Garbage Days Revisited #76: The Adicts - "Smart Alex" (1985)

 

"I've travelled the world and seen all the girls but I'm in love with you" - The Adicts - Troubadour

One of those bands where I'm perpetually puzzled as to how they didn't get more successful than they were, Ipswich's Adicts were a band who, at their mid-'80s peak, had a knack with big bright colourful pop songs with a punk twist which, in the hands of a more commercially fortunate artist, would have been surefire hits but for some reason they never got anywhere near bothering the Top 40.

The group started out in their native East Anglia in the dying days of the 1970s with their first single Easy Way Out surfacing towards the tail end of 1979. To be honest though, it doesn't really compare with what followed it, a nervous wiry 90 second slice of post-punk angst which could almost be Wire if you squint a bit. By the time of their debut album proper, 1981's Songs Of Praise, the group had started to get more of a grip on their tunes with the likes of Get Adicted, Telepathic People and lead-off single Viva La Revolution showing an increased grip on melody. Especially in an age where a lot of punk was sinking into third wave Oi (which by this point unfortunately was pretty much just repeating itself post-tabloid scaremongering) and grunting thrash-punk, the group offered something genuinely different.

Sound Of Music, which followed at the tail end of 1982, and its insistently catchy lead-off single Chinese Takeaway saw them progressing further. By this point, the group were sounding like prime time Adam & The Ants (somewhere between Kings Of The Wild Frontier and Stand And Deliver) with a sense of fun underpinning the likes of Disco, My Baby Got Run Over By A Steamroller and the frenetic opener How Sad (with its immortal opening line of "A boy loved a girl but the girl said no/She ran away with a handsome gigolo/He told her that he loved her but she said they were through/So he fed himself to the lions at the zoo"). Elsewhere, the likes of Joker In The Pack and Shake Rattle Bang Your Head were the sort of songs you can just imagine cleaning up in the charts if someone like the aforementioned Mr Ant were to have released them as singles at the time. The group were still on a minor label, Razor (also home to the Angelic Upstarts, the Newtown Neurotics and Splodge), at this point, but press interest around them was growing and when Sound Of Music breached the Top 100 and a non-album cover of Bad Boy (ironically the group's weakest single to date) breached the Top 75, the majors, who before this had been put off and spooked a bit by the group's name and their Clockwork Orange stage garb (this is the point where said film was still banned in the UK as a video nasty) started to take notice.

The group would sign to Sire which should have been the springboard for them to move up to bigger things but unfortunately it went about as wrong as it could have done - the label just weren't sure what to do with the band with the next two singles seeing the band changing their name to first ADX (for their Tokyo single which just to say grazed the Top 100) and then the Funadicts (for an ill-advised cover of Falling In Love Again). The momentum was pretty much irretrievably lost, the group's third album was shelved and wouldn't see the light of day until 1985 when the group managed to get out of their contract with Sire and returned to Razor who released it.

And it's a real shame because Smart Alex, the aforementioned album, is arguably their strongest effort. With the group allowed to let their pop side run amok, this album is stuffed with hits that should have been if only Sire hadn't messed about with the band so much - Troubadour is absolutely irresistible, a shameless bright pop gem which sounds like the Ants and Dexy's having a jam together over a few pints while the bubbling California, the humorous Jellybaby (including the immortal line "Why'd ya have to be such a party pooper?/You wouldn't even dance to Alice Cooper") and the barrelling Rockin' Wrecker and the title track all lining up to shout "I COULDA BEEN A CONTENDAH!" Rocky Balboa style.

Smart Alex would fare poorly commercially as most people regarded the Adicts as last year's thing by this point and the group would leave Razor and return to Jungle (who'd put out their debut Songs Of Praise half a decade before and had fellow GDR alumni the UK Subs and Cuddly Toys on their books in this era) for their next single Champs Elysees, another fine effort with an instantly catchy chorus which undeservedly missed the charts by a mile. The group's fourth album Fifth Overture (no, I'm not sure either) wouldn't even get a UK release, only seeing the light of day in Germany (it was finally given its proper due over here by the excellent Captain Oi label in the noughties). The band are losing fire a bit here (perhaps understandable after the adversity of the previous few years) but there's still some good moments like Too Much Of A Good Thing and She's A Rocker. However, clearly realising that their time had arguably passed, the group would go on hiatus in 1987.

The Adicts would reform intermittently to do the odd album over the next couple of decades (1993's Twenty Seven and 2002's Rise And Shine, both solid efforts even if they were missing the sparkle of the earlier ones) before reuniting as a full time operation in the mid-noughties and putting out a further four albums since, 2017's And It Was So! being the most recent (I reviewed it for Pure Rawk back in the day - I'd like to say it was a storming return to form but...well, it wasn't sadly).  They still tour frequently although as with a few bands from this era (the similarly underrated Toy Dolls being another good example), they seem to pick up bigger audiences abroad than they do here. Nevertheless, I've managed to catch them live twice (once in Morecambe headlining the Wasted Festival in the mid-noughties and once at the 100 Club in my early London days where the set ended with me getting hit in the face by one of lead singer Monkey's stray flying streamers much to the amusement of my companions on the night!) and they've always entertained, playing the hits and putting on one hell of a stage show. And like I say, the group's first three albums remain underrated classics of their time in this writer's opinion - I'm still amazed they never got at least one Top 40 hit off those efforts as they certainly had the tunes and the hooks which a lot of more successful bands at the time would've killed for. If you're unlucky enough not to have listened to them yet, go get yourself Adicted pronto.