Sounds From The Junkshop Bonus - Footnotes 1997

 

So here's the weird thing - while the previous edition of SFTJ footnotes covering 1995-96 wasn't particularly Britpop orientated, this one is. I think this might be because while in those years, if you were a part of the Britpop scene then you could pretty much guarantee that a record deal and some success would be in the offing (I mean feck, even Menswe@r who, rightly or wrongly, were generally regarded as the most derivative Britpop band by some distance in '95 still managed five Top 40 hits) so it was unlikely that bands of this genre would fulfil the Footnotes criteria of getting a single or two, maybe an album, out to catch my attention and then freefall into oblivion before I'd really had the chance to check them out properly.

By 1997 though, it's safe to say things weren't as clear cut. Blur had pretty much announced the death knell on Britpop with their self-titled album which saw them quickly abdicating their throne as kings of Mockney '60s influenced singalongs and striking out into much darker more complex waters. Pulp would soon follow suit with their "mid-life crisis" album This Is Hardcore while Oasis' dreadful Be Here Now would confirm most peoples' worst fears that Noel Gallagher had seemingly lost the plot, abandoning his everyman touch for overblown five minute plus long coke-fuelled drudge-fests. Many of the bands who'd hitched a ride on the back of the movement and put albums out in late '97 without really moving their template forward (Sleeper, Echobelly, Black Grape, Northern Uproar, Edwyn Collins and Dubstar to name but six) rapidly found themselves going down the dumper with their singles stalling in the lower reaches of the Top 40 (or even just outside it in a few cases) and losing their record deals while others such as Dodgy and the aforementioned Menswe@r simply succumbed to infighting and disappeared off the map altogether with a whimper rather than a bang. And that's before we've even got started on the widescreen stadium balladry of Radiohead, the Verve, Spiritualized, Embrace et al that was quickly elbowing groups such as the above off the front pages of the NME and Melody Maker at this point.

Not that anyone had told the major labels just yet though. One thing that always seems to hold true whenever there's a sea change in the music scene is that it takes a few months for it to translate from a few excited gibberings in the indie press to a full-blown situation where every major is trying to sign their version of whatever the latest fad is. So at least for the first half of 1997, there were still a lot of major label Britpop bands emerging blinking from their burrows into the sunlight unaware that a huge bird of prey was about to swoop down and get them. Now admittedy most of them were dreadful but there were a few who you genuinely felt sorry for - the sort of guys who when the letter from the label arrived in early 1998 saying "Regretfully, after looking at the disappointing sales of the album..." would have probably been cursing the fact that they hadn't been picked up a year or two earlier when they probably would have had a fighting chance of establishing themselves.

We'll be meeting a few of these bands in this column along with a few other weird and wonderful outriders (similar to the '95-'96 Footnotes column) who didn't really fit in anywhere and were probably never gonna be anything other than cult outfits but managed to briefly worm their way into my consciousness and listening habits during this year. Settle in and let's meet the ones who coulda been contenders...

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THE CANDYSKINS

It feels like a bit of a misnomer putting Oxford natives the Candyskins in a section about great forgotten bands of 1997 as they'd actually been around for a fair bit prior to this but it was only in this era that I discovered them thanks to their indie slacker anthem Monday Morning, a fine slice of Pulp-style orchestral Britpop which dented the lower reaches of the Top 40 at the start of the year and gave them their first proper hit after several years of trying. It was pretty much a ready made student anthem so it's probably not a surprise that it would be a song I'd regularly listen to over the next year or two.

Unfortunately it was less of a belated career take-off and more of a false dawn. The follow-up single Hang Myself On You and the accompanying album Sunday Morning Fever weren't really of the same quality and the band silently dropped back into obscurity. One further album, 1998's excellently titled Death Of A Minor TV Celebrity (which I'm afraid I never listened to at the time) and the group would lose their record deal and quietly disband a few years later although they've reunited occasionally in the years since (and even had one of their songs, Wembley, covered by Beach Slang a few years back).

