Sounds From The Junkshop #41 - The Montrose Avenue

 

"Seems as though we never learned, even when the tables turned..." - The Montrose Avenue - Start Again

Another classic case of a band who put out a string of really promising singles only for their album to turn out to be a disappointment (Towers of London syndrome for the noughties kids out there), the Montrose Avenue briefly looked like being rising stars of the indie/trad-rock movement but ultimately the limitations of their sound ended up sinking them. But I'm getting ahead of myself - let's have a look at the story here shall we?...

It's weird how time changes your musical taste because the Montrose Avenue are probably the sort of band that my 40-something self would run a mile from if someone tipped them off to me as "the next big thing" - earnest Americana based guitar rock from a bunch of lads from the Home Counties (Wokingham to be precise). But I was 18-19 when I discovered them and still at that blissful stage of hearing things for the first few hundred times without having that millstone of past music knowledge to compare them unfavourably to. I think I got drawn to them after a live review in Melody Maker raved about them and mentioned that they contained Menswe@r's ex-drummer Matt Everett in their ranks (* see end of this article). The following Monday, I saw their debut EP She's Looking For Me in the racks at the local indie record shop in Stoke-on-Trent and took a punt on it. I was really impressed - sure, there was a definite trad-rock influence in there but both the title track and B-side Start Again had a real urgency and desperation underpinning them. Both of them seemed to be about post break-up panic when you suddenly realise you're all alone in this world again and start worrying that you might just have made a huge mistake. The whole "fight or flight" vibe on the songs made the hairs on my neck stand on end and still sounds good now.

Unfortunately, sod's law being what it is, the group never quite surpassed that debut EP in terms of quality. Second single Where Do I Stand? gave them a Top 40 hit (just) but was closer to the dreary trad-rock of Ocean Colour Scene and Cast than anything. Third single Shine was a little better and they re-recorded Start Again for a fourth single but both stopped short of giving them that elusive second Top 40 hit.

The group's album Thirty Days Out (named after its closing track which had also originally appeared on that first EP) surfaced in the summer of '98 and was...well, okay I guess but apart from the singles it didn't really have a huge amount going for it unfortunately with the dreary likes of Helplessly Hoping, Keep On The Road and the unintentionally ironically-titled Yesterday's Return failing to really hit the mark. Aside from the two tracks from the debut EP and the soaring Shine, the thrills of that debut EP were sadly lacking sorry to say.

By 1999, the group had been dropped and were no more. Guitarist Scott James would go on to bigger things, joining the Stereophonics as second guitarist for two albums while drummer Matt Everitt would go on to be a music journalist and is now a DJ on BBC Radio 6. The others? No idea.

I was hoping that listening to the Montrose Avenue's album again 20-odd years on might lead to me re-evaluating it but unfortunately on giving it a spin this morning, my opinion hasn't really changed much from 1998 - it's inoffensive enough but certainly no world-beater. Overall, the Montrose Avenue are a band I'll remember more for that awesome debut EP than anything they did afterwards. Oh, actually, thinking about it, they did have one other noticeable indirect effect on my music taste - the re-release of Start Again had them covering Shake Some Action by the excellent Flamin' Groovies on the B-side and led to me buying that group's best of a few weeks later starting a fandom which has pretty much lasted ever since. So I guess I owe 'em for that in a roundabout way.

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* GRATUITOUS BRITPOP FOOTNOTE

The observant amongst you will notice that we never did a column on Menswe@r in Sounds From The Junkshop so now seems as good a time as any to take a quick detour to mention "the Britpop Duran Duran". For the record, I thought they were extremely hit and miss but didn't deserve anywhere near the amount of vitriol they got. Sleeping In is still a classic and the Nuisance album had a few other belters like Little Miss Pinpoint Eyes, Hollywood Girl and The One but to me they were a mid-table Britpop act and nothing more really. I s'pose I could have done something on them in a Footnotes column but decided against it for two reasons. One, they seem to crop up in nearly every Britpop retrospective you'll read due to pretty much being the quintessential Camden indie scene "here today gone tomorrow" band of 1995 and two, I just don't really have any stories about them - none of their songs massively changed my life and I never saw them live back in the day so I didn't feel there was much else that I could add to the existing narrative other than that I thought they were okay I guess. Although bizarrely I did see them live about twenty years later (well, singer Johnny Dean plus a bunch of stand-ins) playing in a Mexican restaurant in Camden Market during the Camden Rocks festival where they put on a surprisingly enjoyable show which probably shows that beneath all the hype/vitriol they were actually decent enough. I also ended up randomly running into a mate I hadn't seen since Uni over 15 years before at that gig. Strange days...