Sounds from the Junkshop #2 - The Senseless Things

Looking back while digging through my memories for this column, I don't think I'd quite realised just how important a musical month January 1992 was to my musical tastes developing. As someone living in sleepy suburban Leeds who was just about to turn 13, I was still at this point reliant on listening to the Top 40 on Radio 1 and watching Top of the Pops on a Thursday evening and the ITV Chart Show on a Saturday lunchtime for my musical intake. This meant that the stuff that reached my ears was largely dependant on what was in the charts (and in the to a lesser extent the Indie and Rock Top 10's on the Chart Show - even at that age, I'd already worked out that that's where most of the exciting music was even if I was very unlikely to encounter most of it in the local Woolies) rather than anything I was reading in the music papers like NME, Melody Maker and Kerrang, all of which I was still a good year or two away from discovering.

Nevertheless, the episode of Top of the Pops on 9th January it turns out was the one where a good deal of my music taste for my early teens was set in stone. As well as Carter USM doing an awesome performance of Rubbish (as detailed in this column a couple of weeks ago), there was another band who'd just had their first Top 40 hit after waiting patiently as their previous few stopped just short of the hit parade who were on the show that evening. Ladies and gentlemen, the Senseless Things...

I'm not sure if having my musical coming of age in 1991-2 was a blessing or a curse as the whole post-Madchester pre-Britpop era is generally regarded as a bit of a barren one for "cool" music and it’s left me with a lifelong loyalty to some amazing but criminally under-appreciated bands (then again, I s’pose if it hadn’t then this here column would be a whole lot less interesting!). The Madchester scene of a year or so before was rapidly burning out with the Stone Roses on a long hiatus while they were engaged in record company arguments and the chart positions for the likes of the Happy Mondays, the Charlatans and the Inspiral Carpets all slowly worsening as the bandwagon came juddering to a halt. There was shoegazing of course but with a couple of honourable exceptions (most of the bands seemed to have a couple of good singles but not much beyond that), I was never really much of a fan and as far as heavier stuff goes, the dumb but enjoyable party music of sleaze rock had started to atrophy with the big players getting complacent after becoming megastars and mostly phoning it in by this point (again with the odd exception) while the upcoming grunge movement did nothing for me - it just seemed dull and whiny to these ears. To misquote Public Enemy, Kurt Cobain may have been a hero to millions but I'm afraid he never meant shit to me.

Which left me with the more scuzzy punked-up end of indie or "fraggle" as it was disparagingly referred to by music journos at the time. For me, it was the music scene that pretty much saw me through the early years of my teens - if I was feeling angry I would listen to Carter USM, if I wanted some earworm pop music I'd listen to the Wonder Stuff, if I wanted the more reflective end of it I'd listen to Mega City Four. Oh sure, there were a few less-than-stellar bands mixed in with it (the utterly dire Sultans of Ping FC spring painfully to mind) but by and large it was a much needed ray of sunshine during difficult times. As a teenager coping with bullying, acne and being a miserable failure with girls, all it seemed that grunge was doing was being the equivalent of staring at your demons until you felt ready to slash your wrists through sheer despair. Listening to groups like the Senseless Things though felt like saying "yeah, you know what? Life is pretty shit. But it's all about trying to see the good in the bad and rage against it rather than just lying down in the foetal position and feeling sorry for yourself."

The Things had formed in Twickenham where frontman Mark Keds, bassist Morgan Nicholls and drummer Cass Browne (aka Cass Cade or Cass Traitor depending on which album sleevenotes you're reading) had all been friends at school. After slowly building a reputation on the West London club circuit, they'd recruited guitarist Ben Harding and put out various records on the indies to slowly increasing acclaim and success before being signed up by Epic about a year before I got into 'em. Their debut album The First Of Too Many had come out in mid-'91 although Easy To Smile wasn't on it as I found out when I made a trip to Bradford HMV that Saturday to spend the last of my Christmas money from a few weeks earlier. So in the end I got the album and the single.

