Sounds From The Junkshop #46 - Bis

 

"If it's not worth pretending then I don't wanna know..." - Bis  - Eurodisco

There's an argument that we should possibly have covered Bis a bit earlier in SFTJ some time around the entries for 1996 or so rather than now as we enter 1999 as this was when they had their biggest success and their five minutes of infamy. Bursting on the scene just as Britpop was at its peak, their none more lo-fi aesthetic which harked back to a decade before brought them plaudits and derision in pretty much equal amounts. I remember my younger sister absolutely loved them and I ended up borrowing her copy of the group's debut album New Transistor Heroes mainly just to see what the fuss was about. Although it wasn't deserving of some of the scathing reviews it got, I thought it was good but not brilliant. Certainly Bis were very much a Marmite band with the keyboard bleeps, wannabe-cutesy lyrics about sweetshops etc and screechy vocals putting a lot of people off but in amongst the chaos they showed flashes of the odd good tune with the anthemic Everybody Thinks That They're Gonna Get Theirs and the chaotic Poster Parent being stand-outs.

The group were heralded as leaders of the Teen C musical revolution (indeed, the name given by the music press to it came from one of their EP's) but as we've already ascertained from the articles on Kenickie, Symposium, Midget, Dweeb etc on this subject, this ended up falling apart almost instantly as the only thing most of the bands really had in common was their age. With a backlash against them in full flow, Bis kind of quietly retreated to rethink things as 1997 drew to a close returning in the dying days of 1998.

And the big surprise was that they returned with a genuinely great song that pretty much (temporarily at least) shoved the doubters' words back down their throats. Eurodisco was an absolute stormer of a tune, seemingly about the loneliness you feel in the club at 2am when the night starts to wind down and the realities of the boredom of the rest of the weekend start to sink in but it honestly could almost have been the anthem for how a lot of the "indie" scene was feeling at this time with Britpop now long gone and guitar bands exiled back to the margins as pop mannequins like Steps, S Club 7, Atomic Kitten etc became the "in" thing while the likes of NME and Melody Maker were desperately scrabbling around for some sort of life raft to cling on to, anything really to try and start some sort of revival out of ("The party's at its end/A style is named and it's dead")

It wasn't just lyrically that Bis were evolving as well - second album Social Dancing saw them rounding their sound out nicely and blossoming from the lo-fi caterpillars to the full on indie-pop butterflies that they'd fleetingly threatened to be on their debut. Oh sure, it wasn't quite perfect as there was the odd hark back to the lo-fi tunelessness that hobbled the first album but the likes of Action And Drama (bemoaning the rise of superstar DJ's taking things too seriously instead of concentrating on good pop tunes), the anti-sexism I'm A Slut which pre-dated the whole MeToo movement by a good two decades and Making People Normal was a well-aimed diatribe against shows like Ricki Lake which made a living out of turning individual goth kids into regular mallrats under the guise of having a "makeover" were good stuff and showed that Bis were belatedly starting to look like serious contenders.

Unfortunately despite spawning two charting singles, Social Dancing received a mixed response from the music press and sold poorly and I think this maybe knocked Bis into a bit of a tailspin - similar to Kenickie a couple of years before they were rightly trying to move their sound forward rather than staying still but having to cope with a lo-fi fanbase that didn't particularly want to come with them. The 2000 mini-album Music For A Stranger World tried to straddle the two sides of the band to variable results before 2001's Return To Central and 2003's Plastique Nouveau saw them drifting off into more minimalist lo-fi territory (including a surprisingly good re-working of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart). However, falling record sales and keyboard player Manda Rin's poor health saw the group split in 2003 although they've reformed a few times since.

Bis were a funny one really - a band who were generally pretty inconsistent through their eight year or so existence but for one brief glorious moment absolutely nailed it with Eurodisco - unquestionably one of the best songs of 1998-99 and one which everyone should give a listen. The rest of their output is a bit patchy (I'd select Social Dancing as their best album but the other three all have some bits worth investigating) - certainly they didn't deserve a lot of the vitriol they seemed to attract. The truth is that by 1999 though, my music tastes were drifting into heavier waters and I just simply stopped following bands like Bis I guess. And we'll see how that started to develop in the SFTJ's ahead...