Sounds From The Junkshop Bonus - Footnotes 1991-93

 

So here's a bit of a special feature in the Sounds From The Junkshop series. While writing the first twenty or so entries in the series, it's often occurred to me while retracing the musical steps of my youth that there were a few bands who were deserving of an honorary mention in these flashbacks but hadn't really imprinted themselves on my music taste sufficiently to really warrant a full SFTJ all to themselves. From bands who sort of played around the edge of being in my favourites to ones who put out one absolute blinder of a single only to disappear soon afterwards to those who reeled me in with a decent song only for their album to put me off, these occasional SFTJ round-ups are designed to just fill in a few gaps in the story of my musical journey for anyone who's interested.

As we're now well into the Britpop era with the regular SFTJ lookbacks, it sort of made sense to do a look back at those bands who briefly threatened to become favourites of mine in my early years as a guitar music fan from about 1991 to 1993. My main favourites around this time were Carter USM, the Senseless Things, Mega City Four, the Wonder Stuff, Voice of the Beehive, the Dogs D'Amour and, a bit later, Love/Hate, WASP, Kingmaker, Suede and the Smashing Pumpkins if you need a reference point.

There were a few bands who did crop up in this era but will be dealt with a bit further down the road in the SFTJ series - for example, I liked the Inspiral Carpets and Ride but I'll deal with them when I come to do SFTJ entries for the Clint Boon Experience and Hurricane #1 respectively (spoiler alert, sorry). Likewise, I'm not gonna write stuff on bands like the Manic Street Preachers, the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, the Charlatans, Blur or Suede because all of them have books about their exploits in this era readily available and, as someone who liked all of them but wasn’t really what you’d call a mega fan of any of them (at least not at this point in time), I don’t feel that there’s anything I can really add to what’s already out there.

Anyway, let's go for a quick wander down the musical backroads of the post-Madchester pre-Britpop era, shall we? Enjoy...

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AIRHEAD/NORTHSIDE

I suppose it's a mistake everybody makes when they're taking their first tentative steps into being a music fan - you hear a song in the lower reaches of the charts and absolutely love it then go and get the album and realise you've been taken for a mug because the band in question actually don't have any good songs beyond the single.

There were two times this happened to me in the very early years of me getting into alternative music and I can't quite remember which came first. Both Airhead and Northside were bands who climbed on the Madchester bandwagon just as the wheels came off then the wagon caught fire and crashed headlong into a community hall full of nuns and schoolkids. Northside were signed to Factory and mates with the Happy Mondays and I remember hearing and liking their singles My Rising Star and Take 5, both of which grazed the lower end of the Top 40 in 1991. I seem to remember I ended up buying their sole album Chicken Rhythms in early '92 from a post-Christmas sale at my local Woolworths (probably about the same time as I first bought The First Of Too Many and 30 Something) for the princely sum of £1.99 on cassette after seeing it in the bargain bin and thinking "oh yeah, I used to like them, maybe this is good?"

Spoiler - it wasn't. The two singles were great as was their debut single Shall We Take A Trip? (which I seem to remember being banned by Radio 1 for its none-too-subtle "L-S-D!" chorus - as it happened it missed the Top 40 by a mile so they might as well not have bothered) but beyond that it was just totally anonymous. I think even by the time I actually bought this album, Northside had already been dropped by Factory and split up and Factory would have gone to the wall by the end of the year after the cost of the new albums by New Order and the Happy Mondays effectively bankrupted them. Draw your own conclusions from that.

Airhead, bizarrely, weren't even from Manchester, in fact they were from nowhere near the north-west, hailing from Maidstone of all places. Not that you'd have known it from listening to them as they were blatantly trying to sound as “aaarrr kid” as possible and offering up a much poppier take take on the whole baggy sound. They were written off by a lot of people at the time as being the Monkees to the Stone Roses’ Beatles but that needn’t have been a bad thing - as the Monkees themselves showed, there’s been plenty a good pop song written by taking a popular formula and offering a more melodic chart-friendly take on it.

Similar to Northside, I bought Airhead's sole album Boing! in early '92 after hearing their first two singles Funny How and Counting Sheep, both of which crept into the lower end of the Top 40. I think the former drew me in because of the chorus of "It's funny how the girls you fall in love with never fancy you/It's funny how the ones you don't do". I mean, that was kind of half-accurate with me at the time because the girls I wasn't falling in love with didn't seem to fancy me either but I think to my teenage ears it seemed like a much welcomed dose of honesty about dating compared to the macho posturing of yer Skid Rows and Poisons who I'd mostly been listening to prior to this point.

And again, I realised after my first listen to Boing! that Airhead really didn't have much beyond those two singles unfortunately. I managed to find the album on Spotify while triggering some memories for this article and gave it a listen and unfortunately, if anything, it's even worse than I remember it being with the nasal whining on the vocals which makes even Liam Gallagher seem vaguely reasonable being especially difficult to tolerate. Like the singles it didn’t sell anywhere near enough copies to keep their major label paymasters happy and that was all she wrote.

