Garbage Days Revisited #21: The Wildhearts - "The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed!" (or: The Wildhearts Story Part 3) (2003)

"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 THIS?!?!” To be fair, she forgave me pretty much as soon as she saw what I was gibbering about…

Danny would soon sign up for the reunion as well but with Ritch still over in the States trying to kickstart Grand Theft Audio’s faltering career, it would be Stidi, the group’s drummer from the Earth Vs era who’d recently been in the Jellys with CJ completing the line-up. Unfortunately the group’s first attempt at a tour foundered early on - Danny was still battling his heroin addiction and one gig ended with him and CJ having a bust-up backstage. Danny was rapidly sent home with Toshi from the tour support band Antiproduct filling in for the remaining dates. It would take another year for the band to reconvene with Ginger putting out a few solo singles (with Stidi and SG5 bassist Jon Poole as his backing band plus CJ guesting on guitar on a few tracks) in the meantime.

I finally got to see the band live for the first time in six years when the following year’s tour rolled into Bradford Rio’s in September 2002. I got to the venue just in time to see the last couple of songs by the opening band on the night, a then pretty much unheard of group of glam metal revivalists from Lowestoft called the Darkness who seemed like good fun. Wandering over to the bar I was surprised and pleased to see Danny there holding court with the fans and enjoying a few drinks with everyone looking well and in good spirits. So much so that he was there throughout the main support band Sugarcoma’s set…and while the roadies were running round setting the Wildhearts’ gear up…and when the lights went down and the intro music of Elvis’ American Trilogy started playing and Ginger, CJ and Stidi took to the stage. Eventually Ginger took the mic and said “Erm, Dan, if you’re out there somewhere mate, we’re supposed to be starting…” Cue Danny crowdsurfing to the front (having presumably done the mother of all double-takes a few seconds previously) and sheepishly apologising as he thought it was four bands on the bill that night instead of three! Then they slammed into I Wanna Go Where The People Go and all was right with the world.

After unsuccessfully fishing around for a record deal (remember this was 2002 and we were still in the era of cretinous nu-metal, odious frat-punk and dull as ditchwater emo), the group opted to self-release their comeback single, the thunderous Vanilla Radio and proving that their fanbase was still very much there, it crashed into the Top 30. Follow-up Stormy In The North, Karma In The South did even better, crashing the Top 20 in early 2003 and getting the band their first Top of the Pops appearance since Anthem way back in 1997. Soon afterwards the group would be signed up by Gut records, then best known for having taken Scouse indie quirk merchants Space into the Top 10 a few years before.

Behind the scenes though things were falling apart again. Soon after the release of the band’s first single for their new label, the supremely singalongable So Into You, Danny once again checked himself into rehab with the group’s comeback album half-finished. According to the story, he promised the band that he’d finish recording his bass parts as soon as he was able but with time at a premium, Ginger decided to fill in the gaps himself and Danny quit the band over it. Random Jon Poole, Ginger’s SG5 bandmate, was brought in as bass player for the live gigs and would also play on the B-sides for the next single Top Of The World, another Top 30 hit. I saw the line-up with Jon on bass at the short-lived Town & Country Club* venue in Bradford where Ginger actually took time out to thank the crowd for giving Random such a warm welcome before adding darkly “Not everyone’s been as nice as you lot…”

(* taking a quick break from the story, the T&C probably deserves a mention all to itself here. It used to be a horrible “townie” club called Maestro’s when I was a teenager which I got dragged to by various mates quite a bit in my sixth form years. I was really excited when it re-opened as a rock venue but it was clear from the off that something wasn’t quite right about it. On my way out of the Wildhearts gig I was given a handful of free tickets to see Antiproduct there a couple of weeks later so rounded up a group of mates to go along to that one. Then on the way out of THAT gig, each of us were given a bunch of free tickets to go and see nu-grunge bores Breed 77 there a week later! Which unsurprisingly we never used. The venue literally ended up closing its doors after just a few months. I can’t think why…)

The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed surfaced in the summer of 2003 and seemed to split fans a bit. Much poppier than the group’s previous efforts it almost seemed like a delayed reaction against the brutality of Endless Nameless all those years earlier. Even Ginger’s reaction to it years later was that the band had gone into the studio with 45 minutes’ worth of material and a big bag of stimulants and come out with 32 minutes of material! Me, I thought it was great and still do. Yes it was the sound of the band at their most accessible but when the result was great skyscraping tunes like There’s Only One Hell and Someone That.Won’t Let Me Go I don’t see why you’d complain. Elsewhere, Nexus Icon and the ferocious Get Your Groove On (featuring Therapy?’s Andy Cairns and the Darkness’ Justin Hawkins on backing vocals, bluddyell there’s a weird combo for you!) brought the aggro.

