From the dusty crates #7: Younger Younger 28s

Holy Moses, it's been a while since I wrote in here, hasn't it? Why, the last time there was new content on Are You Gene Hackman, it was a different decade, Conan was comfortably settling into The Tonight Show, and Gordon Brown was the Prime Minister. How times change!

Over the holidays, my old schoolfriend John came to visit from Newcastle, which was lovely. Always nice to see an old face, from my pre-moving-to-America life. Predictably, we spent a large chunk of our day together discussing forgotten bands of yesteryear, whom we used to cover for my webzine. (I still maintain that the 'zine was way ahead of its time, incidentally.)

Today's inductee into the Dusty Crates Hall of Fame, which is something that definitely exists, is Younger Younger 28s, a band that showed up in 1999, played some gigs and festivals, released an album, and then disappeared. How you feel about them will depend very strongly upon how you feel about The Human League. YY28s employed the same dynamic: two guys, two girls, synths, stories about working-class teenagers, and such. The dude that sang went by the handle Joe Northern, and is now an artist/comedian whose bio is interesting and well worth a read. The press didn't know what to make of them - they pretty much got lost in the shuffle.

I happened to see the band play at the Improv Theatre in London, a gig I attended with aforementioned John, along with Stephen Eastwood, who wrote for Teletext Music at the time and was my most famous friend. (Teletext recently closed its music site, Planet Sound, which was a great resource but was rendered sort of superfluous by the internet). At the gig, I happened to bump into a guy named Duck, who played keyboards in a band named Straw, who might show up in this column at some point in the future. It was at this gig, my friends, that I had my first (social) alcoholic beverage. Duck offered to buy me a drink and I had to say "Uh... whatever you're having" since I was sixteen, and had only ever had a beer with family and therefore had no frame of reference as to what to drink to look cool. I think he bought me a Jack and Coke. That's my primary recollection of the gig, which is probably a bad thing, but my review at the time suggests that I liked it a lot. I saw them again on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury that year, too, and remember people in Bush and Marilyn Manson shirts looking unimpressed.

It's hard to listen to their album 'Soap' now and not dismiss it as overtly cheesy, but 'Sugar Sweet Dreams', particularly, could still hold up as a dark, brooding, 80s sounding disco smash.

[download Younger Younger 28s - Sugar Sweet Dreams]
[download Younger Younger 28s - We're Going Out]