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]
From the dusty crates #7: Younger Younger 28s
From the dusty crates #6: My Vitriol
Unlike some of the other bands mentioned in here thus far, My Vitrol were actually from London, and as such, there was an eighteen month period when they were always around. I'm sure I've seen them like ten times, supporting Mansun, King Adora, JJ72, Feeder, at festivals, at random headline gigs... and I don't even like them that much. What's most significant about why I kept coming back to My Vitriol despite my, at best, kinda liking them, was that a) two of them were Indian (possibly Sri Lankan?), and b) their PR guy pushed them REALLY heavily. As in, I'm sure I received their album - and their subsequent and entirely superfluous album reissue - at least three times. They put out a string of singles that were okay, with 'Always Your Way' being a favourite that was released twice. The band's primary influences appeared to be My Bloody Valentine and Nirvana. Vincent Gallo appeared in the 'Grounded' video. Wait, what was that last one?
Once, at the insistence of said PR guy, my friend Natan and I went to interview the band, prior to a gig at Shepherds Bush Empire, supporting Mansun. We went to a pub around the corner, and half the band couldn't be bothered, and went off to talk with their mates. So, Natan and I chatted with Carolyn and Seth, the bass player and guitarist. I thought it went rather well, both were very nice, and just to give you an idea of how long ago this is, we discussed Zach de la Rocha's "imminent" solo album. Yikes. I was happily typing it up the following afternoon, and their PR guy called me up, saying that the band had complained about us, that we'd been really horrible, and that we're never allowed to talk to My Vitriol again. That definitely was unexpected, and took a little sorting out.
That mostly turned me off the band, although our paths continued to cross for a while longer. As far as I can tell, they still haven't put out a second record. Apparently, they are on the covering-Crazy-bandwagon, and were the last band to rock the Astoria before the Man won.
[download My Vitriol - Always Your Way]
[download My Vitriol - Falling Off the Floor]
From the dusty crates #5: JJ72
I'll admit it. JJ72 was one of the first bands I really fell in love with from the ground floor. First heard about them in Select, interviewed them before they headlined the Barfly, wrote some overly sycophantic reviews about their live shows, left the country right before their second album came out. Incidentally, that show of theirs where I interviewed them was when the Barfly was still at the Falcon, before it moved. Supporting them that night were My Vitriol, who may also appear in this column at some stage.
But JJ72 were a three-piece from Ireland who were only a few years older than me, had a sexy bass player, and knew how to do choruses. Also, the singer kinda sounded like a girl. I read a review at the time that said "This is the first band to listen to 'Everything Must Go' and think "Yeah, we can do that"", which probably explains their appeal to me at that time. In a few months, I saw them a lot of times and fell in love with them. Their faster songs were, and remain, okay, but they wrote some really great slow and pretty songs, that still hold up. Supporting the Dandy Warhols at the Astoria, the Reading Festival, two nights at ULU, a couple of other times that I can't remember. I was head over heels. The rest of the world, not as much. I remember other writers for my site saying "The guy sounds like a girl and all their songs sound the same" which was a pretty valid criticism. Also, when playing live, he'd always - always - smash a guitar at the end of set closer 'Bumble Bee', which came off as contrived after the seventh time of seeing it.
By the time they headlined the NME Tour (supported by Amen, Alfie and Starsailor - yikes) even I had grown bored. Or more likely, found a newer band to get behind. The band's second album 'I To Sky' came out very soon after I left for the U.S. and after that they broke up. Mark Greaney started a new band called Concerto for Constantine, with a dude who was in Idlewild, but I don't know anything about them.
[download JJ72 - Undercover Angel]
[download JJ72 - Willow]
From the dusty crates #4: Regular Fries
The other day I mentioned a genre called 'The Scene with No Name', which a) did, in fact, have a name, and b) it was a fucking stupid name. Well, today to (almost) match the inanity of that title, let me tell you about Skunk Rock. The Lo-Fidelity Allstars were the biggest names within this scene, and that ought to tell you something about it. Other bands in the bracket included Campag Velocet (starring the world's most handsome man), and London heartthrobs The Regular Fries.
Now, usually when you hear about bands with journalists in them, you think "oh, this probably won't be good", and that's what I first thought about the Fries. They were an eight-piece who put out a couple of insane EPs that were simultaneously funky and confusing. Seeing them live was equally mesmeric - there were grooves and beats and also camouflage netting and birdcages. They had a single called 'King Kong' which might have been a love song. And then came the album 'Accept the Signal', which paired some pretty great songs - witness 'Dust It', below - with some truly horrific lyrics. "Deep sea diver, dear Lady Godiva, lend us a fiver... the girls" went 'The Girls'. It got mostly poor reviews, but catching them at festivals and around London was always fun. I remember one time they supported Asian Dub Foundation at the Astoria, and it was a severe mismatch between the bands, and I was one of the few who enjoyed both sets immensely.
And then... somehow their second album, 'War on Plastic Plants' was MORE mental. For one thing, there was a song called 'Africa Take Me Back, which was incongruous coming from the whitest, palest men you will ever look at. But there's a track featuring their spiritual forefather Kool Keith, a man so nuts, he makes the Fries look like Dr. Stephen Hawking or something. My buddy Sal once wrote of the band, "they're what you get if an Ikea Store crashes into Cape Canaveral with 8 joyous, energetically manic Bez type people including a legionnaire, thrown in? That covers it pretty well, I feel.
I don't know what happened to them, I can only assume they broke up and did some more drugs. Here's a couple o'tunes for you.
