Sounds From The Junkshop #42 - The Clint Boon Experience

 

"Election beats electrocution/This is the new revolution!" - The Clint Boon Experience - White No Sugar

Unquestionably one of the most entertaining live bands in the post-Britpop era, I must've seen the Clint Boon Experience live countless times around 1997-2000 or so. I know I say this about a lot of bands who crop up in Sounds From The Junkshop but they really should have been megastars.

Clint had, of course, made his name as keyboard player with Madchester (well, Oldham) perennials the Inspiral Carpets. Hand on heart, the Carpets were one of those bands I kind of liked but wasn't a mega-fan of at the time although I've come to appreciate them more since. At the beginning, they seemed well poised to become the scene's figureheads but first saw the Stone Roses then the Happy Mondays then the Charlatans all go storming past them leaving them as a sort of competent mid-table act. They had a clutch of good singles (She Comes In The Fall, Biggest Mountain, Dragging Me Down, Two Worlds Collide, Saturn 5 and their riotous collaboration with Mark E Smith I Want You) but just seemed to lack the sparkle of their contemporaries a little bit. They managed to eke things out for an impressive four albums (two more than the Roses managed) and hung in there right up until 1995 (two years longer than the Mondays) but ultimately fell by the wayside just as Britpop, which could arguably have given them the same shot in the arm that it did the Charlatans, was taking off.

Post-break up, Clint was really the only one of the Carpets who really stayed on my radar at all - drummer Craig Gill (RIP) reputedly very nearly joined Oasis after they sacked Tony McCarroll but ultimately lost out to Alan White (Noel Gallagher had actually started out as part of the Inspirals' road crew) while Graham Lambert joined Peter Hook's late '90s band Monaco as their touring guitarist. Clint, meanwhile, would return to Manchester and put a new group of musicians together (bizarrely including future opera singer Alfie Boe on backing vocals!) with the aim of giving pop stardom another go.

The group would sign to Fierce Panda (who, as we've already established, seemed to have a lot of my favourite bands on their roster at the time) and it was their second single White No Sugar which drew me in. An enjoyably humorous slice of indie-pop about the rise of the Internet ("She said she was looking for a basic introduction and that Creation is an anagram of reaction...I replied that boredom is an anagram of bedroom and it's so good to see kids on the streets again"). In an era where bands seemed to be taking themselves way too seriously (by this point we were on the first wave of post-Radiohead/Verve bands like the Unbelievable Truth and Witness who, much the same as the third wave Britpop copyists of a year or two earlier, were simply recycling what was fashionable without adding any of their own ideas to it except this time the music they were starting from wasn't that good to begin with) it was a much needed dose of fun and enjoyment. Although I do remember one review stating that it sounded uncannily similar to Vic Reeves' I Will Cure You album from a few years before...

Although White No Sugar was a great single, the group's debut which I actually missed at the time, Only One Way I Can Go was even better. A soaring anthem-in-waiting it showed that Clint was going on a much poppier direction than the Inspirals ever had and that bit when the keyboard kicks in after the first chorus remains absolutely fantastic all these years later. The group would continue to put out a string of good singles - Comet Theme #1, You Can't Keep A Good Man Down and The Biggest Horizon all became minor hits (though should really have troubled the Top 40 - again, probably because the group were swimming against the tide a bit in terms of what was "in" in the music press) with the group moving to the slightly larger indie Artful records. I picked up their debut album The Compact Guide To Pop Music And Space Travel when it surfaced in late '99 and it remains a bit of an under-rated classic with the pure pop of songs like The Cool People Know Who The Cool People Are mixing with the more experimental likes of Andy Gill: Astronaut! and Not Enough Purple, Too Much Grey.

I saw the group live a few times around this era as well and this was where they really came into their element. Clint was definitely a great frontman, properly charismatic in an era of mithering navel-gazers like Richard Ashcroft et al and would think nothing of taking a few minutes out to do a Q&A with the audience mid-set to keep things varied up while the band would always be tight and focused. It made for some great gigs down the years.

The group's second album Life In Transition would follow a mere matter of months after the first and saw them collaborating with Fran Healy from Travis (then in their brief spell as darlings of the indie press) on the lead-off single Earworm Song (Do What You Do), a quite lovely slice of '60s influenced pop which should really have been the one to break them. Unfortunately it stalled at number 63 (two places below the re-release of White No Sugar which had been their biggest hit to date) and saw the group's momentum start to falter a bit. The group were also involved in a very nasty car crash while out on tour at this time which put their hard-working touring schedule on hold and probably didn't help either. Hence Life In Transition slipped out with comparatively little fanfare compared to its predecessor. A real shame because it was a good effort with the likes of Cool Vacation, Kids Get Kicks and Climbing Back Inside The Dream were fine efforts indeed.

With the Experience put out of action, it's maybe not a surprise that 2001 would see an Inspiral Carpets reunion which spawned a new single Come Back Tomorrow (which narrowly missed the Top 40). The band would continue for another 15 years, swapping lead singers on the way (Tom Hingley leaving to be replaced by the group's pre-fame singer Stephen Holt) and putting out a decent album in 2013's Spitfire until Craig Gill's untimely passing in 2016 saw them calling it a day. Since then, Clint has gone back to radio presenting and was briefly presenting a rather good podcast, Storytime With Boon although this was also put on hold following Gill's death.

It's a real shame that while the Inspiral Carpets seem to have undergone a deserved critical rehabilitation in recent years, the Clint Boon Experience seem to be nearly forgotten - in this writer's humble opinion, Clint came up with some of his best songs in the Experience and personally I'd love to see 'em back on the road and even coming up with a third album. Hey, stranger things have happened. In the meantime, both of the band's albums are available on Spotify and I heartily recommend them to those unlucky enough to be uninitiated. CBX were a great band and they really deserve to be discovered by a new generation of fans.