Sounds From The Junkshop #44 - The Young Offenders

 

"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 justice...

The group burst on to the scene with the That's Why We Lose Control single, a glorious two minute burst of glam-punk defiance even if the lyrics sounded as if they'd been scrawled on a beer mat in the pub ten minutes before recording it. With its soaring guitars, Bolan-esque vocals (not just the vocals either, vocalist Ciaran McFeely definitely bore more than a passing resemblance looks-wise to the late T-Rex frontman) and fist-in-the-air yoof defiance, it was all over Radio 1 for a few glorious weeks and even if it ended up missing the Top 40, it seemed that it was a question of when rather than if this band broke through.

Their second release, Science Fiction, was just as good, another full throttle rampage through the best bits of '70s glam and '80s sci-fi punk. Annoyingly though they released it as a four track EP thus rendering it ineligible for the charts under the quasi-fascist rules introduced by Gallup that year because, y'know, there were too many bands giving their fans value for money by putting new tracks on the flip-sides rather than pointless remixes by DJ Will Thisdo or similar. The flip-sides were a riot as well from the sinister Man Of The World to the whimsical Rock Stars which pondered the fleeting nature of fame (and could well have been this group's epitaph). I saw them live around this time in an early afternoon main stage slot at the Breeze Festival in Leeds and they were great, a proper dose of glitz and glam in among the earnest T-shirt wearing nature of much of the bill with Ciaran strutting the stage in a glittery Dracula cape while the band slung out tunes like 7000 Years and Ballad Of The Young Offenders. They played that tiny festival like they were headlining Wembley, a trick very few bands even attempt but no question, they pulled it off that day.

The stomping third single Pink And Blue (basically the Darkness if they'd landed that crucial five years too early) was another sublime slice of Bolan/Bowie slice of androgynous glam rock goodness which should have been the run-in to their debut album Once Upon A Time In The Nineties, hotly anticipated by...well, by this writer anyway. Unbelievably though, it stiffed at a miserable number 92 in the charts. Panicking, their label Columbia pulled the plug. That album would never see the light of day and the band broke up. Ciaran would later resurface half a decade or so down the line looking a lot scruffier and clearly having listened to a few Beck records in the interim as Simple Kid where he would enjoy some minor actual chart success. But that's another story for another time.

I'm still amazed that the Young Offenders never became the chart conquering sensation that Columbia clearly (initially at least) thought they would be. They had the tunes, they had the charisma, they had the shameless rock star attitude. As I've said before, they were basically what the Darkness would have sounded like if Justin Hawkins had grown up idolising Marc Bolan and Martin Degville rather than Freddie Mercury and Angus Young and trust me that is very much a good thing. The only thing I can really put it down to is that, as with so many bands who feature in Sounds From The Junkshop, it was a case of chronically bad timing - unfortunately 1998 was the era of arrogant pompous navel-gazing whiners like Richard Ashcroft and Thom Yorke (I remember an exasperated Andy Bell of Hurricane #1 stating at the time that the problem with the music scene in those days was that "humility has become the new arrogance") and any sort of rock star attitude or cockiness was very much frowned upon. Bleurgh. Just like the grunge era all over again...except this time we weren't even getting some heaviness and decent riffs to try and semi-compensate for the endless self-pity.

But wait though...this one does (sort of) have a happy ending. A few years ago, some kind soul who'd evidently been sent a promo of the unreleased Young Offenders album was nice enough to put it on Youtube for the world to finally listen to. And a damn fine listen it is - had this surfaced in 2003 or so around the same time as Permission To Land et al did, make no mistake, this band would have been the megastars they clearly should have been. And now you too can by clicking on the video above and find out what the world missed. As one of the comments on the vid page puts it - "Thanks so much...I've been waiting twenty years for this!"