Volume 22 Tracks 1-5 - Boo Radleys, Echobelly, Sleeper, Julian Cope, Teenage Fanclub

Format: CD/ cassette
Year of Release: 1995

The sleeve design of "Indie Top 20" changes again, this time to incorporate some subbuteo players on a bright green background. If the earliest volumes emerged with images of paper clips and thick-rimmed NHS glasses, the final volumes spluttered out with lots of retro and lad-mag friendly pictures of reassuring boyhood things. The final "Best Of" volume would (as we'll see) use tankards of ale on its sleeve, and Volume 23 toy racetrack cars. You can read into this whatever you like, but if the first LPs seemed to brag that indie music operated on the outskirts and predicted the future, the final ones seemed to be trying to tell us that indieland was a post-modern world of colourful old ideas belched back up as pop ate itself - music to relive your childhood fantasies to with your best drunken chums.

And that really depended on where you were looking, of course. There were numerous bursts of awkward psychedelia and seering bits of indie lo-fi creeping their way into the top ten indie chart by 1995, besides the stuff Chris Evans was happy to play on his Radio One breakfast show. Instead of trying to compete with the numerous major label funded indie compilations around at this point, Beechwood could have chosen to plough their own furrow by hoovering up a lot more of the critically acclaimed Peel and Evening Session bands who weren't making as much mainstream noise. The kids with hairgrips and duffle bags were back (back! Back!) and growing in number - now might have been a good time to differentiate and go back to basics. Other labels like Fierce Panda were beginning to push forward in this respect.

Sophisticated, intricately arranged alternative music was also alive and well thanks to the growing stature of the likes of Tindersticks, Jack, My Life Story, and shortly Divine Comedy - there was an entire Scott Walker/ Nick Cave/ French orchestral pop inspired division of indie which got plenty of press at the time, but barely seems acknowledged as any kind of nineties development now (if you haven't heard Jack, by the way, do yourself a favour and buy their first two LPs now). None of these bands would ever find their way on to the series.

Volume 22 is the penultimate "proper" Indie Top 20 LP, and is something of a compromise, filled to the brim with mostly mid-table commercial indie rock, only some of which flies. Certainly from an historical point of view, though, a lot of it has become fascinating since, but it creates an unreliable picture of the scene as a whole, and smacks of desperation. My singles box at home felt far more exciting in 1995 than this.

1. Boo Radleys - Wake Up Boo (Creation)

And with a big fat parp, the Radleys open things in a celebratory fashion. "Wake Up Boo" has become many things to the group since - an albatross and a regular royalty cheque chief among them, I suspect - and it's also become one of the most overplayed songs of the era, to the extent that trying to listen to it afresh is near impossible. Shortly after its release its jolly brassiness soundtracked Radio One Roadshows, adverts for Virgin Radio, BBC preview footage, sports footage and plenty of other things besides. Listening again, though, my first thought is that the opening bars of the single always did sound like library music which could be entitled "Celebratory Music For An Evening Quiz Show", so the fact it became a media backing track as well as an effervescent, ever-present piece of genuinely appreciated chart music shouldn't be that surprising.

While critics at the time made inevitable comparisons to the Beach Boys, "Wake Up Boo" doesn't sound a jot like anything Brian Wilson would have made, even in his earliest days. Its foot-kicking, vocal harmony infested jolliness resembles The Four Seasons at their most sprightly if anything, and the band confessed that they actually came up with the idea for the record after listening to Take That's version of "Could It Be Magic". Really, this is the group trying to write a pop hit after years of being a cult concern, and finding they were in a position to pull it off.

