Sounds From The Junkshop Bonus - Footnotes 1998

Welcome to the hangover years. 1998 was a strange time for alternative music in the UK - Britpop was rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror, New Labour's whole "Cool Britannia" thing had quickly been blown apart and exposed as the bullshit that it was ("Meet the new boss. same as the old boss...") and there was a genuine confusion over where to go next...

Which kind of sums up my whereabouts at this time as well. I was now living as a student in Stoke-on-Trent attending Keele University and hosting a bi-weekly show on the campus radio station KUBE FM. My shows were on a Tuesday evening and a Saturday morning and the Tuesday show would usually be preceded by me nipping into the Potteries to go to either HMV or the local indie Mike Lloyd Records to see if there were any new singles out that we hadn't received promos for at the station that I could play on the show. Trying to keep this operation going meant keeping one’s ear a lot closer to the ground for new stuff and I’d frequently spend extended sessions using the listening posts in the shop to see what was worth investing two quid in to take back to play on the show that evening and what wasn’t.

I was also making my first nervous steps into the world of music journalism at this point for various student music fanzines. To be completely honest, I was really still finding my feet and basically trying to be either Steven Wells (RIP)  in the NME or Daniel Booth in the Melody Maker only not doing it very well. I really enjoyed their irreverent style of writing and the fact that they very much weren’t averse to sticking a big pin in the egos of some of the more up-their-own-arse bands of the day who badly needed a reality check! Overall I was mostly reading Melody Maker and Kerrang! at this point, very occasionally the NME if a band I liked was in there but, a few writers like Swells, Mark Beaumont and Johnny Cigarettes aside, I usually found it way too stuck up and pompous for my liking - they seemed more interested in promoting pretentious and wilfully difficult tune-free merchants rather than bands who had actually mastered the art of a decent hook and memorable chorus. At least Melody Maker had a bit of a sense of humour about itself and was usually a much better bet for bands with a sense of what an actual tune was.

In terms of my music taste, I was still just to say more of an indie kid than a rocker at this point and was still subscribed to the mailing lists for labels like Deceptive and Fierce Panda. The latter definitely deserve a mention here as I used to religiously buy nearly anything they released (as long as it was on CD - I didn't have a record player) as it was usually a much needed dose of tuneful indie to provide some relief for wilfully tuneless post-Radiohead mewlers and sub-Verve whingers with string sections. Several bands who started out there went on to bigger things but as we'll see in this column, there were also quite a few who didn't. Add in a few late in the day Britrockers and a couple of the sort of lovable eccentrics who cropped up in the last couple of Footnotes columns and you've essentially got this column down pat. So let's dive in shall we?...

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MOJAVE 3

Formed from the ashes of shoegazing also-rans Slowdive, Mojave 3 were less Thames Valley and more Texas prairie as they ditched their sonic cathedrals approach of old and opted for a more Americana approach instead. I first encountered them via the quite lovely Some Kinda Angel single which I think I picked up while DJ'ing at KUBE. I was more idly curious than anything as I remembered Slowdive all too well from my days hanging around with my Ride and Lush loving shoegazer mates in secondary school but they'd honestly never really grabbed me (their titular Slowdive song was good and Catch The Breeze was alright I s'pose but I'd struggle to remember too much beyond that)

With Some Kinda Angel though, they delivered something genuinely brilliant - a great yearning torch song (with a definite similarity to Echo & The Bunnymen’s Nothing Lasts Forever) which grabbed you by the hand and dragged you off for a night out at some languid midwestern bar to drink and have a friendly chat with the locals building to a gorgeous soaring conclusion complete with horn section. A proper lost classic of a song that I thoroughly recommend. The subsequent album Out Of Tune was a little bit hit and miss (I think maybe as someone whose music tastes were gradually getting heavier at this point, the fact that it was largely gentle acoustic laments meant it didn't quite connect with me) but with enough good moments to make it worth a listen.

