Sounds From The Junkshop #79 - Beachbuggy

 

"I'm kickin' back with some friends of mine/I feel so privileged just to know these guys!" - Beachbuggy - Kickin' Back

Another of those bands who were regulars on the Leeds gig circuit in my early twenties, Doncaster natives Beachbuggy were an odd one. I think I first encountered them at the Breeze Festival some time around 1998-99 (although looking back at some old flyers, I've actually found a Heineken Weekend one from 1994 saying that they played there on the day that I didn't go supporting the Wedding Present!) They certainly had an eye catching image, all clad in white drag car racing gear and with an Adam & The Ants style two drummer attack. They even had Pete Spiby, later of Groop Dogdrill and the Black Spiders, passing through one of their early line-ups.

Musically, they were pretty obviously influenced by the Pixies (albeit a Pixies that was spending every weekend at Bonneville Salt Flats) with frontman Jack Straker's Frank Black style vocals the off kilter arrangements on songs like General Electric Pilot, This Car Is Eliminated and Hey Jack definitely marking them out as something different. Around this era they were kind of the default opening band for a lot of the smaller festivals I went to just like Back To The Planet and Chumbawamba had been half a decade earlier. In other words, a solid and entertaining band but not one you could necessarily see ever really breaking out to widespread popularity.

So it was a bit of a surprise some time around 2001-02 to find that they'd suddenly been signed to Alan McGee's new Poptones label of all places (although looking back at their Discogs page, it seems they'd already had an EP out on ultra-cool German label Sympathy For The Record Industry before this). Poptones was generally getting a reputation for having a fairly sound record when it came to bands at this point, having already got the Cosmic Rough Riders and Sing-Sing on their books (and taken the former to actual Top 40 success) and they'd soon add the Hives and the Bellrays to that roster as well.

It could have been a bright new start for the band but, as their presence here on Sounds From The Junkshop suggests, it wasn't. The group would put out a brace of albums on Poptones - Sport Fury! in 2002 and Killer-B in 2003 before McGee suddenly wound the label up with the band splitting soon afterwards. It's a shame because they're both decent efforts - they certainly had a unique sound for the time to match their look and even if neither album is quite all-killer-no-filler, there's enough good songs on there like Kickin' Back (which they actually did a video for directed by Paul Morricone, now better known as frontman for the excellent Scaramanga Six who Beachbuggy definitely share some musical DNA with), Touch My Stuff (You Can Die) and From The South from Sport Fury! and the title track from Killer-B to make them worth at least a curiosity listen.

I'm not quite sure what happened to the various members of Beachbuggy after the band went their separate ways - given that they'd been together for well over a decade by the time they split, I suspect they maybe just decided to quietly leave things be and get on with real life the way a lot of us begrudgingly have to when it gets to the certain point where you realise those dreams of being a rock star you had in your teens and early twenties probably aren't gonna come to pass by this point. While it might be a bit of a push to say I was a mega-fan of Beachbuggy, they were one of those bands that I used to encounter a lot during this era and for that alone they definitely merit their own SFTJ entry not to mention the fact that their live shows (where they were generally at their strongest to be honest) were always entertaining (I remember the last time I saw them on the Killer B tour some time around 2004 they were playing at the Well in front of a projector screen playing the old Stallone film Death Trip 2000 on it for the entirety of their set). Their music has held up surprisingly well too - certainly if you're looking for something a bit out of the ordinary to listen to at the moment then you could do far worse than give their three albums a spin and find out what the slight fuss was about back in the day.