s In Bloom’, trying to ape Gary Stringer’s unique voice. Listening to the song right now, again I’m struck by how much it doesn’t sound like everyone’s perception of Britpop. The vocals are bluesy, the bass is all the way up, the guitars are muddy. These were clearly guys who were influenced by more than just ‘The White Album’.

I remember that we got a good laugh of the song ‘Consideration’, which would be Reef’s third single. It’s a slow, tender, Motown-influenced ballad. Not bad in theory, right? But Stringer’s foghorn vocals were best suited to balls-out rockers, and his falsetto didn’t suit something this delicate. That said, I’m listening to it now, and it’s not bad at all. A gospel choir is joining Stringer and telling me “it’s gonna be alright”, and I’m swaying appreciatively. The single has aged a lot better than I recall it being.

The final single from the album was ‘Yer Old’, a more crowd pleasing stormer which was an obvious live favourite, and the way he sings “Loife” at the end of the song could not be more west country. I love it.

After that, my short-lived interest in Reef dropped off a bit. Their next album ‘Rides’ came and went, and didn’t make much of an impact. In fact, it’s the only one of their records whose album art isn’t on its Wikipedia page. The album charted at a very respectable number three, despite its lead single ‘I’ve Got Something To Say’ being another slow-ish one, whose video shows a white-suited Gary Stringer squatting on the bonnet of a car.

I’ve very little recollection of ‘Rides’, or its followup ‘Getaway’, which came out in 2000. By this time, my interest had moved elsewhere, and so too had the interest of most casual music fans. I do recall the single ‘Set The Record Straight’, and I thought it was pretty good. Reading up about them now, apparently they filmed a music video at a gig in the bass player’s flat, which was attended by one of The Corrs. Fascinating? Watch and decide for yourself.

Why am I still telling the Reef story? We’re now in 2000, when it’s clear that my interest was waning by mid-1997. Well, I got to see the band for the only time in the winter of 2000. They were playing at Shepherds Bush, and were supported by a couple of long-since forgotten bands that I rather liked, Wilt and Crashland. (I really liked the latter, and you’ll hear more about them here in the future FOR SURE). I remember our guest list tickets were for balcony seats, which were ideal since both my friend Tom and I were wearing giant coats - it was a particularly chilly London night. We stuck around to see Reef, because why not?

Reading my review of it now, I was obviously in that terrible “don’t admit you liked the uncool band” bubble, because I wasn’t very kind. I said: “The problem with the fast songs, though, is that they’re all the same formula: Kenwyn House plays a riff, drums go du-du-du-du-du-du, and then bass and vocals come in. And when it’s the same, song after song after song, it grates.” I then added the worst kind of backhanded compliment - along the lines of “Well, everyone else had a great time, so I guess they’re good at what they do, but objectively, it’s all rubbish” - and probably felt high and mighty. What a creep.

Now that I’m older and far less concerned about looking cool (for real, I’m wearing an ugly short-sleeved collared shirt right now and I love it), I don’t mind giving Reef their props. They had a thing, they did it really well, and loads of people enjoyed it. What’s wrong with that? They’ve been reforming and recording on and off for the last decade, but haven’t released any new material yet. They’re back together at the moment and touring in the U.K. and Australia. I do think it’s weird that they released three studio albums, yet have four greatest hits collections. But that’s alright. Reef, you proved Richard wrong. That’s enough for me.

Straw

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:01:10 -0400

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 was more popular than the band’s official one. So, based entirely on one single and a couple of b-sides, I started “World of Straw” - clever boy - which, in a good week, could attract upto fifteen hits.

What was it about them that I liked at the time? It’s hard to say. ‘Weird Superman’ is an uptempo indie song. Almost fifteen years later, there’s really not a lot to it. I wonder if the reason I got SO into Straw, more so than anyone else, possibly on the planet, is that they were so obscure, and I wanted to champion a band that nobody else knew about. Never mind the fact that they were on a major label; even at 14, I had that dumb indie mentality of hitching up to this band in its infancy and hoping for the best.

Of all the bands that’ve been covered in Youth Groups, Straw may well be the ones who I got over the quickest. I first heard them when I was 15, was in love with them at 16, and had moved on by 17. The band’s second single, ‘The Aeroplane Song’, was to be their only top 40 single, making #37 in February 1999. It had a catchy keyboard riff, a chorus that was led by the word “Lufthansa” and a charming music video. Even though the music press pretty unanimously decried Straw as being “corporate indie” and “terrible”, my fandom would not be abated.

The first time I saw the band live was at London’s legendary venue, The 100 Club, a couple of weeks after ‘The Aeroplane Song’ came out. I was still young and naive, and assumed that nobody else had heard of the band, so didn’t bother to buy tickets in advance, and sure enough, it was sold out, and we had to buy them from a tout (scalper). My bad mood about that was soon turned around, just by watching the band’s crew set up the stage for them. Each band member had a neon sign that said ORGAN, GUITAR, DRUMS, SINGER, that lit up at showtime. I remember enjoying the gig a whole lot, though again, I was pretty heavily in love with the band at this time.

Thanks to the website, I had been in fairly regular email correspondence with band member Duck, who played keyboards, and as luck would have it, I got to meet him for the first time that April. I recognized him at a Younger Younger 28s gig at the Improv Theatre, which is no longer around. I attended that gig, incidentally, with Stephen Eastwood, who wrote about music for Teletext. That is a sentence that, maybe five people will care about. Anyway, I think Straw and YY28s shared a manager or something, so Duck was there, and I went and said hello, and he was very nice and offered to buy me a drink. I was 16, and didn’t know anything about drinks. But I sure as shit didn’t want to look uncool, so I said “I’ll have whatever you’re having”, which turned out to be a Jack and Coke. And that, friends, is the story of my first alcoholic drink!

The band’s next single was called ‘Moving To California’, and it’s all about getting dropped by your label, and not having the confidence to tell your mates that things aren’t going well. “I’m Moving to California, at least that’s what I’m telling my friends” goes the chorus. Prior to forming Straw, Mattie, Duck and Roger had been in a band that got dropped before releasing anything, so the song came from a personal place, and would prove to be incredibly prescient about the future too. It holds up pretty well, better than most of the band’s songs. Nice guitar work. Strings on top of everything, as was customary at the time.

For their next single, the label flew the band to Miami to make a video. It’s a fun, upbeat, summery song, that was released just in time for the summer and was called ‘The Soundtrack Of The Summer’. See how that works? Gotta respect a major label single that uses the word “tampon” in its lyrics, though.

Can’t remember the exact chronology, but at some time in the spring or summer, the band’s debut album ‘Shoplifting’ came out to generally weak reviews. Of course, I dug it, but then I bought a promo copy a couple of weeks before release. It had an embossed cover! In addition to the singles, there were a couple of other songs that I immediately loved. ‘Wake Up (Miss Venezuela)’ took aim at beauty pageants, and often began the band’s live sets. ‘Anthem for the Low in Self Esteem’ was suitably upbeat and bouncy. ‘Dracula Has Risen From The Grave’ was okay. If my descriptions here seem a little sparse, it’s because I’ve not listened to the album in many years, and playing it now, I’m not exactly reinspired to write a lot about them. It’s generic, middle of the road indie, the kind that had already started to fall out of fashion by the time it was released. It has not aged well at all.