Unfortunately despite spawning three hit singles, The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed performed poorly, peaking at number 53 in the charts and the group would leave Gut soon afterwards (bizarrely, Top of the World, their final single for the label would have its B-side, a cover of the Cheers theme tune, playlisted by Radio 1). Early 2004 saw the group in the States supporting the Darkness, who’d just broken through over there with I Believe In A Thing Called Love, on a gruelling two month tour. The final gig in LA weirdly saw Ginger and Dave Grohl acting as impromptu peacemakers between Justin Hawkins and Lemmy after the pair had a spat in the rock press only for Grohl to airbrush Ginger out of the story in the subsequent Lemmy documentary meaning Ginger’s rarely had a good word to say about the Foo Fighters frontman since! Legend has it that this was also the night Ginger was introduced to Nikki Sixx and Tracii Guns who would subsequently invite him to join their Brides of Destruction supergroup thus spelling the end for the Wildhearts’ second run.

There would be one final act to this chapter - September 2005 would see me making the trip to the coast and Scarborough for the Rock In The Castle festival. It was a freezing cold September day, a good month or so after any sane human being would have chosen to hold an outdoor festival, the second stage blew off the cliff the night before and was last seen floating towards Norway, there was only one bar on site with a two hour queue to get served (me and my mates ended up sneaking out during prog metal bores Inme’s set to do a runner to the pub and see how many pints we could sink in 30 minutes!) and it was generally miserable. The one saving grace was that it was one of the best bills of music I’ve ever seen - Hanoi Rocks, the Glitterati, Planet of Women, Plan A, a reunited Terrorvision and the Wildhearts headlining with Danny and Ritch joining Ginger and CJ for a one off reunion gig. The memory of a drunk and freezing but happy crowd singing every word to Geordie In Wonderland is still one of my favourite festival memories after all these years.

Ginger would split the Wildhearts again soon after Scarborough - apparently the promoter for the festival did a runner with the proceeds soon afterwards and none of the bands saw a penny of what they were owed. Even ignoring this though, things had been going south for quite a while by this point. As it turned out, Danny wasn’t the only member of the group battling drug demons as Ginger had also been struggling with heroin resulting in the end of his five year relationship with ex-Fluffy drummer Angie Adams who he had two children with which really sent him into a tailspin. Combined with his frustration over how committed other members were to the group (as well as Danny, he also fell out with Stidi over the drummer booking a holiday for a week where the band had some gigs lined up leading him and CJ drafting Toshi and Simon from Antiproduct in as an emergency rhythm section) he decided to call a break and headed off to the States to join Brides of Destruction but that also fell apart horribly messily. He would post a very personal and painfully honest blog entry on his Silver Ginger site about the whole affair upon the release of his 2006 solo album Valor de Corazon which made for quite brutally difficult reading. The other Wildhearts would drift off to new projects - CJ to the Satellites with Paul from 3 Colours Red and Lee from Zen Motel, Danny to an ill-fated Yo-Yo’s reunion and Jon to the God Damn Whores. Stidi would eventually resurface in Supercharger (along with his former Whatever bandmate Nick Parsons) a few years down the line.

Of course, as this story has made abundantly clear by now, nothing is ever particularly straightforward in the Wildhearts story and 2007 would see the band back together again with Ginger, CJ and Ritch being joined by new bassist Scott Sorry for an album that would prove just as divisive as The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed but for very different reasons. And we’ll deal with THAT story in part 4 of this tale…whenever that may be. To sign off here though, I still love the …Must Be Destroyed album. I’d honestly rate it as a very respectable fourth in my favourite Wildhearts album stakes (phuq, Earth Vs and the triumphant comeback that was Renaissance Men being the top three). If you’ve not listened to this one for a while then it’s definitely well worth revisiting - pure Cheap Trick style power pop sunshine as opposed to the black storm clouds that would soon gather on the horizon…