[download Regular Fries - Dust It]
[download Regular Fries - Supersonic Waves ft. Kool Keith]
From the dusty crates #3: Crashland
Well, we moved into the new place. You know what's a whole bucket-ton of fun? Carrying eight car loads worth of stuff across a car park, up a flight of stairs, and down a hallway. Fortunately, it's done now, so I can return to the feature that internet denizens the world over are calling "instantly forgettable" and "more than superfluous".
Today, we're talking about Crashland, a three-piece who I believe were from the West Country. That's Bristol, not, like, Arizona. I may be wrong about that, though. For a very short time, they were a staple on Steve Lamacq's Evening Session, and every time, without fail, Steve would refer to them as "the tightest power trio in the country." The singer came off as arrogant in interviews, but they didn't get much press, and though their album 'Glued' was pretty good, they disappeared not long afterward, leaving very little impact on the music scene, and, as my research this evening concludes, even less impact on this Internet.
They wrote pretty straightforward indie-rock songs with big choruses which were, by and large, unremarkable, but struck a chord with me at the time, and 'Glued' remains a CD that stays (guess what word goes here) to my car stereo most of the time. The last song on there, 'We're on Fire', is especially lovely, although calling it this generation's 'Yesterday' may be pushing it, writer of Crashland's last.fm bio. I once saw the band open for Reef (Terrifying true fact: Reef had TWO number one albums) at Shepherds Bush Empire, and of course Crashland were vastly superior. After 'Glued', the band was dropped by Independiente and put out a pretty killer EP before calling it a day. When the EP came out, we went to see them at The Monarch, and it was one of those gigs. We got there (we being myself and Alex Wells), assuming that it'd be pretty empty, and it was a sellout, with every single person - band and crowd - being surprised to see so many fans for the band. Here's a couple of songs and the video for their first single, 'Standard Love Affair'.
[download Crashland - We're on Fire]
[download Crashland - Money Shot]
From the dusty crates #2: Ikara Colt
Since the inaugural post in the new series was a runaway, resounding success that people are still talking about worldwide in hushed, reverent whispers, it's time for volume two. Today, it's London's own Ikara Colt. For a while, the NME put them, the Parkinsons and some other bands that I remember even less than the Parkinsons into a sub-genre called "the scene with no name" or just "no name". This really did happen.
I first received the band's debut single 'Sink Venice' to review, and while the lead track, was okay and featured the lyric "two thousand damp bricks won't save you now" which is far better than okay, the b-side 'At the Lodge' really caught my attention. They followed it up with a couple of singles that were both stone-cold stunners: 'One Note' and 'Rudd,' and then the album 'Chat and Business'. A singer who couldn't really sing, some killer choruses and a ton of energy, they became a live staple in 2001, and I caught them at Reading and supporting my beloved Six by Seven (future candidates for this feature?) amongst other places. Glancing at old reviews, I noticed that my esteemed pal Olly Parker once said of them:The Colt have a song, it is a fine song, tight, honest, rocking, catchy and cool. Unfortunately their insistence upon playing the song five times diminishes from the overall effect. They're a fine band but any longer than twenty minutes and you would see me expressing some entirely different opinions.
And that sums it up very nicely. Apparently, in the States they were on Epitaph, where I'm sure they didn't sit comfortably next to all those punk bands. I never listened to Ikara Colt's second album, and apparently they split in 2005. Remind me to ask Eddie Argos if IC were an influence on Art Brut - I definitely can hear the resemblance.
Here are two of their best songs.
[download Ikara Colt - One Note]
[download Ikara Colt - At the Lodge]
From the dusty crates #1: Audioweb
I'm moving house this week, and as such, cleaning out the existing house. Trying to get rid of stuff that I really don't need anymore, rather than carry it to the new place, and then the next place after that, and so on and so on until I become a prime candidate for 'Hoarders'. During this process, I've donated a load of old books to the local library, and made two trips - so far - to Goodwill, giving them a box of movie posters*, lots of old cassette tapes**, and most crucially, loads and loads and loads of old CDs. Most of these were things I got for free during my time as a music writer in London. So, there's a preponderance of British indie bands from 1998-2001 that nobody has thought about for years and years.
Looking through these CDs, I got a bit nostalgic and gave them a play. I thought it'd be interesting to write a bit about some of these bands, who are long forgotten, who I was into as a youngun.
First up: Audioweb
These guys were on U2's label, and even supported the Irish behemoths at Wembley Stadium once upon a time.*** They put out two albums, both of which I have, before calling it a day in 1999. Musically, they were pretty much a standard indie band, with decent riffs, choruses, etc. But their singer Martin brought an extra element, with a soulful voice (bear in mind: other bands around at this time were Space and Shed Seven), and he threw in some "lawdamercy" and skankin' over the songs. In hindsight, I think what appealed to me the most about this band was that they weren't just four identical looking white guys, like just about every band I was listening to at the time. Also, Ian Brown was a big fan, and as we know, that guy's judgment is top notch.
Here are their two "biggest" singles. I must confess: I heard their version of 'Bankrobber' before knowing that it was a cover. Imagine my surprise when I heard the Clash's original, which doesn't have any lyrics about cocaine. Also, 'Policeman Skank' from their second album, which is ace and tells the story of a fight in a courthouse.
Another forgotten indie band tomorrow, probably!
[download Audioweb - Bankrobber]
[download Audioweb - Policeman Skank]
* Including, but not limited to, Stealth, The Barbarian Invasions, War of the Worlds, Hustle and Flow, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.
** Turns out, I did own 'Music Box' by Mariah Carey.
*** The lineup for that gig, amazingly, also featured the Longpigs.
