Sounds From The Junkshop Bonus - Footnotes 1995-97

 

And so the Footnotes section of SFTJ, where we look at bands who had a minor influence on my music taste during a certain era but either went off the boil or simply disappeared before they could really have made enough of an impact on me to justify a full entry to themselves, trundles into the Britpop era. Don't let the above photo fool you though because of the six bands from this era who I considered were worth a mention, nearly all of them only really share the timeframe with the whole circular shades, union jack guitars and '60s influence aesthetic of Britpop. A lot of them instead represent the freaks and weirdos who either tiptoed around the edge of the scene or simply existed in the same venues but had hardly any relation to the sounds that were in vogue back then.

And that's probably why they made a brief impression on me but weren't long stayers in my music collection - by 1996 I was 17 years old and finally able to get into gigs without any real hassle. Suddenly places like the Duchess, the Well and the Rocket in Leeds were places I could go to on a weekend (or a weeknight if I had a free period first thing at sixth form the next morning), enjoy myself, have a drink or two money permitting and still have enough change from my Saturday job wages at the local garden centre to get the bus home and maybe a burger upon getting back to Otley where I lived. Even as a teenager, I preferred these smaller venues simply because it was cheaper to get in and, who knows, you might just discover your new favourite band there - certainly this is how I first encountered the likes of China Drum, Snuff, Linoleum and Goldblade among others.

The trouble for these sort of bands was that in an age where major labels were essentially looking for clones of Oasis, Blur or Pulp, these bands were very much on the outside looking in and if they didn't at least attract a cult following then their careers were often brief as it just got to the point where it wasn't financially viable for them to carry on. Of the six bands here, only one was still active by 1998 which probably tells you everything.

Anyway, let's get on with the stories of what was happening on the fringes of indie in 1996. Hey, we weren't all listening exclusively to Oasis at this point y'know...

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GORKY'S ZYGOTIC MYNCI

A band who actually managed to carve out a niche for themselves on the lo-fi circuit for quite a while afterwards, Welsh psychedelic indie types Gorky's Zygotic Mynci were brilliant...but only for one album. Breaking through in the wake of fellow Cymru natives the Super Furry Animals going Top 20, GZM (pronounced Gorky's Zygotic Monkey) briefly looked as though they would be chart conquerors as well with two of their singles (Patio Song and Diamond Dew) agonisingly missing the Top 40 by a single place. The parent album for those songs Barafundle (named after the beach the band grew up near) was an unexpected triumph as well, taking elements of folk and prog but welding them to a surprisingly melodic set of tunes. Heck, they even managed to get away with having a song called The Wizard And The Lizard on there.

Similar to Octopus before them though, they were kind of crowded out of the marketplace by the Super Furries and never made that chart breakthrough. It didn't help that their next album, Gorky 5 was a big disappointment, trading in the endearingly oddball wackiness for nauseating tweeness. Disappointed, I wandered off and it seems I wasn't the only one - in the more experimental post-OK Computer era where their "thinking outside the box" mentality should have prospered, the group's chart positions tanked and soon they were gone from Fontana.

It didn't stop them though - arguably the band were always likely to be more at home on the indie circuit and they signed to Mantra and continued for close to another decade (and another four albums, all of which I have to plead ignorance to) before finally giving up the ghost in 2006. Singer Euros now plays keyboards for Teenage Fanclub which is a logical career step I s'pose. Still, with Barafundle, Gorky's definitely turned in an unsung classic of the Britpop era and deserve kudos for briefly making indie-prog fashionable for about thirty seconds...

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SCARFO

I've briefly mentioned Scarfo in this column before (the Mansun SFTJ entry to be precise) but here seems as good a time to go into them in a bit more detail. Similar to Kerbdog and Baby Chaos a couple of years before, they were a band who I mainly got into through the fact they supported a lot of bands I liked back then. Except whereas with the two aforementioned it was Britrock bands, Scarfo were the indie equivalent and I saw them sharing bills with Ash and the 60Ft Dolls to name but two. They used to gig with Placebo a lot and there was definitely a similarity between the two bands in their androgynous appearance and sinister goth/new wave leanings.

Except...while Placebo broke through into the big time, Scarfo were kind of left floundering in their slipstream. They did have some serious bad luck admittely - their drummer Al was involved in a car crash which essentially put the band on ice for several months while other similar groups were ploughing on ahead which can't have helped matters. However, I think the more brutally honest truth is that they just didn't have the killer tunes that Mansun or Strangelove or, yes, Placebo did.

I listened to a few of the old Scarfo singles I've got on my Itunes while writing this (Bingo England, Cosmonaut No 7, A Year From Monday) and they're...okay I guess but they just don't leap out at you the way other bands of that era did and I think this may be what ultimately did for them. They deserve a mention on here though as I did used to like them a lot back in the day but unfortunately they haven't dated very well. Singer Jamie Hince would go on to form the much more succcessful scuzzball garage rock duo the Kills and marry Kate Moss so it's safe to say he didn't do too bad for himself in the end though.

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BAWL

Here's the weird thing about Bawl (who were briefly touted as Dublin's answer to the Smiths) - their best song, and the one that drew me to them, was actually a B-side. The song in question, Crocodiles, was featured on a cover CD with Select magazine and I remember playing it loads. Its tale of smalltown boredom and unrequited lust definitely spoke volumes to me (as you'll know if you've been reading these columns regularly, both of these were regular themes in my growing up) and it packed a killer guitar solo on the outro as well.

I went out and bought Bawl's album Year Zero on the back of Crocodiles (daft really as the song wasn't on it) and it was...well, okay I guess but not earth-shattering. Similar to Gene, it's safe to say that Bawl were very (pre-racist fuckwit) Morrissey influenced and the baleful likes of Beyond Safe Ways and Girls = Songs were very much designed for listening to post-teenage heartbreak. The only problem is that we kind of already had both Gene and the Divine Comedy for this purpose meaning it came and went without really making much of a splash. I did go and see them at the Duchess some time around this era but I generally don't remember that much about htem unfortunately.

