Nite Songs

  "Live music is dead/The funeral's on Thursday/Bring a bottle and a bed"  - Jackdaw 4  - Karaoke Ballet They were an odd one, Jackdaw 4. Emerging in the early noughties, the group were the brainchild of one Mr Willie Dowling who we've previously encountered a few times on SFTJ's past, not least due to his brief tenure with the Wildhearts in the Earth Vs  era. Willie had actually started out with late '80s Soho glammers the Grip who offered a more measured take on the whole Babysitters / Soho Roses formula and managed a pretty decent album called Be Yourself  before going their separate ways in the early '90s. It was probably while he was with the Grip that Willie befriended Ginger and CJ who were in the Quireboys and the Tattooed Love Boys respectively around this time and he would join up with the Wildhearts as their keyboard player in late '93, playing on the B-sides to the Caffeine Bomb  and Suckerpunch  singles (also appearing in the video for ...

  "If hate is black and love is white then doubt's a shade of grey..."  - Silver Ginger 5 - Church Of The Broken Hearted I'll be honest, I've been wanting to do the second part of my Wildhearts story for a while now but given the amount of stuff I've had to sort out in the meantime for SFTJ I wanted the time to be right rather than just jumping ahead of the timeline. Well, we're now up to 1998 and I think it's safe to pick up the story again so let's do this. As I mentioned way back in part one of the Wildhearts story , 1997 saw the band splitting up amid a flurry of drug demons, record deals gone wrong and a chronically unstable line-up (in more ways than one). However, with so many ex-members now moving on to new musical projects, it did mean that there were suddenly a lot  of new bands on the horizon featuring one or more ex-members of the group and it's fair to say that I had quite a few stories based around the band from that split in the ...