I have to be honest and say that the Candyskins' output has aged better than it really has any right to - certainly Sunday Morning Fever sounds better than I remember it being (it's one of those albums that genuinely could have come out at any point in the '90s and not sounded out of place) and it's actually made me curious to investigate Death of a Minor TV Celebrity as well. Certainly a band worth a listen for the curious if you're unaware of them thus far.

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JOLT

I've never made any secret in these columns of the fact that the Senseless Things were pretty much a key band in my musical education as a teenager. We've already looked at what guitarist Ben and bassist Morgan did following the Things' split via the 3 Colours Red and Vent 414 SFTJ entries and we'll be dealing with Delakota which is where drummer Cass ended up in the next few weeks.

Which just leaves Mark Keds who, fresh from his blink-and-you'll-miss-it spell with the Wildhearts would put a new band together called Jolt. And make no mistake, if it had lasted for longer than just an EP and a single, they would have definitely merited a full entry in these pages but unfortunately the band were very much a flash in the pan affair. Also featuring Lenie Mets, formerly of Mambo Taxi (and Mark's then-girlfriend) as well as a drummer with the rather righteous rock star name of Spikey T Smith, their debut EP Punk Jungle Rules was a furious collection of raw-as-you-like lo-fi punk including a truly rabid career through the Slits' Love And Romance and plenty of other vitriolic tracks such as Can't Leave Without It and Fruit Machine.

Unfortunately it was also an EP that was way out of step with the times in terms of its sound and made next to no commercial impact. I did see Jolt live once at the Duchess in Leeds and they put on the sort of furiously feral show you'd expect - it was good stuff. The full length album, however, never surfaced - one final single in 1998's Made My Day (probably their poppiest effort although that's not really saying a lot given how ferociously anti-commercial a lot of the rest of their stuff was!) and the group were no more. Mark would move on to the Lams and Trip Fontaine, neither of whom I heard anything by unfortunately (he also co-wrote the Libertines' Can't Stand Me Now in the interim), before resurfacing properly with the excellent Deadcuts in 2012.

As you may be aware, Mark sadly passed away back in January - I've sort of got used to people who were in bands I liked growing up leaving us over the last decade or so, unfortunately it's one of those things that come with the advance of years and the fact that being a rock musician does seem to be a surefire way to ensure a shorter life expectancy, but I don't mind admitting that this one hit me really hard. Mark had actually left a comment on one of my articles last year to say that there was a new Deadcuts album on the way in 2021 (I was under the, as it turned out, mistaken impression that the group had gone their separate ways) and I'll admit that the grown-up 13 year old grebo/fraggle kid that saw the Things on TOTP all those years ago might just done a jump for joy inside at knowing one of his childhood heroes was taking the time out to read this 'ere webzine. It's been good to hear that his Deadcuts bandmates have vowed to finish the album as a tribute to him and I'm looking forward to reviewing it when it hopefully lands later this year.

RIP Mark. Miss ya bud.

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DWEEB

I mentioned in passing in the Kenickie, Symposium and Midget SFTJ entries that there was a brief time in early '97 when the NME and Melody Maker tried to create a sort of post-Britpop scene called Teen-C. Unfortunately it didn't really work, not least as none of the bands really had a lot in common other than being of a young age (as the name implies). Dweeb were one of the bands chucked in with it - superficially similar to Bis (who we'll deal with a bit further down the line in this column), the difference is that, at the outset at least, Dweeb were actually a bit better in my opinion.

The group released one absolute lo-fi pop classic in Scooby Doo which had originally been the B-side for their debut single Chart Raider Space Invader (on Fierce Panda natch, they also had a spell with Damaged Goods for its follow-up No Hit Wonder) before moving up to the big leagues with Bianco Y Negro. Unfortunately chart success wasn't forthcoming - they managed three Top 75 hits but none of them got higher than number 63 (the aforementioned Scooby Doo) and their sole album, Turn You On (frustratingly inconsistent but with a few genuinely great tunes in there) fared little better. By 1999, the band was no more.

