Sounds From The Junkshop #3 - The Wildhearts (a look back at the mid-'90s)

When I first started working on the Sounds from the Junkshop feature for this blog, the plan was to try and keep these stories in chronological order but, because there's an obvious lead-on from last week's column, I'm going to take a quick step away from the days of 1992 indie for a moment here to write about my favourite band, the Wildhearts.

A lot (and I mean like a lot) has been written in print about Ginger and co down the years and I guess it proves just how much this band mean to so many people - while I'm here, for those who haven't already, give Gary Davidson's excellent Zealot in Wonderland book a read.

As with the columns on Carter and the Senseless Things, this is more designed to be one fan's story of the rollercoaster this band's taken them on down the years. However, because unlike the aforementioned, the Wildhearts have been a steady and active presence in my musical life for a quarter of a century now, it's also unlikely I'm gonna cover the whole thing in one go so this is gonna be part one of lord only knows how many dealing with the time from my first discovering the band to their messy first break-up a couple of years later. We'll pick up the story again in due course once we've dealt with a few more bands I used to wander around the north following in the mid-'90s...

Anyway, I guess the best place to pick this up would be where I (sort of) left off with the Senseless Things feature last week - in late 1994, I found out that the Things' Mark Keds was standing in on guitar with another group, the Wildhearts. Hand on heart, I sort of knew about them without having listened to too much of their music at this point. They'd had a couple of Top 40 hits by this point with Caffeine Bomb and Suckerpunch with the former seeing the band on TOTP and doing an awesome OTT '70s glam style performance but I'd actually missed the show that week for some reason so all I really knew about them was that a few of my metalhead mates said that they sounded like a heavier version of Terrorvision (who, coming from Bradford, were obvious favourites of all of us) which does kind of make me wonder why I never got round to checking them out sooner. I guess I must've kind of been busy listening to Carter and These Animal Men through the early bit of '94.

Anyway, I found out that they were playing TOTP that week to perform their third Top 40 hit Geordie In Wonderland (a double A-side with the brilliantly titled If Life Is Like A Lovebank, I Want An Overdraft). I duly switched on the box that week and was greeted by this. Mind. Comprehensively. Blown.

Suffice to say I went out to get the single that weekend. I quickly realised that while the "heavier Terrorvision" tag wasn't a million miles off that the Wildhearts were definitely a bit more, shall we say out there, than Bradford's finest were. While Geordie was a Pogues style folk anthem complete with mandolin, Lovebank sounded like Ministry covering the Sweet - all weird distorted vocals topped off with a swaggering '70s glam style guitar line. Even at this point, I could tell that this was a band who weren't interested in staying inside their box musically and I was decidedly intrigued.

The Wildhearts had just come out of a, shall we say, somewhat tumultuous year in 1994 having finally had their chart breakthrough after a couple of years of trying. No sooner had the hits started coming though then guitarist CJ had been sacked by frontman Ginger who he’d founded the band with five years earlier (CJ would subsequently team up with ex-Wildhearts keyboard player Willie Dowling to form the underrated Honeycrack but that’s another SFTJ for another time) and the group had gone through an almost Spinal Tap style procession of lead guitarists. However, they were riding the wave following their album, Earth vs the Wildhearts, which saw the light of day in late '93 and had swept the board in the end of year metal mag awards. With the band's profile growing all the time, they seemed in prime position to well and truly blow open the doors that groups like Therapy? and the Almighty had been working their crowbars on in '92 and '93.

I've often said that, as much as I can't stand their output from Be Here Now onwards, there was something cathartic about when I first heard Live Forever by Oasis a few months before the Wildhearts well and truly came onto my radar. For the previous two or three years, rock music had been completely swamped by miserable pallid blokes in cardies singing about how much they hated life, wanted to die and that kids nowadays might as well just curl up in the foetal position and cry because life was shit and nothing was gonna turn out right anyway. Hearing Liam Gallagher snarling "I wanna live, I don't wanna die" really did feel like the sound of guitar music stamping on the fingernails of the grunge second divisioners like Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots who were grimly hanging on to the clifftops after Kurt Cobain's untimely passing a few months before.

When I heard I Wanna Go Where The People Go, the next Wildhearts single, a few months later, it really did feel like the headstone had mercifully been planted on the godawful grunge movement and rock music had rediscovered its sense of urgency. Yup, the Wildhearts could be pretty dark lyrically as well but they turned that darkness into anger rather than feeling sorry for themselves. When Ginger grinned "I wanna be where the c**ts like me are buried six feet underground", it was the sound of defiance, not self-pity. Mark Keds again appeared with the band on Top of the Pops and the single well and truly took the band into the big league, blasting into the Top 20.

