Sounds From The Junkshop #54 - King Adora

 

"I got the wind on my back like a good Frank Black/Gonna get me some speed like the Lord Lou Reed/I'm your greatest hard on, I'm your heroin, your absolute starfuck" - King Adora - Bionic

King Adora belonged to that lineage of bands who only ever used to surface every 3-4 years or so - a raging firestorm against monochrome monotony, looking like some sort of weird Martian punks landed on earth, spitting bile and not caring who they offended. You can trace said line back through These Animal Men and before then Suede and the Manics in their early forms right back to Birdland and forward to groups like the much-missed Jonny Cola & The A-Grades. And let's be honest as the millennium approached, we really needed a bright leopard print and feathers spark of individualism to rescue us from the grey dull cardigan wearing mundanity espoused by the likes of Coldplay, Travis, Starsailor et al

King Adora really did appear to be that band and I think the first time I heard of them was when they featured in both NME and Melody Maker the same week (as we've ascertained, by this point I was starting to grow away from my indie roots a bit but I was still reading the Maker fairly regularly). I think the NME review of their debut single Bionic described them as sounding like These Animal Men which very much piqued my interest. I went out and bought the single the following Monday and while the A-side was good, it was the freewheeling B-side The Law which was the one that really grabbed me in with its seedy breakneck tale of being seduced by a WPC in the back of her police car to get off a shoplifting charge. It was so brilliantly OTT that it couldn't fail and the group were quickly being hyped as ones to look out for.

The group's second single, the gleefully sleazy Big Isn't Beautiful which was about male anorexia ("Every boy wants a body to die for/Every girl who is thin is his rival") seemed to get up the noses of a lot of people - I remember going to see Rochdale lo-fi-pop-punks Angelica (who briefly threatened to be the new Kenickie but just never quite hit the same heights in terms of killer tunes - they may crop up in a Footnotes section on this column) in Stoke around this time and their singer (Holly Ross, now in the Lovely Eggs) did a huge between-song rant about it claiming it glamourised eating disorders. I see her point but King Adora did this song so utterly OTT (including a video which saw the group cavorting around with a couple of Ann Summers mannequins come to life and lead singer Maxi knocking out someone dressed up as a member of hateful fratpunk neanderthal dickheads the Bloodhound Gang which instantly earned them plus points with me) that there was no way you could really see it as anything other than an elaborate piss-take designed to wind up the straitlaced.

The group's infamy was quickly snowballing - third single Smoulder would break them into the Top 75 and their fourth, the Smashing Pumpkins-esque Suffocate would crash the Top 40. I went to see them a lot in 2000 - a lot of the glam/goth girls I knew via the Uni RockSoc absolutely worshipped them and if they played Stoke (usually the Sugarmill) then there would always be a healthy contingent heading in on the bus from Keele. (we actually used to have a running joke at this point that if there were ever any indie gigs in Stoke then it would always be a combination of two from the same five bands playing namely King Adora, Wilt, goth-grunge dullards My Vitriol and almost certain future SFTJ entries Crashland and Easyworld). King Adora gigs though really were inevitably a complete shambles. The group's songs were all so fast and furious that they often had trouble stringing a set together for longer than 30 minutes (quite honestly you were sometimes lucky to get even 20 minutes out of them) but it was like a white light white heat flash of pure in-your-face attitude, power and riffs before they'd simply thrown down their instruments and storm off. I mean, yeah, the bar was pretty low in 1999-2000 but they really did feel like about the most punk thing around at this point.

I think King Adora picked up a lot of Manics fans who'd got a bit disenchanted with the group toning their image and fury down a few notches after Richey's disappearance - Maxi infamously remarked in an interview with Melody Maker that "The Manics sold out and let people down. We won't." It's safe to say that by the time a rereleased Bionic gave them their biggest hit, crashing into the Top 30, that they were regulars on the front page of the Melody Maker too - they even found time to engage in what was, looking back, quite a funny feud with fellow Brummies the Dum-Dums (think Busted if they'd landed about three years too early and had all their singles stall at about number 25) who'd accused them of contriving their image in an interview. King Adora's classic response was when asked what they thought about said band, "We don't give press to soap operas, darling."

The group's debut album Vibrate You (taken after a line from Smoulder) surfaced in early 2001 and I think it was about this time that things started to go wrong for them as Melody Maker, their main champions in the press, had gone bust leaving NME who were more interested in the Strokes et al by this time as the alt-press gatekeepers. I remember Steven Wells reviewed the album and gave it 6/10 saying that the good bits were brilliant but there was also quite a bit of filler in there. Unfortunately, I think he was pretty much on the money - while the singles were great and there were a few other great ones on there as well like Asthmatic and Supermuffdiver, there were also a few tracks like Aftertime and Whether which sounded a bit like afterthoughts.

Ultimately, Vibrate You came out just as the tide was turning against King Adora and into the new NME-dominated climate where if you didn't come from New York and sound like a watered down garage rock band then the press just weren't listening and by 2002 they would have been dropped from their record label (Superior Quality who were best known for having the Bluetones on their books) after it was taken over in a corporate merger. Finding another label proved difficult for them as a lot of people rightly or wrongly regarded them as last year's thing by this point and it wasn't until 2003 that they made a comeback with the Born To Lose single which showed a more muscular rocked-up side to their sound. Unfortunately it bombed, stiffing at number 68 and the long-awaited second album (produced by Dodgy's Nigel Clark) Who Do You Love? failed to chart at all. By 2004, the band were no more with Maxi and guitarist Nelsta starting a new group, the not entirely dissimilar The High Society who lasted for one EP before dissolving messily.

I s'pose it's apt that King Adora's career pretty much mirrored their live shows - a white hot magnesium flash that burned incredibly brightly for a short period of time but was over just as fast as it had begun. The truth is though that they made a big impact on a lot of kids my age - many years later when I moved to London and started writing for fanzines based around glam and punk, the amount of people who, like myself, had absolutely loved them during their brief run in the spotlight was pretty amazing. It's just a real shame that the ground crumbled from underneath their feet so quickly - I do get the impression that they were quite hard done by - certainly I found their music to be a lot more exciting than a lot of the watered down Noo Yoik garage rockers who the NME were fawning over around this time. 

The group would reform for a couple of one-off gigs in 2010 which I ended up missing for some reason I can't quite remember and, around the same time, a documentary on the band, Who Do You Love?, surfaced (see above vid). It's a good watch and shows a proper warts 'n' all view of the band's meteoric rise and fall. These days from what I understand, Maxi lives in Ireland, bassist Robbie lives in the States, spike-haired drummer Dan is now technical manager at Birmingham Academy and Nelsta now plays guitar for a swing band! They may well be tragically almost forgotten these days but for about five seconds, King Adora really did feel like the most exciting and dangerous band in the world and I thoroughly recommend both of their albums to the uninitated. Hey, we weren't all listening to Is This It? back in 2001 y'know...