Sounds From The Junkshop #91 - Robin Black & The Intergalactic Rock Stars

 

"It's time for the rise of the freaks, the geeks, the individuals and the weirdos! And it's about goddamn time too!" - Robin Black - Over You

We're nearing the part of Sounds From The Junkshop now where a sea change would become noticeable in the music scene. By 2002, I think it's safe to say that most people were getting a bit bored on nu-metal's whinging and frat-punk's decidedly less-than-crucial juvenilia and were looking around for new thrills. Hell, when the music scene's been reduced to the tedious likes of Alien Ant Farm, Wheatus, Drowning Pool and Disturbed, you know that a change has gotta come, right?

The wave would break in 2003 thanks to two things. Firstly, the rise of the Darkness (more of whom in a future SFTJ) and secondly, much as I'm not a fan, the publication of Motley Crue's biography The Dirt. I suppose looking back the time was pretty much right for an '80s rock revival as these things tend to happen when the kids who were around when the movement was big news first time out have now got old enough to have disposable income to go out to the gigs and buy the merch themselves. Hence the reason why there's supposedly a nu-metal revival going on at the moment (which I remain blissfully ignorant of and intend to stay that way). As well as a lot of Sunset Strip bands suddenly getting a shot in the arm, you also got the phenomenon of a lot of new bands rising up who'd clearly read the, um, "musings" of messrs Sixx and Lee and thought "hey, we could do that!". I remember the bassist in my band at the time used to use the phrase "Sixxlings" to describe them which always made me laugh.

The plus side of this was that there were a few genuinely good bands (most of whom had been slogging away for a few years doing this sort of music when it was terminally unfashaionable) who managed to sneak through the gap in the wall (much the same as bands like the D4, the Bellrays, the Donnas etc had done with the garage rock explosion a couple of years previously) and get a bit of a leg-up. One such band was Toronto's Robin Black & The Intergalactic Rock Stars, part of the Canadian rock explosion of this era which also gave the world the excellent Danko Jones and Crash Kelly and the, erm, not-as-good likes of the Red Light Rippers etc.

The group had made their debut way back in 1999 with the Planet Fame album but, hand on heart, I remember not being especially jazzed about this when I listened to it upon a friend's recommendation. The main problem can be summed up in one word - synths. I'm very much with Seb Hunter in his Hell Bent For Leather book on this one - glam rock and synths for the most part just do not go together. I mean unless you're talking the Sweet's awesome Fox On The Run but that's very much the exception to the rule. It's the same reason I never got into Rachel Stamp around the same era, a band who by all rights I should have loved but those blaring candy floss thick synths just put me right off them. Again, maybe a group I need to revisit all these years later but I digress...

Planet Fame wasn't entirely worthless - Some Of You Boys (And Most Of You Girls) was a decent enough attempt at an androgynous fist-in-the-air anthem and More Effeminate Than You was at least pretty funny but it maybe says a lot that I thought the best track on there was the bonus live one tagged on the end, Better Than You. Nevertheless, it gained the band a sizeable fan base (they used to play Bradford Rio's a LOT around this time) and they'd gained sufficient traction to be able to rope in none other than Bob Ezrin (Alice Cooper, Kiss et al) to produce their follow-up.

As it turned out, it might have been the smartest move they ever made - the group's sophomore effort Instant Classic was a huge step-up from that debut (though again I know a few people who loved that first album and think the second one is too smoothed out - I respectfully disagree) with an added oomph to it giving the likes of We Saw Right Through Ya, the twisted balladry of Seventeen and the call-to-arms of Over You a real kick to them which quickly elevated the band to genuine contender status. Hell, they even pulled off a respectable cover of the Sweet's Hellraiser on there, no mean feat!

And then...somehow it just all sort of petered out and I'm not quite sure why. Granted the IRS were always more of a cult band over here (although they were regulars in the pages of the glam-'zines of the time like Bubblegum Slut and Trashpit) and they toured like absolute buggers (one of my friends was their tour manager for a while and had several stories about them, most of which aren't repeatable here for fear of lawyers getting involved) but I always got the impression that they had a bit more of a following in their native Canada - I'm pretty sure they were signed to a major over there. Like I say, the group just kind of sunk into inactivity - the last time I saw them live was in 2009, a good four years after Instant Classic came out but there was no new material and despite the energy still being there, they had a bit of a "going through the motions" feel about them.

After a brief run as a judge on a Canadian "star search" style TV programme, Robin's post-band career must be one of the weirdest out of all of them that we've covered so far on here as he ended up becoming an MMA cage fighter! The last I heard of him, he was working as an analyst for one of the Canadian MMA programmes. What happened to his two lieutenants in chief, Starboy and Killer Ky, I have no idea - anyone got any info? Nevertheless, whether you prefer the synth-heavy first album or the straight-up rock of the second, there's no denying that Robin and his gang definitely provided a much needed splash of colour to the early noughties glam scene without descending into Sunset Strip cliche the way so many of his peers did and they were always great value for money live, playing every gig as if they were headlining Wembley even if the reality was it was just twenty blokes on a Tuesday night in Doncaster. I won't lie, I miss 'em a bit - hopefully one day we'll see them reunite for a long-overdue third album.