The Wildhearts' second album, phuq, would duly follow a couple of weeks later and I picked both it and Earth vs up on the same day when it came out. Hand on heart, although most 'Hearts fans would disagree, I've always thought phuq was the stronger of the two. While Earth vs is pretty much a straight-up rock album (albeit with some of the best hooks and tunes you will ever hear, see Everlone, Loveshit, My Baby Is A Headfuck, Love U 'Til I Don't and several others for proof), phuq was a lot more all-over-the-place musically and to my ears, a more interesting listen for it. While I Wanna Go Where The People Go and Nita Nitro were the big shoutalong rock anthems, the more reflective likes of Jonesing For Jones (about the similarities between drug withdrawal and missing the person you're in a relationship with...let's just say that one would be one I'd constantly come back to in my twenties and leave it there), Be My Drug and In Lily's Garden showed a more mid-paced almost psychedelic side to their work. And the killer one-two-three medley of Woah Shit You Got Through (turbo nutter thrash-punk), Cold Patootie Tango (sinister almost doom-metal) and Caprice (a full old-school riff-fest) really showed what this band were capable of.

And then...it all went a bit weird again. Mark Keds either quit or was fired (depending on who you ask) the same week as the second single from the album Just In Lust came out (he went out to Japan to do a few final gigs with the Senseless Things and didn't come back - long story...), Kerrang! erroneously reported that bassist Danny McCormack was about to be sacked from the band as well which led to the remaining three members visiting the magazine's office and smashing the offending journalist's computer up with a baseball bat (all of which only added to the myth surrounding the band - let's be honest, you didn't get this sort of behaviour with Menswe@r or Powder) and the band announced that they would be splitting up at the end of the year after a final tour in the autumn. They'd been butting heads with their record company East-West (nobody who was signed to this label in the mid-'90s seems to have a good word to say about them , see also Baby Chaos and Voice of the Beehive) for some time and tensions finally reached boiling point.

The group brought in a new guitarist Jef Streatfield, seemingly just to fill out those final few dates, and I finally got to see 'em live on the first night of the tour at Leeds Met. When the lights went down and the piercing opening riff of SIN (In Sin) (the B-side of Just In Lust - in fact, that's another thing worth repeating about the Wildhearts, their singles would nearly always include three B-sides every bit as good as the lead-off track. Apart from Suede at the beginning and What's The Story? era Oasis, I honestly can't think of any other band I could say that about) kicked in as the opener, it was an amazing feeling with the crowd well and truly erupting. It was a great set and my thoughts as the final chord of set closer Getting It abruptly stopped and the audience filed out of the venue with a chorus of Don't Worry 'Bout Me (the "hidden track" at the end of phuq) ringing around as the lights went back up, my thought was "well, fuck it, at least I caught 'em once even if I was a bit late to the party".

So obviously, within the next eight months I'd have seen the Wildhearts live another two times...

Around the end of 1995, the band announced that they'd managed to persuade East West to let them set up their own label, theoretically giving them the extra autonomy they'd been asking for and in April the following year, they'd chalk up their second Top 20 hit with the lightning speed riff of Sick of Drugs. And around that time they also played the Met in Leeds as part of the Radio 1 Sound City gigs which would turn out to be the second time I saw them live and probably my favourite Wildhearts gig to date (the nearest rival being when I saw them on the Chutzpah! tour many years later when the band really were properly locked in and absolutely detonated the Cockpit in Leeds but that's a whole other story for another time). Cue the band giving Greetings From Shitsville and My Baby Is A Headfuck an airing live on national radio and the following exchange between Ginger and the crowd:

GINGER: So Radio 1's told us we can't swear live on radio...

(crowd boos)

GINGER: But you lot can!

(huge cheer)

GINGER: Okay, everybody after three...one two three...

(1500 people shout "FUCK OFF!" live on Radio 1 and several grannies in Tunbridge Wells drop dead due to heart attacks presumably)

GINGER: Okay, one more time, f'ing c, come on Leeds, you know you want to...one two three...

(1500 people shout "FUCKING C**T!" live on Radio 1)

GINGER (grinning from ear to ear): You're all banned.

(huge cheer from the crowd)

Yeah, those are pretty much the memories that seal a band's reputation as being your favourite. So much so that when the tour in support of the re-released Fishing For Luckies rolled into town about six weeks later, I was there again. FFL was a limited edition fan club release which Lovebank and Geordie in Wonderland had been culled from a couple of years before then East West had tried to re-release behind the band's back causing yet another argument between band and label. In the end, the band would re-release the record themselves and record six new tracks for it with the two tracks from the original single being left off. It showed a more epic side to the band's work with the likes of the riffed-up Inglorious and the epic ode to alien sightings Sky Babies (nearly twelve minutes long and sounding like about four or five songs crammed into one) really letting the band spread their wings musically. Oh and the rereleased version also contains the song that gave this blog its name in case anyone’s wondering.

