"And all the dirty women love to hang around/I guess they heard about me last time I was in town…" - Broken Teeth - Guilty Pleasure
I ended up discovering Broken Teeth by accident a bit to be honest. I think it was in the early days of my discovering the near-legendary ChangesOne label around the early noughties where they were doing a "buy two EP's get a third free" offer or similar and I basically ended up picking up a split EP of theirs with the legendary Streetwalkin' Cheetahs who I think I'd heard good things about on Sleazegrinder around the time. Anyway, I remember hearing the EP which contained Devil Money, Hangin' By The Skin and Crashlanding Affair and being well and truly bowled over. There's been a lot of bands who've attempted to channel the spirit of AC/DC down the years but these guys were definitely up there as one of the best. They were ploughing a similar furrow to the one that Airbourne would mine more successfully a few years later but unlike the O'Keeffe siblings, there was no slightly suspicious hint of it being a bit too clean-cut and over-produced, this was the real beer sluggin' bar room brawlin' brass knuckle wielding deal.
Of course, the truth is a little more complicated than that. Broken Teeth were (and indeed still are) fronted by Texas native Jason McMaster, a man who'd already been in the rock 'n' roll game for well over a decade by this point starting out with prog-thrash types Watchtower (who I have to plead ignorance to I'm afraid) before moving on to his most commercially successful venture Dangerous Toys in the hair metal era. Dangerous Toys were basically a southern states Skid Row but not quite of the same quality - most of the songs were basically about booze, fighting or sex (they had a song called Sportin' A Woody which kind of tells you most of what you need to know) and McMaster had an Axl/Seb Bach style high end screech which at least marked them out a bit as did their Maiden style gimmick of having an inflatable zombie clown as their band mascot (if you've seen the classic horror B movie Killer Klowns From Outer Space, just think that basically) but compared to say the not entirely dissimilar Four Horsemen, they always seemed like a bit of a poor relation to be honest.
Dangerous Toys still managed a decent run in the early nineties with songs like Teasin' Pleasin' and Scared being minor hits and being a bit rougher and meaner than most of the competition they were lucky enough to avoid the worst effects of the grunge holocaust and were still putting out albums by the mid-'90s like Pissed which basically sounded exactly the same as the earlier stuff (to be fair, they deserve credit for not taking the easy way out of going grunge the way a lot of their contemporaries did) but as the decade wound to a close, the law of diminishing returns finally caught up with them and the band went on hiatus.
McMaster and latter day Toys guitarist Paul Lidel would move on to form Broken Teeth and I think it's fair to say that they must have been listening to a fair bit of Bon Scott era Accer-Daccer at this point as their self-titled debut was full of Angus style duck-walking riffs and bad attitude topped off with McMaster's trademark screech. But the sheer energy of the thing turns what could have been a shameless rip-off into a damn good album - the likes of She's Gonna Blow, Trippin' Over A Bone, El Diablo, Pull The Plug and their ode to the titular wrestler Undertaker practically melt your face off with their sheer riffed up ferocity and chantalong choruses. It's a great album for anyone who loves unapologetically straightforward zero-fucks-given rock 'n' roll and comes highly recommended.
The group's second album Guilty Pleasure is just as good with the likes of the title track ("But if I go down you're all comin' with me/'Cos I'll probably go to Hell just for the magazines I read!"), Devil Money and Hangin' By The Skin (with its memorable chorus of "Oh lordy what've I done?/I should've listened to me dear old Mum!") being prime headbanger material. It ain't big and it ain't clever but when it's this good, who really cares? I mean, fair to say that McMaster and Lidel really outdid themselves with these after the steady but unremarkable Dangerous Toys.
I was always hoping that Broken Teeth would make it across the Atlantic for a few UK gigs at some point but sadly it's yet to happen. I actually remember running into someone who knew McMaster while out at an Adam Ant gig at the Scala (yup, weird connection I know!) and he told me that the band had been wanting to come over to dear old Blighty for ages but had never been able to get the money together. Hopefully some day it'll happen.
Broken Teeth have continued to be a going concern for two decades now - over time, they've slowly broadened their horizons a bit and although there's definitely still an AC/DC influence to their work, you can also hear elements of Judas Priest and Paul Di'Anno era Maiden in their more recent albums like 2015's excellent Bulldozer and the Four To The Floor EP from a couple of years later. They've even paired up with Danko Jones on the title track for 2008's Viva La Rock Fantastico, another sound effort. I dunno, maybe Danko could bring 'em over next time he's on tour here? We live in hope.
Anyway, here's to Broken Teeth - proof that sometimes the best rock 'n' roll comes from being simple, dumb but with a knack with riffs, choruses and hooks that are absolutely impossible to resist chanting along to. Grab a pint of whatever your poison is, cue up those albums and prepare to bellow along as if your life depended on it if you haven't already. Good times.
"You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?" - Silverfish - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split. I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
"I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..." - The Quireboys - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
"If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!" - Soho Roses - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
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