Sounds From The Junkshop #37 - The High Fidelity

 

"Come on, turn it on, turn it up and make it louder, lie on your back and think of England..." - The High Fidelity, Addicted To A TV

The High Fidelity were one of those brilliant bands who were borderline uncategorisable but with a knack for tunes and experimentalism that set them aside from a lot of their peers. Unfortunately it also left them (as seems to be the case with a lot of Sounds From The Junkshop bands) as a band who didn't really fit in anywhere and just ended up kind of being ignored by the music press.

The group were formed from the ashes of two earlier Glasgow bands - singer Sean Dickson had been with C86'ers turned indie-dance bandwagon jumpers the Soup Dragons, best known for their Madchester-esque cover of the Stones' I'm Free (although ironically the follow-up Mother Universe which fared a lot more modestly was a far better song) while drummer Ross McFarlane had previously been behind the kit for blink-and-you'll-miss-them Britrock/grunge crossover types Stiltskin who'd had a number one hit with the "better than you probably remember it being" Inside on the back of it being used on a jeans commercial and then comprehensively failed to do anything afterwards. The pair would add guitarist Adrian Barry and bassist Paul Dallaway and the band was ready to go.

The group's first couple of releases, the awesome Addicted To A TV and Sick Of It All which appeared on a Fierce Panda compilation EP seemed to mark them out as a snotty lo-fi punk band and were pretty damn good with the former being a scathingly sarcastic attack on couch potatoes slumped in front of the idiot box. However, their second single Come Again (featuring none other than Mickey Finn from T-Rex in the vid) was a five minute slice of glammed up electro-pop which escalated into a full on psychedelic wig-out by the end and its follow-up Luv Dup veered into almost trip-hop territory. It was clear that this band weren't all that originally met the eye and I'll admit it, I was hooked.

Luv Dup had given the band a minor hit, grazing the Top 75 and by rights their fourth single, 2 Up/2 Down should have been the one to build on the success - had it been released in 1995, it would have been perfectly poised to jump on the Britpop bandwagon as it sounded like Pulp covering one of Suede's poppier moments (Trash or similar). Yes, seriously, that good - it even got playlisted by both Mark Radcliffe and Simon Mayo on Radio 1 but amazingly it didn't even make the Top 100. I'm still scratching my head at that one twenty odd years later.

The group would continue putting out great singles - Ithanku saw them going into plastic soul territory a la Bowie on Young Americans but amazingly managing to nail it while the fantastic Unsorry dipped its toe into bhangra of all things but still managed to sound great. I think by this point I'd realised that the High Fidelity weren't ever gonna be a band who broke the mainstream the way the Soup Dragons and Stiltskin had done before them but then in this era not many alternative bands were. When their debut album Demonstration hit the shops it sealed the deal - it appealed to the same side of me that had loved the Boo Radleys' Giant Steps half a decade or so before in that its sheer variety was something you could lose yourself in for days. From the doo-wop inspired A Change Is Gonna Come through to the epic brilliance of Odyssey of a Psychonaut, this was an album that was on my playlist for months and it should have set the band up as underground favourites for years.

Unfortunately, even cult underground status seemed to kind of elude this band - they did put out one further album in 2001's Omnichord (the omnichord was a primitive synthesiser favoured by the band - they even bonded with John Peel over a love of them and Peelie even co-wrote a song on the second album), It was preceded by another hit that should have been in the form of Scream If You Want To Go Faster (arguably the greatest song New Order never got round to writing) which actually gave them a surprise hit in Belgium of all places but I remember it took me a good 3-4 months to even find a copy of the album - I dunno if there were distribution issues or something but again, an opportunity went to waste. Soon afterwards, the band were no more.

There's no doubt in my mind that in a just world, both High Fidelity albums would be up there in the smoking jacket music press' Great Under-Rated Albums lists but I guess their heads were jammed so far up Julian Casablancas' backside at the time that even that kind of slipped past them. Neither album is even available on Spotify it would seem which is a real shame so I guess all I can do is urge you to track down a second hand copy of them somehow and give it a listen for yourself - for sheer scope and variety matched with great tunes, this band really were hard to beat.

Info on the band since they broke up seems to be a bit patchy - I do know that Ross McFarlane would go on to drum for the Proclaimers and Texas and Sean Dickson now goes under the name Hi-Fi Sean as a musician, DJ and producer. There's a good interview with him here on the Louder Than War website where he speaks of his fondness for the High Fidelity:

"I am so proud of that band. That’s where the DJ name came from, Hifi Sean. Bollywood Orchestras, electronic meanderings, garage punk aesthetics, lo-fi and hi-fi flip sides on singles. Those two albums are something that mean a lot to me. I love those three other guys [bandmates Adrian Barry, Paul Dallaway and Ross McFarlane]. We should have been bigger than The Beatles end of. But I fucked it up completely by coming out as gay and totally nose-diving into a world of depression and self-loathing. I didn’t make records for 15 years [after that]."

Which sums up the band very well - the fact that an album as great as Demonstration has now been all but forgotten about is absolutely criminal in my opinion. The campaign for its rehabilitation starts here - track it down and enjoy.