There was so much goodwill towards the Boos at the time that nobody resented them for trying to earn a reasonable living, and I think that possibly lead to "Wake Up Boo" getting a free critical pass it doesn't entirely deserve. Lyrically vague and scattershot - explanations vary, some arguing it's supposed to be about two lovers, one in some kind of LSD trip love affair with the world, the other dour and cynical, others that it's about the change from summer to autumn - and filled to the brim with the plastic bounce of a cheap Woolworths football, it's easy to tire of. It's very much an indie group's idea of what a pop song sounds like; all skip and froth and no conflicting emotional pull (the "Death of summer"/ "You have to put the death in everything" aspect makes it sound as if they tried to cover that base, but lacked the experience to pull it off, and as such it glides past almost unnoticed.) In short, "Could It Be Magic" performs the job much more satisfactorily, having a bit of groove and swagger in its hips. If you're in the wrong mood, "Wake Up Boo" can be a charmless caffeinated stomp by comparison, the noise of the office optimist screaming "Mor-NING!" loudly in your face.

It also put the Radleys in a difficult position. Listening to Radio One one day, I overheard a Roadshow host talking to a small nine year old girl. "We've got the Boo Radleys here today, do you like them?" he gushed. "No!" snapped the petulant girl immediately, clearly unwilling to spend the next six months being mocked by her schoolfriends. "Wake Up Boo" served a purpose and raised the group's profile to incredible heights, but the group didn't look or behave like pop stars (or even want to spend the rest of their careers writing pop songs) and were ill suited to the long-term task. Future singles from the number one parent LP "Wake Up" (a more diverse and satisfying work than you'd realise from the choice of singles alone, actually) performed better than their previous 45s, but none reached the top twenty, with the follow-up "Find The Answer Within" struggling to number 37 as it remained overshadowed by their previous release. You could have choked on the dust the group threw up while running back to the drawing board.



2. Echobelly - Great Things (Fuave)

Echobelly, on the other hand, released something that sounded like "an ambitious media studies graduate's CV set to jolly music", as one particularly harsh critic dubbed "Great Things" at the time. Again, this single makes the cardinal error of believing that a combination of effervescence and optimism, plus the magical ingredient of self-belief, equals pop heaven. It usually doesn't, and pop songwriting is often a far more complex business than that. It yearns, doubts and questions and wonders even at its most million-selling, recognising that most listeners are equally complex, and need those twists and ambiguities to hang on to.

"Great Things" sounds like nothing so much as an overlong advertising jingle for Sonya Madan's personal credentials. The spirit of optimism which shone on the 1995-6 period allowed stuff like this to appear acceptable, but the cold, harsh light of 2017 makes it feel faintly absurd. You wrote an indie-pop song bullet-pointing your personal aspirations? WHY? Even Courtney Love would balk in disbelief at that. Like a lot of Echobelly singles, this feels quaint beyond measure now.



3. Sleeper - Vegas (Indolent)

Conversely, I enjoy "Vegas" way more now than I did at the point of its release. It's easy to write this off as being another sketchy character-portrait, but unlike "Inbetweener", it has a real darkness and warmth to its heart. Leaning back on the standard mid-life crisis "now or never" tale of a man who believes he can become a star, it could choose to be gently mocking, but it's oddly tender instead. Doubtless Sleeper had come close enough to defeat themselves to touch this story with the respect it deserved.

This time, the arrangement drops in yearning string patterns which recall the likes of Welsh melodramatists Jack while never quite taking that route full-on - it instead pulls in two directions, with Wener's vocals frothing over her protagonist's career change, while the group keen and pull the song in a less optimistic direction. The message is clear. The poor old sod is doomed, a deluded and over-excited soul set up to fail. He's probably not going to even get laid in Las Vegas, much less become the next Tom Jones there.

When she wanted to, Louise Wener could actually do this sort of thing exquisitely well. "Vegas" is double-edged and detailed in a way that "Wake Up Boo" and "Great Things" utterly struggle to be, despite being less of a hit in the process (it crawled to number 33 at the time, a comparative flop if weighed up against their later, bigger hits). There's both Britpop kitsch and irony as well as a beating heart somewhere in here, and at this stage in the compilation, that comes as some relief.

