Sounds From The Junkshop #26 - The Supernaturals

 

"In the great scheme of things, it doesn't matter. I'll get through it a little bruised and battered. And maybe some day I can just laugh at myself..." - The Supernaturals, Pie In The Sky, 1997

Written off at the time as the point where the Britpop movement essentially ate itself whole and paved the way for alternative music to get a lot more serious and dark and a lot less fun under Thom Yorke, the Supernaturals are, to my mind, a band who deserve re-appraisal. Or at least their debut album does anyway. After that, they kind of lost their way a bit...but we'll come to that later.

I first heard of the band when their first Top 40 hit Lazy Lover (ironically one of the weaker songs on their debut album) cropped up on a Shine compilation back in the day (ah the joys of 1996). It didn't really grab me but the follow-up The Day Before Yesterday's Man did and this was the one which did reel me in.

The Day Before Yesterday's Man is pretty much the Supernaturals' schtick writ large with a none-more-jolly Britpoppy tune masking some dark despairing lyrics underneath ("When the shit hits the fan/You know I've always been an also-ran") which pretty much invited audiences to sing along with it. Follow-up single Smile (the one you'll remember this band for if you remember it at all as it got picked up by a few advertising campaigns in later years) was similar with the plinky-plonky tune masking some pretty bleak lyrics ("'Cos that's all that you've got left/Your life's a mess, you've been cut adrift") which presumably passed the advertisers by...

When the album It Doesn't Matter Anymore followed in the spring of '97, I was hooked - this really was a band of wolves dressed in Britpop sheep's clothing. Right from the sinister one note bassline and haunted house keyboards opening Please Be Gentle With Me, a genuinely creepy tale of self-loathing ("And I've been down in the dumps, I've been well and truly humped, and my clothes don't seem to fit, yes my haircut's looking shit"). After two of the singles, they well and truly take it up a notch at the end of side one with the cataclysmic ode to a deceased lover that is Love Has Passed Away ("I've given up on the way I look/Stopped going to the football and I've stopped reading books") with frontman James MacColl sounding like Freddie Mercury posessed by the spirit of Jerry Lee Lewis. The scathing breakup song Dungbeetle is even better, slowly rising from an ominous intro to a truly explosive finale with some absolutely vicious Elvis Costello style lyrics ("Your melodramatic gestures won't do you any good/This thing has run its course and I wouldn't change it if I could") Let's be clear here, Menswe@r or Supergrass this very much is not.

Side two is a bit less intense but still with some stark odes to break-ups like I Don't Think So ("Everything has come to nothing, is that such a surprise? Looking back in hindsight, it's easy to be wise") and the quite lovely jazzy piano led Pie In The Sky before the skeletal closer Trees sees MacColl hunched over his acoustic lamenting a break-up ("Caught up this cul-de-sac/I really want my old life back").

Britpop noir? Who knows - all I know is that It Doesn't Matter Anymore is a brilliant album and so much more than just another '97 era "last drop of the bottle" Britpop effort from the movement's dying throes. The Supernaturals were a great live band as well with the group having a real sense of energy and showmanship - they'd really throw themselves into things which really made a nice change from the vacuous posing that some of their contemporaries were guilty of.

So what went wrong exactly? Well, the group put out their second album, A Tune A Day, in 1998 and it was a classic case of Darkness syndrome - a group who'd hit on a winning formula by happy accident trying to actually play up to it and (self-)consciously reproduce it. It was missing a lot of the menace of the debut substituting a "wacky" sense of humour instead (the fact that they'd been taken on tour by Robbie sodding Williams as his support band in the interim may or may not be connected) and...oh look I'm sorry but it was dreadful. Chart positions were decidedly worse (only lead off single I Wasn't Built To Get Up made the Top 40), press reception was a lot cooler and the group would have been dropped within a year. A third album did eventually limp out in 2001 but by then it was all over bar the shouting. A sad end to a group who had so much promise at the beginning.

The Supernaturals would reform as the noughties ended and are still out there gigging today - they play a lot of the Britpop revival festivals like Star-Shaped and I think they might even have done another album in the last few years. But they really deserve a lot better than to just be remembered as a Britpop footnote - their debut album really was a classic of it's time - no joke motherfuckers. It really does make you wonder if we'd had a few more bands like that in the day and if the band had stuck to their guns rather than smoothing their rough edges out and becoming Britpop-by-numbers whether it might have represented another direction for the movement to go in. I guess we'll never know. But really, give It Doesn't Matter Anymore a listen on Spotify or wherever if you get a chance - it really is a bit of a lost classic. Pop music with a dark soul at its centre really doesn't get much better than this.

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