Sounds From The Junkshop Bonus - Footnotes 1993-95

 

So here we go with the second instalment of the SFTJ almost-weres column. For those who missed part 1, this is where I take a look at a few bands who did have a minor influence on my music taste developing but not to the extent that I felt I had enough to write a full Sounds From The Junkshop article on them.

Anyway, today we're looking at 1993-95. It started with the dying embers of grunge and the rise of the short lived crusty rock movement that came along in the wake of the Levellers becoming bona fide chart stars, took in the magnesium flash of the New Wave of New Wave and ended with Britpop starting to coalesce as the big music movement of the time.

For me, early '94 probably represented the first big sea change in my music taste since I'd got into guitar music 2-3 years before. The scuzzy indie-punk bands who'd comprised the majority of my listening up until this point were very much on the wane commercially by now - the Wonder Stuff would split up mid-'94 and the Senseless Things would go their separate ways in early '95 followed by Kingmaker soon afterwards while Mega City Four were in a prolonged period without a record deal after their label went bust and Carter were grimly hanging on in the lower reaches of the charts but the days of Top 10 hits and number one albums were well behind them by this point.

The first few months of 1994 would see me start going to gigs properly - before this point I'd only been to the Carter gig at Bradford Uni where me and my mates were allowed in on the express condition that we didn't try and take the piss by ordering alcohol and a free festival in the summer of '93 featuring Cud and the Senseless Things. However, I managed to go and see Therapy? supported by Baby Chaos in Leeds around the time of my 15th birthday and soon afterwards made the first of many trips to the Duchess to see These Animal Men. By the end of the year, I'd have seen Terrorvision for the first time in Bradford and the soon-to-go-supernova Shed Seven at the Duchess (they'd had their first big hit and TOTP appearance with Dolphin just a week or two before and the place was absolutely crammed - by the next tour they'd have moved on to much bigger venues).

So yeah, by this point my two main music points of reference were the NWONW and the fledgling Britrock movement - it would be early '95 when I'd discover the Wildhearts who were the band who really sealed the deal for me but Therapy?'s Troublegum and Terrorvision's How To Make Friends And Influence People were both getting pretty heavy rotation on my stereo at this point along with These Animal Men's (Come On, Join) The High Society, the Levellers' self-titled album, the Manics' The Holy Bible, Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish, Carter's Post-Historic Monsters and in the second half of '94, Oasis' Definitely Maybe, Shed Seven's Change Giver, the Almighty's Crank, Kerbdog's self-titled debut and Suede's Dog Man Star. Essentially I was pretty much split 50/50 between indie and rock - no wonder I was feeling a bit confused back then...

Anyway, let's have a look at the watershed years shall we?

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BACK TO THE PLANET/CHUMBAWAMBA

One good thing about growing up in Leeds in the early '90s was that there used to be a free festival at Temple Newsam which, for someone who was still a year or two shy of being 16 and therefore limited in terms of getting into venues (by the time I was 15 this had just about stopped being a problem as I was lucky to just about pass off as old enough) was an absolute godsend as it represented the best chance to see new music without some bouncer who was having a bad night turning you away at the door.

Of course, any free festival will always attract those from the hippy traveller community and following the rise of the Levellers in the early '90s, there were a few bands who came up from the same background and would inevitably appear on these bills to cater to this part of the audience. The main two were London's Back To The Planet and Burnley folk-punk veterans Chumbawamba. At the time it felt like you would inevitably see them both at some point during the summer as they were very much mainstays of the free festival scene - the great and good Attila the Stockbroker has a brilliant song dating from this era called Doggy on a String which is a gentle piss-take of the whole movement.

As with any band you end up seeing live a lot by accident (support band syndrome if you will), both of them did worm their way into my music taste for a bit. I ended up buying a couple of Back To The Planet singles after seeing them in various sun-scorched fields in the summers of ‘93 and ‘94  - Daydream was the nearest they came to chalking up anything resembling a hit (it stopped just outside the Top 50). Listening back to it now, it sounds like something from about 5 years later when you had indie-dance bands like Skinny and the All-Seeing I doing the rounds on the circuit so maybe they were ahead of their time a bit? Generally though, public indifference kind of did for them and there came a day when their name just wasn’t on those bills anymore as the band had ceased to exist. Guitarist Fraggle went on to form RealTV with singer Jay Butler who subsequently went on to one of the few shining lights of the nu-metal era Grand Theft Audio (SFTJ coming up at some point in the future there I'm sure).

