Sounds From The Junkshop #24 - Northern Uproar

 

"My misunderstandings maybe led me to my fate" - Northern Uproar, From A Window, 1996

Northern Uproar then...jeez, now there was a band who got pilloried. Rising up from Manchester in Oasis' wake while still in their teens, they were pretty much crucified from the word go as bandwagon jumpers - "Northside Uproar" was one of the more telling insults slung their way by the dictionary abusers at the NME and similar. But, y'know what, I've already stuck up for both Shed Seven and Heavy Stereo in these pages and I'm gonna say it - maybe you just had to be a northern teenager but Northern Uproar were nowhere near as bad as a lot of people would tell you.

I first encountered t'Uproar via their second single (and biggest hit) From A Window. While arguably they'd never quite succeed in repeating the trick again, here they absolutely nailed the whole frustration of being a teenager growing up in some quiet nowhere satellite town ("I swore today I'm leaving, I don't wanna stay") in three glorious minutes. It took them all the way into the Top 20 and soon afterwards I remember going to see them in Leeds (I think it was at the Met). Queuing at the bar, I was somewhat startled to see a couple of eyeliner clad Manic Street Preachers fangirls who I was friends with from my local youth club stood nearby. Suffice to say that they definitely stood out a bit amid the throng of Adidas and Kappa clad lads milling around the rest of the venue.

"Alright," I said to them, "Erm, so what brings you to this one then?"

"Oh, James Dean Bradfield produces these guys," one of them replied, "We figure if they're good enough for him, they're alright by us." (cue the "Plus he might be here and we might see him!" "Oh don't say that, I dunno what I'll do if he is!" conversation between the two of them)

The mixing of the none-more-laddish Uproar with one of the Manics might seem a bit like an odd combination but it's not as daft as you might think - Northern Uproar definitely had a very punky energy to them in the early days (one more positive review likened them to a cross between the Stone Roses and the Clash) as summed up perfectly on From A Window and a few other tunes on their self-titled debut album such as Kicks. Okay so it was very much Generation Terrorists for slow learners but the energy and intent was there and suggested a band who had potential.

The trouble is that, as I've said earlier, Northern Uproar got a very rough ride from the London centric press who basically just wrote them off as a bunch of wannabe-yobbos from Oasis country. Even an exasperated Bradfield remarked in an interview when discussing his association with them something along the lines of the sort of journalists who were perpetually slagging the band off were the sort of people who probably got beaten up at school for liking Elvis Costello or similar.

Put it down to being the same age as the band and coming from an area of the country that still to this day seems to get sneered at by stuck-up trust fund meeja twats living in daddy's loft conversion in Dalston or Shoreditch though but to me, Northern Uproar did just feel like what would happen if you and your mates joined a band and set out to conquer the world. When you went to their gigs where most of the audience and the band themselves were the same age as you and similarly clad (I was still habitually wearing the Adidas tops and jeans I'd adopted my standard clobber when I'd discovered These Animal Men a couple of years earlier at this point) and everyone was just there to have a few drinks, bellow along and have a bit of a mosh to the faster numbers, it felt like everyone there was your mate and you were all on a top night out together (kind of like that excellent Liam Williams sitcom Ladhood but ten years earlier). Maybe I'm just romanticising it now as a bitter fortysomething twenty five odd years on but they were fun times.

As with all good times, they wouldn't last though. Two further singles followed from Northern Uproar's debut album, Livin' It Up and the more mellow reflective Town (which seemed to reflect a lot of my 17-year-old self's frustration of trying to find the words to talk to that girl in your class who you desperately wanted to ask out to the cinema on Saturday but then inevitably completely botching it leaving her just thinking you were a bit weird) but they only just scraped the Top 40. The group would recuperate quickly and produce their second album just a year later which showed some progression had taken place. Comeback single Any Way You Look was powered along by an almost northern soul style horn section and its follow-up A Girl I Once Knew went into almost power-pop territory. Unfortunately neither set the charts alight, the former stalling just inside the Top 40 and the latter just outside it.

The press reception for Northern Uproar's second album Yesterday Tomorrow Today was actually fairly positive (if not rabidly enthusiastic) with even the normally hostile NME saying that it at least showed they were progressing in terms of their sound but by this time it was late '97 and Britpop was effectively relegated to being a joke punchline. As a band who were largely perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be bandwagon jumpers, they were very much in the firing line and it sold very poorly leading to the band being dropped and splitting in early '98. Those of us who'd been at those gigs a couple of years earlier sighed and moved on.

I read an interview with lead singer Leon Meya a couple of years after Northern Uproar split where he'd gone on to start a new job as a barber but the early 2010's would see him and guitarist Jeff Fletcher resurrect the band with a new rhythm section. The group have been active ever since and have put out a further three albums - while 2011's Stand And Fight was a fairly straight continuation of their old sound, 2013's All That Was Has Gone saw them taking a more reflective approach and 2015's Hey Samurai was a real oddity, sounding oddly like '90s indie-dance mainstays the Stereo MC's in places.

Northern Uproar are, to the best of my knowledge, still out there today although it's now over half a decade since their last album and they also had to contend with the tragic untimely loss of Fletcher who died in a road accident in 2014. The most recent reports I have are of them now being a trio with Meya playing bass as well as singing.

I wouldn't class Northern Uproar as leading lights of Britpop or anything but this column is dedicated to groups who perhaps didn't get the respect they deserved back in the day and t'Uproar are definitely a band who fit that description. They never quite delivered a fully consistent album but in From A Window they did deliver a definite under-rated classic of the Britpop era and both of their LP's from the '90s period that we're dealing with here have some good moments that make them worth investigating. Give them another look, they may just surprise you.