Surprisingly, doing a bit of research for this article, it seems that Bawl's frontman Mark Cullen has actually managed to carve out a decent career for himself in music - Bawl would later mutate into Fixed Stars who I remember the name of but never heard anything by and since 2001, Cullen would subsequently release three solo albums as Pony Club and would even join the Lightning Seeds for a bit. Bawl were a bit hit-and-miss but Crocodiles is definitely one of those songs that instantly takes me back to a certain era in my life (drinking alcopops and cider down the park with my friends on warm summer evenings in 1996 principally) and for that they deserve a mention in here.

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COAST

Yet another warning sign as to why you should never buy a group's album based on liking the lead-off single. Coast were a group of Scottish Britpoppers who coasted (a-ha-ha) into the mainstream in the post-Oasis era and I first heard of them thanks to hearing Steve Lamacq play their debut single Now That You Know Me on the Evening Session and really liking it. Yes, it essentially sounded like the bastard lovechild of the Stone Roses' Made of Stone and Oasis' Supersonic but sometimes when you try to splice two awesome tunes a little bit of the stardust rubs off and such was the case here.

Unfortunately, as with so many bands who end up in the Footnotes section of this thing, the subsequent album Big Jet Rising just didn't measure up to that awesome first salvo - it was basically Britpop by numbers with half the songs sounding like Oasis and half like Blur. Maybe a sly attempt to appeal to both sides of the conflict, who knows? Either way though, by the time it hit the shelves, Britpop was pretty much in its dying throes and this just got lost amidst several other bands who jumped on the bandwagon that crucial year too late. And that was pretty much that. Again, a band who are little more than a footnote in Britpop history but give Now That You Know Me a spin - it's definitely a bit of an undiscovered gem.

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SOLAR RACE

Basically imagine if Hole had been about twice as heavy and come from Manchester rather than LA and you've got Solar Race in a nutshell. Unfortunately they were a band completely out of sync with the UK music scene in the mid-'90s and didn't get anywhere near as far as they should have. Had they broken through some time in 1993, I'm pretty sure they'd have fared much better.

I discovered them after reading a review of their album which had a song called Drink My Piss on it. The title made me chuckle and I read that they were playing the Duchess that weekend so I went along, more out of something to do than anything. They were awesome. Singer Eilidh was one of those frontpeople who could just grab a crowd's attention without even trying while behind her the rhythm section were super tight and the songs whacked you like a concrete slab. And this is coming from someone who generally hated grunge so the fact that I became a fan really tells you something about their quality. I picked up a copy of the Homespun album on the way out and played it a lot for the rest of that year during which time I saw them again at the Duchess to deliver a second killer gig.

Unfortunately, as I said earlier, Solar Race were just a band who timed their entrance on to the scene completely wrong and were generally just very unlucky. They were favourites of John Peel and supported Hole and Bush but it was 1996 and nobody was interested in anything grunge by this point. By the end of 1997 they'd disbanded and that was that. Sadly Eilidh would pass away in 2012 after becoming a recluse towards the end of her life. Listening again to Homespun as I write this, I'm amazed how well it's aged especially compared to some of the other bands of this era. Yes it's undoubtedly grunge but there's a punked up energy in there as well which is absolutely undeniable. Give it a spin, it's definitely an under-rated effort. RIP Eilidh.

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SMALLER

The saddest thing about Smaller is that they will probably forever be known among indie and Britpop fans of a certain age as "the band with that bloke who Oasis wrote the lasagne song about". Formed in the late '80s by Pete "Digsy" Deary, they released a number of singles in the first half of the nineties before being signed in the Britpop feeding frenzy (the namecheck from Oasis, who they gigged with a lot back in the day, can't have hurt).

It was Smaller's Is single in late '96 (which just missed the Top 50 and ended up being their biggest hit) which I discovered them through after it was played on the Evening Session. Sure, the Noelrock influence is very much there (indeed, Gallagher Sr plays guitar on it) but it's a much more spiky approach to it with some enjoyably oddball lyrics ("In the name of the father and of the holy cow, Christ is risen but Christ knows where he is now") I bought the single and then picked up the album Badly Badly when it came out a few weeks later.

Similar to the Supernaturals' It Doesn't Matter Anymore album which we covered on here a couple of weeks ago, Badly Badly offers a darker take on Britpop. Forget the whole Round Are Way "life in a northern town is ACE!" ethos, the likes of On Your Own (which sounded oddly like a downbeat Wonder Stuff number), Ticket To Hell and God I Hate This Town were a more cynical and darker take on the neglect these places had suffered under Thatcher in the '80s and which is still going on to this day. Bog standard sub-Oasis music it definitely ain't but unfortunately Smaller released it just a matter of weeks before OK Computer came out and pretty much killed Britpop stone dead. And with Oasis' credibility taking a battering after the truly awful Be Here Now, they were pretty much dead in the water within a few months unfortunately. A real shame - Badly Badly definitely bears a revisiting for a darker take on northern indie in the Britpop era.

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And thus concludes our venture around the dive indie circuit of 1996 or so. As I said at the start of this article, none of these bands really made many waves commercially but all of them did capture my imagination in those hazy long gone days as a 17 year old trekking down to the Duchess or Joseph's Well or the Rocket on a weekend to see what was happening and all of them have at least one song which is well worth you listening to. Our next Footnotes in a couple of months will look at the landscape after the Radiohead gloom bomb hit in 1997. Britpop was dead, Britrock was on life support, where would alternative music go next? Tune in and find out...