The follow-up album, 2000's Excuses For Travellers was a better album overall although it didn't quite have a proper knock-out blow song on it like Some Kinda Angel although the two singles from it, the soaring Any Day Will Be Fine and the mournful Return To Sender (although it had a sly sense of humour underneath it) were good stuff. After that though, I kind of lost track of them more just due to the changing music climate than anything - they would release two further albums but their next release after Excuses For Travellers wouldn't be until 2003 and a lot had happened in the intervening three years both in my music tastes and in the direction of alternative music as a whole and Mojave 3 just kind of silently fell off my radar. According to the interweb they would continue to tour in this guise for a good decade or so after the timeframe of this article until 2013 when the group would mutate back into Slowdive which they remain to this day having released several critically and commercially acclaimed albums which I guess proves that time's a great healer given the circumstances.

I appreciate that alt-country isn't necessarily everyone's bag but Mojave 3 were definitely princes among a lot of the dross in this genre. If you can accept that you're very much heading into gentle acoustic led territory for a lot of the journey then Out Of Tune and Excuses For Travellers are both well worth a listen.

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VELOCETTE

As with a lot of bands from this era, Velocette first came to my attention through a combination of getting a bit of airplay from Steve Lamacq on the Evening Session and (quelle surprise) appearing on a Fierce Panda compilation. Formed from the ashes of riotgrrl types Comet Gain, they sadly lasted for just the one album.

I think it was Velocette's fourth single Reborn which brought them to my attention. It was a bit like Split era Lush, all jangly guitars, sleepy horns and dreamy vocals. I mean, the term "dream pop" was nowhere near being a thing by this point but this song definitely falls into that category and is well worth a listen. It came out just before Christmas '98 and it's one of those songs that for some reason always reminds me of that time of year even though apart from having sleigh bells on it, it doesn't have any real festive overtones at all.

I would end up getting Velocette's Fourfold Remedy album shortly afterwards and it was a bit of a mixed bag with a few songs which verged on being anonymous but with some definite gems in there from the pop stylings of Bitterscene (re-recorded from its original Fierce Panda release) through the orchestral pop of Get Yourself Together and Spoiled Children (which sounded oddly like Burt Bacharach relocating to the Good Mixer for a few pints). Chart success wasn't forthcoming unfortunately though (a re-release of Bitterscene in early '99 for their fifth and as it turned out final single would prove to be their only Top 100 entry let alone Top 75 peaking at number 97) and the group would disband quietly in 2000. Unlike a few SFTJ Footnotes bands I think this was more just a case of the band deciding enough was enough rather than the label losing patience - they were signed to the none-more-indie Wiija label (where Therapy? and Bis both started off). Although the definitive reason is probably lost in the mists of time somewhere.

I'm not really sure if I should class Velocette as a band who could've had a Top 40 hit with a bit better timing (certainly weirder things have happened) or a band who just didn't quite have enough of a commercial sheen on them to make a chart breakthrough in this era. The truth's probably somewhere in the middle - certainly Get Yourself Together at the very least I could've seen being a hit for a more commercially fortunate artist. Either way, Fourfold Remedy is worth a curiosity listen (it's still available on Spotify) as certainly a good half of it is fine stuff indeed. It's just a pity that they didn't see it fit to soldier on for a second album - like Kenickie and Dweeb before them, I suspect that this is a band that might well have developed into something special if they'd only decided to stick things out a little longer.

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DUST JUNKYS

The Dust Junkys were basically supposed to be a Mancunian version of the Fun Lovin' Criminals albeit a bit heavier with the smart-arse raps and chugging guitars at their best combining to form something pretty decent. Unfortunately they were a band who were dogged by inconsistency - like a lot of Footnotes bands, they had two great singles but the album was hit and miss.

The group were fronted by Nicky Lockett aka MC Tunes who'd been the rapper in residence for Manchester dance legends 808 State in the early '90s and chalked up a brace of hits with them in the form of The Only Rhyme That Bites and Tunes Splits The Atom (which sampled the bassline from the Stone Roses' I Am The Resurrection). However, as a lot of the lyrics on the DJ's album Done And Dusted attest, he fell pretty hard after his brief spell in the spotlight and after sorting himself out, decided to give things a go with a more rock-based direction.

