Sounds From The Junkshop #103 - The Music

"What's it like up there? Do you worry anymore? How's it feel up there? So much left to say..." - The Music - Getaway

This one, kids, is a cautionary tale. I seem to remember it was the free Breeze Festival at Temple Newsam in 1999 when I ended up seeing a band from East Leeds called Insense opening the second stage. Honestly, I can't remember a lot about them as I only caught the last ten minutes or so of their set other than that their closing track was an instrumental called The Walls Are Getting Smaller. Honestly, I remember giving them a "they were alright for first band of the day" sort of write-up for the 'zine I was writing for and that was pretty much that - to be honest, I'd probably half-forgotten about them even as I was watching the likes of Rosita, the Jellys, the Clint Boon Experience and headliners Terrorvision later that day.

So fast forward a couple of years and this band suddenly start cropping up in the NME (which I was just about still reading at this point) as "ones to watch" and being described as the new Primal Scream called the Music. I remember reading a live review of them talking about them having a closing instrumental called The Walls Get Smaller and my thought was "hang on a sec..."

Yup, it was indeed the same band - after a couple of years grafting they'd managed to sign a deal with Fierce Panda for their debut single Take The Long Road And Walk It. I remember hearing it on a Panda compilation (quick sidenote here, I thoroughly recommend Fierce Panda head honcho Simon Williams' new autobiography Pandamonium! which has just hit the shelves for any late '90s/early '00s indie kids) and thinking it was...well, good but not great to be honest. The group would later re-record and re-release it after signing to a major and well and truly iron out the creases but this sprawling six minute version was sunk a bit by shonky production and a bit frustrating more than anything - you could tell there was a good tune under there doing its best to break out but a bit of refining was clearly needed.

Slowly but surely they'd get better though - their first single after signing to a major You Might As Well Try To F**k Me predictably missed the charts and wasn't really that good to be honest - less of a song and more four minutes of the same indie-sludge riff repeating itself. Their third one, The People was slightly better with an almost '70s cop show theme feel to it and clearly designed to be a dancefloor filler at indie clubs. In fact, thinking back about it now, the Music's style might have been influenced by Primal Scream and the Charlatans' more groovable moments but there's a definite similarity to the ill-fated skunk rock scene that spawned the likes of Delakota and the Regular Fries in there albeit a much more energetic (and to be honest better) version which was more equipped to take on the charts than the lumbering likes of Campag Velocet or the Lo-Fidelity All Stars ever were. Weird how 20/20 hindsight works sometimes, huh?

It was with a re-released Take The Long Road And Walk It that the group really nailed it though - this version had the production properly amped up to really give it some oomph and the excess flab cut out to take it down to a more reasonable four minutes. I saw the band headlining the second stage at the Leeds Festival soon afterwards with their self-titled debut album having just hit the shelves and they properly knocked it out of the park - the atmosphere for the likes of The Dance, Too High and especially the slow-building middle section of Take The Long Road... had an almost tribal feel to it with the moshpit taking up most of the tent and the crowd bellowing along. They would've got band of the weekend from me if only the Foo Fighters (back before they slumped into MOR purgatory) hadn't absolutely put on the headline set to end all headline sets on the main stage on the final night.

However, looking back, that night was pretty much as good as it got for the Music. The album spawned a couple more Top 40 hits in the trippy Getaway and The Truth Is No Words but by the time they made their comeback in 2004, the world had moved on a bit with the Kaiser Chiefs kind of supplanting them as Leeds' premier "indie" (in such as that term meant anything by that point) band. Their comeback single Freedom Fighters was a good effort and matched Take The Long Road... by making the Top 20 but their sophomore album Welcome To The North sold a lot more modestly and, if I'm honest, hasn't really held up that well apart from the aforementioned Freedom Fighters and the title track.

The group would be knocked into a downward spiral after lead singer Rob Harvey had to take time out to deal with drug and alcohol addictions stemming back to his teens and it felt as if the group's third album got delayed forever. I have to be honest, I completely missed said third album Strength In Numbers when it finally surfaced in 2008 - it just to say scraped the Top 20 but then disappeared again and the title track and lead off single only just made the Top 40. The group would be dropped soon afterwards, sessions for a follow-up came to nothing and they'd eventually call it a day in 2012 (though they've reformed for a few gigs this year).

Listening back to The Music some twenty odd years later, it's not quite all killer no filler (to be brutally honest, the group were always at their strongest in the live arena where those dance rhythms, riffs and yearning vocals combined to make something genuinely great) but the best bits have definitely held up. They may never have quite become the "new Primal Scream" that some were touting them as at the beginning but they left a solid enough legacy behind them and listening to Take The Long Road And Walk It brings back a lot of good memories of howling along at the top of my voice in sweaty nightclubs circa 2002-03. The re-recorded version though obviously...