Realistically, Chumbawamba should have gone the same way. Signed to established indie One Little Indian (who were mostly notable for having the Shamen and Bjork on their books back then), they chalked up a minor hit with Time Bomb (again, I bought it and again it stalled just outside the Top 50) and the ferocious Anarchy album which went Top 30. I think a mate might have taped this one for me because I remember hearing it and thinking it was okay - songs like Never Do What You Are Told and Mouthful Of Shit definitely tapped into my angry teenage consciousness. Again though, they disappeared from view as the Britpop era went into full flow and I think I just assumed they'd split up the same as Back To The Planet had.

And then, of course, this happened...

Yup, we are talking about the same band who released the pop classic Tubthumping and had a Top 3 hit with it. I'm sure most of us who'd done the free festival circuit a few years earlier and remembered Chumbawamba as the perpetual mid-bill band were, the same as myself, picking their jaws up off the floor and going "Wait...whu...whu...WHAT?!"

Inevitably, there were plenty of cries of "sell outs!" from the anarcho-punk community over the band's sudden success but y'know what, they'd been plugging away for almost two decades at this point and you couldn't begrudge them having a bit of sudden success really. Of course, their moment in the spotlight pretty much went as soon as it had arrived and their following album WYSIWYG bombed and they were rapidly gone from their major label deal with EMI

I pretty much lost touch with Chumbawamba once they disappeared off the radar but I did see them one final time about a decade after the fact headlining the acoustic stage at the Morecambe Punk Festival in a pub by the seafront, showing how much they'd gone full circle - it was certainly a far cry from the all-singing all-dancing anarcho-pop extravaganza that they put on for the Tubthumper tour. They put on a good account of themselves and it was enough to persuade me to check out their following album The Boy Bands Have Won which saw them returning to the folk-punk sound they'd originally made their name with in the 1980s and was actually a much better album than it really had any right to be. Unfortunately though, they would only manage one further album before finally splitting in 2012.

The full Chumbawamba story won’t be told here - it would probably take a whole book to do that and I’m not the guy to write it - but they definitely were a regular presence in my teenage musical education and I don't begrudge them their brief shot at megastardom one bit. Certainly the post-Britpop years would've been a lot duller without 'em. But it's so weird to contrast their story with that of Back To The Planet who were effectively done a good year or two before Chumbawamba had their big hit. Just goes to show that life can be funny sometimes I s'pose.

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CREDIT TO THE NATION

And while we’re on the subject, here's a thematic link - in 1994, Chumbawamba did a joint single, Enough Is Enough, with an up and coming indie-rap group called Credit To The Nation. I've referenced it in the Pop Will Eat Itself SFTJ article but in an era where the BNP were starting to scarily gain ground in an increasingly polarised political climate (albeit something that looks like child's play compared to the climate we find ourselves in these days), the take-no-prisoners chorus of "Give the fascist man a gunshot!" really did make it feel like an anthem for the times, for those who were ready to tell the Nazis to fuck off.

Although I'd never really consider myself a rap fan (I did listen to a bit of it in the whole Public Enemy/De La Soul/Dream Warriors era but apart from maybe Cypress Hill I'd pretty much lost interest in it by this point), I really did think CTTN were something special, taking the whole political rap of Chuck D and co but putting an unmistakably British slant on it. Their first single Call It What You Want gained a bit of notoriety for sampling Smells Like Teen Spirit which I remember at least a couple of sneaky indie club DJ's capitalising on by putting the track on and watching the flannel-clad Nirvana fans running for the dancefloor only to see them stop and go "oh fer fookssake" before returning to their seat once Matty Hanson's vocals kicked in.

The group would continue to go from strength to strength with Teenage Sensation giving them a bona fide Top 20 hit and the group supporting the Manics and Therapy? The album Take Dis was a bang-on-the-money set of socialist hip-hop and it really set them out as a unique and exciting group. Unfortunately though, while the band were winning over a lot of converts in the rock press, their (right on the money) diatribes against the "greed is good" mentality of a lot of the major hip-hop and R'n'B stars of the day (see the excellent Hear No Bullshit, See No Bullshit, Say No Bullshit for proof) made them a lot of enemies in that field and probably killed off their chances of getting the crossover appeal that they were aiming for.

