Garbage Days Revisited #5: Shed Seven - "A Maximum High" (1996)

 

"I've got this feeling that it won't last the night..." - Shed Seven, Lies

I mentioned a while back in the Heavy Stereo SFTJ column about how local loyalties can be a powerful factor in dictating which bands you like especially when you come from a place like Yorkshire which often tends to regard itself as a bit of a separate entity from Britain or England as a whole. Prime example - York natives Shed Seven, even at their commercial peak when they were Top 10 regulars, were always regarded as a bit of a joke band in the alternative music press. Initially lumped in with the New Wave of New Wave then (perhaps fortuitously) reassigned to Britpop as they were poppy enough to fit in with the scene, they seemed to attract the "poor man's Oasis" jibes right from the get-go (not helped by the music press gleefully stoking up a Yorkshire vs Lancashire rivalry between the two). Well, it's time for a bit of counterbalance here because their second album, A Maximum High, I would argue is one of the best of the Britpop era. No joke motherfuckers. Let's rewind, shall we?...

I think it was early '94 when I first became aware of the group - they were starting to get mentions in the NME as part of the New Wave of New Wave and, as we've already established in the SFTJ article on These Animal Men, I was following the proto-Britpop scene quite avidly at this point. The fact that they were from nearby and I'd seen their gigs advertised at the Duchess in Leeds probably didn't hurt their cause either. I finally saw them live at a free festival that June in Leeds sharing a bill with Chumbawamba and Kingmaker (they were a late replacement for Elastica) where they were quite easily the standout band of the day. Soon afterwards, me and a couple of friends found out that they were playing the Duchess that August and promptly went into town to buy tickets. It's a good thing we did because a week or two later they scored their first chart hit with Dolphin and the gig rapidly sold out!

The Sheds were a great live band back in the day - yes, they were undoubtedly a lot poppier and more polished than the likes of S*M*A*S*H* or Compulsion but they still had a nervy wiry punk energy to them with Rick Witter lurching around the stage like a giraffe on stilts which made their gigs properly frenetic affairs. Unfortunately their debut album Change Giver was a bit hit-and-miss - when it hit the mark such as on the Stonesy swagger of Dirty Soul, the defiant snarl of Mark, the seasick heroin ballad Ocean Pie and the frenetic closer On An Island With You, it was great. Unfortunately, there was also quite a bit of filler on there - the likes of Head And Hands, Casino Girl and Stars In Your Eyes came and went without really leaving much of an impression. Quickly gaining a reputation as a Marmite band, they would spend most of 1995 out of the spotlight recording the follow-up while Oasis and Blur were warring over the right to be kings of the Britpop hill.

The group would pop their heads back above ground in the summer of '95 for the Where Have You Been Tonight? single, a great ode to smalltown boredom ("There is nothing to do/And nowhere to go when you need to") which definitely spoke to me growing up in a quiet satellite town like I did. It showed their sound was moving forwards and when their second album, the appropriately titled A Maximum High surfaced in early '96, it showed that they'd taken it up to the next level and had to be considered serious players now. If Oasis, Blur, Pulp and a returning Suede were now firmly in place as Britpop's Big Four then Shed Seven were definitely in the mix with the likes of the Bluetones and Dodgy as chief pretenders to the throne.

Kicking in with the fired-up swagger of second single Getting Better, A Maximum High is pretty much all killer no filler. The Pinball Wizard pilfering ode to kerb crawling Magic Streets and the aforementioned Where Have You Been Tonight? keep the tempo running well before Going For Gold (the song that would go on to be their only Top 10 hit) really tops it off. The paranoid On Standby (another Top 20 hit) and the sinister stalker ballad Out By My Side bring side one to a close nicely.

Side two might not have the immediately recognisable songs that side one does but there's still plenty of great stuff on it from the simmering anger of Lies through the cocky swagger of Falling From The Sky and This Day Was Ours (the latter a cheeky ode to knuckle-shuffling unless I'm much mistaken) before the slow-building fury of the anti-drugs Parallel Lines (Rick had broken up with Donna Matthews from Elastica, who was well known to have, narcotics issues shall we say, in the run-up to the album which may or may not be relevant here) brings it to a stinging conclusion with some furiously barbed lyrics ("Yeah that was a joke, every time that you spoke, until you finally choked, and now I'll rule my own roost")

The album went Top 10, spawned five Top 20 singles and, unlike its predecessor, got pretty much universal acclaim in the music press. It should have given the band a clear run to become major players in the Britpop landscape but unfortunately while they were off between 1996 and 1998 the musical landscape went through an almost total transformation from the shoutalong laddishness of Britpop to the much more downbeat post-OK Computer mope-rock of Radiohead, the Verve et al.

Given the way a lot of their one time peers like Sleeper and Echobelly had tumbled after putting out poorly received second or third albums in late '97, Shed Seven were actually quite fortunate to only just miss the Top 10 with their comeback single She Left Me On Friday which was defiantly sticking to the formula that had worked well in the past. However, although it did respectably in the charts, their third album Let It Ride was a bit of a disappointment with a great first side featuring the epic opener Return, the Stones-meets-Terrorvision title track, the great single that should've been Halfway Home and the yearning Devil In Your Shoes but a side two that apart from the aforementioned She Left Me On Friday and former single Chasing Rainbows was just totally anonymous. It sold enough copies to just about keep the label happy but the tide was unmistakably turning against them unfortunately...

 Following a greatest hits compilation (which spawned a final Top 20 hit for the band in Disco Down), the group's contract with Polydor ran out and wasn't renewed. Guitarist Paul Banks who'd founded the band with Witter in the early '90s left and the spell seemed to have broken. A final Sheds album Truth Be Told did eventually surface on an indie label in 2003 but it really wasn't very good unfortunately and the band would fold a couple of years later after attempts at a follow-up foundered after a fallout with their new label.

The irony is, of course, that Shed Seven reunited a few years later and continue to pack out academy sized venues across the UK to this day which perhaps proves that critical acclaim doesn't really count for much when it comes to popularity and so may it continue to be. They even put out a new album, Instant Pleasures in 2017 which took them back into the Top 10. I wanted to like it but was a bit disappointed unfortunately - it just felt a bit by-numbers to me. No, to hear Shed Seven at their best, A Maximum High is where you need to go. While all of their other albums are a bit hit-and-miss (albeit with at least a few good moments on each), this one properly hits the spot with nearly every song being a winner. And yeah, I'll say it again - I'd class it as one of the Top 10 albums of the Britpop era. The joke, it would seem, is on those who laughed at them way back then.