Nite Songs

  "There ain't nothin' on TV but a preacher tryin' to save me/I'll just close my eyes and make it go away..."  - The Hangmen - Rotten Sunday The Hangmen are one of those rare groups who could have featured in either the Sounds From The Junkshop or Garbage Days Revisited columns as their career kind of straddles both. The group would first rise up in the Sunset Strip era when they were briefly being hyped as the Next Big Thing only for things to fall apart and the group to be knocked on their backs for over a decade before pulling themselves out of the gutter to start things again in the early noughties. (Quick NB - this is the American Hangmen we're talking about, not the UK psychobilly band. Just so we're all on the same page right from the off, like) The group formed in L.A. in 1986 under the guidance of Montana native Bryan Small and, similar to the Joneses a couple of years earlier, gained notoriety as a killer live band in the L.A. circuit who we...

  "When I am high, my axe is acid!"  - Electric Eel Shock  - Scream For Me It's often been said that the Japanese do rock 'n' roll slightly different to us Brits. Cultural barriers, call it what you will but it's safe to say that the vast majority of Japanese rock bands I've encountered down the years have often mixed brilliance and oddness. Cases in point - Guitar Wolf (Link Wray obsessed leather clad garage punks who covered Rumble  in a different style on every single one of their albums), EZO (Gene Simmons managed facepaint clad hair metallers whose albums inevitably sounded like '80s Kiss but much heavier)*, Shonen Knife (Kurt Cobain approved all-girl Ramonesy pop-punks with a hard edge) and Mika Bomb (same thing except ten years later and minus the Kurt endorsement). I mean, granted, not everything in this genre works (as anyone who remembers Babymetal's truly dreadful nails-on-chalkboard attempt at thrash will tell you) but sometimes you en...

  "Well I know that you think you're a star/But a pill-poppin' jukebox is all that you are"  - Jet  - Rollover DJ Ah, poor old Jet*. There's an old saying along the lines of not building yourself up too much because it just ends with you having further to fall and of all the early noughties garage rock revival bands, you can't help but think of this lot when you say it. For about five minutes, these Aussies hitched a lift on the back of the garage rock revival bandwagon and seemed to be literally everyone's favourite band. Unfortunately once the scene crashed and burned, the ground fell away from beneath their feet incredibly rapidly and they went from critical darlings to a running joke with their name being used for a byword for sub-par bands of this genre. But I'm getting ahead of myself here, let's start at the beginning, shall we?... * - Just to establish from the off that it's the Australian Jet we're talking about here, not the Briti...

  "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 s...

  "There's fear in your valley/Get on your skateboard and split"  - Amen  - California's Bleeding It seems weird to think it now but there was a brief time in the early noughties when Amen genuinely did seem like one of the most vital US rock bands around. Rising up during the nu-metal era, they managed to not only get good press in the usual places of Kerrang! but even the NME were briefly featuring them regularly - I remember in one review, they were describing Amen's frontman Casey Chaos as the new Jello Biafra, high praise indeed. Me? Well, I hate to admit it but Amen were one of those bands who by rights I should've liked but I never quite got my head around. And it wasn't for lack of trying - I had all three of their albums in my CD collection at some point and I saw them live on a few occasions (they toured with the Wildhearts quite a bit as the two bands were good friends which will become relevant in a few paragraphs' time). Their sound was t...

  "Now they're all watching me/Who did I used to be?..."  - Crystal Pistol  - Rockstar Ohhhh boy. Crystal bloody Pistol. Now HERE'S a cautionary tale about misrepresenting yourself for the unwary if ever there was one... Crystal Pistol were another one of those groups who kind of ended up surfing that post-Darkness/ The Dirt wave that led to the sleaze rock revival of the early to mid-noughties. Hailing from Canada, they were a Backyard Babies influenced mob of scuzzy glam-punks who were clearly intending on following the likes of Robin Black and Crash Kelly to sort-of-infamy. And yeah, I'll admit it, the group's self-titled debut (and as it turned out only) album wasn't bad at all - a full throttle angry snarl of a record that tapped into that whole "piss broke, pissed up and pissed off" vein of anger that had informed the Backyards' Total 13 with songs like Locomotive , Watch You Bleed and Teenage Parasite being angry howls of rage a...

