Sounds From The Junkshop #50 - Backyard Babies/Buckcherry

“You wanna come with me? You wanna ride with me? You wanna blow this town? ‘Cos I ain’t got time to show ya…” - Backyard Babies - Bombed Outta My Mind

“Don’t fall in love, that’s the line they will feed you. But if I can’t have you I’ll be dead again…” - Buckcherry - Dead Again

By the time 1999 rolled around, I think it’s safe to say that my patience with a lot of the new music NME and Melody Maker were trying to foist on me was wearing decidedly thin. I mean to be honest, when the best indie music can offer is the likes of Terris, JJ72 and Campag Velocet, it's pretty safe to say that the whole thing is flatlining a bit. If I'm honest though, Kerrang! wasn't really much better - although the Britrock bands like Terrorvision, 3 Colours Red, the Yo-Yo's and A were still putting up a sterling rearguard action against the advance of the Limp Bizkit and Korn led nu-metal charge, things were definitely getting desperate.

I think it was some time in the summer term of 1999 when I was idly looking through some promo CD's before doing my radio show on KUBE and stumbled across a couple of ones next to each other by bands I'd sort of heard of in the pages of Melody Maker and Kerrang!, namely the Backyard Babies and Buckcherry with the songs in question being Bombed (Outta My Mind) and Dead Again respectively. I gave 'em a quick play on my discman (blimey, there's a phrase to date this article!) and quickly realised these were going to be on heavy rotation in the weeks ahead.

I'd mostly heard of the Backyards through Ginger Wildheart before this as he'd given them a shout out in a few interviews and even done a few gigs with them in the UK and Europe but Bombed well and truly knocked me for six - after a few years of what felt like decidedly diminishing returns for music that was actually, y'know, FUN, this roared out of the traps like an exocet - sheer rock 'n' roll badass attitude. I mean, I think it's safe to say at that point that it made messrs Ashcroft, Yorke et al seem like even bigger anaemic whingers than they already were.

I'd heard of Buckcherry in the pages of Kerrang at this point, usually mentioned alongside the Backyards as part of the nu-sleaze rock revival. As I've mentioned in earlier columns here, I've always thought the whole post-G'n'R scuzzier end of hair metal gets an unjustly bad rep in the press - if you're willing to accept that it was simple dumb fun party music and that sometimes we all need a bit of that in our lives then there were some bands in there who had some pretty kick ass material - Love/Hate, L.A. Guns, the Four Horsemen, W.A.S.P., Cats In Boots, Junkyard. I mean, look, you can harp on about the aesthetic virtues of Paranoid Android all day if you want and I hear ya but there's just something about hearing the opening riff of Blackout In The Red Room or Rip 'n' Tear or Blind In Texas or, yes, Buckcherry's signature tune Lit Up that makes you nod your head and go "yeah". It's something deeply primal, something I hadn't really had properly from music since I Wanna Go Where The People Go a few years before. And this very much delivered it.

I went out and bought both the Backyards' Total 13 and Buckcherry's self-titled debut album within a few weeks of hearing those songs for the first time and they're still albums I come back to now. Total 13 was actually the Backyards' second album, their debut Diesel And Power having come out a good five years previously in 1994 - however, soon after its release guitarist Dregen had been poached by up and coming Swedish garage rockers the Hellacopters (ironically one of the bands who would break through to the UK market behind the Backyards initially) and it was his full time return that had allowed them to regroup. And they very much regrouped in style - the searing opening one-two of Made Me Madman and UFO Romeo is probably one of the most skin-flayingly ferocious opening double shot of songs I heard on any album through my teenage years while elsewhere, the concrete-heavy single Highlights and the ferocious likes of Ghetto You, 8-Balled and Look At You were the sound of the cobwebs of stagnant music in my head being well and truly blasted away.

It's easy to forget given that they've made a fair few mis-steps in recent years that in those early years, Buckcherry seemed to have a knack of making nearly everything they touched turn to gold. Tunes like the awesome album highlight Crushed (like Lit Up, one that I desperately wanted to play on the radio but couldn't because there wasn't a swear-free version available!) and Lawless And Lulu were the sort of shamelessly big scorching bad-ass rock anthems we hadn't heard from across the pond for a good seven or eight years at this point while the miserable addled bleating of grunge was in vogue while the soaring ballad For The Movies (which also had Tara Reid, who I desperately fancied at the time, in the video) and the laid back summer anthem in waiting Borderline showed that they could slow the pace to good effect too. That line-up was rock solid as well with Josh Todd's scowling vocals being backed up by the twin riffing of Keith Nelson and Yogi and the ultra tight rhythm section of JB and Devon Glenn. I mean, that first album is still a stone cold classic, I don't care what anyone says.