Regrettably, though, at least some of this song - not least the occasional cry of "bingo" - seems to have inspired the awful "Bingo" by Catch some years later, often deemed to be the point at which Britpop officially died.



4. Julian Cope - Try Try Try (Echo)

And thank all the pagan deities for Copey. By this point in his career, some suspected him of being in a second slump. The first occurred in the eighties after the Teardrop Explodes demise, the second after he was dropped by Island for being "too old" (apparently) and found himself on the somewhat unfortunately named indie label Echo, just shortly before the Bunnymen themselves were getting back on their feet again.

His debut LP for that label "20 Mothers" is uneven, but when it peaks, it reveals the singer at his most immediately powerful. "Try Try Try" is a yearning cry relating to a family dispute which is far from "The Living Years" or "No Son Of Mine", instead taking the idea down to a bluesy accessibility. Driven by the grinding organ chords in the background, "Try Try Try" sees Cope thrash out in frustration and hopelessness, before taking the track to one of his most furiously simple but effective choruses since "World Shut Your Mouth". It was Radio One playlisted and his first minor hit in some years, meaning that his brief stint on Echo wasn't entirely a bad thing. By the time the game was up in 1996, though, he became a much more marginal figure in rock music, issuing music on his own Head Heritage label as well as writing a number of brilliant books.

Cope really should be up there with Mark E Smith or Nick Cave as a constant and major figure in British alternative music, and I sense that only his own lack of willingness to fully engage with the so-called "industry" at large stands in the way.



5. Teenage Fanclub - Sparky's Dream (Creation)

From the almost universally acclaimed return-to-form LP "Grand Prix", "Sparky's Dream" really does sound like The Fannies had lost the indie scrappiness that (usually charmingly) littered their earliest LPs and had honed their sound to something very close to perfect 70s power pop.

"Sparky's Dream" is both fantastically performed and engaging three-minute FM rock, something you find yourself doubting is in any way melodically original, checking the chord patterns for cribbed riffs as it goes. The group were really firing on all cylinders by this point, and still manage to launch great new music to this day. If the "Indie Top 20" series were still a "thing", they'd still be on there, checking in faithfully from Volume 10 to Volume 88.

Volume 18 Side 2 - Pop Will Eat Itself, Elastica, Verve, Teenage Fanclub, Kingmaker

1. Pop Will Eat Itself - RSVP (Infectious)

Since their last appearance on "Indie Top 20", Pop Will Eat Itself had "enjoyed" a fairly long but fractious stint with RCA. It was clear from the beginning that their relationship with the major label wasn't ideal. Not long after their debut RCA album "This Is The Day... This Is The Hour... This is This!" was released, Clint Mansell could be heard complaining in fanzines that the band's chances of bigger success had been ruined by a series of cock-ups followed by weak excuses at the label. RCA seemed confused by how to market the group, they felt, and had given up trying.

The group's relationship with them still managed a total of three studio LPs and one compilation before they were dropped at exactly the same moment their single "Get The Girl, Kill The Baddies!" smashed into the UK top ten. This peculiar achievement by both band and label caused them to be named as the first ever unsigned group to appear on "Top of the Pops" - until the same claim was made for Bis a number of years later (who, to be fair, did at least have absolutely no major label marketing budget or previous history on their side).

The more indie-friendly quarters of the British music press had a field day speculating what all this meant. Had RCA actually just done something incredibly stupid? Were Pop Will Eat Itself dumper-bound, or ascending towards something greater? The answer,  in the end, was neither - they would remain with the same status they always had. Somewhat unusually for a group who haven't been given much consideration since, they had a core and dedicated fanbase, and the high number nine chart placing for "Get The Girl" was down to the combined fluke of strong first week sales for them and a slow sales week across the rest of the board. They still had yet to achieve a top ten album, therefore still hadn't made any "real" money for their corporate employers.