You may laugh at this but for me, hearing The First Of Too Many for the first time in my bedroom in Otley on a cold January Saturday night was probably what I'd imagine those who came 15-20 years before me must have felt like when they heard the Ramones or the Buzzcocks for the first time (look, I was 13 years old, at that point I didn't have a clue as to who either of the aforementioned even were). This was a million miles away from the post-SAW manufactured pop dross and one-trick-pony dance music that was clogging up the Top 40 at the time - just a brief look at the charts that week the Things and Carter were on TOTP will bear that out for you with the likes of MC Hammer, Kym Sims, Wet Wet sodding Wet, Ce Ce arsing Peniston, a post-shark jump G'n'R (who by this time were reduced to slinging out half-arsed McCartney and Dylan covers) etc all present and correct in the upper reaches of the charts. This was music with attitude and 100mph riffs but with sugar sweet melodies and killer tunes that the likes of My Bloody Valentine wouldn't have recognised if they'd hit them upside the head with a baseball bat. And while the likes of Everybody's Gone, Got It At The Delmar and Best Friend were the frenetic Things sound writ large, the likes of Fishing At Tesco's with its acoustic guitar led melodies showed that they could vary things up as well.

Now it's safe to say that if the Senseless Things had kept to that sound on subsequent albums then they might well have got even bigger and possibly become Britain's answer to Green Day minus the knob gags. As you can probably guess, it didn't quite work out like that. Don't forget that by the time I got into 'em with Easy To Smile, they'd already released two singles off of First Of Too Many and were pretty much ready to move on. In the meantime, they were packed off on an epic three month US tour supporting Blur who at the time were falling out with each other to the extent that they were just about ready to rip each others' throats out and faltering badly commercially prior to the Modern Life Is Rubbish album that ended up saving them. They also ended up supporting then scene darlings Nirvana when they came over to tour the Nevermind album in the autumn. And, quelle coincidence, when their next single Hold It Down landed in April, there was definitely a hint of Seattle in the sound that hadn't been there before...

Now I'm not sure if this was down to hanging out with Kurt and co or if it was record label pressure (a recent interview I read with Mark seemed to suggest the latter) but I remember being a bit more reticient about this one than I had been Easy To Smile. The group were limbering up for their third album, Empire of the Senseless although it wouldn't see the light of day until the spring of 1993, nearly eleven months after Hold It Down hit the charts. Confused? You will be...

So by autumn the group had finished the album and presumably the label had heard it and thought "okay, cool, new grungier sound, that's what the kids seem to be listening to nowadays, we can go with this". And then they played the old Buzzcocks-style "creative control" card and essentially torpedoed their career in a blaze of glory by choosing the opening track (and if I'm honest my favourite on the album) Homophobic Asshole as the first single. You can imagine the sight of the execs' jaws hitting the floor at this point and sure enough, it got no radio airplay and missed the Top 40 by a mile. Fuck it, I still loved it even if the label didn't - I only found out it was even being released by being on the band's mailing list at the time so made the necessary trip into Leeds to pick it up from HMV the week it came out. If Easy To Smile had been a revelation then the sheer fury of this song pretty much cemented the Things as one of my favourite groups - pure raw uncompromising anger at its best. I may have found Nirvana, Pearl Jam etc a bit self-pitying and miserable to enjoy but even if the Things had "gone grunge", there was little evidence of that here.

The dying days of '92 saw a third single Primary Instinct culled from the album but it agonisingly missed the hit parade by one place, stalling at number 41. Another well-placed diatribe against the rise of racism in the early '90s political climate (this was the era where the BNP were making worrying gains in places like South London and people were rightly worried...oh how little did we know that it would get much much worse 25 years on...) and the video was brilliant as well featuring Morrissey (played by legendary comedian Mark Thomas) dressing up as Adolf Hitler before being hit in the face by custard pie thrown by an Indian woman.

(incidentally, I do apologise for the lack of Things videos on here but very few of them appear to be on Youtube - give Vimeo a look as most of them are still up there)

Empire of the Senseless did finally surface in the spring of '93. To this day, I have mixed feelings about the album - at the time I thought it was a bit of a disappointment with only a few songs really capturing the energy of the three singles but looking back it still has some highlights - Keepsake, Ice Skating at the Milky Way and Just One Reason are all decent. It just felt a bit less special than the one before it did.

