Sounds From The Junkshop Bonus: Footnotes 2002

 

Looking back from two decades' distance, 2002 was a weird year and This Footnotes column is likely to be a little more, how shall we say, obscure than the ones that have come before. As 2002 rolled around, I was now out of the other side of Uni and drifting between various jobs (most of which were either warehouse or bottom of the rung admin employment) and accommodations (a fallout with my parents led to me essentially being a bed and breakfast man for a good bit of this year before finally settling in with some bandmates in a house in Kirkstall which was basically rotting away from the inside)

Luckily though, as the internet started to expand, other places started to spring up aside from the obvious two to  get my fix of good new music. My Wildhearts fandom had led me to the excellent Five Miles High webzine (run by Darren Stockford who'd previously run Ginger's Silver Ginger site) while as I've mentioned elsewhere, it was also around this time that I first became a reader of the 'zine I'd end up writing for about 3-4 years later Bubblegum Slut thanks to being tipped off by a friend of mine who was a keen reader. This was also the period where I started reading the Sleazegrinder website frequently as well which provided a much needed antidote to the "scratch our backs and we'll scratch yours" chod that was cropping up in the pages of Kerrang by this point. Through these three outlets, I started to discover bands like Robin Black & The IRS, Kitty Hudson, Broken Teeth and the 69 Eyes. Plus of course, my Friday night wanderings out in Leeds with various fellow rocker friends I'd met through temping (as detailed in the Dead Pets SFTJ) was leading us off to discover our own little underworld away from the trend-chasers at places like Joseph's Well, Phono and the Packhorse in Leeds and Rio's and the Market Tavern in Bradford. Plus the Wasted punk festival in Morecambe which we used to go to as a group (which would later mutate into Rebellion and move back down the coast to Blackpool a few years later) and was always a fun weekend of too much cider and taking in as many bands as we could. As nights out were something that had to be strictly rationed due to a lack of finances at this point, it would usually be to check out a band on someone I trusted's recommendation if I'd not heard of them myself and it made for some fun evenings.

So this episode of Footnotes is a bit of a mixed bag with a couple of last ditch hangers on from my indie kid days, a few who put out singles on labels I was on the mailing list for like ChangesOne or Infernal and some who I just happened upon by happy accident. Unfortunately most of them ended up only being fleeting presences in my listening habits (usually due to me either drifting apart from them after that initial flourish or the band simply disappearing) but they all made an impact no matter how small. Read on and enjoy.

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B MOVIE HEROES

Evesham natives the B Movie Heroes were fronted by former Yo-Yo's guitarist Neil Phillips - indeed, they'd actually been the band that Danny McCormack had pinched Neil from a few years previously but with the Yo-Yo's drifting into inactivity and Danny returning to the Wildhearts around this time, the group would return to being active and, signing with ChangesOne, put some decent albums out - 2001's Just Say Anything saw them mining a bouncy line of pop-punk like Green Day minus the fart jokes but 2003's Anthems For The Underdog and 2004’s Calibrate saw their sound growing to a more muscular Britrock style and was probably their best work.

I'd probably describe BMH as being the 21st century version of Kerbdog or Baby Chaos - a solid mid-table band who ended up supporting a lot of the Britrock bands of the day (I can remember seeing them supporting Therapy? at least once) without ever quite looking likely to rise to the level of their headliners. Nevertheless, they had a few good tunes in their arsenal (Something Better Give (Or I'm Giving In) was my personal favourite) and managed a decent run on the fringes.

I'm not sure what happened to the B Movie Heroes - from what I can gather it looks as though they just kind of petered out with real life getting in the way. Neil ended up being absent for the mid-noughties Yo-Yo's reunion with his place being taken by former Amen guitarist Rich Jones which, after Danny's issues forced him out of the rock 'n' roll game for a bit, would see Spencer and Jones joining together to form the Loyalties...but that's a whole different SFTJ for another time...

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THE CORAL/THE CRESCENT

It was one of the weirder incidents of 2002 - at the beginning of the year, there were two new Scouse bands who had just broken through and both were being touted as ones to watch (well okay, there was a third in the form of the Zutons as well but sadly I was never that big a fan of theirs so we'll skip them for now). And one Monday evening after work as I was browsing the racks in the Leeds Virgin Megastore, I realised that both of them had new singles out. Duly intrigued, I paid the necessary £2 each for them and took them home.

I think it's safe to say I knew which side I thought I was on - the Coral's effort Skeleton Key was a weird twisted slice of psychedelia which had plenty of innovation but not much of a tune but their fellow Merseysiders the Crescent really did lead off with a strong one in Test of Time with its spiralling guitar riff and skyscraping chorus - it was basically like Cast had never gone rubbish. I think I reviewed both singles (might've been for Sandman fanzine I think?) and declared that I could see the Coral becoming a cult band but that the Crescent would be the band who were heading for chart success and sales.

