Sounds From The Junkshop #47 - The Crocketts

 

“Well I was thinking, I’ll wear a rose/And in the morning, I’ll be your dog” - The Crocketts - 1939 Returning

So the legend goes that some time in the mid-‘90s, beardy Gordon Gecko wannabe and alleged inspiration for the old WASP classic Chainsaw Charlie (Murders In The New Morgue) Richard Branson was looking for some new bands to sign to Virgin’s corpo-“indie” offshoot V2 and took a punt on a couple of then-unknown Welsh bands who'd both come up together in the small villages of the province. One was a power trio specialising in blue collar Springsteen indebted odes to smalltown desperation and the minutiae of rural life. They were called the Stereophonics. You might just have heard of them. The other was an ultra-deranged group of Pixies soundalikes who wrote songs about having a Satanic girlfriend and being a hot and sweaty sex slave. They were called the Crocketts. Odds are that if you don't remember the late '90s then you probably haven't heard of them.

Hand on heart, I was very late to the party where the Crocketts were concerned. I completely missed their first album, 1997's We May Be Skinny And Wirey although I do remember hearing Blusterboy, a track from their Nintendo Fallacy mini-album the following year on a free CD with Melody Maker (I think?). Honestly, I didn't rate it - it was an ode to a bullied kid committing suicide but in keeping with its name it kind of had a swirling but decidedly plodding rage to it, very much lacking much of a tune to draw you in. However, their sinister 1999 single Host did at least right things a little bit with its doomy guitar line and snarling vocals (although hearing a band from Aberystwyth referring to "parking lots" does require a bit of suspending reality to be honest).

The follow-up On Something was even better, kicking in with some accordion before blasting into a sandpaper raw riff with frontman Davey McManus (aka Davey Crockett)'s alternately sung and screamed vocals recalling Frank Black in his prime. The group had a well-deserved reputation of being a ferocious live act and this is probably the closest they got to capturing that lightning in a bottle on record. Certainly McManus' antics (he would frequently headbutt the microphone until he bust his forehead open, once legendarily doing it so hard that a piece of the metal embedded itself in his skull!) got the band a fair few column inches in the Melody Maker and Kerrang!

It was the third Crocketts single (and, sod's law with my music taste being what it is, their final one) 1939 Returning which was my favourite though and the one which stayed on my stereo for quite a while afterwards. Building from a sinister jangling verse to a ferocious chorus predicting social breakdown ("Humans are animals, we do as we please, control is a currency, the vulture's disease") which to be honest sound scarily prescient the way the country is some two decades later, it was enough to nudge me into shelling out for a copy of the group's second album The Great Brain Robbery which had just hit the shops at the time. As a quick side note here, the B-side, the ultra-chaotic Happy As A Bastard On Father's Day was an absolute stormer as well but annoyingly it's not on Youtube which someone really needs to right asap.

I really enjoyed The Great Brain Robbery when I first heard it in late 2000 and I have to say it still holds up pretty well now showing a band evolving their sound well from the gentle country strum of Chicken vs Macho to the full on insanity of Lucifer (with its crazed refrain of "Just because you've blown me you think you fucking own me!") and the epic swirling guitars of Ella Luciana. The Crocketts were definitely a bit out there but in the "anything goes re the next big thing" pre-Strokes era of indie, they had a fury combined with a lurking intelligence that actually made them briefly look like genuine contenders.

Unfortunately as with a lot of SFTJ bands, that spark of originality didn't translate to sales - The Great Brain Robbery for whatever reason got absolutely awful reviews from the music press (NME and Melody Maker's Daniel Booth, not a man known for mincing his words back then, being particularly savage). The following year, Virgin wound up the V2 label and the band were left without a record deal. Bassist Rich "Wurzel" Carter and guitarist Dan Harris (aka Dan Boone) both left in quick succession with McManus and drummer Owen Hopkin (aka Owen Cash) changing the band name to the Crimea and actually chalking up a Top 40 hit with the woozy Lottery Winners On Acid in the post-Libertines era. Honestly though, I completely missed them - by this point I'd well and truly drifted away from indie and down the more murky backroads of punk, sleaze rock and general abuse of my liver and nervous system. Quite possibly, it's something I'll look up in the wake of writing this article along with that first Crocketts album that I never got round to listening to back in the day. In conclusion though, I'll still stick up for The Great Brain Robbery. Alternatively tuneful and angry, regretful and unhinged, it was a well aimed dose of chaos in the indie scene before the dull anodyne likes of the Strokes dragged things back to sounding uniform and well scrubbed. Well worth a listen for anyone who fancies a walk on the wild side of early noughties indie.