Supposedly some time around this time, Matty had some sort of nervous breakdown (the constant threats from the BNP that he was facing were a major contributory factor and he even had to move out of his native West Midlands) and it pretty much put the brakes on Credit To The Nation. They would put out a second album in 1995 but I completely missed it - by that point it was Britrock and Britpop and CTTN were very much regarded as last year's thing.

A third album was mooted as the decade neared its end and a lead-off single Tacky Love Song (which sampled Radiohead's High And Dry and which I remember playing a bit on my student radio show at the time) did surface but it bombed commercially and that was pretty much that. The band are now back together and I remember seeing a gig of theirs sharing a bill with Senser advertised at a venue in Croydon when I was at an indoor festival there - time to party like it's 1993 evidently. On a serious note though, I really do feel as if Credit To The Nation should be afforded a bit more respect than they are - their very serious and political take on hip-hop really did make them a stand-out group for a very brief period. It's just a shame that those sensibilities which in a just world would have catapulted them on to superstar status ended up effectively torpedoing their career instead.

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S*M*A*S*H

As of the first 20-odd SFTJ's we've only really touched on the excellent These Animal Men as far as the New Wave of New Wave goes but while they were far and away the main band from that movement who I used to follow, there were others who crossed over into my conscience no matter how briefly and none moreso than Welwyn natives S*M*A*S*H who were very much the other leading lights of the scene.

Hands up, I was a bit slower getting into S*M*A*S*H than I was These Animal Men - while just as aggressive, their music was a bit less immediate. They scored a minor hit with Shame but it was a slow grower compared to TAM's more immediate cut-and-thrust take on punk. However, things would all change in the summer of '94 when I heard they'd put out a new single, I Wanna Kill Somebody that was promptly banned by Radio 1. Well, I had to investigate after that, didn't I? And I'm certainly glad I did.

I Wanna Kill Somebody was pretty much S*M*A*S*H's crowning glory and I'd go so far as to say one of the definitive punk singles of the '90s, a white hot howl of rage against the greedy bigoted incompetent Tory government of the time (the more things change...). I still remember writing the lyrics to it on the inside of my work binder for sixth form at the time ("I wanna chop their fucking heads off and stick 'em on a stake/That's the extent of my hate"). Amazingly, probably due to the infamy surrouding it, it actually managed to breach the Top 30 and was enough to make me rush out and buy the group's album Self-Abused when it surfaced a few weeks later.

Unfortunately, the album was a bit hit-and-miss with some great tunes such as Real Surreal, Revisited, Reflections Of You and Bang Bang Bang (Granta 25) which matched some ferocious aggression with frontman Ed Borrie's mix of heartfelt anger and clever wordplay ("I said that I'm a compulsive liar/But you said that you didn't believe me") but also a few songs which felt like they were thrashing around in search of a point (to hear them at their incendiary best, listen to their first self-titled EP from early '94). Sales were disappointing and the group would be dropped and go their separate ways in early '95. Bassist Salv would join Carter USM for their World Without Dave album and drummer Rob would end up in These Animal Men.

S*M*A*S*H would reform in the late noughties and would actually put out a further two albums, both showing a more mature mellow sound but with plenty of the anger and frustration of old still intact. I went to see them at the legendary Hope & Anchor venue in Islington just after what turned out to be their final album Goodbye Welwyn Garden City came out (give the seven minute title track a spin, it's the sort of thing you could never imagine '90s S*M*A*S*H doing but it's a real eye-opener, a great mid-tempo moody song about the advance of time). Live, they still had the same aggression as they did the one time I saw them in '94 at the Duchess but a few months later, Ed and Rob would announce that they were retiring the S*M*A*S*H name (Salv had been out of the picture for a while by this point). Ed is still recording solo and I'm looking forward to hearing his new stuff when it surfaces. In summary, S*M*A*S*H might have blown a bit hot and cold during their first run but when they were on form, they were flippin' amazing and both the S*M*A*S*H EP and, to a lesser extent, Self-Abused are worth a listen for the curious.

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COMPULSION/MANTARAY

Along with These Animal Men and S*M*A*S*H, there were plenty of other up-and-coming bands who were initially slung in with the New Wave of New Wave. Some, such as Elastica and Shed Seven, were rapidly re-assigned to Britpop once that came along while most of the rest would simply plummet into oblivion within a year or two once the edginess of the wave they'd rode in on was replaced by Britpop's more commercially friendly style.

