Nite Songs

Welcome to the hangover years. 1998 was a strange time for alternative music in the UK - Britpop was rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror, New Labour's whole "Cool Britannia" thing had quickly been blown apart and exposed as the bullshit that it was ( "Meet the new boss. same as the old boss..." ) and there was a genuine confusion over where to go next... Which kind of sums up my whereabouts at this time as well. I was now living as a student in Stoke-on-Trent attending Keele University and hosting a bi-weekly show on the campus radio station KUBE FM. My shows were on a Tuesday evening and a Saturday morning and the Tuesday show would usually be preceded by me nipping into the Potteries to go to either HMV or the local indie Mike Lloyd Records to see if there were any new singles out that we hadn't received promos for at the station that I could play on the show. Trying to keep this operation going meant keeping one’s ear a lot closer to the ground f...

  "Become part of nature's plan, where you is is where ya stand"  - Delakota - 555 As with a few bands we've covered in the post-Britpop era, it was mainly the presence of a former member of the  Senseless Things (yup, them again), in this case drummer Cass Browne, that drew me to Delakota. After the Things had split, Cass had filled in on drums for Urge Overkill* (see footnote at end of article) before deciding to strike out on his own with guitarist Dez Murphy. I seem to remember the group kind of being shoehorned in with the "skunk rock" movement that the NME was trying to push in 1998 or so which was basically indie-dance for the post-Britpop generation and included other bands like the Regular Fries (good), the Lo-Fidelity All-Stars (less good) and Campag Velocet (really not good) who were clearly using Primal Scream's Screamadelica  album as their main touchstone. To my ears at least, Delakota were comfortably the best of the four - there was defi...

  Hailing from Montreal, Pale Lips are another band signed to the ultra-hip Rum Bar Records and their press release describes them as the missing link between the Ronettes and the Donnas which is certainly an intriguing prospect. Certainly opener Some Sort Of Rock 'n' Roll  owes an equal debt to Nuggets style garage rock and the pop-punk of the Buzzcocks and the Undertones in equal measure. It's good but second song I'm A Witch  is even better, a sheer slice of joie de vivre indebted from too many times watching The Craft . Overall, the band Pale Lips remind me of the most is '80s all-girl garage rock revivalists the Pandoras and songs such as You're A Doll , Cosmic Love ,  Doo-Wop Showaddywaddy  and  The Kids  certainly have the freewheeling sense of fun to make them an enjoyable listen. Elsewhere, the Johnny Leyton/Shangri-La's style That Old Ghost Don't Lie  and the harmonica honking Dr Feelgood style  All My Baby Brought Back Was The Blu...

  Regarded as a shoegazing supergroup of sorts, Piroshka were formed by Miki Berenyi (ex-Lush), Justin Welch (ex-Elastica) and KJ and Mick Conroy (both ex-Moose) a few years ago with their debut album Brickbat  being an enjoyably immediate collection of agit-pop which sounded like the missing link between mid to late period Lush and Elastica's first album. With their second album, Love Drips And Gathers  though, the band have clearly decided to go off on a different route with a return to their shoegazing roots. Hence opening track Hastings  is a gentle ode to the seaside and the security of relationships with chiming guitars and glacial synths and The Knife Thrower's Daughter  is a stripped back wistful look at childhood before lead-off single Scratching At The Lid  takes the tempo up a notch into more familiar sounding early '90s territory but giving the shoegazing vibes of old a more modern dream-pop sheen. It's the fact that Piroshka are willing to add ...

  "And now it's gettin' dark, too late to stay between today and yesterday..."  - The Barracudas  - Somewhere Outside Talk about a band out of time. The Barracudas were essentially a full on Nuggets  style garage rock band who unfortunately crashlanded that crucial 15 years too late right in the middle of the punk explosion. Bursting to fame with a novelty minor hit in Summer Fun , their problem was that no-one really knew what to make of them and after a brilliant but criminally ignored first album, they would sort of fade into obscurity. They managed three albums in total but the second and third ones were only released in France (a nation much more attuned to this sort of music than us Brits at the time) and didn't surface on this side of the Channel until Cherry Red re-released them twenty plus years later. But I'm getting ahead of myself here, let's rewind to the beginning... The group would form in 1979, put together by Canadian Jeremy Gluck who'...

