Sounds From The Junkshop Bonus: Footnotes 2003

 

As a few entries since we did the last Footnotes should hopefully demonstrate, by 2003 the music scene was starting to change again. By now, nu-metal was pretty much dead and buried after the Darkness had nuked it (the likes of Limp Bizkit and Korn were starting to see their chart positions wane) while the pig-headedness of fratpunk was starting to be subsumed by its less humourous whiny younger sibling emo. Garage punk was still grimly hanging on at this point but a lot of the bands who'd broken through in the Strokes' wake were starting to run out of road a bit by this point while the rise of the Darkness and the publication of Motley Crue's The Dirt were seeing the start of a new noughties Britrock revival (although a lot of the bands in this variant were looking across the Atlantic, specifically Sunset Strip, for their influences rather than their homeland).

Me? Well, I was out of Uni by this point and still trying to get my bearings back in Leeds. I seem to remember I was working as a junior admin guy for a website-building software company in Harrogate at this point which while not paying sky-high wages was at least earning me enough to just about keep a roof over my head (I'd moved out of my parents' place after one row too many and after a prolonged bout of sofa surfing eventually moved in with a couple of friends/bandmates in a terraced house in Kirkstall just near Leeds city centre which was basically rotting away from the inside. Early 2004 would see us abandon it when the lease was up and move in with various girlfriends and other mates instead). I was drinking a LOT at this point (as well as dabbling in other, erm, mood altering substances shall we say) and starting to gravitate away from current music and towards the angry punk sounds of the Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects and Stiff Little Fingers who articulated a lot of my frustration with the world at large not to mention the Pogues whose Red Roses For Me pretty much became my bible during this less-than-sober year.

Nevertheless, there were still a few bands who briefly grabbed my attention during the year, not to the point where they justified an SFTJ entry of their own but at least enough to get an honourable mention in the Footnotes. And seeing as we've already mentioned The Dirt in this intro, there's really only one place we could start...

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BRIDES OF DESTRUCTION

Brides of Destruction were regarded as a bit of a nu-sleaze supergroup when they first broke on the scene featuring Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx on bass and L.A. Guns' Tracii Guns on guitar. As this was the era where The Dirt had just been released and become a major talking point in the metal mags, there was obviously quite a bit of media interest in the band and surprisingly their debut album Here Comes The Brides just about got away with itself, packing enough of a mix of old school sleaze with a 21st century sheen a la Buckcherry to entice Kerrang-reading mallrats in. I saw them at Download festival in 2004 and fair play, they put on a pretty good show.

So what went wrong? Well, quite simply, once The Dirt became so infamous, calls started to grow for a Crue reunion and soon enough Sixx was gone to rejoin messrs Lee, Mars and Fat Vince for the ongoing running joke that is the 21st century version of Crue. The group would stumble onwards, bringing in Scott Sorry from Amen to replace Sixx on bass and expanding to a five piece with Tracii bringing in Ginger Wildheart, who he'd become friends with at the time after talking to him at a Darkness gig in L.A. where the Wildhearts, then on the verge of imploding (again), were supporting.

It seemed that the situation might just be salvageable...but unfortunately it very much wasn't. Ginger lasted a matter of months with the Brides - supposedly it all ended when he was stuck in a hotel room with the Brides' pretty boy singer London LeGrand who had spent the entire tour whinging about being away from his girlfriend. Ginger, who was going through some pretty heavy issues of his own at the time including cold turkeying from drugs and dealing with the end of a long term relationship, supposedly simply got up, knocked London out, went downstairs to apologise and tell Tracii he was leaving the band, then set off for Nashville where he'd record his excellent Valor del Corazon solo album (of which more in a future SFTJ entry).

The group would continue to limp on, even bringing in Tracii's son Jeremy to replace Ginger, but their second album Runaway Brides was a real stinker (as you'll know if you read our 50 Worst Albums feature last year) which even Ginger co-writing a few songs couldn't save. The production was flat, the tunes were below par and there was a general air of hopelessness about the whole thing. When the group toured the UK to promote it, they found themselves playing to nearly empty venues - a then-bandmate of mine went to see them at Bradford Rio's and informed me that there were approximately 12 people in the audience. Needless to say, Tracii called time on the project very soon afterwards.

Tracii's first response was to call up Phil Lewis and Steve Riley and ask to rejoin L.A. Guns. Still smarting at the fact that he'd essentially left them high and dry with a tour pending when he'd bailed out to form the Brides a few years before, they turned him down which led to the decidedly farcical situation of Tracii putting his own L.A. Guns line-up together with first Paul Black (ex-Joneses and the group's original singer before Phil joined them from Torme) and then Love/Hate's Jizzy Pearl, taking turns to front the group. Eventually though, he would reunite with Phil and the result was a surprisingly strong run of albums culminating in 2020's excellent Checkered Past. So this one does have a happy ending...eventually. Elsewhere, Scott would go on to join Ginger in the late noughties Wildhearts line-up before moving through the ranks of Sorry & The Sinatras and putting out an excellent solo album in 2016's When We Were Kings. But those are other SFTJ's for other times. More recently of course, Scott has beaten a brain tumour and has been back over here touring with his old Wildhearts bandmates CJ and Ritch and general consensus among all those at the gig I went to in Leeds was that it was good to see him back up and about again. Apparently a new album from him is in the works and I'm very much looking forward to hearing it.