In May, my friend Tom and I interviewed the band in their dressing room prior to a show at ULU in London. It was a daft, silly conversation, which was very fun to take part in, though very tough to transcribe afterwards. If anyone would like to read it, let me know. I still have it. The band offered us beer in the dressing rooms and we gladly accepted. They were a corrupting influence! The gig itself was a lot of fun again - in addition to their own songs, they ended the show with a cover of the Turtles’ ‘Happy Together’, which was equally upbeat and chipper.

A month later, the band played The Other Stage at Glastonbury and did more of the same. It was a big deal for me, Tom, and a handful of others, but most people in the audience were waiting for whatever was coming next. I’m sure this was the biggest crowd that Straw ever played for, though.

And then, after Glastonbury… DISASTER! Guitarist Roger Power left the band, and he emailed me to put an official statement on my website about it. There was nothing too controversial; he just wanted out, and Glastonbury was his last show. He always came off as more quiet and introverted than the other three dudes, so personality-wise it wasn’t a giant shock. But the fact that he had contacted ME to break the story felt huge. Again, I’m aware that only about eight people will have read it. And as I’ve said before, Straw weren’t getting any music press coverage anyway, so the “story” passed everyone else by. For me, it was akin to Guigsy and Bonehead getting kicked out of Oasis.

Roger left and WEA dropped the band. Then, a long absence, broken by the so-so ‘Homework EP’. The lead track, ‘Watching You Sleep’ was pretty mediocre, even to me, though ‘Be Careful’ was pretty and suggested better things.

The band recruited a new bass player called Dan, and returned as a four piece. I saw them for one last time at the Underworld in Camden, and they had a handful of new songs, which didn’t strike me as particularly exciting anymore. It was now the autumn of 2000, and I had discovered Rawkus Records, and Chemikal Underground, and Idlewild, and Straw’s brand of “five years too late” (NME) indie pop just didn’t cut it for me anymore. I gave the website to someone else to run, and sheepishly admitted that maybe this band wasn’t as amazing as I’d told everyone sixteen months earlier.

They put out one more single, ‘Sailing off the Edge of the World’, but the second album never came out. Various snippets are all over YouTube, and it’s a pity they never had a second chance to show the world what they could do.

Mattie Bennett is a media studies teacher now, apparently. It’s funny to watch these YouTube clips and see comments like “Go Mr B!” and things like that. Andy Nixon and Dan McKinna played with Crispian Mills (ex- of Kula Shaker) for a bit. Duck Blackwell produces now, and is probably doing some sort of insane chemistry experiments in a bus.

Straw are the typical Youth Groups band: came and left quickly, I fell in and out of love with them quickly, and people forgot about them quickly.

Elsewhere

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:49:00 -0400

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.

The Wannadies

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:02:02 -0400

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 sure we’ll get to The Boo Radleys at some point in the future, but today’s band is from Sweden, and will forever be remembered for one song.

I didn’t hear ‘You and Me Song’ upon its first release in 1994, but it was reissued a couple of years later and it seemed like the song was everywhere. There weren’t too many songs by obscure foreign indie bands that were getting played on mainstream radio stations like Radio 1 and Capital, but ‘You and Me Song’ managed it. The belated popularity of the song was attributed mostly to its inclusion on the ‘Romeo + Juliet’ soundtrack. (Also home to ‘Lovefool’ by compatriots The Cardigans, another song that basically defined a band’s career). ‘You and Me Song’ was inescapable, yet only charted at number 18. To this day, people may not remember the band’s name, but everyone can recall that insanely bouyant chorus.

Like most of the nation, I sort of forgot about The Wannadies after that song. I’m disappointed now, in retrospect, that I missed out on their album ‘Bagsy Me’ at the time, as it has plenty of songs that I love far more than the aforementioned earworm. I remember hearing ‘Hit’ and ‘Someone Somewhere’ on the radio - probably XFM - and the former, especially made an impression. Did he really just sing “Thursday’s the day after Wednesday”? Of course he did. This is a dumb song about going out, and it’s fun as hell, so it works. I wasn’t in my own going out most nights phase - yet - but this made it sound even more exciting.

For the most part, though, this was not a band I thought about much for a while. Reading up about the band now, apparently this was a tumultuous period for them, with a drummer leaving and long, drawn-out record label strife. But after everything, they hooked up with producers Mike Hedges (again, he worked on ‘Everything Must Go’, so lifetime pass) and Ric Ocasek from The Cars (!) and got to work on the new album. The first anyone heard of this new material was the song ‘Yeah’. I saw the video on MTV 2’s excellent nightly show ‘Brand New’, and it grabbed me at once.

A few months later, the album - also called ‘Yeah’ - followed. First things first. Check out that album artwork. According to frontman Pär Wiksten, the band had felt - ahem - fisted by their label during the recording, and so that’s what the gentleman on the album cover represents. Live, the band had a cardboard prop of the guy, with moving arm. And they put out t-shirts that said “I got fistfucked by the Wannadies and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”, which I cannot find any pictures of anywhere. (BTW, that’s an awkward Google Image Search).

I bought the album as soon as it came out. This was more like it! The opening track, ‘I Love Myself’ is a corker, with grungy guitars, knowingly arrogant lyrics, and a big chorus. Then there’s the already-familiar ‘Yeah’, and that’s followed by two more instant favourites. ‘No Holiday’ begins gently and then has a monster chorus, but it’s still sweet throughout. Like many of the best indie songs, it has sad lyrics covered up by an upbeat song. It’s followed by ‘Big Fan’, an unambiguous ray of sunshine that had a funny video and shares a title with a great film. (They’re wearing NY Giants colours in the music video - coincidence?)

Elsewhere on the album, there were a couple of other really amazing songs. ‘String Song’, in particular, begins quietly before the violins come in and it builds up and up and up (which, if you’ve read Youth Groups before, you’ll know I love) until Pär is yelling “What have you done?” over and over again. There are no videos of the song on YouTube, but when I search for it, the top result is ‘How Many Wanna Die?’ by Ja Rule, which I feel is misleading. There’s an annoying dearth of ‘Yeah’ era material on YouTube. Apparently, following their massive dispute, BMG Records just refused to put the album out in the States, and summarily dropped the band. The second half of the album drops off a little bit, but there’s a song called ‘Ball’ on there that still holds up.

Anyway, after enjoying ‘Yeah’ so much, I finally went back and checked out ‘Bagsy Me’, and it’s pretty great. The opening track ‘Because’ starts off quietly, with distorted synths and filtered vocals, but within about six seconds, it’s a demented upbeat stormer.