  "I know what I know, I know what I know, I'm sick of singing songs about the video..."  - The Young Offenders  - That's Why We Lose Control A classic case of a band who had they timed their entrance on to the scene just a little bit better would have been megastars, make no bones about it. As it turned, the Young Offenders must be one of the unluckiest bands we've featured in Sounds From The Junkshop so far (and if you've been a regular reader of this then you'll know that there's some serious competition for that particular accolade!) Released on the world in a glorious flash of riffs and publicity in the summer of '98, they were a glorious technicolour roar against the tedium of Radiohead, the dullness of the Verve and the soporificness of Spiritualized. They should have been selling out arenas by the time 1999 rolled around. Instead they found themselves back on the dole with their album remaining unreleased. Talk about a miscarriage of justic...

  Back after an extended break, this is the first Datsuns album since 2014's Deep Sleep . Hand on heart, my main memory of the New Zealand garage rockers was seeing them live back in their five minutes of fame when they broke through in the post-Strokes wave of garage bands and thinking they were amazing only to buy their debut album and be really disappointed by it as the flat production comprehensively squeezed out the sparkle the band had in the live arena. I've encountered a couple of their albums since then (2004's Outta Sight/Outta Mind and the aforementioned Deep Sleep ) and none of them have really captured my imagination so can this one buck the trend? Well it gets off to a good start with the revved up Dehumaniser  recalling Brain Capers  era Mott the Hoople which is no bad thing but unfortunately it quickly sinks back into a fairly familiar '70s rock aping rut with the "Thin Lizzy on Mogadon" Warped Signals  and the Dylanesque White Noise Machine  b...

  Still very much out there and kicking, Monster Magnet's most recent album, 2018's Mindfucker , was a much welcomed return to form from Dave Wyndorf and his stoner rock veterans. Now in 2021 we get the prospect of a Monster Magnet covers album and I'm not quite sure what to expect here. Certainly, it's fair to say that there's literally only two tracks on here I'm even vaguely familiar with in the form of Hawkwind's psychedelic rave-up Born To Go  and the Pretty Things' sinister spaced-out  Death . Wyndorf and co definitely do a credible job on these, keeping the spirit of the originals intact and adding the unmistakable Monster Magnet stamp to 'em. The rest of the songs I'm not familiar with from their original forms so you're going to have to excuse my ignorance here but highlights include the lurching riff of Solid Gold Hell  (originally by the Scientists), the belligerent Mr Destroyer  (originally by Poobah), the pure Stooges style chaos...

"And I've got a list of things I'm workin' on, I'll be workin' on number one, I hope you do the same"  - The Wildhearts  - Top Of The World Well I said we'd be back to the Wildhearts story pretty quickly yesterday, didn't I? Truth is though that ...Must Be Destroyed  is a prime GDR candidate as it shows off Ginger and co at their poppiest and is crammed full of songs that could have been singles in their own right. Not bad considering the hardship the album was born out of... I seem to remember it was the last day of term before Christmas 2000 at Uni and I was quietly sat in the IT room with my then-girlfriend (a fellow Wildhearts fan) just browsing the web and looking at Ginger’s Silver Ginger website which had an update from the man himself announcing that he and CJ had decided to get the band back together. I seem to remember my initial reaction was to grab my poor unsuspecting girlfriend’s shoulder and shout “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS HAVE YOU SEEN TH...

  "If hate is black and love is white then doubt's a shade of grey..."  - Silver Ginger 5 - Church Of The Broken Hearted I'll be honest, I've been wanting to do the second part of my Wildhearts story for a while now but given the amount of stuff I've had to sort out in the meantime for SFTJ I wanted the time to be right rather than just jumping ahead of the timeline. Well, we're now up to 1998 and I think it's safe to pick up the story again so let's do this. As I mentioned way back in part one of the Wildhearts story , 1997 saw the band splitting up amid a flurry of drug demons, record deals gone wrong and a chronically unstable line-up (in more ways than one). However, with so many ex-members now moving on to new musical projects, it did mean that there were suddenly a lot  of new bands on the horizon featuring one or more ex-members of the group and it's fair to say that I had quite a few stories based around the band from that split in the ...