Sounds From The Junkshop #16 - 60Ft Dolls

 

"The devil on my shoulder buys me drinks so I don't care. My angel's slipped, he's lost his grip, I guess I'm heading straight for you know where..." - 60Ft Dolls - Pig Valentine, 1996

And so Sounds From The Junkshop returns after its Christmas break with another tale of bands who really should have made a bigger impact than they did. Newport natives the 60Ft Dolls were one of those bands who came to prominence during the Britpop movement but ended up kind of falling between two stools - they were probably a bit too rough and scuzzy for the Adidas clad Oasis/Blur brigade but not quite heavy enough to appeal to Britrock fans. It's a real shame because they put out two absolutely storming albums which are well worth tracking down.

I think my first encounter with the Dolls was some time in late 1995 when I saw them sharing a bill with their labelmates Sleeper and the Wannadies in Leeds. All three bands gave a good account of themselves that night but I do remember the Dolls being the ones who stood out with a much harder sound than Sleeper's Camden indie by numbers or the Wannadies' hit and miss quirky indie-pop. 

A few weeks after the gig I was in HMV on a Saturday afternoon (as was my wont) and noticed the group had a new single out in the form of Pig Valentine. To this day, it's one of my favourite songs of theirs if only because of the lyric from the intro to this piece. Let's just say that if my 25-year-old self had been in the shop with my 16-year-old self back then I think he'd have said something along the lines of "Aye, watch out lad, this is gonna become quite scarily prescient a few years from now..."

The group were on the up and their subsequent singles would see their chart placings steadily improve - Stay would narrowly miss the Top 40 and the hard-edged gem Talk To Me would actually just to say graze it as would a re-release of their debut Happy Shopper (which I remember playing to one of my mates who promptly responded "'Ang on, have Ned's Atomic Dustbin got a new one out then?" I s'pose if you listen to the intro I can kind of see how it maybe sounds a bit like a speeded up version of Trust or Happy...)

The Dolls' debut album The Big 3 surfaced in early '96 and like the singles, peaked around the thirtysomething mark in the charts. As I've said earlier in this article, I'm still not sure why it didn't do a bit better to be honest as it's a great effort and surprisingly varied as well from the sheer rush of opener New Loafers through the sinister epic Streamlined and the ultra-frenetic Terminal Crash Fear to the quite lovely longing closer Buzz ("Close my eyes and I'll wake up one day tied to the sky...").

I think there were two things that kind of held the Dolls back to be honest - firstly as I've said they were kind of slightly stuck between two stools musically, too heavy to be Britpop and not quite heavy enough to be Britrock. Had they burst on to the scene in say 2015 rather than 1995 then I suspect they'd have found a ready made home for themselves with the burgeoning power-pop scene and there's even an argument that if they'd come along a few years earlier then they'd have fit right into the whole Wonder Stuff/Senseless Things group of bands but in this era they were a little bit out of sync. The other thing was that the Dolls were a band who really did drink with a passion in the words of Buckcherry and I think their offstage antics sometimes got in the way of appreciation of the music - certainly drummer Carl Bevan's exploits often dominated the NME's gossip pages back then (I seem to remember he once hit the headlines for vomiting blood all over the foyer carpet in a posh hotel). It all made for fun reading but if it did lead to a few people simply writing them off as daft Welsh pissheads rather than listening to the music properly then it's a real shame.

I saw the Dolls a few times live as well through '95 and '96 and yeah, they clearly did like a drink but they had a sloppy but hard-hitting belligerence that made them a fearsome force to be reckoned with. Guitarist Rich Parfitt and bassist Mike Cole would share vocal duties pretty much 50/50 and both had the necessary chops to well and truly grab your attention while Bevan lashed away at his kit like an octopus at the back. Hell, the live gigs were often worth it just to hear the band's 500mph demolition of the Beatles' Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey.

The group would take 1997 off to write their sophomore album but by the time they came back in the ring for another swing in early '98, the musical landscape had changed dramatically and if the band had seemed like a not-quite-right fit for the Britpop era, they really did seem like fishes out of water in the dreary era of OK Computer, Urban Hymns and Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space where any sense of fun had evaporated from alternative music to be replaced by snore-inducing navel-gazing and self-pity. The group's comeback single Alison's Room was a decent effort if not quite up to the standard of their best stuff but it tanked, stalling just outside the Top 60. Soon afterwards, BMG shut down the Dolls' label Indolent before the album could come out and the group quietly broke up.

I saw what I reckon must have been one of the Dolls' last gigs at the free Breeze Festival in Leeds that August where they headlined the second stage (that festival was quite a sad changing of the guard actually as it was also the last time I saw Kenickie, another massively under-rated band and almost certain future SFTJ entry who were on just before them and would also have broken up before the end of the year). I seem to remember it was tipping down with rain at the time and the group were playing to maybe a couple of dozen onlookers who weren't sheltering from the downpour while waiting for main stage headliners Symposium. The set was a good mix of old favourites like No 1 Pure Alcohol and new tunes which carried on the sound well - it's just a pity there were hardly any of us there to see it!

The "lost" second Dolls album Joya Magica finally came out the following year. I only really discovered it by accident on a trip to Scarborough one October weekend (I literally have no idea what I was doing there - I think I'd just decided I needed a seaside break even if it was the autumn half-term and hardly weather for going to the coast). Sheltering from the cold in the local Our Price, I saw the album on the New Release rack and thought I'd give it a try.

And I'm really glad I did - it's an absolute crying shame that Joya Magica didn't get its scheduled release when it should've as it's a perfect summer album - listening to it on the train journey home sat on the floor in one of the between-carriage sections of an overcrowded Transpennine Express train on a freezing October evening, it felt as if it was a ray of sunshine coming back into my life. Honestly, I think that if the band had put the soaring Back To The Summer out as a follow-up to Alison's Room then they'd finally have had that proper chart hit that had eluded them for the previous few years. Elsewhere, Let It Show and The Biggest Kick sounded like the Jam at their most energetic (Ocean Colour Scene and post-'96 Oasis, you can f**k right off) while the psychedelia of Baby Says Yeah and Killer Inside, the lovelorn Silver Screen, the surprisingly vulnerable Cars, Bars and Movie Stars and the achingly lovely closer Spanish really were the sound of a band on top of their game and it's a real shame that this is where the band's story ended. It's an album that really deserves to have been heard by a lot more people than it was and I honestly can't recommend it enough.

I know that Rich put out a couple of solo albums after the Dolls broke up which I sadly didn't hear (again, something I should really put right at some point), I've no idea what happened to Mike or Carl. All I'll say though is that the 60Ft Dolls really were a band who were desperately unlucky not to have become the megastars they deserved to be - as I've said earlier, a few years earlier or several years later and I'm pretty sure they would've. As it stands though, both The Big 3 and Joya Magica are fantastic under-appreciated gems and really deserve your attention if you've been sadly unaware until now. Go investigate and tell 'em Andy sent ya.