It’s followed by ‘Friends’, which became a mixtape staple of mine for years. The pick of the bunch is ‘Shorty’, about that moment when you realize that the girl is too tall for you to stick with.

I only saw the band live once, but it was very memorable. I was 17. It was a Friday night. We used to have a routine for gigs in the West End on weekend nights. Meet at one particular pub, go and see the gig, cool down with a McFlurry at the McDonalds across the road from Tottenham Court Road tube, wait for others to meet us there, and then go to the indie club night at Metro’s across the road. It was as predictable as it was awesome. I remember that, specifically, because that was the sweatiest I’ve ever been at a McDonalds. The band were fantastic. Heavy. Charming. Fun. I remember being right up against the front barrier - an unfamiliar spot for me - during ‘You and Me Song’, and thinking my ribs were going to break, but in a good way. There was obviously so much more to them than just “You… and me… always… AND FOREVER” and I think everyone at their gigs felt like they were in some sort of secret group, that everyone else was missing out on.

After I moved in 2002, the band put out one more album, ‘Before & After’, but I didn’t much care for it. After several years of inactivity, they finally broke up in 2009. They are that rare band that DOESN’T have a best-of compilation, and that’s a real shame, because while their albums are uneven, a singles collection would be unbelievably great. Since they don’t really have a record company that’d go to bat for them for a Greatest Hits, we’re left with a scant YouTube and Spotify presence, and permanently catchy lovable songs like the one below.

Idlewild

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:08:00 -0400

Lots and lots of the songs mentioned in today’s post are included in the rolling Youth Groups Spotify playlist. Subscribe to that, if you’d like!

A wall of distortion. Pure noise. Clattering drums. A screamed “1-2-3-4!” and then some nonsense about culture. Then some semblance of melody. The repeated refrain “A song is a beautiful lie”. Then the same again. And then a third time. Then the pedal is pressed, and the guitars are clean for a few seconds. A big scream and then back to the same, with the clattering drums and the shouting. Some more words and then it ends, rather calmly, less than two minutes after it started.

‘Self Healer’ is the first song on Idlewild’s mini-album ‘Captain’, and as such, is the first song of theirs I ever heard. Having read about them in the press for a while - the NME famously likened them to “a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs” - I braved the horrendous artwork and bought the CD based purely on what I had read.

The six tracks, which came in just under twenty minutes, had a big effect on me. I had just turned 15, and then as now, I didn’t really like anything particularly heavy if there wasn’t a melody at its heart. The guys in Idlewild were only a few years older than me, and in addition to the fury of ‘Self Healer’ (which, for some reason, they would later play acoustically), they also exhibited an ear for a tune on ‘Satan Polaroid’ and ‘Annihilate Now!’ There’s also the eighty-second romp ‘Last Night I Missed All The Fireworks’ - which I annoyed my friends by playing every July 5th from 2003 to 2007 - and the mini-album’s two big tunes, ‘Captain’ and ‘You Just Have To Be Who You Are’. Both were heavy, catchy, shouty, featured lengthy breakdowns, and would become personal and live favourites.

That summer, the band released a couple of singles - ‘Film for the Future’ and ‘Everyone Says You’re So Fragile’. The former was okay; a cheeky take on ‘You’re So Vain’ but with hard guitars. The most remarkable thing about the single was its b-side, ‘Mince Showercap Part 1’, a wonderfully shambolic rocker that - no joke - culminates in somebody reading out a recipe for hummus. For some reason, this tune did not make it onto the band’s 2007 rarities compilation ‘A Distant History’, and for this, I will be forever furious. The single did, though, give the band its first opportunity to make a music video.

On the other hand, ‘Everyone Says You’re So Fragile’ is an instant hit. (Not in the charts, but just as a belter). It storms out of the gates, features the same couple of sentences again and again as the verses - a common Idlewild trick - and even has time for a two second break for Roddy Woomble to yell. It’s fantastic, and I still hope that my numbered 7-inch single will one day be worth millions.

In the autumn, after a third single - the fine if unremarkable ‘I’m a Message’ - came the band’s debut album, ‘Hope is Important’. Beginning with a ten-second, piercing wall of feedback that gave way to a ninety-second statement of intent called ‘You’ve Lost Your Way’, the album collected all the strengths we’d seen from the band up to that point. It was ramshackle, for sure, but that was part of the appeal. In addition to the three singles, there were songs like ‘Paint Nothing’ and ‘4 People Do Good’, which rocked pretty hard but still had discernible choruses and hooks. Indicating a new side to the band, there were also a couple of slower songs. ‘Safe and Sound’ was alright, and featured a violin, but sandwiched in the middle of the record was ‘I’m Happy To Be Here Tonight’, a slow, simple and gorgeous song. I know! I said gorgeous! Nobody saw that coming.

And then there was ‘When I Argue I See Shapes’, the fourth and final single from the album, and instant fan favourite. Despite nonsense lyrics about Syd Barrett, the song has a singalong chorus, and is catchy as all get out. I never loved it as much as most did, maybe for the snobby reason that they had much better songs - ‘Paint Nothing’ is superior, in my opinion - but that said, I never got tired of hearing it.

The first time I saw Idlewild live, it was just after the album had dropped, at ULU. Located on the second floor of a student union building, between (if I remember correctly) a Mexican restaurant and a post office, ULU was a weird venue, but over the next few years, it would become one of my favourite places to see live music. In late November of 1998, Idlewild fans packed out the place and the crowd’s energy, plus the band’s rawness, made for the sweatiest gig I’d ever attended. Nobody argued that the band were virtuousos or amazing musicians - in fact, they were often rough and messy - but that’s what made their early gigs so much fun. Bass player Bob Fairfoull, particularly, usually looked like he had just woken up from a long nap. (Bob ended up being a friend of a friend, so we met him around a couple of times, and he was always very sweet). I would see them at least six more times over the next four years, and they always got better.

After touring ‘Hope is Important’ extensively, the band hooked up with producer Dave Eringa to work on some new songs. Now, Eringa may not be a household name, but he had worked on ‘Everything Must Go’, and so it was clear that whatever they came up with, I would love it. The first fruit of this collaboration, the grammatically-unacceptable single ‘Little Discourage’, was something special. For the first time, the band had successfully combined their rocking side with a catchy chorus and huge hooks, and it signaled a new level of focus. Listen to it now: as the song hurtles towards its conclusion, Roddy repeats the same lyrics over and over again while Rod keeps singing “All I need is a little discourage” and it’s heavenly… and THEN a second guitar chimes in with another riff. It’s entirely perfect.

They toured to promote the release of the single, and we saw them at the Astoria. As if I wasn’t already excited about their next record, that night made me even more so. They opened with another brand new song, which just repeated the sentence “Listen To What You’ve Got’ several times before erupting. They also played another great new song, called ‘Roseability’, about which I said at the time, “the most melodious chorus the band has ever done”. A few months later, after terrific single ‘Actually It’s Darkness’, album number two was with us.