I think both Chicken Rhythms and Boing! had found their way to the local charity shop by the time 1992 was out as this was before I'd discovered the joys of the record exchanges in Leeds. Oh well, onwards and upwards...

As a footnote though (a footnote to the footnotes! Ooh, how meta!), in that same Woolies sale I ended up picking up Northside's album from, I also picked up a tape copy of the Charlatans' Some Friendly album, again on the basis of having liked their two singles from a year or so earlier (The Only One I Know and Then) and again for £1.99. While it was a bit better than Chicken Rhythms in that it had a good three or four other decent songs on it as well as the singles (Sproston Green and Opportunity still sound good now), it still had quite a bit of filler in there and ended up gravitating to the back of my tape rack fairly quickly. However, it did prompt me to give the band another go upon hearing the classic Can't Get Out Of Bed single a couple of years later and buying the Up To Our Hips album which was a big improvement and I'd remain a fan for a few years afterwards - in fact I still listen to their mid-'90s efforts now and again to this day. Which I guess just proves that it's a thin line between success and failure sometimes... 

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NED'S ATOMIC DUSTBIN

As I've mentioned in past SFTJ columns, I probably should have liked Ned's Atomic Dustbin more than I did. Given that SFTJ's past have featured Carter USM, the Wonder Stuff, the Senseless Things and Mega City Four, they should have been a natural fit to my music tastes. Yet to me they always kind of blew hot and cold, a good singles band who never quite seemed to nail it when it came to albums.

I first got into the Neds after hearing the classic Kill Your Television single on the ITV Chart Show in 1990 and absolutely loved it. I was only 11 at the time but I seem to remember sneaking off on a shopping trip into Leeds with my mum (it would be another year or so before I was allowed to go into the big city on my own) to buy a copy from HMV. I still love that song and it really proved how potent the Neds were when they were firing on all cylinders.

Follow-up Until You Find Out was similarly quality and third single Happy broke them into the Top 20. I bought it when it came out so I guess there's actually an argument that they pre-dated Carter USM in becoming favourites of mine as this was a couple of months before Jim Bob and Fruitbat hit the Top 40 with Sheriff Fatman. However, I remember not being as fond of their fourth single Trust which just seemed a bit sluggish compared to its predecessors although it gave them a second Top 20 hit.

I bought the Ned's debut album God Fodder about the same time as I picked up 30 Something and The First Of Too Many in early '92 (although it had come out the year before) and unfortunately I remember being really disappointed by it - apart from the singles and the rumbling Cut Up, I thought the songs just weren't as good as the ones that Carter, the Things and the Megas had. Almost overnight, the Neds went from being one of my favourite bands to being about midway down the ladder.

I still went out and bought the odd single of theirs from thereon out - I remember buying Not Sleeping Around when the group came back in late '92 only to discover that the subsequent album Are You Normal? didn't really have much of note on it apart from that one song. Their third album, Brainbloodvolume, released in 1995 a good two years after the whole fraggle movement had died out, was a little bit better and had two great singles, Stuck and the excellently titled All I Ask Of Myself Is That I Hold Together on it but by then, my attention had kind of moved on as had that of the country at large and they split soon afterwards.

The Neds would reform around the time of the millennium and have been diligently plugging away ever since so respect to them for that. Looking back with three decades' distance, they were a bit of an odd one - they had their moments but their songs generally never quite fully grabbed you the way those of a lot of their peers did. I've got a singles collection of theirs on my Ipod and I guess that's probably all you'd really need to be honest. I've not been to see any of the gigs since they got back together but I guess if they were co-headlining with someone like the Wonder Stuff or Jim Bob at a Leeds gig or similar then I'd probably be persuaded if finances allowed. And fair play, as a bass player myself, any band that has two four-stringers in its ranks is alright by me.

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CUD

Cud were another band who fell into the category of "I should by rights like these guys but somehow..." being as they were the great white hopes of Leeds indie in the early '90s (although they were actually students at Leeds Uni rather than natives of the city themselves). By the time I became aware of them, they'd already been plugging away for a good few years before their classic Rich And Strange single cracked the Top 30 in mid-'92. I remember going out and buying that after hearing it on the Top 40 countdown on Radio 1 - I think I was just thrilled that a band from Leeds was in the Top 40. As I previously mentioned in the Kingmaker SFTJ column, it's safe to say that the post-New Model Army pre-Terrorvision days were pretty fallow ones for my neck of the woods so this was a bit of a big deal for us.

Unfortunately, they never quite cracked the heights of that song again. The next single Purple Love Balloon made the Top 30 again but wasn't really of the same quality and the album Asquarius had some decent moments but blew hot and cold a bit. I think the problem was that Cud were another band who didn't quite fit in anywhere but unlike a lot of bands I loved that you could say that about, in their case it actually ended up working against them from my point of taste in that they kind of half-leaned towards the whole "fraggle" indie-punk scene but were kind of coming at it from a more Smithsian "smarter than the average bear" angle. To me, it kind of diluted their sound a bit and put them back a bit from the likes of Carter and the Senseless Things in terms of quality moshpit fodder.

