Sounds From The Junkshop #81 - The Electric Soft Parade

 

"And all I know is no-one is my friend/But it's empty at the end/So we start again..." - Electric Soft Parade - Empty At The End

I think what originally drew me to Brighton indie-experimental types the Electric Soft Parade was their much-vaunted love of my old favourites the Boo Radleys. The Boos had split up a couple of years prior to ESP breaking through and I s'pose they'd left a bit of a hole in my listening habits so the prospect of a group coming along to fill it was definitely something that interested me.

The group had formed in Brighton around the turn of the millennium (we seem to have been covering a lot of bands from this area in recent SFTJ's - Clearlake were from there as well and Easyworld hailed from just down the coast in Eastbourne) and were based around brothers Alex and Tom White. The pair were taking the tried and tested indie formula and putting an endearingly wonky sort of psychedelic take on it with incredibly catchy hooks and choruses which had you cueing up their Holes In The Wall album repeatedly.

For a little bit, it seemed as though ESP genuinely couldn't do any wrong - the indie press almost unanimously loved 'em and their chart positions were slowly increasing to the point where the spiky Empty At The End and the gentle Silent To The Dark (the album version of which was nearly ten minutes long but they cut out the five minutes' worth of train noises in the middle to create a gentle song to soundtrack your Sunday morning hangover to) both gave them legitimate Top 40 hits and the latter even saw them get on Top of the Pops, a real rarity for guitar bands in this era. Holes In The Wall was even nominated for the Mercury Music Prize similar to how Badly Drawn Boy (another to disappear incredibly quickly after an initial burst of success around this era) was although unlike BDB the group didn't win.

So what went wrong then? Record company politics basically. The group had signed a deal with DB records who were a "corpo-indie" offshoot of major BMG. Unfortunately with the label losing money, DB was wound up and its artists transferred to the main roster. ESP would come up with a decent follow-up to Holes In The Wall in the form of The American Adventure (named after the now-defunct theme park near Chesterfield that your correspondent went to on more than a few occasions as a kid). It was basically pretty much a straight continuation of their debut with a winsome psychedelic indie sound but the trouble was I think that it didn't have a standout track to push as a single. BMG hardly put any effort into promoting it (I remember being puzzled at how little hoo-ha there seemed to be about it especially given the rapturous response to Holes In The Wall), it slipped out with very little fanfare and reviews were a lot more mixed (NME seemed to love it but elsewhere, a lot of other indie mags seemed to view the band as a busted flush by this point). The group were dropped soon afterwards and that was kind of where I lost track of them.

So imagine my surprise when writing this article to find out that ESP are very much still an active band twenty years later - their response to BMG dropping them, it seemed, was simply to shrug their shoulders and head back to the indies where they've remained ever since (and which, to be fair, is probably more their natural habitat where they aren't being pressured to write something for heavy radio rotation). They've released a further three albums since The American Adventure (last year's Stages being their most recent which I shall definitely give a spin in the weeks ahead) as well as being involved in an absolute ton of side projects. Rest assured if any new ESP releases turn up in the near future we'll give 'em a write-up on Nite Songs as well. Anyway, I guess you could say that ESP are one of those early noughties indie bands similar to Badly Drawn Boy or the Hives who seemed to be critical darlings for about five minutes then had the rug rapidly pulled away from under their feet. However, the fact that they had the wherewithal to retreat, rebuild and are still going strong to this day is something they deserve a lot of credit for. And obviously Holes In The Wall is really an album you should give a spin if you haven't already.