Garbage Days Revisited #6: The Bluetones - "Return To The Last Chance Saloon" (1998)

 

"One more day in the valley and then I'm free to roam..." - The Bluetones, Unpainted Arizona, 1998

Memorably described as the Ole Gunnar Solskjaers of Britpop back in the day, the Bluetones were one of those bands who briefly threatened to be a threat to the major order of the movement before instead settling into a role as a comfortable mid-table band who did impressively well in outlasting nearly all of their contemporaries. I think this might be why I ended up following them for quite a few years even as my music tastes started to turn away from the indie I'd grown up with into heavier waters - they were a stubborn bunch of buggers who were happy to go out and convert the country (or, in later years, remind them that they were still there) one town at a time if need be and I think you have to respect that really. Plus, they had an undeniable knack with a tune which always helps.

There's also the fact that the Bluetones' debut album, Expecting To Fly, was the first record I ever reviewed as a 17 year old amateur music journo for my school's magazine. I gave it a rave write-up and still stand by my words to this day - it's a good collection of songs which stay in your head for weeks afterwards as epitomised by the group's biggest hit Slight Return which made it all the way to number two in the charts. Like Shed Seven's A Maximum High, it's one of those albums which has kind of been semi-forgotten about since but it would easily walk into my Top 10 Britpop albums.

I'll hold my hands up as well and say that Expecting To Fly was one of the first albums that kind of became go to post-breakup albums for me. Well, I s'pose Mega City Four were the first a few years earlier but there was a definite theme running through that album of sombre reflection looking back at relationships going wrong and what you could've changed if only you'd been a bit more aware at the time. Frontman Mark Morriss always denied this but the likes of The Fountainhead, Things Change, Putting Out Fires and especially the heartbreaking A Parting Gesture ("I'm not the same person I was a year ago/You cut me deeply and the scars still show") definitely seemed to have that strain running through them while the closing Time And Again appeared to be about picking up the pieces afterwards and trying to move on ("Everything is empty here, the things I knew are gone/The darkness lays dormant now where colour once shone")

The group would spend most of 1997 (the excellent non-album single Marblehead Johnson aside) laying low recording their second album while the nuclear winds of change were blowing across the land and decimating Britpop. I think it's safe to say that they clearly knew their second album would have to be a good follow-up if they were to avoid the fate that had befallen Sleeper, Echobelly et al.

However, they needn't have worried - the two lead-off singles off Return To The Last Chance Saloon both fared well with the weird but enjoyable Mexican-sounding Solomon Bites The Worm cracking the Top 10 and the twisting five minute epic If (which would be the group's live set closer for the rest of their career afterwards) stalling just outside it.

Although the press reaction to Return... was more middling-to-good than the near-blanket praise the group had received for Expecting To Fly, the thing I was struck by upon listening to it while writing this article up is how well it's actually held up. Like all good second albums, it's the sound of a group taking the strongest parts of their debut, building on them and introducing some new tricks while keeping the key knack with a tune that was their big selling point in the first place intact. Kicking in with the moody Shadows style instrumental Tone Blooze which leads straight into the sinister Unpainted Arizona and the ode to being homesick across the Atlantic that is UTA and it's off to a flying start.

It's the frenetic Four Day Weekend that really takes the album up a level though, building from a gentle opening to a truly frenetic tale of two people spending one last chaotic weekend together before life takes them their separate ways. It's probably one of the best songs the band ever did and even listening to it twenty plus years on, it still sounds equal parts amazing and terrifying.

After that and If, side two of the album is a bit more mid-paced and relaxed by comparison with Down At The Reservoir and the sinister Heard You Were Dead providing the pop sensibility, The Jub-Jub Bird, a dark tale of sexual obsession, going almost Sabbath-heavy on the verse riff before the gentle chorus takes things down a notch. The gentle Sky Will Fall is another highlight plus I always liked the slightly daft chorus of "And maybe the sky will fall/And maybe kill us all/Or maybe just the very tall".

The closing Broken Starr is another highlight on the album, building from a satisfyingly crunchy riff on the intro to an epic Beatles-y string drenched conclusion - it's a suitably grandiose closer to an excellent album that, although it sold well enough to keep the band on their label, seemed to get forgotten about very soon afterwards. I'd say it definitely holds its own and stands up there as both a worthy companion to the more celebrated Expecting To Fly and as one of the best alternative albums of 1998 (yeah, I know, tallest dwarf contest and all that but the point still stands).

Unfortunately while Return To The Last Chance Saloon was a good enough album to help the Bluetones dodge the bullets that hit a lot of their peers in the Britpop aftermath, things did start to go a bit awry on album number three Science And Nature - a generally decent collection of songs which they bizarrely decided to choose the two weakest numbers from as singles in the plodding Keep The Home Fires Burning and the downright dull Autophilia. Given that the album had at least two songs which sounded like surefire hits to these ears at least (Last Of The Great Navigators and the delicate Tiger Lily) as well as plenty of other high points such as the yearning One Speed Gearbox and the gentle but barbed Slackjaw, I really don't quite understand the logic there. Album number four, Luxembourg, was solid rather than brilliant although lead-off single Fastboy was a good slice of indie garage rock.

It was around this time that the band lost their major label deal and, similar to Terrorvision a couple of years earlier, upon returning to the indies started touring like absolute buggers to keep their name out there. Because of this, I ended up seeing the band a lot around this period and, given that they now had four decent enough albums to choose from, they were always good value for money. They kept on with things until the end of the decade but when their self-titled fifth album (which, hands up, I pretty much missed altogether) only just cracked the Top 100 even as the indie scene was crammed with bands who were essentially doing what the 'Tones had done a decade earlier only not as well, the writing was probably on the wall unfortunately.

The group have reformed on and off for tours during the last decade with Morriss pursuing a solo career in the meantime and guitarist Adam Devlin teaming up with singer-songwriter Chris T-T to form the excellent indie politico band Thee Cee Cees who put out a good debut album in 2015 or so but seemed to disappear from view soon afterwards. Like Shed Seven, who I covered in this column the other week, they continue to draw in a good audience when they tour and who knows, there may yet be a further album from them (although nothing's been forthcoming for a while). But for a band who put out two genuine classic albums in their first two and had a number two single and number one album, it does seem a bit unfair that the Bluetones often get dismissed as Britpop also-rans. If you're one of the people who holds that opinion then I humbly suggest that you give both Expecting To Fly and Return To The Last Chance Saloon another listen and remember that actually, this lot were pretty damn good and really deserve to be remembered up there with Britpop's best.