And, erm, yeah, not for the first time I was somewhat wide of the mark. What I didn't take into account was that the Coral would follow Skeleton Key with two pretty damn good songs (Goodbye and Dreaming Of You) which would break them into the Top 40 and go from strength to strength afterwards. Meanwhile, it became depressingly obvious that the Crescent had pretty much blown their load with that first single that I heard of theirs as its follow-up Spinnin' Wheels was just anonymous (apart from having a young Liverpool footballer by the name of Steven Gerrard who the band were mates with in the video) and the album, apart from Test Of Time and its predecessor On The Run was depressingly short of the sort of spark that they really needed as opposed to the Coral's self-titled debut which still sounds great 20 odd years on.

Ah well, them's the breaks. The Crescent would be dropped by their label Hut the following year and quickly disband while the Coral are, of course, very much still with us and with last year's Coral Island produced arguably the best album of their career - a proper world within a record that you can lose yourself in with the first half being all lazy gentle summer seaside songs and the second half seeing the season change to winter and packing in some dark and paranoid slices of psychedelia which perfectly sum up how it feels to spend the winter in a seaside town off season with the sea lashing the shore and the rain pouring out of the sky on to the beach. Give it a listen asap if you haven't already. As for the Crescent...well, to be fair to 'em they did at least leave us with two good singles which are worth a curiosity listen if jangly Merseybeat indie's your thing. Which is two more than a fair few bands down the years I could name ever managed...

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EASTFIELD

Now here's a genre you don't hear much of...trainspotter punk. Birmingham natives Eastfield (well, singer Jesse was a Brummie, I think the others were from Bishops Stortford) were another band who I ended up seeing on the lower end of a lot of the punk festivals I started going to as the early noughties kicked in and they were always good fun with the band at least putting a different spin on punk as opposed to the legions of third division Pistols/Exploited soundalikes you'd often encounter in the early part of the day at these things.

I picked up a couple of their albums at these things (Roverbrain and Express Train To Doomsville) and they were good fun to listen to, mixing some serious anger with a sense of humour - the likes of Port Talbot Transport Police Are Scum, Burt Reynolds Rides Again and the excellently named Rod, Hull And Emo still bring back fond memories of those days in places like Morecambe drinking lots of cider and headbanging.

Eastfield remain an active proposition to this day although their last album was back in 2015. They still regularly pop up at places like Rebellion Festival and hopefully one day I'll catch up with them again.

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GOLDRUSH

Yet another one of those bands who managed to successfully reel me in with a great single only for their album to disappoint, Goldrush hailed from Oxford and were one of those bands who might've been in with a fighting chance of doing something had they emerged in 1999 or 2000 when the indie labels were generally throwing darts into a board in the hope that one of them would stick and prove to be the next big thing. By 2002 though? No chance - they were way too fey to fit in with the post-Strokes alternative music landscape.

They did leave behind one underappreciated classic though in the form of the Wide Open Sky single, the sort of thing you could imagine Coldplay doing if their lyrics weren't utter pretentious arse-drivel and they didn't have a singer who believed he could solely communicate in whalespeak. A genuinely heartwarming song about accepting the good and the bad in life and following the road onwards. In a fair world, it would've been a hit, in the actual world it stalled in the lower reaches of the Top 75. And sadly the disappointment only continued from there - their album Don't Bring Me Down didn't really have much else worth listening to other than the single and they'd be gone from their deal with Virgin in short order.

Goldrush would stick around on the minors for a few years after their brief brush with the big time but I pretty much lost track of them at this point. However, they did leave one legacy that's outlasted their music in that the label they ran Truck Records (where they initially started to and would return after splitting from Beelzebub Branson) would be the people who set up Oxford's infamous Truck Festival (the one where all the bands play on the back of a massive truck) which would continue for several years after they did. As I say, I can't really recommend the group's debut album but Wide Open Sky is a genuinely lovely song that deserves a listen.

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THE MIDNIGHT CREEPS

A ferociously feral glam-punk band from New York, I first ran into the Midnight Creeps acting as TV Smith from the Adverts' backing band as well as supporting him at a gig and was impressed by their sheer energy and bile (not least their vitriolic lead singer Hurricane Jenny). The group would put out a pair of albums around this time in Game Over and Give The Night A Black Eye and tunes like Red Rum and Barracoochie Lucy were excellently scathing slices of riffed-up scuzz-punk

As with a few bands in this footnotes column, I have literally no idea what happened to the Midnight Creeps post-Give The Night A Black Eye - one year their name just wasn't on the Wasted/Rebellion bill anymore and that was that, they'd evidently just quietly broken up while I wasn't looking. Nevertheless, a very underrated band who I'd heartily recommend looking up their two albums if you can. It's just a shame they never made it over here for a few more gigs.

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PHLUID

Phluid were a Leeds band who seemed to crop up as the support group at a lot of glam/punk gigs I went to at venues like Phono and the Well in the early noughties. Led by the irrepressible Polly, they managed to put out a good album (Propaganda 625) and an EP (Cynical Smile) which are both available to download free, gratis and for nowt at their Bandcamp page. They were always good live with a crackling energy which set them nicely apart from a lot of the "too cool for school" garage punk brigade and the "trying too hard" Crue wannabes.