The Dust Junkys were the result of this new direction and they emerged in late '96, releasing a number of singles which had slowly improving chart placings until their fourth release What Time Is It? gave them a bona fide Top 40 hit and it was this one that put them on my radar. I have to say I enjoyed it - as I've mentioned in SFTJ's past, generally rap has never been a genre of music I've listened to a lot of down the years but I can appreciate it when it's done well (De La Soul, Credit To The Nation etc) and this was one of those times - it reminded me a lot of the first Fun Lovin' Criminals album and as this was the point where Huey and co were starting to soften their sound up a bit after their initial run of chart success it definitely filled a gap in the market.

The follow-up Nothin' Personal ("It's nothin' personal me pissin' on yer picnic, but if yer don't like it YER CAN STICK IT!") was even better and enough to make me check out the album. And unfortunately this is where it came unstuck a bit - Done And Dusted had a few other boss tunes on it like Non Stop Operation but also quite a bit of filler with the likes of Fever just dragging. It wasn't a big seller and unfortunately the group were on Island just at the time where they did a mass roster cull (see Carrie, the Warm Jets etc) and were another victim of this as '98 came to a close, splitting soon afterwards.

Lockett has reunited the Dust Junkys in recent years with a remixed and remastered version of Done And Dusted being self-released in recent years. The group are still active live and, having missed them in that arena first time out, I'd definitely be interested in checking them out once the current pandemic is over. I can't really give Done And Dusted a full on recommendation as it's a bit patchy to say the least but certainly give Nothin' Personal a spin if nothing else, it's a good 'un.

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REGULAR FRIES

Failed attempts at starting a new musical movement to fill the post-Britpop void that the NME tried number 37 - skunk rock. We've touched on this briefly in the Delakota SFTJ entry but it was first touted by said mag in early '98, the premise was basically a group of decidedly shambolic bands doing Screamadelica influenced indie-dance music which may or may not have been mostly powered along by various narcotics. The trouble is that a) Screamadelica was seven years old by this point and b) most of the bands they threw into this scene like Campag Velocet and the Lo-Fidelity All Stars just weren't very good. However, there was one exception in the form of the Regular Fries.

The group belong to that lineage including the Pet Shop Boys and Gay Dad (the latter of whom I'm sure we'll come to soon enough in this column) in that they were a band formed by bored music journalists. Hey, don't laugh, I've done very much the same thing myself on more than one occasion in the dim and distant past. Their calling card was their debut single Dust It Don't Bust It, originally released on Fierce Panda offshoot Rabid Badger (yup, this was a thing, they also had another one called Livid Meerkat back in the day) but it was when they re-did it for their new label JBO that it properly came into its own, going from a plodding slice of indie trip-hop to a furious riffed-up slice of Kowalski era Primal Scream style paranoia. Great stuff.

It was enough for me to check out the band's album Accept The Signal and I do remember playing it quite a bit through '98/'99. Similar to the shoegazing bands a few years before, it was mainly an album to chill out to when me and my mates had...erm, herbal relaxants in shall we say. Certainly the trippy King Kong and the spaced-out acoustic led Supposed To Be A Gas always seemed to go down very well with a bit of the old magic parsley. Although listening to it now having not partaken of any of that stuff for well over a decade, I have to say it hasn't aged brilliant with the slightly reedy vocals in particular sounding a bit less cosmic than I remember.

The group would stick around for long enough to make a second album, War On Plastic Plants in 2001 and it was okay but again it felt by then like my music tastes had kind of moved on without the Fries. Indeed, the main song of theirs I remember from that era is a James Dean Bradfield remix of their collaboration with veteran reggae star Kool Keith Supersonic Waves (Coke 'n' Smoke) which took the trippy vibe and blasted it to bits with a furious guitar riff. After that, the band just kind of faded from view really.

It's a bit disappointing to find on revisiting the Regular Fries again two decades later that they haven't quite held up as well as I was hoping but they deserve a mention on here as they definitely played a minor part in my listening habits back then and I remember giving both Dust It and King Kong quite a bit of airplay on my radio show at the time. Maybe you just need some relaxants flowing through your system to properly get it I s'pose...

