Sounds From The Junkshop #23 - Kenickie

 

"Drain my colour, leave me grey, there are too many moths around when I shine..." - Kenickie, How I Was Made, 1996

I like to think that somewhere out there is a parallel universe where Kenickie decided to weather the storm after their second album underselling and came back with a triumphant third effort similar to Ash's Free All Angels which gave them the long-overdue commercial breakthrough they'd been waiting for. To this day, the band are still together putting out an album and touring every 2-3 years to an appreciative faithful in the Academy sized venues with Lauren Laverne, Marie du Santiago, Emmy-Kate Montrose and Johnny X now being well-respected veterans of the indie/glam community especially among the wave of female-dominated bands who followed in their wake in the early years of this version of the 21st century. I'd also like to think in said universe that the Stereophonics and Coldplay both apologised and went away some time around 2001 or so never to be heard from again and Mumford & Sons decided to go into accounting rather than boring the hell out of us with their tedious blando-indie-folk...

But anyway...Kenickie are one of those bands who nearly everyone that remembers them generally agrees should have been superstars in a just world. When I was asked to do a column about great forgotten bands (Songs From A Wasted Youth which was kind of this column's predecessor) while writing for the excellent Bubblegum Slut fanzine years ago, it was Lauren, Marie and co who were the subject of the first instalment while they've been eulogised everywhere from the Guardian to R*E*P*E*A*T. Even twenty plus years on, I think that to most people who remember them it still just kind of doesn't make sense - they had the tunes, the look, the smarts, the razor-sharp personalities and that all too rare knack of being able to articulate teenage hopes, dreams and frustrations absolutely perfectly. Without wanting to sound melodramatic, it really is one of the great musical injustices of the late '90s that Top 10 success eluded them.

Rewind to the summer of '96. I think the first time I heard of Kenickie was on Steve Lamacq's evening session show when the group's second and third singles, Come Out 2Nite and Punka started getting airplay. In a scene that was already starting to get clogged up with second division clones of Oasis and Blur, they shot through like a bolt of leopard print lightning. The former, released on notorious indie Fierce Panda, was almost a perfect two minute ode to the joys and fears all teenagers feel on going for that big Saturday night out at the one local nightclub that'll serve you ("It's dark and it's savage but it's only neon so come out and grab it") while the latter, their debut single after being signed by EMI, was a brilliant scathing put-down to the sort of Mogwai-worshipping mooks who instantly scream "sellout!" at a band the second they get a major label record deal and very nearly took them into the Top 40.

For the second half of '96 and most of '97, it seemed only a matter of time before Kenickie would break big. Although Punka's follow-up Millionaire Sweeper was a good song but not necessarily a great choice as a single and stalled a bit further down the chart, single number five In Your Car with its irrepressible "Yeah yeah yeah yeah!" hook line would be the one that broke them into the hit parade properly, crashing into the Top 30 and earning them the accolade to be the first band to play Top of the Pops in 1997. It seemed like a harbinger of things to come.

When Kenickie's debut album At The Club surfaced in the spring, it really did seem to sum up the whole "what Britpop could have evolved into" feel of the times better than nearly anything else at the time. Casually sticking two fingers up at tedious white boy Noelrockers like Ocean Colour Scene and dour-faced lo-fi nerds with equal relish, it was split between songs for those teenage nights out when you've had three or four bottles of alcopop and feel on top of the world (Classy, PVC, Come Out 2Nite) and the morose morning after when the hangover kicks in (How I Was Made, Acetone, People We Want). It picked up plaudits from everyone from Courtney Love to Ginger Wildheart and deservedly cracked the Top 10. Add to this interviews where they easily came across as far more savvy than slack-jawed trackie wearers like the Seahorses and Cast and the fact that in Lauren and Marie they had two frontpeople who quickly established themselves as crushes of both myself and a lot of the guys I knew (well okay, Lauren in the case of nearly all of my mates and Marie in my case) and it really did feel like they were going to be unstoppable. I saw them live on the tour to promote the album and they absolutely killed it - all three of the girls had enough stage presence to easily be a frontperson in their own right and they walloped through their set with a tightness and aggression that made it a truly exhilirating hour or so.