Another band where my overriding feeling looking back is what might've been if they'd had the opportunity to grow and develop a bit (see also Kenickie) but in Scooby Doo, they can rest safe in the knowledge that they came up with one absolutely undeniable classic indie-pop song of that era.

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MY LIFE STORY

Poor old My Life Story. A band who were absolutely pilloried in the music press (their second album The Golden Mile has the dubious honour of being one of only two albums to be awarded 0/5 in Select magazine during its decade-long existence), they were into their second decade as a band (their first single came out way back in 1986!) before landing a major deal at the height of Britpop and setting off to conquer the world with their brand of baroque orchestral pop which should have fit right in with the times.

There was just one problem - the Divine Comedy had got there and hit paydirt with almost exactly the same formula a few months earlier and it made MLS just look like bandwagon jumpers. Now I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case (it's probably a moot point as to whether Neil Hannon or Jake Shillingford came up with the idea first as both bands had toiled away for a good few years and gone through a few different musical incarnations before the charts came a-calling) but as we all know, in music (and especially Britpop), perception is everything folks and I think My Life Story really took a hit because of it.

The group would notch up a clutch of Top 40 hits (the sweeping Sparkle being the pick, they also grazed the charts with a, erm, singular version of the old Stranglers classic Duchess) but as I've mentioned earlier, they were always regarded as a bit of a joke band by the alternative press. I do remember giving The Golden Mile a listen at the time after finding a sale copy on CD for the princely sum of £4 in a record shop in Harrogate of all places (I think I was probably morbidly intrigued by the absolute pasting it took in Select!) and it's really not that awful (although there's a few absolute clunkers on there like the dreadful Strumpet) - the cinematic scope of the songs is certainly way more ambitious than a lot of their contemporaries and they should really have been commended as such. The other issue was that Shillingford's over-dramatic vocals really were a bit of a Marmite affair and if you're intending to give MLS a listen on the back of reading this, be warned - they definitely take a bit of getting used to.

MLS would stick around for another album, 1999's Joined Up Talking, but I'm afraid I have to plead ignorance to it. Similar to the Candyskins, it's something I may look into after revisiting them for this article. It did give them a couple more minor hits but the group were shedding members by this point and wouldn't be long for the world afterwards. They have since reformed and are still going strong today (2019 saw them release their comeback album World Citizen - again, not heard it yet I'm afraid). A band who most definitely weren't to everyone's taste but deserve more credit than they're given for at least trying to take the whole Britpop formula off somewhere different rather than just slavishly following Noel or Damon.

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RUTH/BENNET

As you've probably gathered, the 1997 Footnotes has a good few casualties who arrived with a bottle at the Britpop party only to find out it was effectively shutting down for the night with various bleary-eyed stragglers staggering off into the sunrise. The glut of Oasis-lite bands like Heavy Stereo, 18 Wheeler, Northern Uproar, Hurricane #1, the Hybirds, the Seahorses etc we've kind of touched on in this column a fair bit already but there were also a good few bands peddling copies of Blur's Mockney Kinks-influenced singalongs during this era even as Damon et al were frantically peddling in reverse and trying to get as far away from their previous image as possible.

Bennet, from Reading, were one such band. Bizarrely signed to Roadrunner, normally a none-more-metal label (the thought of this lot being labelmates with the likes of Type O Negative is definitely a bit of a head-spinner!), they managed to sneak a Top 40 hit in early '97 with their chirpy anti-consumerism rant Mum's Gone To Iceland (a slogan nicked off an advert for the popular frozen food chain). At the time it was irritatingly catchy (muggins 'ere bought a copy after hearing it on the radio), listening to it now it just feels horribly dated (to be fair, much the same as most of Blur's The Great Escape which was clearly their template, does). I remember they used to tour like absolute buggers as well meaning I saw them in concert a good two or three times during this era. To be fair to 'em, they were an entertaining live band but as indie music started to take itself more seriously into 1997, you could almost hear their death knell chiming.