I’ll just come out and say it. I think ‘100 Broken Windows’ is a perfect album. It’s in my all time top five and is unlikely to ever leave. Everything the band had done had finally been fully realized. The singles were radio friendly but also moshpit friendly and collectively boasted more hooks than some kind of factory that predominantly made hooks. Elsewhere, ‘I Don’t Have The Map’ and ‘Rusty’ rocked like magnificent bastards but also showed a level of polish that the band’s earlier output had lacked. The band started to get compared to Echo and the Bunnymen and, particularly, REM a lot more.

Every song on this record continues to do it for me. Perfect chorus after perfect chorus after perfect chorus. Rod and Roddy’s harmonies working together just right. The song ‘The Bronze Medal’ having the balls to end an upbeat album on a downbeat note, but doing so successfully. I listened to ‘100 Broken Windows’ today on my walk to the library and back, and it reminded me of being 17 and feeling on top of the world, and if that doesn’t make an album great, then I don’t know what does.

Seeing the band at Reading in the summer of 2000 was a disappointment only because they were on the main stage in the middle of the afternoon, and if you weren’t right at the front, the space was too enormous to build up any kind of atmosphere. John Hart’s review mentions a saxophonist joining them onstage for ‘Captain’, which I don’t remember at all, but if that’s true, that’s amazing. That October, at the Shepherds Bush Empire (notice how they keep moving up to bigger and bigger venues), the band had a new second guitarist onstage with them, which gave them a newfound level of musical consistency. As my pal Olly put it, it was nice for them to have “Someone to fall back on when Bob drops his bass or when Rod falls over.”

—

Turns out, the band’s ascendancy was only just beginning. In early 2002, the band released their new single ‘You Held The World In Your Arms’. With its keyboards-as-string-sections, it sounded more mature than anything the band had ever done before, but retained all the charm and power of ‘100 Broken Windows’. The video was played on MTV2 in the UK all the time, and it became their biggest ever hit, charting at #9.

The single that followed, however, is the one that really did it for me. Early in the summer of 2002, I told my friends that my family and I were moving to the States. The move itself was obviously a big deal, and though excited about it, I was going to miss my gang. While I was certainly not a ringleader or anything that important, the group did gravitate together through my website, and most of our plans were made on its message board. I didn’t know what’d happen to the site, and whilst I was sure everyone would remain close in my absence, I was sad to be leaving.

Given how emotional I was, you can imagine how I felt when our beloved Idlewild - one of the few bands that just about everyone in the group loved - released a gorgeous single about maturity and moving on and called it - seriously - ‘American English’. That’s some serendipitous shit right there. The song became a symbolic anthem among the Brain Farm crew and will never not mean the world to me. And the video had fairy lights.

I got to see the band do a couple of very low-key shows prior to album number three being released. One was at the Hanover Grand in London, which my little sister won us tickets for. (Thanks, XFM! No thanks, press company that couldn’t swing it!)

The other was at King’s College. I wrote at the time: “Pick of the bunch [of new songs] is ‘I Am What I Am Not’, which rocks with the power of a million horses, and sees Roddy climb the bass drum, jump off, walk into Rod, ricochet off his mic-stand, bounce off Bob, and end back up on the bass drum.” That night, during the encore, the sound system started to buckle, and the band scrapped the setlisted encores and did a raw, explosive ‘Captain’. I wrote “It’s just like the first time we saw Idlewild - the musical stability provided by Jeremy on second guitar has been cancelled out, so it’s just an explosion of arms, cymbals and screams.” One of the songs eschewed, incidentally, was a cover of ‘I Found That Essence Rare’, a good two years before seemingly every new band in Britain falling at the feet of Gang of Four.

So then, ‘The Remote Part’. Some longtime fans were dismayed at the polish and the lack of raw, demented fury that had characterized the band’s early output, but not me. I was mostly annoyed that the band had a new logo. The album did plenty of things very well. ‘A Modern Way of Letting Go’ filled the ‘I Don’t Have the Map’ position of short, fast, second track.

‘Century After Century’ and, especially, ‘Stay The Same’ were terrific faster songs, the latter sounding like the Idlewild of old. But this time, there were an even balance of fast and slow songs. The slow songs were generally pretty good, but that took some getting used to. Again, it didn’t bother me all that much, as I can’t begrudge a band growing up and maturing musically, but it’s certainly an album that I go back to far less than its predecessor.

The album’s closing song, ‘In Remote Part/Scottish Fiction’, featured a cameo from Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, and is one of the band’s finest hours. I love the sweetness of the lyrics, the slow build of instruments arriving, and Morgan’s authoritative Scottish brogue. When I saw them live the final time, Roddy started singing lyrics from ‘The Bronze Medal’ over it, and it just made me love the song even more.

We saw the band, en masse, at Glastonbury that summer. They were on the Other Stage - smaller than the one they’d had at Reading in 2000 - and we were near the front. It was magical, and they closed with ‘American English’. Oh, and the full set is on Youtube.

After that, I moved to America, and paid progressively less attention to the band. There were fewer and fewer songs that I enjoyed on each of their three albums that followed. Nothing against the band, necessarily. They grew older and maturer, and their output reflects that. Similarly, my tastes shifted. For instance, I love the quiet version of ‘Too Long Awake’ that’s buried at the end of the ‘Warning/Promises’ album, and not the reverb-heavy version on the record. The band has been on a lengthy hiatus for the last couple of years, dabbling in solo projects and other work. If they come back, will I care? Maybe not. But Idlewild were a very big part of my youth, and that will always mean the world to me.

Closing note: When I told John that I was writing about Idlewild, he summed them up more brilliantly than I ever could:

Always thought of Idlewild like the classic sitcom life cycle - Hope Is Important = establishing characters/format, 100 Broken Windows/The Remote Part = imperial phase, can do no wrong, Warnings/Promises = running out of ideas, Make Another World = reliving old glories, still good work, but feels pointless, Post-Electric Blues = jesus, is this still going?

No update this week

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:46:25 -0400

Due to my computer being uncooperative; the Florida Film Festival; and a visit from my sister, there’s no new update in Youth Groups this week. Sorry, everyone.

To make it up, here’s the video for Manic Street Preachers’ breakthrough single ‘A Design For Life’, which was released sixteen years ago this week. I could write a book about this song and what it means to me, but I probably won’t.

Back next week!

Symposium

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:02:53 -0400

Here’s our first ever guest post on Youth Groups, written by my pal and new dad John Hart. (He’s a new dad. Not MY new dad. My existing dad remains my dad.) You may remember John from the Six by Seven post and our attempt to interview Chris Olley. John and I went to high school together, and he was one of my regular writers at the Brain Farm. You can follow him on Twitter @groucho_marxist. Enjoy!

The bands which have always meant the most to me - The Smiths, Manic Street Preachers, The Auteurs, Los Campesinos! - have one thing in common: Unashamed intelligence, and a passionate belief that there is no more beautiful way of communicating that than through a pop song.

