Sounds From The Junkshop #56 - Straw

"If we get dropped I will sail out the window, clutching the artwork to my debut single..." - Straw - Moving To California

Largely written off as a corporate sham-indie band the same way others who didn't deserve to be like the Supernaturals and Silver Sun were in previous years, Straw were one of those bands who were arguably doomed from the start. Yet under that "little too clean" exterior was a band who'd mastered the art of great twisted indie-pop songs with a deceptively sharp lyrical edge that the world largely missed.

I think it was the group's second single Aeroplane Song (an actual bona fide Top 40 hit) that brought them to my attention with its slightly weird and wonky take on indie-synth-pop and a quick look at the gig listings confirmed they were playing Stoke soon afterwards so I ventured down to see them. I have to say they absolutely smashed it that night with songs like their debut single Weird Superman soaring over the venue, frontman Matty Bennett resplendent in a yellow parka and ski goggles and the group finishing with a revved-up version of the old Turtles classic Happy Together. I seem to remember writing a rave review for the campus fanzine claiming that Straw were the future of rock 'n' roll afterwards.

And, erm, yeah, not for the first or last time in my journalistic career I was wide of the mark. Their third single Moving To California should have been the one to well and truly crash the charts with its tale of death-or-glory last ditch attempts at being rock stars. There was something about its sheer snotty "we think we're brilliant and if you don't get it then fuck you" attitude ("I don't wanna talk about it/I'm just glad we failed") that really made me think it was gonna be a hit (Bennett also sounded a lot like Miles Hunt from my perennial favourites the Wonder Stuff which probably helped endear them to me) but unbelievably it stalled outside the Top 40 despite being used frequently on then-zeitgeist favourite TV show Trigger Happy TV.

When the group's debut album Shoplifting surfaced, it got mixed reviews (Melody Maker loved it, NME hated it, quelle surprise) but I really enjoyed it. In a world of cardigan wearing acoustic strumming dullards, Straw were shamelessly harking back to the technicolour blast of Britpop a few years ago but using their bright and bouncy tunes to disguise some pretty dark lyrics which is something I've always been a bit of a sucker for as you may well know. While Anthem For The Low In Self-Esteem and Wake Up (Miss Venezuela) were bright and bouncy pogo-along numbers propelled by the suspiciously monikered Duck Nixon's keyboards (was he from Stoke I wonder?), the poisonous break-up laments like Kill Your Boyfriend ("I will wait until summer's over/I will waste away"), Postcards From Hell ("This is the last day of the war/This is the last day I will wanna fight with you") and We Don't Belong ("This is the end/The beautiful friend turns ugly") showed that despite their major label indie band appearance they were a dab hand with some seriously dark and sinister introspective lyrics beneath the cheeriness.

The group's fourth single Soundtrack Of The Summer was a case in point - on the surface a bright breezy bouncealong summertime indie tune with the lyrics actually being about hating the hot weather ("Summertime, the tide is rising/Close my eyes, see tampons floating by") True to form it didn't stop them releasing it that summer albeit as a six-track EP to make it ineligible for the charts - I'm not sure if this was because the band didn't want to be written off with a gimmick song or the label (Warners) essentially just clearing out the old songs in preparation for dropping them after Shoplifting had bombed (which they duly did soon afterwards) but whoever was responsible I can't help but feel they missed a trick there as it probably would've been in with a chance of being a hit.

Surprisingly the group would resurface in 2001 having changed bassists with Graham Coxon lookalike Roger Power (who'd started out with Bennett in art-school indie weirdos the Blue Aeroplanes a decade before) being shown the door to be replaced by Dan McKinna (formerly of '80s guitar-pop types T'Pau - definitely a bit of a change of pace for him!). They would sign a new deal with another major, Columbia, which resulted in two singles Watching You Sleep and Sailing Off The Edge Of The World which were pleasant enough but kind of lacked the weird undercurrent of their earlier stuff (I'm guessing having already been dropped once that they were hedging their bets a bit more in terms of expressing themselves this time around). Unfortunately chart success wasn't forthcoming and the group found themselves dropped again before their second album Keepsakes could see the light of day. Various tracks from it have turned up online over the years and, although it's not quite in the same league as Shoplifting, it's still a respectable effort with the likes of Flowers On A Lamppost and Tomorrow Is Promised To No-One being well worth a listen.

Straw would disband soon after being dropped by Columbia with McKinna and Nixon joining the Jeevas who were fronted by Britpop's answer to Tim Nice-But-Dim, Crispian Mills from Kula Shaker. Bennett, meanwhile, would move into teaching similar to Marc from Octopus and most Straw vids on Youtube seem to have comments from his pupils along the lines of "Dude, it's Mr B!" which always raises a smile with me when I see them for some reason. Joking aside though, Straw are definitely a band who deserved more of a bite of the cherry than they got. Bad timing? Possibly - trying to start a Britpop revival in 1999 was always going to be a tricky one but you need to remember that, as I've said in a few other recent SFTJ's about bands from this era, there wasn't really an overriding scene at this point pre-Strokes and a lot of labels were taking a punt on almost anything they could see as having some sort of commercial potential in the hope of striking gold with it even if most of the time it usually wasn't. Either way, Shoplifting is a very under-rated album and well deserving of a listen. Cue it up on Spotify now and see for yourself.