The group's album Super Natural landed in early '97 and was...well, it was far from the worst thing Britpop threw up in its dying throes but it was at least 12 months too late to make the impact they were probably hoping for and song titles like Wanker, Cha-Cha Charlie and Jordan Bennet were never gonna endear them to the Radiohead and Verve fans who now comprised the majority of the alternative record buying public. Surprisingly the success of Iceland allowed them to stick around to make a second album in 1998's Street vs Science but it was basically more of the same as their debut and fared even less well with the band parting ways soon afterwards. Looking back, they were kind of like an indie Darkness if you can imagine such a thing and if you can get past the omnipresent goofball humour, Super Natural is harmless enough if no classic.

Even more weird was the case of Londoners Ruth - there was a period in late '96/early '97 where they seemed to be absolutely everywhere, appearing on several Shine compilation albums and even performing one of their singles I Don't Know on the National Lottery TV show. Ultimately it didn't help them though - they culled about five or six singles from their one album Harrison (which weirdly didn't surface until 1998 a good few months after the last of their singles came out) but none were hits. The brutally honest reason why is that none of them were really very good - a classic case of someone bankrolling the operation who probably should've given up a lot sooner than they did.

Oh okay, with one exception - Fear Of Flying which the group put out in the summer of 1997 was a fine slice of driving indie-rock and I can't help but think that if they'd led off with that one when they signed with whichever indie Simon Cowell type figure was behind them then they might have scored a hit. Unfortunately by the time it came out they'd long since been written off as also rans (not entirely undeservedly it has to be said) by pretty much everybody and that was that.

Bizarrely, Ruth would hang around on the scene for a while afterwards, changing their name to the 45's and trying to start a Britpop revival in 2000 with the Waiting For My Heart To Break single which couldn't have been more 1995 if it had arrived with a Camden Town underground station sign round its neck. Said Britpop revival predictably didn't happen and the group changed name again to Aqualung, going for a more Moby-style chillout sound and finally getting the hit they'd been trying for for half a decade with Strange and Beautiful which reached the Top 10 after being used on a Volkswagen ad. Singer Matt Hales is still releasing singles and albums under the Aqualung moniker to this day and has also gone down the songwriter for hire route, penning songs for Paloma Faith and Mika among others in the last decade or so. Again, I've really only included them in this column because it was quite difficult to avoid them and because for better or worse they represent a good example of what Britpop had kind of boiled down to in the dying days. Fear Of Flying is worth a curiosity listen though - it's just a shame they didn't have more tunes of that quality really.

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THE WARM JETS

Another group who leapt on the Britpop wagon just as the wheels fell off, the Warm Jets were a bit of an oddity in the late Britpop era as their sound was more reminiscent of the early '90s with distorted guitars and "Frank Black minus the shoutiness" vocals. Then again, given that their line-up included ex-members of Leeds shoegazers the Pale Saints and grebo-psychedelic types Eat, maybe not that surprising.

What is maybe a bit surprising is that they actually managed to get a bit of minor chart success with it - both Never Never and Hurricane managed to breach the lower end of the Top 40 (albeit both on their second release) as did their sole album Future Signs and the group briefly looked like being ones to watch. Unfortunately, it just never happened - they suffered from the curse of being a band who a lot of people kind of liked but didn't exactly inspire the sort of rabid devotion that you needed to survive in an era when "indie" was very much out of season in terms of press attention etc.

And I'll be honest, that was kind of my take on them as well - I did get drawn into their orbit briefly thanks to Hurricane (a great slice of slow-fast slacker indie - I seem to remember especially loving the weird guitar sound on it) and Future Signs did have a few belters on it like the nervy Move Away and the closer Liverpool Street but it was a good album rather than a great one and that wasn't enough to save them from the great Island records cull of late '98 (see also Carrie and several others). The group persevered on for a little bit adding ex-Strangelove and future Suede guitarist Alex Lee to the line-up but when a new deal wasn't forthcoming they split very quietly in mid-'99. Although it's not essential, Future Signs is definitely worth a curiosity listen and certainly stands out a bit from a lot of the post-Britpop fare that was doing the rounds at the time.