Compulsion were one such band - I first ended up hearing them after their almost-hit Mall Monarchy ended up on a compilation album that a friend did for me and listened to the Comforter album off the back of it. It was...well, okay I suppose but not of the same quality as (Come On, Join) The High Society or even Self-Abused. However, it was their second album in 1996, The Future Is Medium that really saw them spread their wings.

Similar to These Animal Men's Accident And Emergency a year or so later, The Future Is Medium saw Compulsion, possibly upon realising that with their chance of commercial success had pretty much gone by this point, basically just make the album they'd always wanted to make, chucking in some of the most oddball tunes and lyrics you're ever likely to hear (opener All We Heard Was A Dull Thud starts with the lyrics "I said they're red and you said they're grey and then you said I was wrong. You stopped in your tracks as I grabbed the axe and caught you behind the ear. Bet that hurt") along with a liberal dose of electronica and some genuinely great tunes from the weirdo-pop of singles Question Time For The Proles and Juvenile Scene Detective to the frenetic punk of Burst to the maudlin Lost On Abbey Road.

Great stuff - and of course, as befits my track record, as soon as I'd got into this album and was telling all my friends they absolutely had to go out and buy it, Compulsion split. Drummer Jan would end up joining fellow One Little Indian signees and SFTJ alumni China Drum while guitarist Garrett would reinvent himself as Jacknife Lee and go into Fatboy Slim style dance music with...shall we say, varied results. No idea what happened to singer Josephmary or bassist Sid. Yup, Compulsion may not have quite been up in the premier league of NWONW bands but The Future Is Medium is definitely a lost classic album and genuinely sounds like hardly anything else from the era. Well worth a listen out of curiosity.

Braintree natives Mantaray, on the other hand, were supposed to represent the more melodic side of the NWONW. They supported both These Animal Men and S*M*A*S*H and were signed to Dead Dead Good who also had the Charlatans on their books. They were meant to sound like a '90s version of the Jam (presumably as they had a fondness for mod suits in the early days) or Generation X but were really more like a less snotty These Animal Men with less punchy tunes.

As I remember it, they were a good singles band who just seemed to struggle when it came to albums. I remember buying their two lead-off singles Adoration and Insomniac's Dream and really enjoying both only for the subsequent Some Pop album, in true Northside/Airhead fashion (see the first SFTJ Footnotes article for that explanation) to disappoint a bit. It had a couple of other good tunes (the self-deprecating Greatest Living Soul was a humorous stab at some of the other NWONW bands like These Animal Men who'd come up alongside them with lyrics like "I set out my stall to offend you all, I'll have you all as my prize, wish I'd signed to Hi-Rise") but also a LOT of filler.

Despite sales for both singles and album being pretty much negligible, amazingly Mantaray ended up coming back in 1997 having moved from Dead Dead Good to major label Fontana for the Reds And The Blues album. It was preceded by an absolutely killer single Know Where To Find You which saw them amp up their sound to good effect with a punchy swirling guitar riff powering the song along. "Ah-ha!" I thought upon hearing it, "Maybe they've got it right this time!" before going out and buying the album.

And...yeah, more fool me, it had three absolute classics on it in the aforementioned Know Where To Find You, the fast-paced pop-punk of Patient Man (which they sensibly put out as the follow-up single) and the haunting closer Don't Believe In Me and the rest pretty much being filler albeit with a slightly bigger production budget than last time. Again, it failed to sell, the band were dropped and I can only assume they split soon afterwards.

Mantaray were very much a band I wanted to like more than I did and I think if they'd managed to keep the quality consistent across their two albums they could have been up there as NWONW front runners with These Animal Men and S*M*A*S*H and maybe even hitched a ride on the Britpop bandwagon. As it stands though, they're pretty much just a footnote in mid-'90s musical history. I'd certainly recommend the three songs I've highlighted off each of their albums for curious listeners though as it shows what they were capable of when the mood took them. Just a pity there weren't a few more of them really.

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Anyway, thus concludes our trip through the darkness before dawn and the first light of the Britpop years. We'll return in a few weeks with a look back at some of the bands from the mid to late Britpop era who just missed out on getting a full SFTJ written about them. Until then...