  "Due to lack of interest, tomorrow is cancelled..."  - The Kaiser Chiefs  - Ruby So let's go right back here. Specifically to a gig my old band Brookside Riot Squad were playing at a short-lived Leeds venue called the Platform in the basement of the Corn Exchange some time around...I reckon 2003 probably? It was an afternoon bill with about six bands on it and we were the first one on. Headlining the evening was a group called Parva who'd just been dropped by their label Mantra (who'd also had China Drum and Compulsion on their books in earlier years) after releasing an album that hadn't sold the previous year. After our set had finished and we'd packed up our gear, I'd headed to the bar for a much needed post-gig pint while the second band of the evening were playing and I remember striking up a brief conversation with the bloke next to me who, as I'd find out later in the evening when he was onstage, was the headline band's lead singer. H...

  "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 ...

  "The world's a rollercoaster, and I am not strapped in..."  - Incubus  - Wish You Were Here Sometimes, Sounds From The Junkshop throws up some surprises when you're writing these columns up. Incubus were one of those bands who I was convinced had sunk beneath the waves many years ago once the nu-metal wave they surfed in on petered out - their last hit over here in the UK was in 2005, around the same sort of time I stopped reading Kerrang and started moving across to looking for fanzines that more reflected the way my music taste was going. So imagine my surprise when doing my research here to find out that the band are still big business in their native USA with their last few albums all hitting the Top 5 over there even though they've been making a very meagre splash on this side of the Atlantic in those intervening years. Strange business this looking back at your twenties sometimes. Anyway, let's investigate a bit further, shall we? Incubus were one of t...

  "Folsom cures to prison/Now I'm stuck in Pelican Bay/There ain't no way now, that I'm goin' out this way..."  - Motochrist  - Hang 'Em High I've mentioned a few times in SFTJ about bands who emerged from inferior '90s sleaze bands but Motochrist are a bit of an exception in that their frontman Danny Nordahl had already chalked up two great bands prior to getting this bunch of reprobates together. In the late '80s, he was bassist with the Throbs whose The Language Of Thieves And Vagabonds  was, as we've discussed, a great doomed slice of gothed-up sleaze rock sunk by a mixture of Birdland / Gay Dad levels of over-hype and landing just as the grunge nuclear winter hit. After that, he would move on to New York Loose , another great band whose switchblade sharp street-smart Noo Yoik punk would have probably seen them go on to be chart-conquering megastars in pretty much any era except  the one they actually emerged in when Britpop was the mo...

  "I'll have to learn to live without until my time is through..."  - The Chesterfield Kings  - Streaks And Flashes It's safe to say that I was VERY late getting into the Chesterfield Kings. By the time I got wise to them, they were already two decades into their career and, indeed, would split up after just one more album. There's an argument that they might have fit better in the Garbage Days Revisited column but seeing as they just to say count as a band I was listening to while they were still active, they've scraped it into the Sounds From The Junkshop column. My introduction to the Chesterfield Kings was when they cropped up in two places which should by all rights be completely exclusive to each other. The first was a book on '80s hair metal and the second was an '80s garage rock compilation called Children of Nuggets which I was listening to at the time. And let's be honest, you don't expect to find, for example, the Prisoners and the ...

  "But every time I coulda died, I thought of being by your side..."  - The Ga*Ga's  - Crash And Burn They were an odd one, the Ga*Ga's. As I mentioned in the Darkness' SFTJ entry a few weeks back, once Justin and co had become Top 3 artists, exactly what you'd expect to happen happened. In that it seemed that there was a massive rush by every single major label to sign "their" version of the Darkness. Add to that Motley Crue's The Dirt becoming as infamous as it did and there was also a sudden new rush of bands who'd been drawn in by  Permission To Land and then heard Girls Girls Girls and Dr Feelgood * for the first time and thought "Hey, WE could do that!" Predictably, some of these bands were truly dreadful (anyone remember the Answer or Red Star Rebels or Jack Viper or Nothin' To Lose or Lionsex or...actually I should probably stop there or else we'll be here all day) but in amongst the chod there were a few bands w...