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LLAMA FARMERS

Hailing from South London, the Llama Farmers were one of those bands who seemed to lurk on the fringes of breaking big for a few years in the late '90s without ever really making the proper jump up to the big time. Sounding like a grungier Symposium, they were another group I remember seeing live a lot around this point and they certainly packed more of a punch than most of their co-accused in the Melody Maker in this era. Weirdly their best song was a B-side (similar to Bawl who we covered on here a while ago) in Jessica, a fine two-minute blast of teenage paranoia which recalled Ash's Trailer mini-album. For some reason the vocals really remind me of the Lemonheads on this one...not sure if that's a good or a bad thing!

After a brief run on (yup, you guessed it) Fierce Panda, the group would move up to Beggars Banquet for their Dead Letter Chorus album which was a two-thirds decent effort with songs like Yellow (no, not the Coldplay snorefest, more a haunting grunge/goth crossover which seemed to have half-inched its bassline from REM's Man On The Moon of all things) and the barrelling Get The Keys And Go. Sure there was the odd more lumpen moment but mostly this was pretty good stuff.

I saw the Llama Farmers quite a bit on the live circuit as they were one of those indie bands who toured like absolute buggers. Although they weren't quite of the same standard as Symposium and Midget, they still had that good mix of youthful energy, slacker cool and a self-deprecating sense of humour (I remember a gig in Stoke where they introduced themselves with the line "We're the Llama Farmers from London. But don't hold that against us."). They seemed to get a decent amount of positive press coverage as well, especially in the Melody Maker and there was a feeling in 1998-99 or so that they might just be ones to watch going forward.

The group would notch up a brace of Top 75 hits (Big Wheels and the aforementioned Get The Keys And Go) which was enough for Beggars to keep them on for a second album El Toppo which surfaced in 2000. Unfortunately aside from the quite lovely trippy Same Song, this one just wasn't quite as good and sales started to dwindle off. The fact that Melody Maker, who had been their main champions in the music press, went under around this time probably didn't help their cause either. Either way, it would turn out to be their swansong and they'd break up soon afterwards.

It's weird revisiting the Llama Farmers again twenty years on and to be honest my opinion of them hasn't changed that much - they were a solid competent mid-table indie/Britrock band but they just kind of didn't quite have the stardust sprinkled on 'em. However, as with quite a few bands around this time it was more due to the fact that they were a band I saw live a lot (where to be honest they were always at their strongest) and that in what was admittedly a pretty barren climate for alternative music, they did at least have enough energy to stand out from the crowd meant that they were regulars on my stereo for a while at least before other superior bands kind of pushed them to the back of my CD rack. As with all Beggars bands, their albums are still both available on Spotify so why not go and judge for yourself?

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GROOP DOGDRILL

Although quite a few of its major players had long since fallen by the wayside by this point, Britrock was still staggering on in 1998 thanks to the efforts of Terrorvision and 3 Colours Red with the help of a few new bands joining the ranks to bolster the movement a bit such as A, Symposium and Doncaster scuzzers Groop Dogdrill.

Ver Dogdrill were a bit of a weird one - they had the necessary riffs and scuzziness to be slung in with the Britrock crowd but there was a kind of wilful sloppiness to their material which, similar to the Llama Farmers above, meant they had a bit of a kinship with grunge as well. Their debut album Half Nelson was a fine slice of piss 'n' vinegar smalltown attitude with singles like Oily Rag, Lovely Skin and Jackie O being good stuff. They also had a real belligerence in the live arena (plus the fact that they toured with a lot of my favourite bands of the time like the Yo-Yo's) which made their gigs fun to watch.