It's safe to say though that despite now being on their own label, Round records, relations between the band and East West (who were still funding the operation) weren't improving as the video for the second single Red Light Green Light probably demonstrates. "Okay lads, here's the video budget, can you go off and film something?" "Yeah, sure" (record exec leaves room) "Right, to the pub - whose round is it?"

The group would remain active touring for the rest of '96 (mostly in Japan where they were hugely popular at this point) before disappearing into the studio to record their third full album in early '97 with Ginger mentioning in interviews that it would see them going for a much heavier sound. With their contract at East West finally having run out, the band would sign to Mushroom records and it looked as though they would now have a free rein to do what they wanted without banging heads with A&R men. The first fruits of the new labour emerged in August with the Anthem single which really threw everyone for a loop. Sung by Danny, it was a big bruiser of a tune, sounding like the industrial/glam hybrid of Lovebank but even heavier with distorted drums, a brutal rumbling bassline and guitars crashing in all over the place. Still a great tune though and when they did a live version on Top of the Pops minus the studio trickery, it was pretty obvious that despite the heavier sound, the band's knack of a killer tune was very much still there.

A tour was announced for October and although I was due to go to Stoke to start Uni that September, I made sure I'd booked a ticket for the Leeds gig as they weren't playing anywhere near the Potteries. Sod it, if it meant potentially missing a lecture the next morning because I was travelling back then so be it. As it turned out though, it never came to that. The week I started Uni, the bombshell dropped that the tour was cancelled and the band were splitting up, for real this time. I was gobsmacked - I'd literally just gone out to buy the second single from the upcoming album Urge a couple of days before and genuinely thought that the band were back and ready to roll. Urge itself was an absolute beast of a song, almost Nine Inch Nails style heavy with screamed vocals and pounding guitars, easily the most brutal thing the band had ever done. It felt almost unlistenable the first time you heard it, strangely addictive by the third or fourth...

Seemingly I wasn't alone in being surprised, the letters page of Kerrang! that week was full of 'Hearts fans either dumbfounded, inconsolable or furious at the decision. As we would subsequently find out, Ginger took the decision to break the band up because all four of them had been cultivating serious drug habits during the making of the new album with the frontman developing a crack addiction, Danny struggling badly with a heroin problem, drummer Ritch Battersby having discovered ecstacy and new boy Jef having a taste for the old wacky baccy. And in between times the whole band were consuming both speed and speedballs to try and aid the creative process. When Ginger said later that if the band hadn’t broken up when they did, someone would probably have died, he really wasn’t joking.

Endless Nameless, the third and, as it seemed then, final album from the band followed a week or so later. Believe me, it certainly sounded like the work of a band trapped in four different drug bubbles, a real ugly behemoth of an album that certainly wasn't an easy listen but you somehow still found yourself being drawn back to. Hands up, when I first heard it, I really didn't get it - there was the odd moment where the tunes of old could just about be heard under the layers of industrial noise like Nurse Maximum and Pissjoy but at times it went borderline unlistenable. In fact, it took me give or take about four years to "get" it - many years later, back in Leeds after finishing Uni, I found myself at a house party with a group of younger metalheads who were taking it in turns to cue all the dismal nu-metal music of the day (Limp Bizkit, Korn, Papa Roach, you know the sort of crap) up on the stereo and remarking how heavy it was. I'd brought Endless Nameless with me for some reason and slotted it in saying "No lads, that's not heavy, THIS is heavy!". Seeing their faces as opening track Junkenstein exploded from its low-volume scratchy start into the full-on all-out assault at the end (they'd wandered up right next to the stereo to see if something was wrong with it and it nearly blasted them halfway across the room) was a brilliant moment (sorry lads) and made me think "Okay, you know what? Maybe I was a bit harsh on this bugger..."

I remember Ginger saying in an interview years later that it was an album to listen to in your darkest moods when you just want something brutal and nasty to scream along to and I'd have to agree with him. Certainly there's more than a few times down the years when I've come home from a staggeringly shit day at work and put Endless Nameless on and screamed along to Soundog Babylon or Why You Lie at the top of my voice to get the frustration out (Christ only knows what my neighbours at the time must have thought) and while it doesn't necessarily make the world any better, it at least afterwards it feels like you've found the pressure valve to let the bad feelings and hatred coursing through your veins out.

Of course, this isn't the end of the Wildhearts story by a long shot - I'd still spend the next few years singing their praises to anyone who'd listen and all of the members would duly resurface with new bands in the next twelve months or so. But that's another story for another time.

To be continued...