This is not something which can easily be said about Symposium. Let’s be honest. It’s unlikely anyone would confuse them with that Plato book with the same time.

Symposium were not credible and neither were they even remotely cool. Guitarist Hagop Tchaparian’s invariable stage wear of a plain white t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms made it look like he’d come straight from PE class; fellow guitarist Will McGonagle is still probably getting ID’d to this day, and I once saw frontman Ross Cummins declined entry backstage at his own gig as the bouncer clearly thought there was no way on Earth he was in a band at all, let alone the band. They met at a Catholic boys’ school, and if the memory serves, may once have got themselves in a slight bit of media bother for espousing views with more in common with Republican presidential candidates than rock and roll stars (although I hasten to add, I can’t find any evidence of this ever happening).

“They’re great live”, people would say, “But on record they’re hopeless”.

This does Symposium an immense disservice. In fact debut mini –album* “One Day at a Time” is, in its own way, pretty much perfect. In fact, the opening 18 seconds of debut single “Drink the Sunshine” might just be the most perfect 18 seconds of sound ever recorded.

And this is a song whose chorus runs: “Christmas time in December, the best time I can remember”, a lyric that not only sounds like it was written by a child, but makes zero sense in the context of a song about hanging out with your mates in the sun.

And that’s Symposium in a nutshell. Not so much a Youth Groups band, as a Youth Club band. They were us. They were 17. They formed a band with their mates, arranging the line-up on the basis of who owned a bass rather than who could actually play the bass. They had a handful of hundred- miles-an-hour not-exactly-intellectually rigorous songs packed with big silly choruses and unbridled joy and in 1997, this - plus an appearance on TFI Friday** - was enough to propel a song as limited as “Farewell to Twilight” to #25 in the charts.

Madness producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley imbue “One Day…” with enough ramshackle Panda Pop fuelled charm to make songs like “Fairweather Friend” and the actually-stands-the-test- of-time-quite-well “Fear of Flying” not just work, but be pretty much irresistible. If you can listen to songs like “Smiling” without, um, smiling, then you aren’t human. Plain and simple.

But by now it was 1998. #25 in the charts for a band like Symposium is no longer a remarkable achievement, it’s a failure, and follow-up album “On the Outside” has the same producer as Embrace and The Verve in a presumably label-led move to take Symposium to “the next level” by riding on the coat-tails of bloody Space or something. And it’s here where the wheels start to come off.

It’s not to say that “…Outside” is without its charms. In fact, songs like “The Answer to Why I Hate You” (admittedly released as a single before several songs from “One Day”) “Bury You” and “Disappear” easily match the lunatic teenage fun of its predecessor, with crunchy opener “Impossible” and impressively hard “The End” not far behind.

But far too often the album sinks into a quicksand of mid-paced late-nineties indie mediocrity, not only crassly jettisoning everything which made Symposium magical, but trying to make them a band they plaintively aren’t and never can be. Turning Symposium into Ocean Colour Scene was no more viable than desirable and in this context lyrics like “you’re all going your way, and we’re all going our way, so let’s all go the same way” (um, “Way”) no longer sound endearingly silly. They just sound dreadful.

An absolutely awful arse-end-of-Britpop aping single called “Average Man” (notable at least for being a magnificent example of the ‘band plays in white room’ genre of video) and it was kind of over for Symposium.

But there was still time to go out on a high.

Valedictory single “Killing Position” is arguably Symposium’s finest moment, albeit one that speaks volumes about the “musical differences” to which their dissolution was publically blamed (McGonagle and drummer Joe Birch went on to form the altogether harder Hell is for Heroes, and here it shows). Marrying Symposium’s trademark endearing naiveté to some monstrous riffing this and some other rockier songs like “Peshwari Naan” which appeared in live sets around this time it hinted at an interesting future that was sadly never to be.

Unfortunately these songs only exist in poor-quality live recordings, and Symposium left behind more inexplicable cameos in underperforming britflick “Five Seconds To Spare” (adapted for the screen by Jonathan Coe from his own worst novel, “The Dwarves of Death”) than they did mature works.

But in a cheesy paraphrasing of their own (self-deprecating?) “Nothing Special”, Symposium, the way I think might make me a fool, but I couldn’t get enough of you.

Postscript: Even Symposium’s detractors would acknowledge they were an impressive live prospect. In fact, Melody Maker went as far as to call them “the best live band in Britain”, and they were absolutely right. The internet doesn’t quite record this, but you can see Symposium gleefully tearing the place up on Top of the Pops (of all places) and literally tearing the place up at the 1998 Reading Festival, the latter worth viewing for Cummins bellowing “WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY SHOES…. …oh there they are”, as you can enjoy in the video below.

* Yes, this was a time when bands put out tiny collections of songs out as appetisers to their albums, rather than tacking them on the end of a re-released “deluxe” version

** In these dark days the only place you’d hear music that wasn’t high-NRG reimagining of a BeeGees song

Bonus: Andrew W.K.

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:08:42 -0400

Here’s an unprecedented Saturday update here in Youth Groups. Last night, I saw Mr. W.K. bring his “I Get Wet” 10th anniversary tour through Orlando. Now, I’m not much a fan of his - I enjoy ‘Party Hard’ and ‘She is Beautiful’ but couldn’t name any other songs - but I had some free tickets, a buddy who’s a big fan, and I figured it’d be fun. After all, the words “fun”, “party” and “puke” are the only three in the guy’s vocabulary.

Anyway, the show was indeed really enjoyable. For some reason, there are eight people onstage throughout an Andrew W.K. show, four of whom play guitar, and so it is an assault of noise and energy. I admit, I had a great time. But the reason I’m writing this is because of something I saw in the audience during the show which was really sweet and made me love music and shed my layers of cynicism if only for a moment.

There was a young-looking kid standing pretty close to us who could not have been more than sixteen. He was there with what looked like an older brother. Like us, they were standing just behind the pit, which was aggressive in a charming, friendly way. Still, I am an old man that wears glasses so I was happy staying away from it. Before ‘I Get Wet’ (the song), I saw the younger boy grab his brother’s sleeve, and say “Please?” and then they both made their way into the frenzy. I couldn’t really notice them during the song, while everyone was performing some modified circular conga line, complete with silly string and streamers, but after the song I caught glimpse of them. The youngster was SO HAPPY. He and his brother were hugging and the older kid looked very proud. But the image of the teenager, smiling as though he’d just scored the World Cup-winning goal (or whatever American reference you’d prefer… Superbowl?) has stuck with me since then.

I don’t anything about these guys. But I like to think that it was Junior’s first ever real show - weird that it’s to commemorate an album released when he was six years old, but that’s irrelevant - and he was experiencing the pure joy of being amid sweaty people shouting along to an insane anthem while jumping into one another. I miss seeing that. Maybe it’s because the few gigs I make it to these days are attending by joyless beardstrokers like myself, but that sense of happiness, of sheer excitement, is something that I was trying to recall when I decided to start this project. I never had an older brother to take me to shows; my friends and I all started going out around the same time. I love that this kid has someone supportive who can take him to things like this and encourage him to have the time of his life.

