Sounds From The Junkshop #4 - The Wonder Stuff

Okay so this instalment of Sounds From The Junkshop is likely to need a little bit of prior clarification. It's not that the Wonder Stuff are exactly an unknown band but they seem to be a band cursed where their two big hits, the omnipresent Size of a Cow and their Vic Reeves collaboration Dizzy seem to be the first thing people think of. For this episode of SFTJ though, we're taking a trip down a road less travelled to revisit an album that's generally regarded as the runt of the litter when it comes to the group's first run and was fairly swiftly disowned by the band at the time but ended up being one of my favourites and an album I've frequently revisited down the years. I refer of course to the band's swansong prior to splitting, Construction For The Modern Idiot.

I was aware of the Wonder Stuff before then obviously - I remember the excellent Don't Let Me Down Gently being on Top of the Pops a few years before and buying it from the local Woolworths the next day and it'd be the first of many Stuffies singles I'd end up buying - Circlesquare, Caught In My Shadow and Sleep Alone would all join it in my collection in due course (Sleep Alone is a bit of an odd one as it actually just missed the Top 40 and I only found out about it upon discovering it in the Woolies bargain bin a week or two after it had exited the charts - I'm still a bit puzzled because it's a great song and the band were on a good run of chart placings at the time. Hey ho...).

Maybe it was just my choice of singles by the band but despite their reputation as happy-go-lucky Slade loving Brummies, there always seemed to be a bit of a dark undercurrent bubbling under with the Wonder Stuff - lyrics like "I've been a long time disappointment to myself/But it hits me like a hammer when I'm after someone else"* on Circlesquare or "These streets used to look big/This town used to look like a city/These people used to talk to me" on Caught In My Shadow hinted at a general frustration and disillusionment which, as someone who was rapidly transitioning into an angsty teenager at the time, seemed to resound a bit. Even the mega-hit Size of a Cow suggested that the group weren't exactly content with megastardom with the line "These should be the best days of my life/But life is not what I thought it was..."

* (or as it was pointed out to me upon publication of this article, “when I’m that to someone else” What can I say, even us music writers occasionally hear things wrong for 30+ years evidently!) 

The thing is, even though I'd bought quite a few Wonder Stuff singles, I'd never bothered to pick up the albums for some reason. It could be that the Stuffies tended to have a reputation more for being a singles group (unfairly if so - Eight Legged Groove Machine, Never Loved Elvis and especially the gleefully vitriolic Hup are all fine stuff indeed) or it could just be that pre-1992 I tended to just buy singles (actually, I did have copies of AC/DC's The Razor's Edge which I got in a January sale for £4 on tape and a C90 a mate had done for me consisting of his older brother's copies of G'n'R's Appetite For Destruction on one side (well, most of it anyway - My Michelle, Think About You and Anything Goes had all been chopped off to get it down to under 45 minutes) and Skid Row's first album on the other. Oh and Jive Bunny's album but let's not go there - I was nine years old at the time)

So in a way, I was a bit unlucky with the Stuffies - if they'd put an album out in 1992 then I'd almost certainly have bought it the same way I did with Carter's 1992 or the Senseless Things' First of Too Many and then worked my way back to their previous output (again, as I did with Carter) but as it turned out, it'd be the end of the decade when I started rooting around the second hand record stall at Keele Uni student market before I discovered their first three albums properly. But in terms of new material, it'd be the dying days of 1993 before the group resurfaced and they properly moved up in my estimations from "yeah, I quite like this band" to "these guys are bloody awesome thank you very much".

If the previous Wonder Stuff singles I'd bought had had a bit of a dark undercurrent to them then On The Ropes was a departure...in that it wasn’t an undercurrent anymore, this was very much a darker and angrier Wonder Stuff. Lyrics like "Take this time to lie about everything/About who you are and who you've been/Don't let the world get in" really resonated with my increasingly angry and paranoid teenage psyche and I played it to death after getting it the week it came out. As I've said on here before, the whole grunge thing just kind of passed me by but when bands turned their downbeat feelings into anger rather than just whinging, it obviously drew me in. And when Construction For The Modern Idiot came out a couple of weeks later, I went straight out and bought that too. And it's an album that's genuinely helped to prop me up when I've been down many times since.

Right from the opening line of "I have seen every mountain I'm expected to climb...but they're not mine", it's clear that Construction was not the work of a contented band. I remember Ginger Wildheart once saying in an interview that one of the most heartbreaking things about experiencing the reality of the music business is finding out that the old Clash style "Last Gang In Town" myth is literally just that - a myth. Put any group of four or five kids in their early twenties in a band together, add on that band skyrocketing from playing to your mates down the local pub to having Top 10 hits and selling out 5000 capacity venues in just a few short years, mix in the realities of touring where they’re forced to spend weeks, even months on end sharing a bus with each other and the people who emerge cynical and burned out on the other side are likely to be very different from the wide eyed youngsters who started the journey in the first place. Now add on to that reaching the point where other movements (specifically grunge but also newer bands considered by the NME and Melody Maker to be more glamorous like the Manics and Suede) have started to edge past you and the fear that everyone suddenly hates you is creeping in and you’ve got a surefire recipe for full on neurosis brewing...

