Sounds From The Junkshop #70: The Dead Pets

 

"Well you might shake your head at the things I once said but it comes from my heart not what I've read" - The Dead Pets - Dreams For A Crook

Living legends in this writer's native city of Leeds, to my mind it's an absolutely criminal shame that the world at large seemed to miss out on the sheer joy of the Dead Pets. As I've sort of mentioned on here, by the time my university years finished in 2001 and I found myself back in West Yorkshire after four years away, I'd realised that my music tastes weren't necessarily being catered for by the legions of identikit "million dollar looks and ten cent tunes" New York garage punk bands or the cringy frat-punks who were saturating the pages of the NME and Kerrang! respectively and had started to strike out on my own looking for other things to satisfy my craving for good life-affirming rock ‘n’ roll.

Trying to find my place in the whole musical scheme of things was a very lengthy process of trial and error. I'd realised that crucial year or so too late upon leaving Keele that a 2:2 degree in history and politics wasn't really going to be of much use with my original plans to go into teaching well and truly sunk after spending a few months living with a bunch of student teachers during my Uni days (if I heard the words "I swear to god I'm gonna kill one of the little bastards" once during that time I must've heard it a million times) and no desire to go into politics either (the supreme irony is that after learning how the political system works, you quickly realise that having morals and standards pretty much disqualifies you from pursuing a career in it!) So I found myself slung into the world of temp employment, working shifts in factories and warehouses and taking bottom-rung-of-the-ladder office jobs for a few weeks at a time while I worked out what I wanted to do with my life. All the while I was frequently sending my CV off to music magazines, record labels and record shops and never hearing anything back from any of 'em.

The one advantage of living something of a nomadic existence in terms of employment was that occasionally you'd run into another temp with similar music tastes to you and this is how I seemed to form a lot of my friendships during this era. Slowly a group of us would start to coagulate together, we'd start organising nights out in Leeds and Bradford, going to see gigs at Rio's or the Cockpit or Joseph's Well and even end up forming bands of our own. With all of us being into the punk/metal/goth end of things, we'd start to get into bands that we'd introduced each other to including a few local ones as we'd start to go and see bands like Robochrist, New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attack, Vicious Cabaret, Les Flames, the Poison Hearts and Phluid. None of them were ever going to make it on to the pages of Kerrang! the way that the bandwagon jumpers (UK arm) of this era like Spunge and Vex Red were because they weren't pandering to what was popular at the time, they were just doing their own thing and making music that they believed in. Which in a way made them a bit more special - they gave us hope that that actually yeah, there was plenty of decent music away from the various dead horses that the trendies were trying to flog to us. And arguably the band who looked "most likely to" out of these vagabonds were the Dead Pets.

It's weird because the first time I saw the Dead Pets live, I didn't actually think they were very good - it was at the Well just before Christmas 2001 and I'd been dragged along by one of the guys I'd met while temping who loved them. I had high hopes but unfortunately they just weren't on form that night and I think I might have even left before the end. A few months later, said mate persuaded me to give them another chance though (again at the Well) and this time they well and truly hit it out of the park with a storming set of barrelling council estate ska punk to a fired up audience and it made for a top night. Afterwards, a few of us ended up having a chat with the Pets' singer Sweeney at the bar where one of the guys ended up mentioning the December gig and his response was to apologise and explain that the group had been on tour for three or four weeks on the trot at that point and were a bit frazzled hence why they didn't quite seem with it! Understandable really.

The Dead Pets really were a formidable outfit in the live arena - Sweeney was a brilliantly charismatic frontman at the eye of the storm, geeing the crowd up to rabble rousers like Revenge of the Village Idiots, WMC and the Pogues-esque Dreams For A Crook like a mohawked Tony Wright from Terrorvision while behind him the band often lurched into borderline chaos onstage but always had the tightness to keep it together. I saw them sharing bills with other bands who were taking the punk template but putting a new twist on it to stop it going stale like Gold Blade, Antiproduct and Zombina & The Skeletones and it always made for a top evening. Their two albums, 2001's Too Little Too Late and 2003's Revenge of the Village Idiots were both great efforts, packing a supremely tuneful punch. The band were also unabashedly working class lads and songs like the Murdoch-bashing If It Sells It Sells and Council Concrete showed that there was a sly intelligence hiding behind the brashness similar to King Prawn who I was listening to a lot around this time as well. It was great stuff.

I'm still not sure why it never quite happened for the Dead Pets. They certainly picked up a few mentions here and there and were even signed to Fat Wreck records for a bit in the States after NOFX's Fat Mike heard their albums and liked them so much he re-pressed them. Sweeney even managed to go on Channel 4's Faking It trying to pass himself off as an orchestra conductor and he came across well in the programme. But somehow despite the odd mention in the live or album reviews section of Kerrang!, they never quite graduated to having interviews or features done on them, mainly because they were never quite in step with what was "popular". There's probably an argument that if they'd formed a decade or so later than they did then some of the newer magazines like Vive Le Rock or Big Cheese or Down For Life would have happily picked up on them but unfortunately, it's that old SFTJ classic of bad timing mostly.

The Dead Pets would hang on for most of the noughties before quietly calling it a day as the decade came to an end. I think that might have been about a year before I moved to London to try and kickstart my life and give being a musician or music writer a proper go but even by that point our little gang of reprobates who'd been going to see the Pets regularly a few years before were slowly drifting apart - some of the Lost Boys and Girls simply grew up and real life got in the way, others fell into the trap of being stuck on the dole, losing hope and spending most of their time staying in and getting stoned meaning I just stopped seeing them out and about. I still talk to a couple of 'em on Facebook once in a blue moon but it's a shame that the good times couldn't last. The last I heard, Sweeney and Pets' trumpet player Stash (like myself, a Hartlepool United fan so fair play) were both living in the States so I think it's sadly unlikely that a reunion is gonna happen any time soon. But for a few years, the Pets were a group who I'd always make a beeline to go and see live whenever they played near and those two albums were regulars on my CD player through the turbulence of my early twenties. I won't lie, I miss 'em.