Sounds From The Junkshop #32 - Linoleum

 

"It's been a while since we were last wasted..." - Linoleum - On A Tuesday, 1997

There seems to be a common thread through the SFTJ's covering the Britpop era and afterwards of great bands who for some reason or other just never quite slotted in anywhere. Linoleum are another good example - they seemed to be a band who were forever lumped with the sub-Elastica student indie likes of Sleeper and Echobelly but they were way better than that. Unfortunately the fact that they didn't really fit into the stereotype of what a female-fronted Britpop band was supposed to be was I think maybe the reason why Top 40 success largely eluded them. The world's loss really

I first heard the band after Steve Lamacq started playing their early '97 single On A Tuesday (arguably their best moment) on the Evening Session. Although maybe there's a superficial similarity to the above Britpop bands, Linoleum always seemed a lot darker and gothier - if anything they were probably closer to the indie-goth New Grave movement with the song's sinister lurking guitar and breathy vocals. It did help that in Caroline Finch they had a stone cold fox of a singer who looked like she'd stepped straight off a 1940s movie set and somehow ended up in a Camden indie band. Along with Marie from Kenickie, she was pretty much my main musical crush in this era (she would end up going out with Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh) and it was probably a factor in me buying their singles and first album. Mind you, it was far from the only factor - I mean, I thought Sam Fox was gorgeous as a teenager but you certainly wouldn't have caught me buying any of her music!

Linoleum's album Dissent saw their darker take on Britpop given full flow with the likes of On A Tuesday tackling drug abuse and Marquis dealing with domestic violence. It's a genuinely unsettling listen and well and truly hooked me. I went to see the band quite a few times during that year including being the opening act at the first big festival, V97 in Leeds, that I went to.

Unfortunately although Dissent was fairly well received by the indie press, sales were underwhelming to say the least - the band were self-releasing a lot of their stuff on their own Linovinyl imprint (weirdly they were signed to Geffen in the States and actually recorded the album over there but the deal wasn't extended to over here in Blighty) including a couple of CD's which came in linoleum sleeves. Gimmicks or no though, the band were kind of caught in a bit of a catch 22 situation - too dark and sinister to be Britpop but too uptempo to really fit in with the Radiohead/Verve/Spiritualized scene that was taking over at this point.

They would get a second bite of the cherry though as Fierce Panda signed them up in late '98 for the gorgeously sinister Your Back Again single (a split with Sing-Sing, Emma from Lush's new band). Again, another great song that the world missed and I think as I was a student at this point and going through a very rapid string of "relationships" that could best be described as fleeting that lines like "I'll keep your legs entwined in mine even if this night should break in two" kind of summed up a lot of my experiences at this point of my life.

The group would follow this up with a cover of early '80s goth-pop types the Passions' I'm In Love With A German Film Star which was a good choice as the bands were definitely very similar. Unfortunately it was a 7" only release and didn't chart. The group's second and final album The Race From The Burning Building would surface in early 2000 and I saw them a couple of times that year playing Leeds (either the Well or the Cockpit, I think the latter) and also at the Leeds Festival. However, the group suffered a hammer blow with the loss of founding guitarist Paul Jones who was poached by Elastica for their second album The Menace. Although the group recruited a replacement in Gavin Pearce, the end of Fierce Panda's distribution deal with Mushroom records saw them basically cutting nearly all the acts from their roster and Linoleum would have split up by the end of 2001.

Looking at the band's Wikipedia page, the various members of the group seem to have all done alright for themselves - Finch is now a soundtrack composer with several awards under her belt, Jones is Rough Trade's head of A&R and bassist Emma Tornero is now an acclaimed artist so I'm sure they've no regrets about how life has turned out. It's a bit of a shame that the world didn't get a bit more hip to Linoleum when it had a chance though - even taking my teenage crush factor out of the equation, their back catalogue has held up well in the last twenty years or so, kind of like the missing link between Elastica and Siouxsie & The Banshees. If that sounds appealing then I'd highly recommend both of their albums to you. Again, a group who mainly got missed just because they didn't fit in a neat little pigeonhole for the music press which is a real shame - they certainly deserved much better.