The band did ‘We Want Fun’ (turns out, I recognised that one, too) as a second encore at the end of the night, and a bunch of fans all stormed the stage and were singing and dancing with their white-jeans’d hero. A different very young looking kid was onstage. He looked like McLovin’, and he got prime position between AWK and the lady who sings with him for some reason. This McLovin’ kid had the microphone thrust in his face and screamed “We wanna have fun and we wanna WASTED!” and the look on his face also made my night.

Maybe I’m getting old and sentimental, but seeing these teenagers experience such unbridled joy at a gig made me really happy, and I had to share that with you all.

Embrace

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:01:05 -0400

When people ask me what my first concert was, I answer with “Pulp, Wembley Arena, March 1996”. I’m lucky that I saw that cool of a show at thirteen. It could have been New Kids on the Block or something. But that was one where a friend’s mum drove us to the gig and sat through it with us. For the next year and a half, there were a handful more like that, where someone’s dad would chaperone us, like the TOTP gig I mentioned in the intro. Or, Manic Street Preachers at the Royal Albert Hall – the only gig I’ve ever seen with my dad. It’s just not his thing, okay?

In my mind, the REAL first gig I ever saw means the first gig where my mates and I got on the Tube, found the venue, and were able to enjoy it sans parents, as Garth Algar would say. And for me, that one was Embrace at the London Astoria, December 1st, 1997. But we’ll get to that in a moment. (I’ve been watching a lot of the TV series How I Met Your Mother lately, so that explains the jump back.)

Once again, the sadly-missed Select Magazine was responsible for me discovering these guys. They were the “New band to look out for” in one issue in early ‘97, and they sounded interesting. I still remember the photo of the band – three dudes with long, scraggly hair, and one guy with closely clipped short hair. The caption read “See if you can guess which one’s the drummer” and I thought that was pretty funny.

That weekend, I picked up their ‘Fireworks’ EP on cassette. I bought most things on cassette back then. The EP featured a couple of decent fast songs, a so-so slow one, and last of all, the title track, which is built over a piano and a cello and is super pretty. Here’s something you should know about me: I am a sucker for a good indie ballad. Even if the singer’s voice isn’t technically proficient or whatever, songs with powerful, surging choruses and string sections and sort-of sad lyrics just destroy me. (See also: ‘More Than Us’ by Travis; ‘By The Sea’ by Suede; ‘Run’, the song that singlehandedly propelled Snow Patrol from indie darlings to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’-scoring international supergroup.) And Embrace had a bunch of this kind of song.

I remember watching them on Jools Holland (8^th November, 1997; other guests: M People, Cast, Blackstreet(!)) and they were the lead band on there – the only band that got to do THREE songs. And they didn’t even have an album out yet. That was a big deal. And they looked pretty cool doing ‘Blind’.

Right from the start, Embrace were never cool. The music press had the attitude of “Two mouthy brothers from the North? We’ve seen that before” and didn’t really want to – ahem – embrace the band, so they began as something of a punching bag. They came off as stuffy and combative in interviews and sang really serious-sounding songs, and I wonder if that’s what the problem was. I was 14, and too young to start caring about what was cool and what wasn’t, so I was stoked to go and see them at the Astoria, my first non-Arena, non-with-someones-parent show. The concept of standing on the main floor, in a giant crowd of people was new to me, and it was completely great. I have Embrace to thank for my first experience in a moshpit and for the first time someone spilled their beer down my back. Being in the middle of a large crowd, singing along to something anthemic like ‘One Big Family’ was an unforgettable experience. (Incidentally, the support band that day was Gomez, playing only their 8th ever show. I’m sure they’ll pop up in this column in the future.)

Their debut album, ‘The Good Will Out’, came out in the summer of 1998, and by that time, we were all familiar with most of the songs already. Three of the four tunes from the ‘Fireworks EP’ were on there, plus three other singles, and a bunch of songs we knew from seeing them live. Their big, signature tune ‘All You Good Good People’ never did a whole lot for me, but elsewhere, there was much to admire. Of the upbeat songs, ‘I Want the World’ was the most impressive, with its heavily reverbed guitars and a healthy wash of psychedelic organ. It was hard to resist the naked ambition of the band in the song and its lyrics. But there were a lot of quiet songs on there – perhaps a few too many, as it made the album drag a little too much. That said, at least three of them became lifelong favourites of mine – ‘Higher Sights’, ‘Retread’ and ‘My Weakness Is None of Your Business’ all still hold up today.

The album closes with the title track, which I’m listening to right now, and it still gives me goosebumps. Sure, there’s something cloying about motivational lyrics like “You won’t know how well you’ve played, until you’ve won”, and a giant singalong outro, but so help me, that kind of shit wins me over every time. The first chorus, when the second guitar comes in… gorgeous. The album went straight in at number one.

After the triumph of ‘The Good Will Out’, the band spent the rest of 1998 on something of a victory lap, playing to huge crowds at festivals, and headlining at bigger venues. I think I still have a bootleg of their show at Brixton Academy, where Danny McNamara at one point says “Did everyone who saw us at t’Astoria come back with two mates?” Towards the end of 1999, they put out a new single called ‘Hooligan’, which was absolutely the opposite of what everyone was expecting. The key word to it was “Loose” – something Embrace had never been before. The song was fun, a little lightweight, but breezy, with a simple singalong and a kazoo solo. The press didn’t know what to make of it. Guitarist Richard McNamara sang this one, as opposed to usual vocalist Danny, and his voice is more Dylan-esque, which maybe suits the tune a little better.

In March 2000, the band’s next single ‘You’re Not Alone’ came out and it was a bit more like the Embrace of old, but with brass replacing strings. It was anthemic again, and proved that ‘Hooligan’ was an outlier. The album ‘Drawn From Memory’ followed a couple of weeks later, and this time, the slow tunes didn’t do a lot for me, but the upbeat ones were ace. ‘New Adam New Eve’ had keyboards that sounded like sitars; ‘Yeah You’ had a chorus that came out of nowhere, and single ‘Save Me’ was, again, relaxed, but with a killer guitar solo. The band even came across as more convivial in the press – maybe they felt like they no longer had anything to prove, and were finally enjoying themselves a little?

If you read my post last week about the Cooper Temple Clause, you’ll know that my favourite song of theirs was track one on album two, and the same is true of Embrace. ‘Drawn From Memory’ begins with ‘The Love It Takes’, and it’s a song that builds from warm electronic burbling to a gorgeous, soaring tune. Again, the part where the second guitar kicks in (at 2.07) is pure goosebumps for me. Even today, I adore the song and STILL think it could do with cutting out the final minute or so.