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CRASHED OUT

Crashed Out are, of course, still very much a going concern and we've featured them in this 'ere webzine fairly recently thanks to their new album. But when I first discovered them it was actually way back in the early noughties on a Captain Oi! compilation called Addicted To Oi!, an attempt by the label to revive Garry Bushell's infamous early '80s Oi! compilations. While the majority of the compilation was comprised of old stagers (Cockney Rejects, the Business, Red Alert, Slaughter & The Dogs, Menace etc), there were a scattering of new bands in there and along with the ferocious political ska-punk of the Filaments (more of whom in a future SFTJ somewhere I'm sure), Crashed Out's sinister Devil On My Back (which owed as much to the Doors and House of the Rising Sun as it did to street-punk) was one of the best new offerings on there.

I would see the band quite a bit back in those days at the Wasted Festival in Morecambe (the precursor to Rebellion and the successor to the Holidays In The Sun festivals of the '90s) and they were always a pretty solid early day group to warm the crowds up. I seem to remember it was at a Wasted one year that I picked up their debut album Here, Now And Real and it's still a decent effort all these years later with the likes of the title track, On The Road and Respect You'll Never Gain being solid slices of street-punk. 2005's Pearls Before Swine was a similarly lean and muscular effort, capped off by a cover of The Jarrow Song to close things.

Of course, Crashed Out are still out there today (with guitarist Lee also being in Monkey Mind with Olga from the Toy Dolls) and I can confirm having listened to the album and seen them live at Kubix Festival this year that they still pack as much of a punch as ever. And long may it remain so.

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DAVID R BLACK

Hands up, I'll claim a personal bias here. In the mid-noughties, myself and a bandmate ended up starting a gig promotions company, Primitive Promotions, in Leeds and David R Black were a band we became friends with and booked quite a lot. I think the first time I met them was at a gig by a Motorhead tribute band which also had Chris Catalyst from the Eureka Machines on the bill as his one-man techno-punk-terrorism-with-kids'-TV-samples Robochrist alter ego.

DRB hailed from Manchester and their sound was kind of like a cross between goth, rock and shoegazing. Frontman David's vocals were similar to Brian Molko from Placebo but without the attention-seeking while behind him bassist Sarit and drummer Paul were a solid rhythm section. They played a few times for us back in the day and were always a reliable bunch who would bring a decent crowd in, not to mention a good band to boot.

The group would produce two albums, 2006's Secret City and 2011's Hearts And Stars, both good efforts, before lapsing into inactivity (I remember Sarit joining none other than Fuzzbox before the pandemic although I'm not sure if she's still there). Recent rumblings suggest that the band are back together with tentative plans for a new album being mooted. If so, it'll be good to see them back.

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SUGARCOMA

For about five minutes in 2002-03, Sugarcoma briefly looked like they might be ones to watch out for. Heralded at the time as the UK's answer to Kittie (oh wait, most of you have probably forgotten who Kittie are/were, right? Trust me, that's no bad thing), these Essex natives ended up getting a bit of publicity via the old tried and tested "implausible punk/metal cover" route by covering Britney Spears' You Drive Me Crazy which gave them a minor hit which they then comprehensively failed to get anywhere near again sales-wise.

It's a bit of a shame because my impression of Sugarcoma was that beneath the brickbat guitars and death piggy grunt vocals was a decent band waiting to get out. I remember seeing them supporting the Wildhearts in 2002 (above the Darkness on the bill!) and picking up their album soon afterwards and when they eased off on the heaviness and let the songs breathe, they were capable of coming up with something decent (the single Zero Star being their best example which showed that frontwoman Jess actually had a pretty good voice). But unfortunately, it was the nu-metal era, people didn't want subtlety and arguably Sugarcoma painted themselves into a corner before they had a chance to really get going. Either way, they'd be gone from their deal with Music For Nations after the first album and would disappear soon afterwards.

The group's Wikipedia page has them doing a one-off reunion show in 2013 but apparently the band have grown up and got proper jobs now meaning I think we can probably discount any further reunions. But I'd say that Sugarcoma definitely had a bit of potential at the beginning, it's just a shame they never got the chance to go on and realise it really.

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THE VINCENT RAZORBACKS

The Vincent Razorbacks were formed by notorious rock 'n' roll illustrator Vince Ray (whose cartoon horror artwork has adorned releases from the likes of Ginger Wildheart, the Yo-Yo's and the Urban Voodoo Machine and is...well, pretty damn cool to be honest) and were a psychobilly revival band of the early noughties who I seemed to end up running into at Wasted quite a bit.

Let's be fair here, apart from maybe a few months in 1982 when King Kurt were in the charts with Destination Zululand and the Cramps were at the peak of their infamy, psychobilly has never really been what you'd call an "in" genre but I guess groups like the aforementioned Yo-Yo's had done a bit to turn my ear that way slightly with their greaser rock stylings and I'm pretty sure it was Danny or Tom talking up Mr Ray that led me to the Razorbacks. They managed a couple of albums, 2003's Volume 13 and a self-titled effort in 2004 which featured them packing in a kick-arse set of high octane originals like Surfin' DOA, King Of Jack Shit and Ain't Got No Skull with covers of Screaming Lord Sutch (Jack The Ripper) and the Osmonds (Crazy Horses). In a way they were a bit unlucky I guess - had they started up around 2010 rather than 2000 they'd probably have been a shoo-in to become regulars at the infamous Gypsy Hotel club.

The Razorbacks would soon mutate into Vince Ray & The Boneshakers who I'm sure we'll deal with in a future SFTJ but for those into horror B-movie obsessed '50s greaser thrills, both of their albums definitely come recommended.

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And so our journey through 2003 comes to an end. To be honest, things would plod on much the same in 2004 although it would be the calm before the storm for me a bit. But anyway, I'll save that angst for a future SFTJ. Certainly, the next couple of years would back up the old Chinese blessing of "may you never live in interesting times..."