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ULTRASOUND

Hailing from Leeds, Ultrasound essentially took the prog tendencies of Radiohead, Spiritualized etc to their natural conclusion by putting out what was pretty much a full on prog rock revival album with 1998's Everything Picture. Predictably they ended up being something of a Marmite outfit - I remember one scathing review stating that this was everything about music that Sid Vicious had died to save us from!

Me? I actually quite liked 'em. Ultrasound's main drawback, as with any prog band, was that they could go horrendously overblown and pompous (I remember singer Andy "Tiny" Wood appearing on the front cover of the NME wearing a crown and robe which I suspect definitely brought back bad memories of Rick Wakeman, ELP et al for those old enough to remember that era!) but when they remembered to rein things in a bit and come up with a decent tune, they actually weren't bad. Their debut single Same Band (Fierce Panda again - they'd subsequently sign to Nude, home of Suede) was a cracking slice of revved-up psychedelia and others such as Floodlit World, Stay Young and Kurt Russell (the latter unbelievably relegated to a B-side) were pretty decent.

The trouble is that when Everything Picture, all 100-odd minutes of it, arrived in early '99, the tide very rapidly turned against them. Their prog-psychedelic wig-outs had worked well in a five or six minute time frame but close to two hours of it was just too much for most people. Had they arrived on the scene today then there's an argument to be made that they'd have had a ready-made audience among the Classic Rock/Prog magazine readership but that was still a good decade or so away from coalescing into a thing at this point. Again, bad timing, a thing which a lot of SFTJ groups seem to have in common. Combined with this, relationships were falling apart within the band with members at each others' throats and Ultrasound would split soon after the release of their album. Bassist Vanessa would go on to form the Soulwinners with Andy and Matt from Dodgy while keyboardist Matt would put together briefly-touted pre-Strokes indie "great white hopes" Minuteman who we may well cover in a future edition of this column.

Surprisingly given how much bad blood there was between various members at the end, Ultrasound reformed in the late noughties and have put out two further albums in 2013's Play For Today (better than it really had any right to be) and 2016's Real Britannia (which I've not yet heard). They remain out there and are apparently gearing up for an Everything Picture 21st anniversary tour once lockdown is over.

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SANTA CRUZ

Bristol natives Santa Cruz were another band who hooked me in with a great single only for their album to ultimately be a bit of a disappointment. The single in question was their fourth one, Rocket Man, a great soaring singalong tune which sounded a bit like latter day Ride (although I remember my girlfriend at the time coming round to my flat while I was playing it once and asking me if it was the new single by Crowded House!) Listening to it was enough to persuade me to give the band's debut album Way Out, which had just been released at the time, a spin.

Unfortunately, similar to fellow Bristolians the Warm Jets (see earlier in this column), it was a good album but not a great one. The group kind of fell into a bit of an odd halfway house - it felt like they had the chops to do some genuinely good Britpop style tunes when the mood took them (fellow singles Heaven Only Knows and the menacing Thirty Degrees Below were the other prime picks) but they also had a tendency to go into weird psychedelic waters with daft proggy lyrics which didn't work quite as well (Scissormen being a prime example).

The band were signed to a major, MCA, which in 1998 basically meant that your album had to be a best seller to avoid you joining the masses of bands being dropped by their labels in the great post-Britpop fallout and, well, suffice to say that Way Out very much wasn't. The group would soon lose their deal and split shortly afterwards. Santa Cruz were probably too short on genuinely killer tunes to realistically be a commercially viable prospect, especially with the Britpop horse having long since bolted by the time they broke through, but give Rocket Man a spin if you get the chance, it's definitely a bit of a lost classic of this era.

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And that concludes our wanderings through the dying thrashings of Britpop and the scrabble around to see what was coming next. Our next column, dealing with 1998, should be here in a few weeks' time and we'll look at how things were starting to change. That year was probably your correspondent's last big hurrah as an indie kid as a big change was a-comin' in terms of my music taste but we'll deal with that a bit later on. By this point, Britpop was little more than a speck in alternative music's rear view mirror but it still seemed as if nothing had really come along to replace it with the bands people were taking a punt on getting decidedly more out-there. We'll find out more in a few weeks. Till then.