Sounds From The Junkshop #9 - Mega City Four

 

"Take these words I give to you, take some comfort, every word is true" - Mega City Four, Wallflower, 1993

Yup, it's that time again where your friendly music reviewer takes you back on a journey to the early '90s in search of overlooked gems. Given that we’ve already covered Carter USM, the Wonder Stuff, the Senseless Things and Kingmaker in this feature, I suppose it was inevitable that Mega City Four would crop up here as well and so they should - they were another very underrated band who were generally written off as too unglamorous by the stuck up pricks in the inky indie press at the time and whose back catalogue deserves a closer look.

The thing is though that Mega City Four were actually a bit different from the other bands haphazardly chucked together under the “fraggle” scene of the early ‘90s. You listened to the Wonder Stuff or to a lesser extent, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin (a band who I have to be honest I liked a few songs by like Kill Your Television but was never really that big a fan of) when you wanted something to jump about and sing along to, you listened to Carter or the Senseless Things when you wanted to get angry about the ignorance of the country and shout the lyrics in defiance but the MC4 were for when you needed something to mend your broken heart to during those first ultra-awkward and usually resoundingly unsuccessful interactions with the opposite sex as a teenager. When I first heard them via the Words That Say video on the ITV Chart Show as a 13-year-old, I think I’d already realised that this band were going to be a depressingly but cathartically regular presence in my teenage record collection for when I was feeling a bit down in the dumps.

Even all these years later, I'd still put Words That Say up there as my favourite MC4 track just because it was the one that got me into them but it still sums up the sound of teenage heartbreak in a way few others could back then ("And I wouldn't wanna put you through the torture that you put me through, and I guess I learned from all our games that only stone cold hearts can play"). It stopped just short of the Top 40 annoyingly meaning I ended up traipsing into Leeds to get it on cassette single from HMV but chart success wouldn't elude the Farnborough four for much longer and their next two singles Stop and Shivering Sands managed to crack the charts properly, just managing to breach the Radio 1 Sunday night countdown.

Weirdly although I bought both of the above singles, I didn't buy the parent album Sebastopol Road which most people regard as the band's finest hour just because I literally couldn't find anywhere that had a copy in annoyingly! It actually took me over a decade to finally find a copy when Ebay first started up which tells you about what a frustratingly elusive album it is/was! Nevertheless, it definitely shows off the band's ability with a tune and frontman Wiz's ability as a songwriter on the likes of Prague (later covered by Muse of all people - MC4 were a big influence on them when they were starting up), Anne Bancroft and Wasting My Breath. Some may laugh at this but I regard Mega City Four as probably the nearest thing the early '90s indie scene threw up to a new Buzzcocks as the lyrics often dealt with heartbreak and emotional paranoia and I guess you could say that as someone who was just starting to notice girls and wanting to go and talk to them without having the first idea where to start or what to say that they basically got me just at the right time.

I think because their singles tended to generally stall a few places either inside or outside the Top 40, Mega City Four were one of the first bands whose mailing list I signed up to (the Senseless Things being the other) and it's probably a good thing I did because otherwise I probably would never have even known about the follow-up album Magic Bullets. As with a lot of similar bands, by 1993 the tide had kind of turned against the fantastic 4 and according to the NME and Melody Maker, they seemed a bit like last year's thing compared to the up-and-coming likes of the Manics and Suede.

(I do remember quite a funny exchange between MC4 and the Manics after Richey and Nicky accused them of being too unambitious in an interview and not having any aims higher than just going out and slogging round the country town by town in a transit van - the same journo ended up interviewing the Megas a few weeks later and brought this up to which their response was just to laugh and say that the Manics were saying this like it was a bad thing!)

I bought the comeback single Iron Sky the Saturday after it came out from HMV Leeds and it's still one of my favourite Mega City Four songs - the sound of the band at their fastest and most wired sounding, certainly even though it's about something as mundane as having to nip down the shops when it's chucking it down, I still love the lyrics to it ("And the rain fell like bullets from a gun/And the sky came and swallowed up the sun...") and it's a song I still play frequently on my Ipod all these years later. Unfortunately with the band having fallen out of fashion a bit, it just missed the Top 40 and probably represented the start of the downward spiral for the band commercially.

I bought Magic Bullets a couple of weeks later and, yeah I probably am biased because it was the first MC4 album I actually managed to find in the shops but it's still probably my favourite of theirs. Quite a bit darker than its predecessor, the likes of Perfect Circle, Drown and President are great stuff while the second single Wallflower would have been a hit in a perfect universe and showed their ability to tap into how it feels to have your heart broken. I still can't listen to that line "And if I did not care if I saw your face again/I'd have gladly turned my back and walked away..." without it bringing back a lot of memories of girls at the local youth club or school disco that I desperately wanted to go and chat to but either never had the courage to or would finally manage to go and stutter a few words out only to realise that my initial fear that they were way out of my league (and that they knew this all too well) was unfortunately pretty much bang on the money. 

Wallflower would be Mega City Four's last charting single - the end of 1993 saw their record label Big Life go bust leaving the band looking for a new deal. They would eventually sign to Fire records (whose main claim to fame was putting out Pulp's early stuff and Spacemen 3 in the '80s) and belatedly resurface with the Soulscraper album in 1996. I was overjoyed to find out the band were still going and quickly rushed out and bought it as well as a ticket to see them at the Duchess that March. Unfortunately it pains me to report that the album was a bit of a disappointment with the band deciding to go for a heavier grungier sound (a good year after that particular bandwagon had rolled out of town) and the earworms of previous albums by and largely absent apart from the excellent lead-off single Android Dreams and maybe Slow Down at a push. Despite this I enjoyed the gig (though it has to be said that the older songs got the best reception there) and I'm glad I at least did get to see MC4 for reasons that will become sadly apparent shortly.

Mega City Four would split up towards the end of 1996 after the failure of the Soulscraper album with Wiz subsequently resurfacing in first Serpico (along with MC4 bassist Gerry) and then Ipanema. Although neither of the above were of the same quality as the Megas, they were still capable of the odd song which reminded you of the guy's talents as a songwriter. So it was a huge shock when on a grey December day working at Bradford Council in 2006 that I got the news that Wiz had died suddenly from a blood clot on the brain after collapsing at a band rehearsal. I think until then I thought that rock stars dying was the sort of thing that only happened to the guys in bands my mum and dad used to like or guys like Kurt Cobain or Richey James who, god love 'em, both clearly had major issues right from the word go. I guess it was a moment of depressing realisation that death was going to start being a recurring thing among my musical heroes from now on and, as I write this on the day that I found out James Broad from Silver Sun, another band who I used to love as a teenager and who will almost certainly be a future SFTJ entry, has passed on due to cancer, it really does feel like every year you can almost hear the reaper lining up another swish of his scythe for some unlucky soul.

I remember going home that night and writing on my Myspace page (bluddyell, that dates it doesn't it?) "Thanks for the songs and the comfort Wiz. My teenage years would have been a lot harder to get through without them." Fourteen years later, that sentiment very much still stands. Mega City Four may not have been the most glamourous band of the early '90s by a long shot but in terms of tunes and empathy, they had few rivals. Give Sebastopol Road and Magic Bullets a listen and see for yourself.