Sounds From The Junkshop #60 - Cosmic Rough Riders


"I used to believe in love, I used to believe it'd last forever till you stuck a knife through my heart by making me choose between love and art" - Cosmic Rough Riders - The Pain Inside

Although it's safe to say that by 2000 my music tastes had very much moved away from indie, it didn't mean I wasn't immune if a good band came along which could sometimes make for some, erm, "interesting" conversations shall we say with my more rock-oriented friends. Glasgow's Cosmic Rough Riders were such a band - I remember one of my metalhead bandmates way back in the day rather cruelly referring to them as the Cosmic Muff Divers after I played him their album and describing it as one of the worst things he'd ever heard!

He was being unduly harsh of course - I really liked CRR (I mean obviously, I wouldn't have done an SFTJ on them otherwise!) but they did seem to suffer almost right from the get go with everyone calling them a poor man's Teenage Fanclub. Again, I'd disagree with this and say that I actually prefer them to TFC, sure they were both Scottish bands playing Byrds/Big Star style wistful power-pop but to my ears Cosmic Rough Riders just had slightly better tunes and came across as a bit less twee.

The group were the first group signed to Alan McGee's post-Creation label Poptones which garnered them a bit of press attention but they were a slow grower on me - in fact I think it wasn't until I heard their fourth single The Pain Inside (which gave them their second Top 40 hit following on from Revolution In The Summertime) that I realised that they were a band capable of some damn good tunes despite being a bit more mellow than my usual listening fodder by this point. I think as well that the song helped me get through a breakup ("Hold my hand, walk with me to a distant land, a place where I can see that my friends will want me home when the pain inside has gone") so maybe it was just a case of right band, right place right time. I shelled out for a copy of Enjoy The Melodic Sunshine soon afterwards. Although there were a couple of moments where it veered worryingly close to Kula Shaker hippy indie waters (Baby You're So Free, This Gun Isn't Loaded), the good bits like the yearning Melanie and the folky Glastonbury Revisited more than made up for the odd mis-step.

I saw CRR at the Leeds festival that year but unfortunately they were cursed with playing the Second Stage just as then-press darlings the Strokes were on the main stage meaning the tent was about a third full! They gave a good account of themselves though and proved that their recent success was no fluke. The group would disappear soon afterwards and return two years later with singer Daniel Wylie having departed and guitarist Stephen Fleming taking over on vocals. The resultant album, Too Close To See Far was actually, to my ears, an improvement on the debut with songs like the lilting For A Smile and the desolate Life In Wartime (a song I ended up coming back to quite a lot during the uncertainty of lockdown last year). It also gave them two further Top 40 hits in the yearning Because You and the gentle Justify The Rain. I think it just sounds a bit more focused and tight than the debut does which always helps.

I saw the band live on that tour at the Roscoe in Leeds and I remember they put on a great show - the group were supremely locked in and tight, especially Mark the drummer who lashed his kit like an octopus. Unfortunately, soon afterwards the band would disappear from view after Poptones folded and it pretty much killed their momentum with it being another three years before their third album came out on a minor label and, to be honest, I just completely missed it as I'd long since given up on reading the NME and similar by this point after landfill indie compassion fatigue set in.

Recent years have seen original singer Daniel Wylie resurrect the Cosmic Rough Riders name with a new line-up. They've put a new album out a couple of months ago and who knows, there may be a review of it coming in these pages some time soon. Both of the first two CRR albums are available on Spotify and I'd definitely recommend both as being worth a listen - as I've said earlier in this article Too Close To See Far is the better of the two to these ears but Enjoy The Melodic Sunshine has plenty to recommend on it as well. Like I say, I wasn't really listening to a lot of jangly indie by this point but CRR were good enough that they managed to infiltrate my ears and those two albums still sound good now.

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