Sounds From The Junkshop #15 - China Drum

 

“I’ve seen you before with good ideas but this one has its moments...” - China Drum, Last Chance, 1996

I seem to remember mentioning on here a couple of weeks ago when I did the SFTJ on Kerbdog that there are certain bands who seem to almost sneak into your record collection and become favourites by osmosis after you see them supporting enough bands that you like. This is another one of those stories albeit much more immediate.

So it was some time in the autumn of 1995 if memory serves me correctly. Having recently seen the Wildhearts for the first time, your correspondent has found out that CJ and Willie, both of whom departed the band the previous year, have got a new band called Honeycrack who are playing the Duchess in Leeds. Ticket duly purchased, I head along there on the night and am well and truly blasted into the middle of next week.

Unfortunately, it isn't by Honeycrack. Oh don't get me wrong, they were a good band (Sitting At Home and King Of Misery still sound great even 25 years later) but they made a rookie mistake that night of inviting a support band along who well and truly detonated the joint and left them with a near-impossible task to follow up. The band in question were three Geordie lads - a bald singing drummer and a guitarist and bassist who looked like they'd wandered off the nearest building site who proceeded to slam through half an hour of absolutely skull-busting punk rock with an energy that I'd not heard since the Senseless Things in their pre-grunge phase capped off with a 300mph demolition joyride through Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights. There's a mini-album called Rolling Hills and Soaking Gills on sale at the merch stand on the way out and I duly purchase a copy. It's never far from my CD player for the next six months or so and the band will go on to be one of my favourite groups for the next three years or so. This, my friends, was China Drum.

China Drum had sort of been bubbling under for a year or two before I became aware of them - they'd formed in Ovingham (just up the Tyne valley from Newcastle) around the turn of the decade - but they'd really started to gain a bit of momentum in with the whole New Wave of New Wave scene when that broke a year or so before. However, they were a lot more rough-edged than the likes of These Animal Men or Elastica - if anything, they were kind of a halfway house between that and the scuzzy grebo-punk of the Senseless Things, Snuff and Leatherface. So they didn't really fit in anywhere to be honest which probably hurt them a little bit in terms of getting in with the music press as there wasn't really a nice pigeonhole for them to be placed in.

However, their sheer bloody-mindedness and hard-gigging nature ensured that they weren't going to be ignored for long and they even managed to sneak the opening slot on Green Day's first big tour over here following Basket Case going Top 10. Rolling Hills And Soaking Gills was a good opening salvo from them which compiled the best bits of their first three EP's. From the brutal assault of Barrier (their second single and arguably finest moment) through the lightning fast punk assault of One Way Down and Meaning to the mournful acoustic Biscuit Barrel, the classics just kept on a-comin'.

I would end up seeing China Drum a few times over the next couple of years either headlining themselves or sharing a bill with the likes of Compulsion or Snuff at various venues in Leeds. Early '96 saw their star rise further as they gained a brace of Top 75 hits with the frenetic Can't Stop These Things and the more reflective Last Chance (which included an entertaining "Reservoir Dogs" spoof for its music video) before the release of their debut album proper Goosefair in the spring of '96.

Goosefair is probably the sound of China Drum at their punkiest with the brutal opening assault of Can't Stop These Things and Cloud 9 setting the stall out for the rest of the album. Oh sure, there's the occasional foray into ska (Had A Good Idea On Monday) and the odd more mid-paced moment (the driving closer Better Than Me and a new acoustic version of Meaning - bizarrely the album also includes a plugged-in version of Biscuit Barrel) but for the most part this is full on pedal-to-the-floor punk rock to bounce around and enjoy yourself to and is all the better for it.

However, it was the album's hidden final track, the aforementioned version of Wuthering Heights, which attracted the most airplay (especially from Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley on the Evening Session) and what was essentially a novelty tune ended up becoming the band's best known tune which was always a bit of a curse on them I felt as they had so many better original numbers. Hey ho, I guess that's how it goes sometimes but I can imagine it could have been very frustrating for the band at the time...

Anyway, I would carry on seeing China Drum regularly at venues like the Duchess and Joseph's Well in Leeds - they were always a great live band with a hardcore following that could probably best be described as "rabid" - certainly their gigs usually involved me drinking a fair few pints, bouncing in the moshpit and at least once leaving the venue with one of my shoes missing. Thinking about it, I seem to remember I discovered Snuff around this time as well whose gigs were pretty similar! It was all great fun either way.