While you would normally expect an unsigned band with a top ten single to cause a bidding war, the majors were therefore somewhat sniffy about rescuing PWEI, and they ended up back in Indieland, this time on the newly formed Infectious label. "RSVP" was their 1993 debut there, and it shows the group moving back towards a harder, edgier, guitar-led noise. Its chant-a-long chorus was memorable, the relentless noisiness of it very much in vogue with the grunge and industrial sounds edging into the mainstream, and it allowed them another one of their many minor Top 40 hits (seriously - count them). They even managed to get the twins from the Australian TV soap "Neighbours", Gillian and Gayle Blakeney, to appear in the video (who had been in the band The Monitors in the early eighties, as my other blog Left and to the Back will testify).

You could actually sympathise with major label's confusion about how to market the group, though, if such a dilemma did indeed exist. They continually sold modest volumes of records to the same bunch of dedicated fans for years without really gaining new converts or inching much further forwards. Attempts had been made to market them as "Britain's answer to the Beastie Boys" initially, then as an Indie-Dance group, then as a band who could crossover to Kerrang or Metal Hammer readers - none of these really stuck, and they sat in no-man's land appealing to their own gang of Grebo oddballs.



2. Elastica - Stutter (Deceptive)

As the old superstars of British indie found themselves being kicked off major labels or falling out of favour, so the arrogant and dashing new breed emerged. One thing that's often forgotten about Elastica is that they were a fledgling group when the first wave of publicity hit them, having only played a small number of gigs. Justine Frischmann was absurdly savvy and had a clear idea in mind of how the group should look and sound before they even put out their first single, of course - but even so, it's surprising how well they dealt with the media furore.

I caught them live supporting Pulp at the Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms in 1993, and there was a palpable buzz in the room, and a slightly unexpected one considering they were only the support band (at this point, Pulp had yet to achieve a Top 40 hit, so their support bands were seldom groups about to dominate popular culture). A handful of fanzine-writing teenagers scurried to the front of the room, chatting excitedly with pens and notebooks in hand. As the group took the stage, one was heard to ask Donna "Did you like the photos I took?" to which Donna nodded somewhat distractedly.
"She said she liked them!" said the young photographer shamelessly, brimming over with excitement. "Did you hear that, she said she liked them!"
What the fuck was going on? Who were these people? I mean, I'd seen them in the NME and heard them on the radio, but...

Then the group began to play and... they sounded quite good. They sounded very much like what they were - a band with a probable future who had yet to develop a commanding live presence. Justine seemed confident and effortlessly cool, but only in the same way as lots of wealthy Hampshire types at my university.  I was starting to meet people born into wealth for the first time in my life, and at that point I couldn't see much difference between Justine's aloof, airy mutterings between songs and the distant poshness of some of my fellow students. Looking back on early interviews, it's apparent that she was incredibly intelligent, witty, cheeky and sparky in her own relaxed and casual way, but none of those personality traits were apparent on-stage yet.

Donna, on the other hand, seemed far more interesting, appearing born into her particular insouciant, punkish and vacant role in the group.

The debut single "Stutter", however, was two minutes of almighty and wonderful noise about the problems of drunken erectile dysfunction. At the time, the press bracketed the group in with the short-lived and under-achieving "New Wave of New Wave" scene, which tried to rally support for a raffish punk revival on Britain's somewhat underwhelmed gig circuit. Elastica were the only one of those groups to really go on to first division success, and if we're going to round up the best "NWONW" singles ever (though it's hard to understand why we'd bother) "Stutter" would almost certainly be number one. It's a commanding great treble-heavy, adrenalised rush which sounds like all the best elements of the late seventies era tied to the back of a Transit van and dragged along the road by a rope. Scuzzy, dirty (in every sense of the word) but so energising it's impossible not to listen to when it comes on the radio to this day, it actually sounded like the start of something big, brash and new, whereas the likes of "I Just Want To Kill Someone" by S*M*A*S*H (to give another NWONW single as an example) sounded like a reprisal of old ideas recreated to please ageing IPC journalists.

