Sounds From The Junkshop #14 - Gene

 

"You said that I should look to the future - I've seen and I'll stay here" - Gene, Where Are They Now?, 1997

And so Sounds From The Junkshop leaves the early '90s behind and moves on to the Britpop era. It was an odd time and looking back, I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it. As an era, it seems to get a lot of bad press retrospectively - I remember one journo describing it scornfully as the point where music stopped trying to move forward and started just regurgitating the past whole sale while a lot of the bands I'd grown up with and loved over the previous 3-4 years who suddenly found their record sales tailing off with this new movement were predictably scathing. I remember Fruitbat from Carter saying something in an interview along the lines that he wished bands like Oasis and Ocean Colour Scene would just apologise and go away and recall a Senseless Things interview circa Taking Care of Business where they described the scene as "It's just fuckin' Stars In Their Eyes, isn't it?"

The thing is though...when Britpop was at its apex in 1995 I was 16 years old and getting caught up in it was just unavoidable. And you know what, after putting up with non-stop manufactured pop like Take That and the dozens of xeroxed imitators who sprung up after them like some hen night from hell's entertainment revue not to mention all that terrible Euro-house shite like Snap, 2 Unlimited and Scooter that was inexplicably popular at the time, it was just good to see guitar bands properly back in the charts again and appearing on Top of the Pops and the proper chart rundown on the ITV Chart Show rather than being exiled to the Indie Top 10. Looking back with 25 years' hindsight, yes it was a very hit and miss movement and for every genuinely great life-affirming band like Pulp or Supergrass (the supremely irritating Alright not withstanding, their first two albums were great) who came to prominence there were a dozen bands like Powder, Ruth or Sussed who gave the impression of having heard Parklife or Definitely Maybe and thinking "Hey, we could do that!". Trust me, by 1997 the market was well and truly flooded with 'em...

I guess Gene were the first Britpop band I really became a fan of outside the "obvious" ones (Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Supergrass, Elastica etc). I think it was due to being on the Deceptive records mailing list (the indie that had originally been co-set up by Steve Lamacq and who'd hit paydirt with Elastica a few months previously) who put out their second single Be My Light Be My Guide. I remember seeing it in HMV on a Saturday trip into Leeds and decided it was worth spending £2.99 of my Netto wages on picking it up. It kind of became my "going out" song for the next two years and seemed to capture perfectly mix that mixture of excitement and apprehension about going for a night out in the city when you're just old enough to start drinking (“Oh tonight, let it be my night”) - some nights you might end the night having a girl kiss you, sometimes it might end with you getting punched in the head by some nutcase who thought you were looking at his pint funny. Add to that a self-deprecating Smiths style streak to the lyrics ("And tell me more about women/Yes, I had four last night/So can I be your friend now?") and you had a winner.

I guess we should reluctantly mention the Smiths here as Gene got a lot of unfavourable comparisons to that band, especially Martin Rossiter's vocal similarities to Morrissey. I always thought this was massively unfair - I would certainly agree that Gene very much did fill that gap to a lot of music fans my age who were too young to remember the Smiths ten years before but their songs were more than strong enough to stand up on their own as evidenced to Be My Light's follow-up Sleep Well Tonight, another tale of smalltown violence that I related to given some of the pubs in Bradford that I used to drink in at the time (I still remember being chased out of one by a six foot three psycho convinced I'd insulted his brother then running into the same guy at the same pub the following week later who, seemingly having completely forgotten the fact that he'd tried to batter me seven days before, asking if I wanted to buy some ferrets off him!). It became the group's first Top 40 hit and showed that even if a few pinch-faced NME journos had marked their cards that the majority of their readers were seeing this for what it was, namely good music. And it's easy to forget that Morrissey was very much persona non grata among the music press at this time thanks to his ill-advised racist comments and subsequent failure to apologise for them, in the wake of the Vauxhall & I album (a pity as that 'un had some of my favourite solo Moz numbers on it like We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful and Certain People I Know).

Gene's progress would continue through 1995 with Haunted By You following Sleep Well Tonight into the lower reaches of the Top 40 before the release of their debut album Olympian which despite mixed reviews made the Top 10. It still holds up well now with songs like Truth Rest Your Head, London Can You Wait? and Still Can't Find The Phone showing off the band's songwriting skills.

The aching title track from the album (and probably its highpoint) would be the next single and would see the band break into the Top 20. Similar to Mega City Four a couple of years earlier, it would be a soundtrack to a lot of thwarted crushes in my late teenage years (that line "I wanted to be there with you, for I can only be normal with you" really did seem to hit painfully close to the bone for my 16-year-old self). A re-release of their debut single For The Dead would give them their biggest hit (though to be truthful I thought it was the weakest of their early singles - still a good song though) and would act as a precursor to the release of their Hatful of Hollow style odds 'n' sods compilation To See The Lights. I've always said that the mark of a band on a roll is that they can casually chuck out songs on B-sides that a lot of bands would have killed for to have as singles - think the Wildhearts in their prime or Oasis before they got bloated, fat and lazy. Gene's early singles also fall into this bracket - the fact that they could take great songs such as Sick, Sober and Sorry, I Can't Help Myself and This Is Not My Crime which a lot of bands would have happily taken as singles in their own right and sling them out on the flip side really was a testament to how much of a hot streak they were on at this point.