Even if I had been disappointed though, it still didn't stop me going to see the Things live that summer at a free gig at Temple Newsam in Leeds where they were the main support to local indie heroes Cud (who'd also notched up a brace of Top 40 hits the previous year). Bizarrely, below them on the bill were Chumbawamba (who, along with Back To The Planet, seemed to be the perennial midcard band at every free festival in those years before they hit it big with Tubthumping) and, even more weirdly, Embrace (still a good four years away from chart success at that point and who I have to be honest and say I remember very little about on that day). My main memory of the Things is that they put in a decent enough set but it was very heavy on the then-new album - understandable I s'pose but I remember being way more excited when they played Everybody's Gone than I was for the new stuff. Still, it was my second gig ever so I can't really complain.

After that appearance, the Things would disappear for 18 months to write their next effort. And, as I've mentioned before on here, in the mid-'90s, that was a long time in music. By the time they came back, the New Wave of New Wave had been and gone, Britpop had started and they'd kind of lost their place on the ladder a bit. Their comeback single, Christine Keeler (originally titled Christian Killer when they did it on the John Peel show few weeks before) kind of came and went with little fanfare but when I picked it up I honestly thought it was the best single they'd released since Easy To Smile showing a more confident grasp of the whole alt-rock sound (very similar to the Replacements as it turned out although I was still a good few years away from finding out who Westerberg and co were at this point). The follow-up Something To Miss did the same before their fourth and final album, the appropriately titled Taking Care of Business saw the light of day in February.

For me, if Empire of the Senseless was the Things trying to get to grips with a more Americanised sound, Taking Care of Business was where they genuinely nailed it and it still holds up well today. Heavily influenced by the Replacements and Husker Du (ie the good grunge stuff before it all went corporatised and rubbish), there's an angst here but it's slyly underpinned by a general "too cool to give a fuck" attitude which makes it a great listen. Marlene, Role Models and Watching The Pictures Go still sound great now.

Around the same time in those early days of 1995, news came out that Mark Keds had been filling in on guitar with the Wildhearts (another band who I'd sort of heard of at the time without really paying that much attention to). I remember hearing they were on Top of the Pops doing their then-single Geordie in Wonderland that week, tuned in and...well, that's another story for another time which I'll probably get on to in the next instalment of this column.

With Mark joining the Wildhearts, it spelled the end for the Things although his tenure there was brief and he'd subsequently resurface in ultra-distorted lo-fi punk types Jolt with Lenie from riotgrrl types Mambo Taxi (one great mini-album called Punk Jungle Rules). Morgan would end up joining up with Miles Hunt from the Wonder Stuff to form the sadly underrated Vent 414 (comeback album incoming apparently) before reuniting with Cass in indie-dance types Delakota. Ben would probably be the most immediately successful of the ex-Things initially (Morgan would end up joining Muse as touring guitarist after Delakota split so I think he probably takes the award over the long haul) by joining 3 Colours Red who'd have a decent run in the late '90s before musical differences did for them.

Mark Keds would go into a bit of a period of hibernation after Jolt split - he would end up co-writing the Libertines' number one hit Can't Stand Me Now and battling some serious personal demons before resurfacing in indie-goth types Deadcuts as the noughties ended who ended up putting out two genuinely good albums before various factors conspired to sink them. I was due to interview him for Pure Rawk when I worked there but unfortunately circumstances intervened and I ended up interviewing their guitarist Jerome (formerly of the Skuzzies) who turned out to be a good guy and a pleasure to talk to (well, exchange e-mails with). You can have a read of the interview here should you wish.

Cass would end up joining Mark in the Deadcuts in 2016 and soon afterwards, the exciting news came through that the Things were aiming to get back together for a reunion gig (they'd briefly reunited at the tribute gig for Wiz from Mega City Four a decade or so earlier). I duly splashed out for a ticket to the Shepherd's Bush Empire gig and it was great fun. Seeing the place going absolutely nuts for the likes of Is It Too Late? and the Things' breakneck cover of the Slits' Shoplifting really was an awesome thing to experience after all this time and the comeback single Lost Honey wasn't bad either. Will it happen again? I don't know. But as I write this sitting back in a room in north Bradford somewhere, those memories still make me smile.

Mark, Ben, Morgan and Cass, whatever you're all up to now, thanks guys - I owe you all one for making my teenage years a much less miserable place. Hopefully we'll all get to do it again someday.