I didn't know it at the time, but in the space of one evening, I'd witnessed two groups with distinct identities both pointing different ways forward for British music, and both being correct. Britpop would prove to be a slightly bigger, broader tent than it's been credited for in recent years.



3. Verve - Slide Away (Hut)

And then there was Verve, of course, who with "Slide Away" provided Oasis with a future song title (or did they?) and arguably paved the way forwards for some of the mid-nineties indie sound. The melodrama of the song arrives through a thick pea-souper smog of effects pedal laden guitars, but the song still has a fussiness and fragility to it that would be sledgehammered out of the way by most of the new breed.

There will be those who disagree, but I personally find "Slide Away" a bit too directionless and woebegone to completely hit home. It's a big old meandering noise about nothing very much, and caused some people to wrongly assume the band had totally lost their footing. On the contrary, future releases would show they were actually beginning to find their way - commercially, at least.



4. Teenage Fanclub - Norman 3 (Creation)

Taken from their "underachieving" self-produced album "Thirteen", the pathetic number of views "Norman 3" has had since being uploaded to the Fannies official YouTube account certainly points towards opinions about this single being mostly negative or at best indifferent. In fact, many music journalists almost wrote the group off after "Thirteen" was released, feeling that whatever opportunities they had, they'd managed to lazily waste away with a mediocre follow-up album to a widely acknowledged cult classic.

That's needlessly harsh, though. "Norman 3" is the group at their most straightforwardly sweet, combining powerpop melodies with a slow, lazy wallowing in the emotions that surround the early stages of a love affair. "Yeah! I'm in love with you!" the chorus announces bouyantly, and it's incredibly simple and dumb but entirely relatable. It's not the group's finest moment, but catch it at the right moment on an early Spring day, and it will worm its way into your heart.



5. Kingmaker - Queen Jane (Chrysalis)

Few bands epitomise the slightly half-arsed politicised edge of early nineties indie more than Kingmaker. Released during a period when casual racism and fascism seemed on the upswing in Britain - though it all seems like a fairly harmless family row over Sunday dinner compared to the present day - "Queen Jane" paints portraits of disillusioned far right sympathisers, though fails to make particularly coherent or cutting points as it does so. It's clearly trying to make a clear and angry satirical point, but feels too scattershot and incoherent in its aims. "Oliver's Army" it isn't.

Musically, "Queen Jane" saunters along nicely, but also fails to deliver anything that might make it memorable or impactful. It swings by having made its snarling complaint, and within thirty seconds your mind is on to something else entirely. The late Conservative wilderness years of the early nineties probably did need a relevant political soundtrack of some kind, but God knows we deserved better than this.

Kingmaker had been hyped as one of the frontline indie groups of the early nineties, but as the decade progressed were struggling to maintain critical support. Their records all sold moderately well, but their sound clearly owed a debt to groups whose success was beginning to wane. When Suede supported them on tour, one highly critical review ran with the headline "Diamonds and Dogshit" (It made it quite clear, if you needed to be told, that Kingmaker were the "dogshit" in the evening's entertainments). Another tour of theirs featured Radiohead in the support slot. If nothing else, through accident or design they showcased two of the more influential nineties group on their tours, while failing to make any serious cases for themselves.

Volume 13 Side One - Stone Roses, Teenage Fanclub, Revolver, Chapterhouse, Slowdive

Year of Release: 1991
Formats: Double LP/ Cassette/ CD

We're about to enter a brief period of thin gruel for the Indie Top 20 series, and I'm unsure how much of that could be blamed on the series new compiler Tim Millington, or the state of the British music scene at the time.

