Sounds From The Junkshop #38 - The Hybirds

 

"I wanna drink to the children of tomorrow! I wanna raise my glass up high!" - The Hybirds - "Born Yesterday"

So this story starts some time towards the end of 1997 - your correspondent, now living in Stoke-on-Trent as a student, has been badgered into going to see Cast with some mates (I think it was at the Sugarmill). Although I'd liked the first Cast album, I'd heard the second when it came out a few weeks before and hadn't been convinced - it really felt like they were treading water and had used up all their good ideas on the album before (Be Here Now syndrome if you will). "Ah well," thinks I, "hopefully they'll chuck a bunch of stuff from the first album in the set - if so it should be okay."

We end up getting to the venue early and seeing the support band - a bunch of up-and-coming lads from Nottingham called the Hybirds. Who promptly absolutely blast us away. Yes, it's very much the standard Noelrock template but the fire and energy with this lot is less like the self-satisfied laxness of the Beatles and more like the sheer energy of the Who in their early days. By the time they hit their signature song Born Yesterday at the end of the set, it's safe to say that they've gone from having a few semi-interested onlookers in the venue to getting an impressive crowd in and it nearly takes the damn roof off the place.

I mean, let's be honest, Cast were never gonna be able to follow that and they duly sank like a stone in a morass of fourth-division idea-free Lennonisms. I later found out that one of the guys had seen the Hybirds supporting Ocean Colour Scene in Manchester a month or two before where the result had very much been the same (I mean, fair play, blasting a band as bloody awful as OCS were off the stage isn't exactly a hard task but there you go). Either way, this band were now very much on our radars and we wanted to find out more.

A trip to the local indie record store the following weekend and I'd locate the band's current single See Me Through, another Who-indebted number. I liked it and it was enough to persuade me to shell out for the group's self-titled album. The group had already been around for a good year or two at this point and had put out a string of singles and EP's building up to the album. I remember my sister raving about their debut Take Me Down which for some reason didn't make the album - not sure why as it's a bit of a cracker and shows off the band at their punkiest.

Weirdly the group seemed to well and truly polarise the music press - in a total reverse of what you'd probably expect from such a band, the NME used to absolutely rave about them giving the album a 9/10 write-up whereas the normally more Britpop-sympathetic Melody Maker absolutely panned it, calling it the last dying twitchings of the Noelrock beast. As always, the truth was actually somewhere in between - it had its moments but was a frustratingly inconsistent effort.

I suppose I should get the obvious out of the way first - yes, the Hybirds most definitely had a noticeable Oasis influence in there and it's this which kind of stops the album being amazing rather than just good - the meandering likes of I'm Coming Out and Call Me Blue just drag and sound like the same sort of sluggish dross that the Gallaghers were doing on Be Here Now. But beyond that, there are some good moments on here - 24 (another single to be culled from the album) sounded like Kinks' You Really Got Me dragged into a garage and given a distorted 13th Floor Elevators style makeover and the epic Suzy Parker drifted from a Happy Mondays style intro into a full on psychedelic freakout towards the end and even the ballads like The Only Ones (reworked into a full on rock out for one of the group’s B-sides) and The Wanderers (the latter of which shamelessly ripped off the opening riff from Shed Seven's Going For Gold) were quite sweet in their own way.

The trouble is that by now it was almost 1998 and Britpop (or more pertinently Noelrock) was dead in the water. The Hybirds album sold absolutely dismally and the band broke up within a few months of that stormer of a gig. Had it come out a couple of years earlier, there's maybe a chance they'd have scored some minor success with it and been allowed to stick around for a follow-up but by this point, no way. Frontman Richard Warren would go through an almost 180 degree musical change and resurface the following year as lo-fi experimental solo artists Echoboy. He's continued to make solo records ever since.

I suspect Warren doesn't really think much about the Hybirds now and I'd be surprised if anyone really does apart from maybe the guy at the NME who used to rave about them. But if you see this album in a charity shop anywhere then it's worth a curiosity listen for the good bits and, as I've mentioned before, they were a cracking live band. It's just a pity they arguably burst on the scene 2-3 years too late for their own good. Hey ho, them’s the breaks I guess.