Sounds From The Junkshop #120 - The Glitterati

 

"We got sex and drugs and friends at the bar..." - The Glitterati - Back In Power

The time was somewhere around 2005. The place was a gig at Leeds Cockpit. Myself and the bassist from my then-band Brookside Riot Squad (just to say hanging on at this time before we decided to turn off our life support the following year) were at a gig by hometown lads the Glitterati handing out some flyers for an upcoming gig of ours at the Vine. At this point the Glitterati were in a bit of a weird position as they were being lauded by both the NME and Kerrang! and by being able to dip a toe in both pools it had actually taken them to proper Top 40 success. Anyway, Brookside Riot Squad's slogan which we put on all of our flyers was "No emo. No trendies. No bullshit. Just proper fuckin' punk rock."* Our wander around the bar saw us handing the flyers to a couple of Julian Casablancas wannabes hanging around at the edge of the venue and one of them simply fixed me with a stare and said "Oh, no trendies? Well, I guess you won't fucking want us there at your stupid little band's gig then, will you?" before laughing, scrunching up the flyer and throwing it over his shoulder. Wanker.

Anyway, a bit later on during the show, Glitterati singer Paul Gautrey is introducing the band's then-new single Back In Power and urges all of us in the audience to go out and buy it, adding "Let's get a comeback going for proper rock 'n' roll and get all that NME-approved trendy indie shit out of the charts, eh?" Which was obviously our cue to look over and happily see the two trendies who'd taken offence to our flyer earlier and make what any other '80s children reading out there would refer to as a "three types of coffee bean" hand gesture at them**. Good times.

* - I always wanted to do a T-shirt for us with our logo on the front and that slogan on the back. Sadly, the miniscule funds we made from BRS never even remotely looked like stretching far enough to cover us doing a run on them...

** - I spent about half an hour looking for the original advert that this perpetual playground insult at my school originated from before giving up in the wake of an overdose of Giles from Buffy The Vampire Slayer appearances. So you'll just have to make do with this video circa 1:45 or so. I know, I spoil ya sometimes, don't I?...

Right, anyway, back to the story in hand here... 

I think it was some time at the beginning of 2005 that I first encountered the Glitterati, probably through one of the above magazines. As I say, there was a period of about six months that year where they were regarded as very hot property indeed, the future of indie and Britrock all rolled into one, straddling the divide in a way that few had managed since the halcyon days of the Wildhearts and Terrorvision a decade earlier. It would've been easy to be cynical about them but as anyone who saw them live will tell you, they had an impressive energy which set them well apart from the skag-addled mumblings of the various Doherty wannabes or the too cool for school sub-Kaiser Chiefs brigade on the one hand and the "trying too hard" nu-sleaze mob on the other. There's nothing quite so heartening as finding a band who can just make all that whole rock star stuff just look incredibly effortless and make no mistake, the Glitterati very much were such a group.

The trouble kind of started with their album - it seemed to be a perennial curse of Britrock bands around this time that they would end up being stuck with the wrong producer who would promptly siphon all their energy out and leave you with a flat husk of a record which didn't capture the full on rush of the band's live set at all. I remember a year or two before the Glitterati, there was another Leeds band called 10,000 Things (whose singer Sam Riley went on to enjoy much greater success as an actor) who again were being tipped for huge success, were briefly NME darlings and had an awesome live energy to them but put out a record where the production was so awful that it got panned across the board, absolutely killed their momentum stone dead and would lead to them splitting a matter of months later. The Glitterati didn't quite get the whole "bullet in the neck" treatment as badly as 10,000 Things did but when you consider that they spent six months out in L.A. recording that album with Mike Clink who'd been the engineer behind G'n'R's Use Your Illusion, you couldn't help but be a bit disappointed that it didn't really capture the fizzbomb live energy that anyone who'd seen them at a gig knew they were capable of.

And again, although not quite as much of a disaster as the whole 10,000 Things debacle, the result was that while the group's debut album spawned three Top 40 singles, sales of the long player were negligible and, having evidently spent a small fortune producing it, their label Atlantic promptly dropped them like hot bricks. Really unfair given that a lot of the issues with that album very much weren't the band's fault. The group showed admirable tenacity and would continue to tour like absolute buggers over the next few years supporting everyone from the Wildhearts (who they would become good friends with and accompany out on the road on a few occasions) to W.A.S.P. Tellingly, the gigs with the more indie style bands like the Vines and Jet became a thing of the past and it actually felt like the group had used their new found freedom to finally become the full on Britrock band they'd clearly always seen themselves as.

It would take until 2010 for the group's second album Are You One Of Us? to finally surface but when it did, it genuinely felt like a bit of a vindication of what their debut could've been with a much fuller production which actually captured the lightning in the bottle that was the group's live experience with the likes of Overnight Superstar, Fucks Me Up and Cashcow being a much better representation of what the band could do.

Unfortunately the group would disband the following year - I think that the lengthy struggle to finally get that second album out had taken its toll on them and they decided to call it a day rather than going through all that again. Singer Paul and guitarist Gaff would go on to put a new group, the Dedwardians, together who were a much more rabid Stooges style garage punk band. They put out two or three genuinely good singles but never reached the album stage. Gaff can now be found playing guitar for Rich Ragany & The Digressions and Desperate Measures. Drummer Billy meanwhile would go on to join the Howling with Rev from Towers of London and Blackie from Red Star Rebels. Who also failed to reach the album stage but looked decent enough the one time I saw them live. I've met Paul and Gaff a few times down the years, usually at gigs during my London days (bizarrely, my wife used to be part of the Glitterati's merch team back in the day!) and they were always nice blokes, happy to have a pint and a chat if you ran into them at the bar. I think the last time I saw Paul was at one of Ginger Wildheart's Birthday Bash gigs where he got up onstage with the G-man, CJ and Ritch to sing Sick of Drugs. He had exactly the same sort of livewire energy as always and it's a bit of a pity he seems to pretty much be retired from making music these days.

Anyway, in closing, the Glitterati were a band who genuinely deserved a bit more of a rub of the green than they got I feel and both of their albums deserve your attention if you missed them first time round. Even if the production on that debut is just a bit too flat for its own good, the quality of the tunes still shines through and the second one really does show what they were capable of. Another great Britrock band that the world sadly missed for the most part.