I saw Embrace at the Shepherds Bush Empire with JJ72 and Doves, and they were terrific, and looking back at my review from the time, the key word I keep coming back to again is “loose”.

Then, for a long time, I stopped caring about the band. Their third album came out while I was still in the UK, but I can’t even hum any of the songs. I was 18, out of high school, meeting new people, etc. and I wonder if I was trying to move away from uncool bands like Embrace. The Strokes were obviously the coolest band in the world then, plus I was listening to The Beta Band, Elbow, Seafood, I Am Kloot, The Music… other bands who were newer and cooler. Don’t get me wrong, I still love most of those bands, but Embrace just got lost in the shuffle. And they remained lost to me for a while. I moved to the U.S. and made new friends and discovered new bands. In 2004, they released their fourth album, ‘Out of Nothing’, and it again went to number 1. (Their fifth would do the same). I didn’t hear the lead single, ‘Gravity,’ which was written by Coldplay, but then given to Embrace by Chris Martin. But I read a review that talked up two of the other tracks, ‘Ashes’ and ‘Keeping’, and both are ace. The latter, especially, pushes all my buttons. Starts slow and then soars with optimism? It’s as if they wrote the song for me. ‘Ashes’, meanwhile, has a quiet verse before rising up into the kind of chorus that is designed for festivals and stadiums.

After another album, and a World Cup anthem, in 2006, the band has been on a lengthy hiatus, but they’re due back later this year with album number six. I don’t know that I’m going to jump on it as soon as it comes out, but I’d be interested to see how it turns out. Embrace were a band that never were trendy but still managed three number one albums, which says a lot about their ability to write great songs. Listening back to a lot of them while writing this brings back a ton of memories, and I guess I’ll always be willing to give them another chance.

The Cooper Temple Clause

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:00:05 -0400

Like last week’s inductees to the Youth Groups hall of fame, The Cooper Temple Clause was another band that I was able to get onboard with very early in its existence. I used to get a lot of CDs in the post to write about for the Brain Farm, and I was dedicated enough to at least listen to all of them. The ones I didn’t care for much, I’d pawn off to my writers, most of whom I’d see every day at school, and get them to cover. One day I got a CD-R of TCTC’s first ever release, ‘The Hardware EP’, and I was hooked within about thirty seconds. At the time, I referred to the intro of track one, ‘The Devil Walks in the Sand’, as having “Zepellin-aping enormochords” and I remain very proud of that description. I liked how the song kept getting bigger and bigger and then halfway through just switched course into something a lot more jaunty – out of nowhere – and then brings back those enormous guitars. Also on the EP was the song ‘Way Out West’, which was a bit more straightforward for a while, but then again, got quiet and then got all ferocious for the last couple of minutes. Here was a band that could use electronics, guitars, samples, keyboards, and all sorts of other elements and still be good. And rock like bastards. On their early press releases, one of the dude’s responsibilities were described as “Bass, Madness”.

We got to see the band a few times over that summer (2001), and became pretty familiar with a large chunk of their songs. ‘The Warfare EP’, their second, was released, and was led by ‘Panzer Attack’, a more direct, less proggy, full-on freak-out. I used to have the MP3 of them performing the song on XFM, acoustically and in French. Alas, that recording is in old hard drive heaven now. Live, it really exploded was the regular set-closer. Apparently, later in the band’s life, they always reworked it as a more danceable thing, and that’s all I can find video for, so the clip below is of the album version. Seeing them so many times in a few months, we got used to the rhythm of their songs. They had the short, punchy songs, and the longer, meandering, bass-heavy prog-songs, which also had their moments of paunchiness. I didn’t mind that they were sticking pretty closely to a couple of formulae. It worked really well.

As far as I’m concerned, stage 2 of my TCTC fandom began when I saw them at the Garage in North London in October of that year. As I’ve said, I knew all their songs until this point. They played a pretty similar set each of the five times I’d caught them over the summer. But at the Garage, they opened with a new song! How dare they! It began all spooky with hushed vocals and discordant keyboard loops. Then one guitar came in. Then everything cut out and it was about thirty seconds of droning and build. And then it just stopped for about two seconds before smashing back in, faster than ever. That was the first time I heard ‘Did You Miss Me?’, the song which would go on to open their debut album. At the Garage, they also played ‘Film Maker’ and ‘Been Training Dogs’ for the first time, two other songs that were new to me, but would jointly be the next single. Both were to the point and fantastic, and the latter’s video, where they perform in a giant cage, perfectly captures the energy and insanity of those early live shows. When I saw them at the Scala in December, I was in my very brief phase of wearing contact lenses, and one of them fell out during the headline set, so I missed ‘Amber’ because I had to figure out a way to keep from dying or whatever happens. (An aside: the following night, having learned my lesson about contacts at gigs, I wore my glasses to see Ash at Brixton and – of course – they fell off and got trampled. I can’t win.)

The band’s debut album ‘See This Through and Leave’ came out in February 2002. By this point, we knew most of the songs on there, but a couple – ‘Digital Observations’ and the closing ‘Murder Song’ – hadn’t been played live yet. There was also an instrumental track in the middle of the album which I can never not skip. The familiarity of so many of the songs made the album’s release a little less exciting for me, but even so, it was cool to have all these songs I’d enjoyed for such a long time, together in one place. Album highlight ‘Who Needs Enemies’ was released as the album’s final single, and after seeing one final time at Ocean in Hackney (with Super Furry Animals and, um, Vex Red), I moved to the States. By my estimate, I saw TCTC nine times in about a year and a half, always playing songs from their first album. I’d say that I was quite a dedicated fan.

But that’s not quite the end of the story. A month after I got to Florida, they gave away a new track, ‘A.I.M.’, which was more electronically-grounded but still delivered a huge chorus and massive dynamics. This trend would hold for their second album, ‘Kick Up the Fires and Let the Flames Break Loose’, which came out a year later. For a while, TCTC were one of the few bands from my London days who I made an effort to keep up with, and I’m glad I did. The album, whose title comes from a Larkin poem (as if you didn’t know that), and where the debut was equal parts guitar and electronica, this one was definitely more grounded in loops, synths and keyboards. It’s not much of a surprise that the two most guitar-friendly songs were released as singles. One was ‘Promises, Promises’ and the other was ‘Blind Pilots’, whose music video starred Michael Fassbender. Cool! Warning: It gets weird.

For my money, though, the best song the band ever made was ‘Kick…’’s opener, which is called ‘The Same Mistakes’. I’m a big sucker for songs that start quietly and then slowly build and build and build. (See also, ‘Bad Timing’ by dEUS, anything by Six by Seven). ‘The Same Mistakes’ offers that, while being entirely menacing for the whole journey. It’s almost ready to erupt at any moment, and the gothic layers of keyboards and echoes give it a sense of unease before it finally all explodes in a nice moment of catharsis.