Unfortunately the momentum couldn't last - their second album, 2000's Every Six Seconds was bloody awful and saw them slump into a morass of tune deficient "trying to be clever" art-metal with none of the cut 'n' thrust immediacy of their debut and nary a memorable tune in sight. They duly left their label and the end was nigh. Well, not quite. Half a decade later, singer Pete Spiby would resurface with another band you might have heard of, the Black Spiders, who promptly rocketed to much greater heights than Groop Dogdrill ever managed. Their new album was released a couple of months ago (review here) and is well worth checking out. As for Groop Dogdrill, certainly Half Nelson deserves a curiosity listen if you want to hear where the guy started off.

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THE INTERPRETERS

A classic Fierce Panda "came from nowhere, released a couple of awesome singles and then rapidly vanished just as soon as they'd arrived" band. The Interpreters were actually from across the pond in Philadelphia but their sound was pure UK new wave/power pop. Put it this way, 15 years earlier they'd have fit right in sharing bills with bands like the Knack and the Romantics and 20 years later and they'd have had a ready made audience among UK power pop fans at nights like Some Weird Sin and the Pump It Up festival. As it was they emerged in 1997-98 and sort of fell through the cracks despite some positive press in both NME and Melody Maker. I first heard of them on one of Fierce Panda's compilations with the short sharp shock of Shout! I remember playing it on my radio show quite a lot at the time and thought the follow-up, a single in their own right on the label, I Should've Known Better, was even better.

And then...nothing. The group did apparently put an album out, rather excellently titled Back In The USSA (I remember the single advertising it as coming soon) but it would be well over a decade before I heard it as I couldn't find it anywhere - to be honest, I'm not even sure it actually got a UK release. I remember they did a couple of UK gigs (for some reason I remember the Melody Maker review noting that instead of saying thanks after each song they would instead say "you are most welcome friends, most welcome" which I thought was cool) but I can safely say they never played Stoke or the surrounding area. After that, the trail well and truly went dead and they just kind of drifted into that group of bands who you kind of forget about until you do a Footnotes column two decades later.

Looking up the band's entry on Wikipedia, it seems that things went a bit murky after I lost track of the Interpreters. The group ended up playing at the Republican Party Convention in 2000 in the middle of the George Bush Dubya era and unsurprisingly were absolutely crucified for it (including a typically brutal verbal slating from Jello Biafra on one of his live albums). Their credibility was well and truly shot and they'd disband before releasing any further albums. Sigh...ah well, can't win 'em all. If you're willing to put their somewhat questionable politics to one side, Back In The USSA is ironically enough now available on Spotify if you fancy giving it a listen yourself.

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CHEWY

Another one of Fierce Panda's decidedly off-the-wall signings, Chewy were a Swiss band who briefly looked like causing some waves with two rather good pop-punk singles. Again, it was their appearance on one of the label compilations with Prime Time which sounded like Placebo covering 1977 era Ash and was a hilarious invective against has been '80s TV stars namechecking Mark Hamill, Diff'rent Strokes and Hangin' With Mr Cooper as well as including the immortal lyric "Luke Skywalker was such a loser! Princess Leia sucks Darth Vader!". Great stuff.

Following a second single All Over The Place (again, pure first album Placebo with its helium vocals and Wedding Present style clanging guitars), the group put a self-titled mini-album out which had some other good stuff on it like the lurching Second Hand Magic although there were a couple of clunkers on there like Simon and The Big Bradford.

And then, as with the Interpreters around the same time, the trail went cold and that was the last I heard of them. A quick bit of web research reveals that the band continued to do well in their native Switzerland and managed to put two albums out over there before disbanding. They've reformed and remain active in their home country but I suspect the odds of them returning over to the UK any time soon are pretty remote and not just because of the current pandemic outbreak. Nevertheless, that mini-album is available on Spotify and well worth a listen for the good bits.

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And so we come to the end of another Footnotes column. We'll return soon enough with the next one which'll cover 1999-2000 ie the second half of my time living as a student in Stoke-on-Trent and also the pre-Strokes era before every band seemed to be image-over-tunes leather jacket wearing merchants and I well and truly drifted away from indie full stop. With my tendency towards heavier music well and truly starting to come to the fore by this point expect a mix of the jangly and the more riffed-up stuff - let it not be said my music taste was anything other than ultra-schizophrenic in this era! Till then...