The To See The Lights tour in early '96 would be the first of a good few times I'd catch Gene live, on this occasion at the Rocket (later the Cockpit) in Leeds and they well and truly smashed it out of the park. Rossiter stalking the stage with the sort of supreme confidence that all the best frontmen have, Steve Mason slashing away on his guitar like a young Paul Weller and Kev Miles and Matt James making sure the group were tight as a boa constrictor at feeding time. They were a group on top of their game and the fact that they would already be making preparations for their new album by the end of the year showed that they were very much making hay while the sun shone.

Gene's second album Drawn To The Deep End released in early '97 did what any good sophomore album should by essentially being a widescreen version of their debut with the comeback singles Fighting Fit and We Could Be Kings both breaching the Top 20. Although there's a couple of songs where they go a little bit too overblown for their own good, it was still a worthy follow-up with the likes of Where Are They Now?, Sub Rosa, Long Sleeves For The Summer and the quite lovely Save Me I'm Yours (the great single that should have been) being worthy additions to the Gene repertoire. My only complaint was that the title track of the album (a heartbreakingly stark ode to Rossiter's battle with depression) was relegated to a B-side - it would have worked much better to close side one than the rather lumpen Why I Was Born did but hey, there you go. They managed to sell out the Royal Albert Hall for the final gig of the tour and I remember taping the gig off the radio with the band being in great form.

Unfortunately, in the words of their next single, that really would be as good as it got for Gene. It's weird because as Britpop turned into the tedious epic windswept balladry era of Radiohead, the Verve and Spiritualized, you would have thought they'd be one of the bands who should have been in good position to weather the changes. However, for their third album they decided to "do a Style Council" and go political. Not a bad idea - this was 1999 and the UK was starting to wake up to the depressing fact that the "New Labour" government we'd elected a couple of years earlier actually weren't going to be the red wave to sweep away the 18 years of abuse that the country had suffered under the Tories that we’d hoped for and were actually simply content to let the country coast along rather than actually trying to right some of the injustices of the previous two decades - but unfortunately when you've built a reputation as a band who write songs to nurse your broken heart to rather than get angry about, people aren't necessarily gonna buy you as the new Joe Strummer.

Sure enough, the resulting album Revelations was inevitably a bit of a disappointment, seemingly with the band stuck halfway between moving forward and sticking to the formula that had served them so well until this point. It had its moments - Mayday and The British Disease were righteous blasts of anger at the impotence of the Blair government and the betrayal a lot of us were feeling over it while Angel and You’ll Never Walk Again showed that they could still do the big epic torch songs but overall it sounded much more disjointed musically than its predecessors and sales were disappointing leading to the band being dropped by their label Polydor.

I'll be honest, this is probably where I started to drift away from Gene a bit as well. By 1999-2000, my musical tastes had started to drift into heavier waters again and I was listening to the Backyard Babies, Buckcherry and the Hellacopters rather than anything that the NME was trying to desperately flog to me. I saw them playing the Leeds Festival in '99 in the dreaded 2:30pm slot on the main stage and to be honest they kind of came and went without really leaving much of an impression on the just-waking-up crowd (although the following year they'd been moved to second on the bill on the second stage which seemed to work much better as they had an activiely interested crowd and they gave a decent account of themselves). A live album recorded at the Troubadour in LA came out called Rising For Sunset before their swansong Libertine in 2001.

To be honest, I missed Libertine all together when it came out - as I say, I'd kind of drifted away from indie and Britpop into heavier waters and it would be a few years later before I picked up a cheap copy from the record exchange. Clearly stung by the less-than-enthusiastic reception that Revelations had received, it saw the band trying to move back to the sound of old but unfortunately without the number of top drawer tunes that the first two albums had (although the closing Somewhere In The World is genuinely lovely and reminded you of glories past).

Gene would split in 2004 and, unlike nearly all of their mid-'90s contemporaries, have resisted calls to reform in the decade and a half since. There was talk of a reunion gig last year when Martin Rossiter promised a big announcement but it turned out to be that he was putting on a solo gig playing Gene material for the first time since the band split without the other three members much to their chagrin. In the end, due to Covid, the gig never happened and the band appear to now be back on talking terms having collaborated on some reissues earlier this year. But somehow I'm still not holding my breath for a reunion any time soon and maybe that's for the best.

So where does this leave Gene's legacy in 2020 then? I've always thought the band were a bit unlucky in that they've generally been pretty much left alone by the indie mags as the general (very unfair in my opinion) consensus is that they were a bit of a second division Britpop band and they were never gonna be anywhere near heavy enough for magazines like Vive Le Rock who only really dip a toe into the spikier end of these waters. Yet I'd say that there's a lot of mid-'90s indie bands out there who'd have killed to put out material of the quality that was on Olympian, To See The Lights and most of Drawn To The Deep End. Yes, maybe they were a '90s Smiths in that, in Rossiter's words, they were a band who wrote songs that made hardmen cry, but they were also so much more than that. And thankfully, unlike the man who he was often accused of ripping off, Rozzer at least never turned into a hateful bigoted racist who alienated the vast majority of his fanbase in subsequent years meaning I can still happily listen to his band's records without feeling massively conflicted. So he wins. End of.