By 1993, the Wonder Stuff were very much at that point - founding bass player Bob Jones had left the band in the wake of the Hup! album and subsequently died from a drugs overdose. Although the group had rebounded with a new five-piece line-up, it was clear just from song titles like Cabin Fever and lyrics like Hush’s opening couplet of “If this is a prize, it feels like a threat/It hangs like a fist over my head” (written according to Miles Hunt after being wined and dined then taken to see Guns ‘n’ Roses at the LA Forum by a group of suits from the band’s American record label) that all wasn’t well. Oh sure, there's the odd venture into slightly lighter territory such as the odes to Mickey Rourke (Full Of Life (Happy Now)) and Diana Dors (Hot Love Now) but for the most part, this is an angry confused album that sounds like it was made by a band on the brink of imploding. I think that’s why it appealed to my by turns confused, angry and paranoid teenage psyche. Certainly the closing song Sing The Absurd was the one I almost instantly gravitated to especially the lyrics “And guess who just threw up when he learned that he grew up/And guess what he learned when his fingers got burned/That we all sing the absurd”. It seemed to articulate all the frustration I was feeling with life at the time infinitely more accurately than any of the skag-addled mumblings of the grunge bands did.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, although Construction did respectably in the charts and made the Top 10, the Wonder Stuff weren’t long for the world afterwards and split in the summer of 1994. The album, however, would remain a regular presence in my music collection for many years afterwards as it started to take on a whole new significance as the years passed. Like a lot of disgruntled teenagers who rely on music to get them through the difficult years, I would inevitably spend most of my twenties in bands trying and failing miserably to be a rock star myself and being in groups ranging from Britpop to punk to sleaze rock to Britrock. Inevitably a couple of years in we’d have got sick of being stuck playing the same venues month in and month out, of seeing bands speeding past us who were blatantly chasing trends by trying to sound like the Strokes or the Libertines or Jimmy Eat World or the Arctic Monkeys or whatever fad the NME were creaming themselves over that month. God, I hated that whole "landfill indie" era. Tempers would flare, someone (usually the lead guitarist) would storm out, we’d spend a few months failing to find a replacement who fit in with the rest of the group and finally jack the whole thing in out of sheer frustration then I’d start the whole thing again a few months later having evidently learned nothing from my previous mistakes. Bitter? Yeah, too bloody right. But just like some people have relationship break-up albums, Construction For The Modern Idiot kind of became my band break-up album for when my musical ambitions had been thwarted yet again (usually via my own doing). Certainly On The Ropes, Change Every Lightbulb and especially Storm Drain (about the dangers of having your creativity stifled by smoking too much pot which honestly could have word for word been about the demise of one of my old bands) have been songs I’ve frequently come back to for reassurance (or if I was going to be especially self-critical, to rebuild my own fragile musician's ego back up) at these times...

The Wonder Stuff would reform around the turn of the millennium and fair play to Miles Hunt (and guitarist Malcolm Treece who’s been with him for the majority of it), he’s kept the group going ever since, putting out some good albums along the way  with 2012’s Oh No! It’s The Wonder Stuff being the pick. More recently they’ve released their ninth album Better Being Lucky and who knows, we may have a review coming up on this site soon. Stay tuned...

Although I saw Miles and Malc touring their acoustic show in both Stoke and Leeds prior to the group reforming (in between times, they did alternative projects with Miles teaming up with Morgan from the Senseless Things and ex-Clash/Eat drummer Pete to form Vent 414 and Malc joining up with Stuffies drummer Martin Gilks (RIP) and Eat singer Ange to form Weknowwhereyoulive), it wasn't until much later, 2011 in fact, that I saw the band live (in Holmfirth of all places). I wasn't entirely sure what to expect but as the above live vid of the opening duo of Red Berry Joy Town and On The Ropes shows, they certainly still pack a punch after all this time and I've caught them live on several occasions since. Suffice to say they've yet to disappoint me.

So where does this leave Construction 25 odd years on then? (feck, that makes me feel old) I very nearly interviewed Milo in Hatfield a few years ago and was fully planning on asking him what his thoughts on it were after all this time but annoyingly I couldn't get the afternoon off work to go to the venue so had to make do with catching the band play a gig at the Poly there later (they were on good form despite the venue being half empty due to it being the Uni holidays at the time). Well...I can kind of see why it's not the group's favourite album, I mean who wants to revisit the time when the band was fed up and at each others' throats? But even so, it's an album that's given me plenty of solace when times have been difficult and it'll always be one of my favourite Stuffies albums for that reason alone. And as anyone who's seen me doing a live acoustic set down the years will know, my cover of the B-side from that era (which really should have gone on the album) Room 512 (All The News That's Fit To Print) tends to usually make an appearance at some point. If Hup and The Eight-Legged Groove Machine are the ones I put on when I want to smile and sing along at the top of my voice then this is the one that tends to keep my spirits up when the flame's burning a bit low and sometimes that's just as important.