Sounds From The Junkshop #76 - Easyworld

"Here's a day lost for a while/We'll run towards the guns and go out in style" - Easyworld - Demons

Of all those UK indie bands who looked likely to break through only to see the ground fall away beneath them once the NME started to lose their heads over the vapid likes of the Strokes, the failure of Easyworld to become the chart-conquering superstars they deserved to be is surely one of the most unjust. They were arguably the last band who I started following while they were on the Fierce Panda label (and as you'll know if you've been reading the SFTJ column for the last few months, there were a LOT of those) who I stuck with after they broke through and for five minutes they really did look like they were British indie's great white hopes.

The group first came to my attention with their Fierce Panda single Hundredweight and the attendant mini-album Better Ways To Self-Destruct in early 2000. I saw them live a fair few times around this point as they supported a lot of other bands I liked (King Adora and Crashland to name but two). They seemed to get compared to the then-briefly-fashionable JJ72 a lot in those early days, I think because of having a singer (Dav Ford) who had quite a high voice and having a female bass player (Jo Taylor) but while JJ72 only really had one decent song (Oxygen) and a lot of stuff that seemed to spend most of its time meandering around in search of a point, Easyworld were a lot more direct and melodic with tunes like Lights Out, Junkies And Whores and You Make Me Wanna Drink Bleach showing their knack with a spitefully tuneful chorus and a spiky melody.

Easyworld's rise up the ranks would be a very slow one - the rise of the Strokes et al in 2001 would see the NME spotlight very much switch across to the States and they'd be forced to do the tried and tested fanbase expansion via transit van route that a lot of my early favourite bands like the Senseless Things and Mega City Four had a decade earlier. Better Ways To Self-Destruct would do well enough sales-wise and get good enough reviews to get them signed to major label Jive who would put out their debut album proper This Is Where I Stand with the singles from it - a re-released Bleach and Junkies plus the sleazy You And Me ("I know you look like you're innocent baby/I know you're tellin' all your friends that you hate me/But every weekend we're at it like crazy") which seemed to sum up a lot of those weird and wild relationships I ended up in around this era - slowly creeping further up the charts.

It was the summer of 2002 where Easyworld well and truly reeled me in. I was at the Leeds Festival on the first day around 7 in the evening basically looking for somewhere to go and opted to go and see Easyworld on the Third Stage. The stage had been fairly quiet all day but upon going into the tent, I realised it was suddenly rammed and when Dav came onstage and started thrashing out the opening riff to the title track from This Is Where I Stand it felt like literally everyone was joining in. Somehow in the 12-18 months since I'd last seen them, Easyworld had picked up a seriously devoted following and they absolutely knocked it out of the park that day with songs like the wrenching Demons (the album's highlight) and A Stain To Never Fade not to mention a storming finale of You And Me well and truly bringing the house down. No lie, they were easily one of the best bands I saw that weekend and it wasn't a surprise when Junkies would bring them their first Top 40 hit soon afterwards.

My memory from this period is often a bit unreliable as I've mentioned before but I'm pretty sure it was quite soon after this that I saw Easyworld in Leeds supporting JJ72, the band they'd been compared to a lot on the way up (and whose fortunes were very much on the wane by this time) and they absolutely wiped the floor with them - you could definitely see which band was heading upwards and which was heading downwards commercially at this point. It seemed only a matter of time before they took the next step up to the Top 20.

It seems that Jive thought so too and when Easyworld's second album Kill The Last Romantic surfaced in early 2004, it was noticeably a lot heavier on the ballads (the label clearly reckoned that this trick had worked well for the likes of Coldplay and Travis a couple of years before). But unlike Chris Martin and co, this was simple heart-on-sleeve honest odes to heartbreak rather than trying to wrap it up in tedious metaphors with a singer who seemed to be under the impression he could only communicate in whalespeak and the likes of the heart-stopping Tonight ("But tonight, before you sleep, there will be a you and me/And I hope I'm on your mind when you awake") and the mournful ode to lost youth Drive ("And all the greyest little men remember all they used to be/Well if this was all we ever had then it was good enough for me") were genuinely beautiful heartbreak songs. It seemed to be working as well - the album's second single Till The Day (a quite lovely ode to having someone you can depend on when times are tough) gave the group their biggest hit to date breaking into the Top 30. I saw them at Leeds Cockpit shortly afterwards and they put on a good show even if it was a bit slower paced than when I'd seen them a couple of years previously.

And then...well, I'm not quite sure what happened to be honest. Tonight was slated as a third single from the album but it never got released and instead we had to wait until the summer when the group put out a non-album single How Did It Ever Come To This? which lacked the sparkle of old and missed the charts. Then a couple of weeks later, Dav announced on the website that the band were breaking up due to disagreements with the label and the fact that they felt they'd taken things as far as they could. He'd been posting on the group's website for a while by this point of his frustration with the nature of the music business and what it expected of him but even so, it came as quite a shock to see them breaking up when it felt like they definitely had at least one more great album in them.

Although Jo and drummer Glenn would both move on to new bands post-Easyworld, Dav, now David Ford, is the only one who's really managed to keep on making music up until the present day with his current guise as a singer-songwriter. I've heard a few of his albums and while they're all decent enough slices of earnest troubadour style music, for me they kind of feel like they're missing that mix of sugar and spite that made Easyworld such a great proposition back in the day. Surprisingly, I've heard Ford on more than one occasion say that he tends to look back at Easyworld's music with a bit of embarrassment at his younger self. I guess this might be due to the troubles they had and the fact that the label were clearly trying to shoehorn the band into being something that they felt they weren't but I think he's being very harsh here. Those two Easyworld albums (and one mini-album) were very much a soundtrack to my early twenties and I still listen to them now. In an era where the default mode of indie seemed to be irritating ironic detachment, they were fantastic slices of heart-on-sleeve honesty about life, love and the universe for a certain group of us who were in our teens and early twenties at the time and I really can't recommend them highly enough if you're unlucky enough not to have heard them. As a footnote, it was brought to my attention while putting this article together that Ford also has a book out which I shall no doubt be tracking down in the near future - maybe that might explain his reticence regarding this phase of his career a bit better but all I'll say is dude, have no shame. Those songs meant an awful lot to some of us - you should be proud of 'em feller.