Towards the end of '96, the group would expand to a four piece with new drummer Jan joining from Compulsion (another sadly-underrated indie-punk band who'd just split following a second album, The Future Is Medium, which was brilliant but seemed to pass completely under nearly everyone's radar - I sense a future SFTJ coming on somewhere...) allowing singing drummer Adam to concentrate on being a frontman. The Wipeout single was another absolute blinder which saw them consolidating their progress so far and set the ground for where they'd go next.

China Drum's second full album Self-Made Maniac would surface in late '97 (I think it might have been one of the first records I bought as a student living in Stoke-on-Trent from the excellent Mike Lloyd Records in the city centre) and for me this is where they really hit their peak. To put a comparison in with fellow Geordies the Wildhearts*, if Goosefair was them setting out their stall similar to Earth Vs then Self-Made Maniac was them spreading their wings and trying a few new tricks a la phuq. Lead-off single Fiction of Life was a straight-up rocker but upon listening to the album itself, there were definite signs of progress creeping in...

(* Incidentally, I surely can't be the only one who would've loved to have seen a Wildhearts/China Drum tour at some point back in the day. If circumstances allow it any time soon then Ginger could really do a lot worse than give 'em a call if the 'Hearts need a support group for a few gigs)

Essentially Self-Made Maniac did what all good second albums should in that it kept the strongest bits of Goosefair and built on 'em. Right from the opening cement mixer riff on One Thing, the sound was unmistakably China Drum but they were taking it up to the next level to good effect - Guilty Deafness kicked in with a full throttle assault before dropping down a gear to a blissed-out mid-paced middle section then stepping up the charge for the finale. Elsewhere, songs like the acoustic-led Somewhere Else showed them introducing little tricks to vary things up a bit and the sinister slow-burning Another Toy and the almost post-punk 60 Seconds saw them channelling their anger to devastating effect. By the time the rueful Bothered signed things off, you knew you'd listened to a classic.

Unfortunately, unlike phuq, it didn't sell and I remember actually getting into a friendly argument with another student who was a fan of theirs on the bus back to Keele from seeing the Drum play in Stoke that year. He thought they'd moved away from what had made them great on Goosefair by going more mid-paced while, as said above, I disagreed - to me they were building on that sound not deserting it - but it does make me wonder how many other fans felt the same. Either way, China Drum would go into hibernation for late '98 and all of '99 before re-emerging in 2000 with a change of name (becoming The Drum) and another change of direction for their third and final album Diskin.

However, unlike Self Made Maniac, this one really didn't work as it saw them drifting into a weird kind of muddy post-punk sound but with the killer tunes of yore noticeably absent. There were a couple of decent moments such as the Bleach era Nirvana soundalike Dogpile and the rumbling lead-off single Reasons but all in all it kind of sounded like Placebo when they went into their ill-advised industrial phase around the same time and sunk without trace. The band broke up before the year was out and I seem to remember guitarist Bill posting on the announcement on the band's official site that the change in sound had been Adam's doing and that him and his brother Dave, the group's bass player, had been against it but that Adam had been writing more material so they went along with it. It was a sad end to a group who'd been on such a blinding run of form until that point.

China Drum would briefly reform in 2013 for a couple of tours as a five-piece with the group adding a second guitarist John Steel and new drummer Kate Stephenson (I believe Adam suffers from a medical condition these days which restricts him to just being a frontman), both previously of psychedelic types Jackdaw 4 (who'd been led by former Wildhearts/Honeycrack man Willie Dowling which again proves that rock 'n' roll really does go round in big circles sometimes). I saw them just before at Highbury Garage on my birthday weekend in 2013 (the same weekend as I saw the Dogs D’Amour original line-up reunion gig - that was a good couple of days!) and just before Christmas 2014, the latter without Bill who'd left the group again. They were great both times and I remember ploughing forward to be in the moshpit for the first gig as they kicked in with Can't Stop These Things, Cloud 9 and Situation before my body reminded me in no uncertain terms that I was 34 years old now and not 19 and I was forced to the back to take a breather!

China Drum continue to gig sporadically mostly around their native north-east and have even put out a single, the grungy Water, since reforming. Hopefully once the current insanity subsides a bit we might get a few more gigs from them and rest assured if they play West Yorkshire on any of 'em, I will very much be there. In the meantime, I guess all I can do is recommend Rolling Hills and Soaking Gills, Goosefair and Self-Made Maniac to anyone who hasn't heard 'em already. From furious punk rock to a more thoughtful take on Britrock, China Drum were a much more versatile band than they're often given credit for and deserve better than just to be remembered for a novelty Kate Bush cover. Investigate and go see for yourself.