Phluid would quietly disband in the mid-noughties with drummer Ginna moving on first to Velvet Star and then to the Main Grains with Danny McCormack (Wildhearts/Yo-Yo's). Polly meanwhile would go on to the Idol Dead who've released four very worthwhile albums in their own right and who I'm sure we'll cover at some point in a future SFTJ. The pair would also team up in the excellent Spangles along with guitarist Ben Marsden (Main Grains, Warner Hodges Band, Ryan Hamilton, Grand Theft Audio, the Modern Day Dukes and many many others) whose sole album is well worth your attention as well.

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SAHARA HOTNIGHTS

I used to joke that it seemed as though Swedish rockers Sahara Hotnights had basically been created by some glam-punk scientist as a stand-in band for festivals where the Donnas weren't available to be the opening band on the day as I remember them opening the main stage at Leeds at least twice during their existence.

Sound-wise they were similar to the Donnas but not quite as good although I remember their lead-off single On Top Of Your World being an enjoyably insistent little bugger of a tune with a chorus which sunk its hooks into your brain and refused to let go. Unfortunately their Jennie Bomb album failed to really make any commercial headway and they'd disappear soon afterwards. I assumed they'd simply split up so imagine my surprise on researching this 'ere article to discover that the band are very much still active in their native Sweden and have just released no less than their seventh album over there. Fair play to 'em.

Sahara Hotnights used to tour with the Hives a lot and I guess you could kind of regard them as almost being like an all-girl version of that band with the same sort of urgency and bratty attitude which made Pelle and co such an enjoyable proposition back then. Which is no bad thing. And at least they weren't anywhere near as bad as Crucified Barbara who'd try and ham-fistedly pick up their baton with a more metalhead approach to the formula. But that's another story for another time...

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SINNERSTAR

Sinnerstar we’re formed by Koozie Johns who had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spell with Tyla’s band around the turn of the millennium. I first became aware of Sinnerstar thanks to the presence of one of their songs, Sweet Oblivion, on a compilation around the time (I think it might've been one of the Screaming Tarts ones?), a swaggering slice of Bowie-indebted glam paranoia. It impressed me sufficiently that I shelled out on a copy of the parent album Craving Aches And Bitter Lemon Hearts.

As it turned out though, the track I'd heard was a bit of an anomaly with most of the rest of the album being more acoustic based, sort of like the Dogs in their more downbeat moments with maybe a slight hint of the Waterboys thrown in there as well. In other words, most definitely not what I was expecting but I did enjoy it. Unfortunately it turned out to be Johns' one and only album under this moniker - I'm not sure what happened to the guy (though I seem to remember seeing Sinnerstar advertised as playing the late and much lamented 12 Bar in Soho a couple of times when I lived down in London) but I remember by the time I saw the Dogs in the mid-noughties, Tyla had Tom Spencer of the Yo-Yo's playing guitar for him. Either way though, Craving Aches... is an interesting curio which is well worth a listen if you can find a copy.

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THE STREETWALKIN’ CHEETAHS

A band who are of course very much still a going concern today and only narrowly lost out to the Wildhearts in our Album of the Year stakes last year with their storming comeback effort One More Drink. Yet I seem to remember that back in the day the Cheetahs were a band who I was a bit slow to catch on to. I first heard of them via the Sleazegrinder website where they always got a good press and this was enough to make me shell out for a split EP of theirs with Broken Teeth on ChangesOne. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the Broken Teeth SFTJ entry, it was Jason McMaster and co who really blew me away with their side of the EP and the Cheetahs ended up being one of those bands cursed with me quite liking them.

I did however end up eventually getting round to giving some of their noughties albums a listen and I would definitely recommend them - strutting glam-punk with riffs and attitude to spare, not a million miles away from the Black Halos. Certainly, Greetings From Gainesville and Waitin' For The Death Of My Generation are fine stuff indeed. Of course though, the Cheetahs really did produce their magnum opus with last year's triumphant One More Drink effort and I reiterate that if you're still unlucky enough not to have heard it then you really should put that to rights - it's a veritable tour de force of pretty much everything that makes genuine foot-to-the-floor rock 'n' roll so great.

As I was putting this article together, news came through that the Cheetahs have just signed with the excellent Rum Bar records with an album due to surface later this year. It's got a lot to live up to following its predecessor but personally I can't wait to listen to it - rest assured a review will surface on here as soon as our copy drops through the door.

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And so our look back through 2002 concludes. We'll probably be covering the remnants of 2003 but expect a similarly ramshackle group of reprobates to the ones above. Although as we'll see, the music scene (especially the rock side of it) would have gone through another seismic change by then and this time for the better. But we're saving that story for the 100th Sounds From The Junkshop in a few weeks' time...stay tuned.