Unfortunately though, despite At The Club making the Top 10, this is where it kind of stalled for the band - subsequent singles Nightlife and a re-released Punka failed to improve on In Your Car's chart placing. Admittedly the mid-'97 sea change towards Yorke-style miserabilism probably didn't help matters - Kenickie were certainly a lot more savvy and credible than other Britpop-come-lately types such as Speedy or Ruth but they certainly weren't immune to the Britpop backlash and I certainly think it might have slightly taken the edge off those later singles commercially.

So perhaps it's not a surprise that when Kenickie were gearing up for their second album Get In just a year later that it saw them in a much more downbeat mode. From what I remember at the time, drummer Johnny X (Lauren's brother and probably the most "indie" minded one of the band) had taken more of an active role in the songwriting with Lauren and Marie and whereas At The Club had been that mix of night before and morning after, this one was veering very much towards the latter. They still had the tunes mind - comeback single I Would Fix You was a fine slice of melancholy pop which unbelievably stiffed at number 36 in the charts. Follow-up Stay In The Sun was even better and would have been a perfect summer anthem...only for EMI to bizarrely choose to release it in September just as everyone was going back to school or university and it to miss the Top 40 altogether.

Hands up, Get In threw me for a loop when I first heard it but I've come to appreciate it more as the years have gone on. Very much the sound of an older, sadder and wiser Kenickie disillusioned at what fame and their label expected them to be, there's still plenty of great songs here from the haunting Lunch At Lassiters and '60s Bitch to the proto-Goldfrapp stylings of Magnatron and the gentle 411 (La La La). It's much less immediate than its predecessor but has plenty of rewards if you're willing to stick with it.

It would be tempting to say that with the commercial failure of Get In that the writing was on the wall for Kenickie but I'm not sure that was necessarily the case - lest we forget, the album came out around the same time as Ash's grunge-influenced second album Nu-Clear Sounds which also got a very lukewarm critical reception and sold poorly but after a couple of years off to recuperate they came back all guns blazing with the excellent Free All Angels which went to number one and spawned five Top 20 hits to well and truly put them back in the mix. Had Kenickie done the same, as I've said at the start of this article, I genuinely think they would have not only survived but finally had that big Top 10 single that it seemed would surely come their way sooner or later.

Unfortunately it seems that by this time Kenickie really were at the end of their tether in terms of putting up with the music industry and what it expected of them and the above documentary which surfaced on Youtube many years later, lays it bare in heartbreaking fashion, culminating in Lauren having a near-nervous breakdown in the back of the tour van while it's parked outside Leeds Cockpit (a gig I actually went to). It really goes to show that unfortunately a lot of those romanticised images you get of putting a band together with your mates, touring together and conquering the world often are sadly just bullshit. I'd actually seen them at the Breeze free festival a couple of months earlier supporting Symposium when the new songs had gone down like a cup of cold sick among fans wanting to hear In Your Car and Punka and a clearly frustrated Lauren scowled "See you all in hell" before leaving the stage at the end of the set. It was a sad sight - a band clearly trying to move their sound forward but playing to an audience that just didn't seem to want to come with them.

Kenickie would break up in the dying days of 1998 and the general reaction at time was mostly disbelief - I think a lot of us thought that their setbacks with Get In were something the band could easily rebound from given the chance but it seems that they disagreed. Marie and Emmy formed Rosita who put out a brace of under-rated singles on the Beastie Boys' Zubazarretta label before that went under while Lauren chalked up a Top 20 hit when one of her solo singles Don't Falter was remixed by Mint Royale in the Fatboy Slim dance era but subsequent releases failed to crack the chart. Supposedly according to an interview I read with Lauren around this time the band very nearly did get back together until Rosita were offered a record deal and opted to go down that route instead. Of course, Lauren would eventually move into a successful career in TV and radio presenting and she can currently be heard hosting Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 among other things. And despite what the stuck-up pricks at the Daily Mail might say, very good at it she is too.

While I'm sure I can't be the only one who'd love to see a Kenickie reunion even as just a one-off, something tells me that if it hasn't happened by now then it probably won't. I remember reading an interiew with Lauren a few years ago where she said that all four of the band are friends again with any bitterness following the split now long since in the past but that none of them were up for a reunion and if that's the case then fair enough - sometimes it's best to leave things in the past rather than drag them out again when not everyone's up for it. So all I can really do is say that if you're unfortunate enough not to have listened to Kenickie's two albums yet then you really should put that right as soon as you've finished reading this. Definitely one of the great lost '90s bands.

...oh and if anyone finds a doorway to that parallel universe I mentioned at the start of this article then let me know. Obviously.