I would end up going to see Cud as my second ever gig at a free festival in Leeds in the summer of 1993 where the Senseless Things were the main support (as mentioned in the Things' SFTJ feature a few months back). To be fair, they put on a good enjoyable set on the night which maybe shows that they were more in their element as a live band but it would be a good year or so after that before they put any further material out in the form of the Showbiz album and its minor hit lead-off single Neurotica - had something come out a bit sooner then it's fair to say I might well have given them a second chance but the one year gap kind of saw them drop from my memory a bit - shame. I did buy Neurotica out of curiosity but it didn't really hit home with me and I chose to give Showbiz a miss. Again, probably because by now it was late 1994 and I was more into listening to These Animal Men etc by this point.

Cud reformed post-millennium and are still going today. They still command a healthy following in Leeds and have sold out the Brudenell a couple of times in recent years so fair play to 'em. Similar to the Ned's, they always felt like a band who blew hot and cold a lot of the time which I suspect is why even though they did play a role in my teenage musical education I don't quite hold them in the same high regard as the other bands from this era that I've covered on SFTJ. Rich And Strange though remains an undisputed classic.

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CURVE

It's weird to think now but there was a brief period in 1992 when Curve were arguably the biggest indie band in Britain and were genuinely chart-conquering stars. Representing the point where grunge and goth collided, they really reached their peak on the awesome Fait Accompli single driven along by Toni Halliday's truly sinister ice maiden vocals and Dean Garcia's ferocious driving guitar line. An absolute classic of its time and for those unaware of it, I really can't recommend it enough.

Curve had broken onto the scene right at the start of the decade with the brooding classic Ten Little Girls and subsequent EP's had seen their chart placings slowly increase right up to Fait Accompli breaking into the Top 20. It really did look briefly like they were going to be British alternative music’s defining band going into 1993.

Then...suddenly they were no more. Horrorhead, the follow-up to Fait Accompli, did respectably, reaching the Top 30 but then they disappeared for a year, put out one further single and album and abruptly split. To this day, I'm not sure why, from what I can understand upon browsing t'internet, it seems that they'd simply burned themselves out from constant touring and needed a break.

They would reform towards the end of the decade and put out a further three albums but unfortunately while they were away another group essentially took their whole schtick of moody Scottish goth girl singer and American electro-rock guy backing her up and filched it wholesale, namely Garbage. The fact that Shirley Manson and Butch Vig took the whole thing to greater commercial heights than Curve did after shamelessly co-opting it must have been a real sickener for Toni and Dean and when they did make the comeback, their music had suddenly gone a lot more electronic with the rock influences pushed into the background.

Curve's first two albums Doppelganger and Cuckoo are both worth a listen for those who want a taste of the era as is the early singles collection, the erm, delightfully named Pubic Fruit. They're not quite all killer no filler but there's definitely enough good moments in there to make them worth a spin for any curious goths out there.

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DAISY CHAINSAW

Now here's a band who really did burn bright for about five seconds before disappearing just as soon as they'd arrived. Daisy Chainsaw are probably best remembered for their storming debut single Love Your Money which cracked the Top 30 in late '91. I remember it fondly just because of the horrified expression on my parents' faces whenever they passed my room as it was blasting out of the stereo. Kicking in with what appears to be the sound of an actual chainsaw before powering along on Crispin Gray's brutal driving distorted glam rock riff and Katie Jane Garside's downright disturbing childlike vocals, it still sounds great today.

Unfortunately, that one song would pretty much be it for Daisy Chainsaw - I did hear the follow-up single Pink Flower (even more intense than its predecessor before drifting to a blissed-out ending) on an Indie Top 20 compilation I borrowed off a mate a while later but it stopped some way short of the Top 40. Reading the band's Wikipedia page, they apparently released several further singles and even did two albums, all of which I have to plead total ignorance to even being aware of at the time.

Garside would disappear to live in a hippy commune in the Lake District for several years after the group split up but she would reunite with Gray in goth-metallers Queen Adreena at the end of the decade who put out one of the most sinister covers of Dolly Parton's Jolene you will ever hear and managed to put out a further four albums (I heard two of them - both deliciously weird but a bit inconsistent albeit with a few classics on each).

Gray would go on to the not entirely dissimilar Dogbones who I saw a few times in my early days living in London a decade ago and is now in Starsha Lee. Garside I remember being in a group called Ruby Throat who I didn't hear anything by unfortunately - not sure if she's still there now. Either way though, both of them can rest easy knowing that they came up with an absolute shock-rock classic in Love Your Money.

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And there we finally leave the early '90s behind. I'll be doing another one of these round-ups in a few weeks' time where we'll look at the early days of Britpop/New Wave of New Wave and a few bands from just before it. Expect dreadlocks, tracksuits and a whole lot more as the hippies meet the indie-punks uptown. So to speak.