Unfortunately, as with all good times, they couldn't last. The Backyards actually put out a pretty awesome follow-up to Total 13 in the form of 2001's Making Enemies Is Good which I actually ever so slightly preferred. With killer fist-in-the-air tunes like Payback, The Kids Are Right and Star War (which Dregen had already road tested with Ginger in Super$hit666 a year or two previously) plus collaborations with both Ginger on lead-off single Brand New Hate and Tyla from the Dogs D'Amour on the ominous Painkiller, it showed them building nicely on their progress and when I got to see them live on that tour supported by Danko Jones (my first introduction to the awesome DJ3 and another band who are almost certainly gonna be a future SFTJ entry) they well and truly ripped the shell off Leeds Cockpit. It was a great night.

Unfortunately, despite good reviews, Making Enemies didn't get the sales that the Backyards' new major label paymasters BMG were hoping for and the band were dropped which, at least in terms of the UK market, sent them into a tailspin a bit. Their next album Stockholm Syndrome never got a proper UK release and it wouldn't be until several years later and the advent of online music that I finally heard it. To be honest though, although it was a solid effort, you could tell they were losing fire a bit and 2008's People Like Us Like People Like Us was crap frankly, hampered by poor production and below par tunes. It seems that the band knew the game was up and after one more eponymous album (which was at least a bit better than its two predecessors although still not up to the imperial era stuff) they were no more. They would reunite in the mid-teens but their comeback album, 2016's Four By Four was a real stinker, the sound of a band phoning it in and hoping the fanbase would be so overjoyed to see them back that they'd overlook the lack of tunes. Needless to say, it didn't really work that way but thankfully 2019's Sliver And Gold did at least see a bit of the fire of old returning and suggested that hopefully the Backyards do actually have more to offer than just twenty year old memories. Fingers crossed...

If the Backyards' quality plummet was a cliff edge then Buckcherry's was more like a gentle downward slope. Their second album, 2001's Time Bomb got panned upon its release but listening back to it now it's not that bad, I think what arguably did for it was that it was a bit too similar to the first. The tunes were arguably still there though - the title track, Ridin' and Frontside brought the rock energy, Helpless was a decent ballad to go alongside For The Movies and Porno Star was as hilariously OTT as its title suggests. However, sales weren't forthcoming, the band were dropped and JB, Yogi and Devon all left in quick succession leading Josh and Keith to call time on the band in 2002.

Josh and Keith both apparently very nearly joined Velvet Revolver at this point but ultimately lost out to Scott Weiland and Dave Kushner in the final line-up. Eventually they would reassemble Buckcherry in 2005 with a new line-up and would put out a respectable comeback in 15, prefaced by the gleefully OTT single Crazy Bitch. Tunes like So Far, Next To You and Broken Glass showed that they still had the snarling aggression but the more considered Out Of Line, Everything and Carousel showed a gentler side to their sound while the token ballad Sorry gave them a genuine Top 10 hit. However, from that peak unfortunately it's been mostly downhill ever since. 2008's Black Butterfly and 2010's All Night Long were solid efforts if not quite up to the standard of what had come before but 2013's Confessions was a horribly misjudged attempt at a concept album based around the seven deadly sins and by 2016's dreadful Rock 'n' Roll, the band had gone into almost Spinal Tap style unintentional self-parody. Shortly afterwards, Keith Nelson would leave the band and Josh would place Buckcherry on hiatus although this would also turn out to be temporary as after a decidedly less than stellar solo project under the Josh Todd & The Conflict banner, he would reunite the group for 2019's Warpaint which, while not exactly a classic, was at least slightly better than its two predecessors. At time of press they've just come up with a new album Hellbound which I'm due to review in the next few days. Will it be that long-awaited return to form? Well, stranger things have happened I guess...

 

It's a shame that both the Backyard Babies and Buckcherry both eventually went off the boil after a decent run each and neither has really yet to get anywhere near the lofty heights they once occupied in terms of quality because it's safe to say that both of them had a huge impact on me in terms of my music taste as my teens turned into my twenties in that they arguably shook me out of my indie cocoon and said "hey, come up here to the bar, pour yourself a jack and coke and enjoy things buddy, life's too short!" There's a good reason I picked this to be the 50th episode of Sounds From The Junkshop because that week when I properly discovered both of them was a definite turning point in my music taste and it's safe to say that things would never really be the same again afterwards as we'll see in the next few SFTJ's. It's easy to laugh about both bands and dismiss them as has-beens now but just for that wonderfully brief five minutes both Nicke Borg and Josh Todd were very much in joint possession of that fabled brass ring - my ears had been opened up to a whole other world of music and I'm still feeling the after-effects of it some 20 plus years later. I guess if you're unlucky enough not to have heard Buckcherry's first three albums and Total 13 and Making Enemies Is Good by the Backyards then I'd say you urgently need to change that. Turn it up loud, grab a glass of whatever your poison is and raise it to 'em - they very much deserve it.