Sounds From The Junkshop #31 - Spacehog

 

"Lands are green and skies are blue but all in all, we're just like you" - Spacehog, In The Meantime, 1996

I've mentioned in SFTJ's past how it was a bit of a rarity in the mid-'90s for bands from Leeds or Bradford to be chart-bothering material. I started listening to guitar music in the early '90s and as far as northern music went then the focus was very much across the Pennines in Manchester. Although the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission and the Cult were all technically Leeds/Bradford bands (or at least had members hailing from there), it was unlikely to say the least that you were going to run into Andrew Eldritch or Wayne Hussey on the Headrow or see Ian Astbury doing his shopping at the Kirkgate Centre. New Model Army were still doggedly hanging on at this point although they were very much at the tail end of their success by now while the Bridewell Taxis and Cud never really rose above cult status (though as mentioned in the first Footnotes section of this column, the latter did at least manage to find a bit of minor chart success).

Of course, as the '90s wore on we did get Terrorvision's rise to success but as far as bands from Leeds went, things were still suspiciously quiet. Even when Britpop rolled around, it seemed to be a repeat of five years earlier with the majority of the northern bands hailing from Manchester again. Even Sheffield, home to the Longpigs and Pulp, and York which had Shed Seven, seemed to be outperforming the city at this point. Depressing times. Then, as 1996 turned to 1997, we finally got a Leeds band breaking into the chart. Their name? Spacehog.

So there was a slight catch - Spacehog were actually ex-pats and although three of the band, Roy and Anthony Langdon and Jonny Cragg, did originally hail from Leeds, they'd all met while living and working in the Big Apple (hence the group's witty reference to hailing from "New Yorkshire") and had actually broken through in the States before they made the charts here. This bizarrely led to them being slung in the same bracket as latter day grunge dullards Bush in the British music press but the two bands couldn't have been more different. While Bush were yet another tiresome bunch trying to jump on the grunge bandwagon a good 2-3 years after it had rolled out of town, Spacehog were shamelessly influenced by the glam rock sounds of the '70s. As such, they were definitely a bit of out of key with the prevailing musical trends at the time which were obsessed with the British invasion sounds of the '60s and I think this off-kilter approach might be why they never quite broke through big on their native side of the Atlantic.

It didn't matter though. They duly got their first hit over here with their signature tune In The Meantime, a Top 30 hit on its second release in the dying days of 1996 and I remember it being a regular fixture on the sixth form common room stereo at the time. Heavily influenced by Bowie and Bolan and with a killer stadium-sized chorus (that bit where the riff kicks in after the blissed out intro still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end all these years later), it stuck out like a sore thumb among the drudgy anorak wearing likes of Ocean Colour Scene, Cast and the Verve, shamelessly flashy and showy and gave the group the foot in the door they'd needed.

 Unfortunately for Spacehog, that really was about as wide as the door ever opened for them. Sales of their debut album Resident Alien were a bit disappointing by comparison with In The Meantime's success - I think because nobody really knew what to make of it. In an age of the whole dreary sub-Oasis "lads lads lads" culture, having a group of Bowie worshipping glam rockers gleefully playing with androgynous stereotypes like Suede with an added wacky sense of humour (see Space Is The Place) just confused the hell out of people and, both here and in the States, the group just never quite built on that first flourish of interest.

It's a real shame because upon rediscovering Resident Alien a few years ago and listening to it for the first time in well over a decade, the main thing that struck me is how well it's held up from the swirling balladry of Starside and Candyman (I remember playing the former to a girl I was friends with upon hearing it again and her asking if it was the Scissor Sisters!) Had they released it in the noughties in the wake of the Darkness hitting paydirt with a not entirely dissimilar formula, they may well have cleaned up and got a Top 10 hit. Spacehog really were a band who broke through at just about the worst possible time for their sound.

I should probably plead guilty to the above as well - I seem to remember that although I did listen to Resident Alien a bit when it came out, it kind of fell away from my listening fairly quickly as, In The Meantime aside, I just thought it was a bit too...weird, I guess, compared to the Wildhearts and Terrorvision albums I was mostly listening to at the time. Again, when I revisited it as a 30 year old having discovered the joys of '70s Bowie, Roxy Music, Alice Cooper's Welcome To My Nightmare et al in the intervening decade, it made a lot more sense but, aside from Placebo and Suede, nobody was really doing this sort of thing at the time (and even Suede had drastically reined the formula in following Bernard Butler's departure)

A second Spacehog album, The Chinese Album, did surface in 1998 but I don't think I even listened to it at the time (I do seem to remember it being the subject of an especially vicious review by the late great Steven Wells in the NME which may well have coloured my judgment) but again, listening back, it's not too bad aside from the rather dreary trip-hop style opener One Of These Days. Again, it's the same formula with a mixture of glam rock camp and vaudeville stylings (they even managed to get Michael Stipe of all people to do backing vocals on Almond Kisses) but again, this was the era of the big coated misery of Radiohead, Spritualized etc and while Carry On only narrowly missed the Top 40, the album well and truly bombed and didn't even make the Top 100. The group would be dropped by their label Elektra and limp on for one more album, 2001's Hogyssey which I completely missed at the time, before putting the band to bed shortly afterwards.

Well, actually that's not entirely accurate - the group would replace guitarist Richard Steel (their sole American member) with Roy and Anthony's younger brother Chris (who'd previously fronted late '90s indie-rockers Cube, another group who I used to see live on bills in Leeds a bit back in the day) to form Arckid (geddit?) but they never reached the recording stage and by the end of the noughties had mutated back into Spacehog. The Hogfathers would end up putting a fourth album out in 2012's As It Is On Earth which I remember reviewing for Pure Rawk at the time and I have to say, wasn't too bad. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was this which prompted me to dig their first two albums back out and be pleasantly surprised at how well they'd held up down the years especially compared to some more successful bands at the time!

Anyway, you know the phrase "right band, wrong time, wrong place"? Well, that's Spacehog in a nutshell essentially. Had they picked another time (I mean literally any other time) to make their breakthrough on to the scene than in the middle of Britpop then I'm pretty sure they'd have been given a much more fair hearing rather than just kind of written off as a bit of a joke from the word go. Either way, both Resident Alien and to a lesser extent The Chinese Album have held up pretty well in the intervening quarter of a century and are definitely worth a listen for the curious, especially those with a love of all things glam and androgynous. A great band that the world sadly pretty much missed while it was obsessing over Noel Gallagher's coke-addled burblings on Be Here Now. For shame.