For make no mistake, the spotlight was largely off British guitar based music at this point, even here at home. Grunge was beginning to slowly pull itself out of its mouldy cigarette butt infested bed, and within a matter of moments it would become the dominant alternative cultural force in the UK. But it's not as if our homegrown bands were putting up any kind of a fight - our assortment of uncharismatic shoegazing bands and faintly miffed indie pub bands just didn't carry the same alienated cultural message. Indie Dance could realistically have promised us some more goodness, but The Stone Roses were embroiled in a long-lasting legal dispute and unable to record, and the Mondays had largely gone to seed. Without those two lynchpins being active, the scene buckled and weakened.

There are some fantastic tracks on "Volume 13", but there's also more to criticise than usual, and I'm afraid the contents do accurately reflect my memories of this period. Things started to get interesting again quite quickly - though it felt like an age to live through it - but for the next couple of LPs, we're going to find ourselves struggling slightly.

Also, it's hardly an important point, but this is possibly also one of the worst sleeves for any LP in the series. It looks more like a flyer advertising the opening of a new local organic greengrocers than anything else. As Tony Barron of Reeves and Mortimer's "The Club" sketches might have said: "Pears are irrelevant to concept of indie hits".

1. Stone Roses - I Wanna Be Adored (Silvertone)

The first track, straight off the bat, is from a group who had been inactive for some time at this point, embroiled in a legal battle with Silvertone Records which would ensure they didn't release any new product until 1994. Putting this two year old track right at the front of the LP rather than an exciting new band or a big sound from an established indie group does, it has to be said, feel a bit desperate.

Still, it wasn't as if it hadn't only recently charted. "I Wanna Be Adored" was the first single released without the Roses permission, plundered from their debut LP in the hope that Silvertone could make some more money out of the group while they "relaxed". At the time, we had no idea whatsoever that it would be the first of many plundering missions the label undertook, and within months "Waterfall" and a shockingly bad edit of "I Am The Resurrection" (where the group sounded as if Reni had been replaced by a toddler thumping on some shortbread tins and a cowbell) would also be singles, followed by remixes of "Fools Gold", a B-sides compilation, an A and B-sides collection, a Remix album, and on and on it went. Given that they were only on Silvertone Records for one LP and a small brace of singles, it's staggering just how much the label managed to stretch and repackage the contents of their vaults.

Of all the releases, "I Wanna Be Adored" felt the most excusable, partly because it had already been issued as a 45 in the USA, and partly because the UK B-side "Where Angels Play" had never been officially released until this point. So for our money, we got a very pretty, delicate B-side in return for not terribly much money, and few people had any gripes about it.

We're not here to discuss "Where Angels Play", however, but its evergreen A-side which has become something of an alternative FM anthem in the years since. It was actually the oldest Stone Roses song to find a place on their debut LP, having been a feature of the group's live set since their earliest days, and as such is slightly uncharacteristic of the rest of the contents. As a first track it's a bold bark of intent and its slow, steady build does an exciting job of preparing you for the rush of the rest of the first side, but it's hard to imagine it being anywhere else on the album and fitting in comfortably. The dark, echoing basslines it opens with still have an epic gothy tone to them, and feel like something The Mission could have written. John Squire's chopping and chiming guitar spins things back into a more Roses orientated direction, but even then there's a strange, echoing, rockist darkness to the track the rest of the LP largely avoids. Even "Shoot You Down" is brighter and bolder sounding than this, and altogether less cavernous.

Still, it was and remains one of the group's more appreciated tracks, and crossed over to audiences they may not otherwise have reached. In Essex, I noted with interest that stray bar-dwelling goths could be persuaded to sway about a bit to "I Wanna Be Adored" in a way they wouldn't do for "Waterfall" and certainly not "Fools Gold".
"I do like that track of theirs," an older Siouxsie and the Banshees fan said to me once. "You know, 'I Wanna Be A Dog'".



