Sounds From The Junkshop #36 - A

 

"I'm getting older, I'm getting smaller, everybody tells me ya gotta walk taller" - A, Old Folks

Another late-in-the-game group to hop on the Britrock wagon just as the petrol ran out, A definitely proved themselves to be an adaptable bunch...for a bit anyway. Unfortunately they're another band who suffer from the dreaded Boo Radleys syndrome of being remembered for a song which had very little resemblance to the rest of their output. But more on that in a moment...

I think I first became aware of A some time around the time of their first album How Ace Are Buildings? as they were favourites of my younger sister and her friends. With two of the band being from Leeds (the rest hailed from the Ipswich area if I remember rightly) they used to gig around Yorkshire quite a bit and I remember at least once having to babysit my sister and her mates to one of their gigs at the free Breeze Festival. At the time I thought they were good but not great - if Symposium were being hailed as a British Green Day then A were very much a UK Offspring with the bleached hair, frenetic riffs, less than serious nature of the songs and screeched vocals definitely being somewhat reminiscent of Dexter Holland and co

Make no mistake though, A were very much not critical darlings (although Melody Maker and Kerrang! did both seem to warm to them as time went on) and got some pretty vicious abuse in the music press. One review described them as "rock for rugger buggers" (given my frequent run-ins with rugby playing neanderthals at my school, I can't help but wonder if this might've been a factor in me being quite slow to warm to 'em) while the late great Steven Wells said that they sounded like the Police trying to play heavy metal in one review...ouch!

The group would start to get a more confident handle on their sound with second album Monkey Kong in 1999 and put out a trio of enjoyable singalong singles from it, the mellow Summer On The Underground, the frenetic Old Folks and the singalong I Love Lake Tahoe. I remember seeing them a few times around this point (they'd made the step up to an early afternoon slot on the main stage at the Leeds Festival that year and I saw them headlining on the tour as well). The album showed them starting to expand their sound a bit as well (the way all good second albums should) from the frenetic Warning and If It Ain't Broke, Fix It Anyway to the more mellow likes of Hopper Jonnus Fang (to me the album's highlight). While it didn't break them commercially, it did show a band slowly inching up the charts and honing their sound well.

The breakthrough would come with the following album...and unfortunately in true sod's law style with their worst single which easily outsold all its predecessors and went Top 10. The track in question was Nothing, a dreadful atonal slice of nu-metal yowling - it sounded as though the band had had their heads turned by the atrocious Limp Bizkit and well and truly done some shameless bandwagon jumping. Gutted, I wandered off.

The weird thing is, upon finally listening to Hi-Fi Serious, the album which spawned the aforementioned Nothing, it's pretty much a straight continuation of the old sound with the odd nu-metal aping exception. The trouble is that by this point, ironically just as they broke through, A were starting to sound as though they were repeating themselves a lot. They quickly finished a follow-up while the sun was shining in the form of Teen Dance Ordinance but a combination of record company issues and singer Jason Perry being struck down by illness meant it didn't see the light of day until 2005 by which time the Darkness had mercifully put the twin limping dogs that were nu-metal and frat-punk out of their misery. The album stiffed and the band were no more.

The split was a short one and A reformed towards the end of the noughties - I actually ended up seeing them supporting the Wildhearts in 2010 or so (and let me tell you, nothing quite makes you feel old like seeing a band who you used to have to babysit a younger sibling to gigs of on the reunion circuit!) They remain active on the live circuit to this day but no new material has been forthcoming.

It's a shame that Nothing pretty much killed off my fandom of A as they'd been a pretty solid Britrock group prior to that and listening to their final two albums as I write this, I'm prepared to admit that I may have been a little bit hasty in writing them off when I did - admittedly neither of them are as good as Monkey Kong which remains their finest 50-odd minutes but they're nowhere near as offensively bad as a lot of the competition around that time. Bassist Dan Carter can now be heard presenting the Rock Show on Radio 1 and occasionally puts out a podcast called SWIM (Someone Who Isn't Me) which is worth a listen. Overall, while A were very much a second division Britrock band, they did at least do one excellent album in Monkey Kong and three further decent efforts. Unfortunately they're also living proof that while jumping on a bandwagon may give your career a boost in the short term there's also a serious danger of it coming back around to bite you on the arse if you're not careful.