After that, they took a short break, during which Didz (bass, madness) left to join Carl Barat’s band Dirty Pretty Things (hey, that one song was pretty good), and when TCTC returned, I wasn’t too fussed anymore. They released one more album, ‘Make This Your Own’, but I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it all the way through. And in 2007, the band called it quits. The Cooper Temple Clause were one of the few bands who could hit that sonic sweet spot for me, where dance and rock music converge, and unlike most who tried, they actually made it sound amazing. Listening to their first two albums today is fun for the sake of nostalgia, but man, it gets exhausting! These guys really made A LOT of noise. They set out to kill music, and didn’t manage that exactly, but I’m a lifelong fan.

My Vitriol

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:27:00 -0400

Unlike some of the other bands mentioned in here thus far, My Vitrol were actually from London, and as such, there was an eighteen month period when they were always around. Seriously: I saw them at the Astoria, at ULU, at Dingwalls, at the Shepherds Bush Empire, and at the Camden Falcon, now a ~~posh~~ modern apartment complex. I’m sure I’ve seen them like ten times, supporting Mansun, King Adora, JJ72, Feeder, at festivals, at random headline gigs… and I don’t even like them that much. What’s most significant about why I kept coming back to My Vitriol despite my, at best, kinda liking them, was that a) two of them were Indian (possibly Sri Lankan?), and b) their PR guy pushed them REALLY heavily. As in, I’m sure I received their album - and their subsequent and entirely superfluous album reissue - at least three times. Also, I heard a rumour that their name was inspired by ‘Brighton Rock’ and that’s one of my favourite novels, so I gave them some extra points for that.

When the album, ‘Fine Lines’, did get released, it had several annoying intro-style snippets, as individual tracks, which led into the singles. This inflated the thing to a 16-track monster, which bugged me at the time, for no good reason.

The band’s primary influences appeared to be My Bloody Valentine and Nirvana, which would usually earn an eye roll and a loud “Snooze!” from me, but in 2012, the band’s best moments still hold up well. ‘Always Your Way’ is a great soaring single with a kick-ass chorus. ‘Losing Touch’ and ‘Cemented Shoes’ are both fairly generic grunge-oriented singles, which still carry something of a punch, and don’t sound overtly whiny. The band used to finish live sets with the song ‘Tongue Tied’, a quiet instrumental that ended up going mental. It was always a pretty thrilling conclusion. Vincent Gallo appeared in the ‘Grounded’ video. Wait, what was that last one?

Once, at the insistence of said PR guy, my friend Natan and I went to interview the band, prior to a gig at Shepherds Bush Empire, supporting Mansun. We went to a pub around the corner, and half the band couldn’t be bothered, and went off to talk with their mates. So, Natan and I chatted with Carolyn and Seth, the bass player and guitarist. I thought it went rather well, both were very nice, and just to give you an idea of how long ago this is, we discussed Zach de la Rocha’s “imminent” solo album. Yikes. I was happily typing it up the following afternoon, and their PR guy called me up, saying that the band had complained about us, that we’d been really horrible, and that we’re never allowed to talk to My Vitriol again. That definitely was unexpected, and took a little sorting out.

That mostly turned me off the band, although our paths continued to cross for a while longer. As far as I can tell, they still haven’t put out a second record. Apparently, they are on the covering-Crazy-bandwagon, and were the last band to rock the Astoria before the Man won.

It has been over a decade since their one and only album, and though the band has not officially split up, it’s hard to see what they’ll do next. It’s always a bad sign when your Wiki page lists two separate hiatuses. At times when I just want to rock out like my teenage self, I could do a lot worse than listening to a bit of My Vitriol.

Don’t forget the Youth Groups Spotify playlist, which features many songs by these guys, and others that have been up here in the past.

The Soundtrack of our Lives

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:34:42 -0400

The day was February 5^th, 2002. Me and the gang were at the London Astoria to see Ash. An impressive rock band from Northern Ireland called Jetplane Landing had just played. Hundred Reasons were up next. But first, a band from Sweden that we’d heard of but didn’t know anything about. The Soundtrack of Our Lives.

They come out, metaphorical guns blazing. The singer looks and dresses the way I imagine Friar Tuck looked and dressed. The first song has a huge intro, with a simple guitar riff and huge drums. Everyone is already clapping along. The strobe lights are blinding. The drums cut out for a second and then – BAM – the song really takes off. This song is called ‘Infra Riot’ and I am in love with this band. It took about ninety seconds.

Since they were only third on a four-band bill, they only had about half an hour, but they filled it with tracks from their then-new album ‘Behind the Music’. In addition to ‘Infra Riot’, the songs ‘Broken Imaginary Time’ (I wrote at the time: “like early Mercury Rev, when they too had a fat guy singing over epic, sprawling backgrounds”) and ‘Sister Surround’ made a strong impression. During the Stonesy ‘21^st Century Ripoff’, lead singer Ebbot got everyone in the crowd to sit down, and then walked over, climbed the barrier and stood amongst us. It was cool. They closed with ‘Nevermore’, and I bought the album then and there.

I don’t really like “older” music. I’ve never had a Beatles/Stones/Zepellin/Floyd phase. So what I liked about ‘Behind The Music’ was that it sounded like the best qualities of all those bands. ‘Sister Surround’ has really pretty west coast (of Sweden) harmonies. ‘Still Aging’ is an old-timey singalong. Everything on the album – perhaps a little bloated at 15 tracks and 58 minutes – sounded vintage but fresh. Though I played the album a lot during the spring of 2002, I never really was inspired to check out their previous work. Not sure why. I guess ‘…Music’ just sounded so complete and satisfying that I didn’t feel compelled to see what they had done beforehand.

I saw the band again in early May, headlining at the Astoria 2. The band took to the stage and opened with an older song, introduced by Ebbot thus: “This is called ‘Rest in Piece’. Not “peace”, but “piece” as in “piece of shit”.” Good start. They pull the same “everyone sit down” trick during ‘21^st Century Ripoff’ and it’s still cool – even though people sat on top of other people. They were clearly having a lot of fun on stage, throwing shapes and milking the moments, but the songs were strong enough that everyone went along with it. On the way out of the venue, I got a text informing me that Arsenal had beaten Manchester United, and thereby secured the League and Cup double. Yeah. It was a great night. The next month, at Glastonbury, we got up early on the Sunday to see TSOOL open the Other Stage. Ebbot threw us a can of beer, but unfortunately his microphone chord wasn’t long enough to make it into the audience. The set was as fun as usual, though a huge stage, broad daylight and a huge spacial gulf between fans and band was not ideal for seeing them.

Surprisingly, after moving to the States, I never really thought about the band much. I still enjoyed spinning ‘Behind the Music’ every so often, and continued putting ‘Infra Riot’ or ‘Nevermore’ on mixtapes, but I’ve not been bothered to listen to any of the band’s subsequent releases. They’re still going strong. They put out a Best Of last year, called ‘Golden Greats No. 1’, and there’s new music due from them next month. Do I care about them a decade later? Not really. But for a few months, ten years ago, I was under the spell of The Soundtrack of our Lives.