2. Teenage Fanclub - Star Sign (Creation)

Teenage Fanclub had by this point established themselves as the Great Hopes of British Alternative Rock, which was a pity as the group lacked the hunger and ambition to really compete on the global stage. When the group also signed with Geffen in America, they could probably have celebrated in any location they chose - in reality, they signed the contract in their local fish and chip shop. And so it would continue.

One listen to "Star Sign" is enough evidence for why everyone was getting so excited, though. It's a pounding, punching piece of rock music with a Byrdsian melody upfront and Big Star styled guitar lines behind, sounding as bright and hopeful as Slade at their most optimistic and as heavy and hard as the US grunge bands rising up at this point. In fact, it sounds as if it should have been an enormous hit outside the indie charts, so rammed is it with chiming hooks - but for some reason it only settled at number 44.

The B-side was a bizarre and popular cover of "Like A Virgin", and mutterings emerged from critics and label bosses alike about a huge album the band were about to release. By the end of the year, "Bandwagonesque" would become a much-wanted Christmas gift for indie kids everywhere. My copy got played to death and still sits on my shelf today, occasionally pulled down for relistening, and I can recall visiting the houses of friends and acquaintances and seeing their copies sat by the side of the stereo as well. For an LP which only climbed as high as Number 22 on the national charts, it seemed to be everywhere in my social group for awhile. Sadly, while the group have sustained moderate success to this day, a release of theirs would never be greeted with that kind of mania again.



3. Revolver - Heaven Sent An Angel (Hut)

Revolver had it all. Press. Endless features on "The Chart Show" and evening radio. A contract with Hut, who were essentially just a boutique label reporting to Virgin Records. And yet not a single one of their records, to the best of my knowledge, entered the national Top 100.

This either has to be considered extremely unfortunate or a symptom of the group's mediocrity, and I'm afraid in my opinion it's the latter. Revolver looked and sounded the part, being a bunch of cute kids big on atmospheric guitar soundscapes. They had the major label backing. What they lacked were tunes which stood out from the pack in any way whatsoever.

Debut "Heaven Sent An Angel" is probably their finest effort, yet still sounds like something which consists entirely of an admittedly good guitar riff the group were clearly in love with, vocals which follow the guitar line very closely, some atmospheric meandering, and nothing else. It's early nineties indie at its laziest and most generic, and it's staggering that anyone took it seriously. It's also absurdly tough to write about - there's so little of interest actually going on here that it's impossible to find much to say at all. I can only conclude that Revolver were a jammy bunch of buggers in the right place at the right time who failed to capitalise successfully on their luck.



4. Chapterhouse - Precious One (Dedicated)

That said, Chapterhouse were responsible for one of the worst gigs I attended during the period - 45 minutes of men flicking and thrashing their long hair around to bits of effects pedal fiddling as they desperately struggled to approximate the sounds they had created on vinyl. They came back out for an encore even though nobody was much enthused about them doing one.

Fortunately, they're not so bad on your stereo, and in fairness to them they were playing at a club with  a horrible PA the one time I saw them. Somewhat bafflingly, though, "Precious One" is taken from the popular "Mesmerise" EP, whose lead track provided them with their largest hit. Presumably the rights to obtain that were too expensive?

"Precious One" is a soft and buttery track which has a similar blissful quality to their club staple sound "Pearl" without having the same amount of drive. It does sound like a quintessential example of the shoegazing sound in retrospect, being filled with layers of intricate detail and a distinctly foggy, hallucinogenic feel. It's never going to be hailed as the group's defining moment, but as a mere B-side it proved that some of the early hype Chapterhouse experienced wasn't totally unreasonable. After all, if they were throwing songs away which were this luxurious, they must have had moments of pure genius up their sleeves.



5. Slowdive - Catch The Breeze (Creation)

In case you were wondering, Volume 13 really proves that mid-1991 was Peak Shoegaze - the scene was utterly overrun with pie-eyed groups singing about being hypnotised, or watching dolphins, or flying about, or feeling the breeze against their faces. Honestly, anyone would have thought there was a huge fucking Donovan festival going on that year or something.

