Sounds From The Junkshop #49 - Gay Dad

 

"You better look out world, 'cos nothing's gonna bring me down!" - Gay Dad - To Earth With Love

It's fair to say that Gay Dad were very much a Marmite band. To their detractors, they were the ultimate scam group, a bunch of bored music journalists playing at being rock stars (interesting that a lot of these detractors seemed to be other music journalists - a touch of jealousy that they hadn't thought of the same idea maybe?) To those of us who became fans of the band though, they were a much needed dose of stardust and glamour in the increasingly grey and beige alternative music scene in 1999.

The campaign for the group's debut single To Earth With Love was certainly a very effective affair - I remember some time in the dying days of 1998 these posters featuring what looked like a blue and white pedestrian crossing sign started appearing everywhere and I mean everywhere. The group had managed to get some low level press attention prior to this after supporting the not entirely dissimilar Mansun on the tour to support the sheer insanity that was their Six album and were now ready to spread their wings properly. Sure enough, the single crashed into the Top 10 in January (in an age where most new indie bands were lucky to even breach the Top 40) and the band were quickly being tipped as the future of rock 'n' roll by pretty much everyone. Beneath the hype though, To Earth With Love was a great song, a full on breathless rush of Bowie style cockiness shamelessly reaching for the stars which you couldn't help but get drawn in by.

Unfortunately the backlash against Gay Dad was swift and brutal and subsequent singles would fall well short of To Earth With Love's chart-storming antics. It's the old story - band comes from nowhere to chalk up a surprise hit by offering something genuinely different to what's in vogue at the time (at this point that would have been tedious post-Radiohead/Verve navel gazers) and get their fair share of plaudits for standing out from the crowd. Unfortunately this then brings them to the attention of people who very much don't like their style of music and are annoyed that people are going out and buying it (especially those who've seen someone they possibly used to share an office with a year or so earlier going out touring round the world and living the rock star lifestyle while they're still stuck behind a desk in Canary Wharf producing copy for their editor) and they promptly start the "knock 'em down again" process with no quarter given. Frontman Cliff Jones' determination to act like an actual proper rockstar in an age of boring cardigan wearers like Thom Yorke, Fran Healy and Chris Martin also seemed to attract a fair bit of criticism which again proves that there really were some humourless pricks working in places like the NME in this era.

The group's second single Joy! would stall just outside the Top 20 while their third, the quite beautiful Lennonesque balladry of Oh Jim (written about Jim Irvin of '80s alt-pop types Furniture who'd helped produce the band's initial demos) missed the Top 40 altogether, a real shame as it deserved to be a hit. Despite the battering the group were taking in the press, the debut album Leisure Noise got good reviews and made the Top 20 with songs like the soaring opener Dimstar, the gentle My Son Mystic and the yearning Black Ghost, it had great songs to spare frankly.

However, by the end of 1999 I think most people were seeing Gay Dad as a busted flush with guitarist Charley Stone and keyboard player James Riseboro both leaving the band. Supposedly they very nearly had Andy Bell join them from the wreckage of Hurricane #1 but that fell through when Oasis came calling for him instead. The remaining core of Jones, Baz Crowe and Nigel Hoyle would silently slip out of the spotlight as the millennium dawned, resurfacing in 2001 with the excellent Now, Always And Forever single which agonisingly just missed the Top 40 stalling at number 41. Unfortunately we were now in the era of the Strokes where leather jackets and say-nothing watered down garage rock were in and rock star flash was very much out.

Transmission, the group's second album, would follow that summer and was very much an album of two halves with the first six songs being absolutely killer from the soaring optimism of the title track, the aforementioned Now, Always And Forever, the spiky paranoia of Nightclub and the driving Harder Faster leading up to the breakneck brilliance of the anti-suicide ode Plane Going Down and the quite lovely end of the evening breakup lament that was All My Life, probably the best two tracks the band ever did in this writer's humble opinion. Unfortunately the second half was pretty anonymous but for the first half a dozen songs alone, this album deserves your attention.

I saw what turned out to be Gay Dad's last ever gig at the Leeds Festival in 2001. They were second top of the bill on the Other Stage but due to earlier bands over-running their set got cut short at 20 minutes or so much to the anger of the crowd. Cliff refused to leave the stage, leading the crowd in an a cappella rendition of Joy! - if he really was the millennium's answer to Ziggy Stardust then this was his "When the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band" moment. The band put on a good set that day as well and I'm still a bit gutted it's the only time I ever got to see them live.

Two decades after the fact, I've still got fond memories of Gay Dad - in the dull and monochrome millennial music scene, they were a much needed flash of colour and rockstar attitude rebelling against the uninspiring greyness of bands like the Verve, Starsailor et al and they were actually the second band I covered in this column's predecessor Songs From A Wasted Youth in Bubblegum Slut fanzine (the similarly underrated Kenickie being the first). Was it all a con job? An excuse for Jones to write a book about being a rock star? (if said book ever appears then I'll certainly put myself down for a copy put it that way!). Who knows? Frankly it doesn't matter. Gay Dad were a great band who we should have treasured for bringing something different to the prevalent tedium at the time rather than scorned. Still, at least they left us with one and a half great albums to look back on and I heartily recommend you do. Turn on, tune in and take in the transmission.