Slowdive were highly inspired by My Bloody Valentine and were also signed to Creation Records alongside them. Unlike MBV, though, Slowdive didn't experiment on their audiences to ascertain the psychological effects of extreme decibels, or record anything as occasionally terrifying as "Loveless". Most of their music was ponderous, deeply stoned sounding, and rich on atmospherics. "Catch The Breeze" isn't their finest single in my view - we'll catch up with that later - but does give a firm impression of where the group were at stylistically. Tumbling Nick Mason-esque drum patterns meet gentle melodies, Rachel Goswell's angelic, breathy vocals, and a closing melody which constantly reaches for some kind of blissed euphoria.

If you were being unkind, you could argue that (here in particular) they were an indiefied Clannad at best. Then again, if you were the Manic Street Preachers, you would argue that they were "worse than Hitler", which is harsher still. Certainly, there was something slightly retrograde and lacking in modernity about Slowdive - interviews revealed a band from comfortable backgrounds who had very little to say for themselves, and musically they sounded like a cosy, fuzzy sonic duvet at a time when Britain was a somewhat troubled country. If you're wondering why shoegazing bands from very middle class backgrounds were so frequently derided at the time, you have to understand their position in the context of the times, and also the backgrounds of many of the music journalists criticising them. Against the Poll Tax riots and a decade of seemingly unending and occasionally outright spiteful Conservative rule, they seemed docile and complacent, content with their position in the world. While they were hardly all emerging from the Thames Valley and other Home Counties areas to soundtrack some kind of enforced medication time, to many music journalists who had been versed on punk rebellion, they seemed uncomfortably close to an indulgent hippy past we were supposed to have been "saved" from. These all seem like ridiculous reasons to criticise a group's music in retrospect, possibly because they are.

In reality, a lot of material they recorded has stood the test of time extraordinary well, and perhaps sits more comfortably in the present day than it did in 1991. "Catch The Breeze" may not have been asking much of the listener other than to take a chill pill, but that's hardly much of a sin, and it still sounds sumptuous in places, which is what actually matters. We can hardly be expected to spend every minute of our waking lives being furious at the world, can we? (Cut to: Rik the People's Poet glaring furiously at my words on a computer screen and hissing "Hippy!"). 

Volume Eleven Side Three - Charlatans, Teenage Fanclub, Pale Saints, Welfare Heroine, The Shamen

1. The Charlatans - Then (Dead Dead Good/ Situation Two)

"Excellent follow-up to their hit earlier in the year. Outstanding, a massive hit that should establish Northwich's finest as a major band".

It wouldn't have been illogical to expect another juddering piece of catchy organ-driven indie as a follow-up to the hugely successful "The Only One I Know", but "Then" took people by surprise in 1990. While it was still a bit of a smash by indie standards - number 12 in the national charts isn't really to be sniffed at - it has a despairing dream-like quality to it, sounding like the soundtrack to someone's slow-motion meltdown.

It is beautiful for all that, though, and the misty, blurry sound to this showed that there was far more to The Charlatans than foot-tapping retro pop. In "Then", they had also managed to create a piece of atmospheric indie which, while not being overly similar to the likes of Ride, Lush or Slowdive, certainly had a similar tripped-out, steadily building ethereal nature at its roots.

Frustratingly, despite the fact that it was a reasonably big seller at the time by indie standards, "Then" is very infrequently heard on the radio now, with programmers tending to skim past all the post-"Only One I Know" singles until they get closer to their more upbeat Britpop revival material ("Weirdo" occasionally excepted). This does the group a disservice, as they're much more versatile than they've generally been given credit for. Three singles down the line, and they'd already managed to show us three very unique sides to their personalities.



2. Teenage Fanclub - God Knows It's True (Paperhouse)

"Jack Black - it's good for singing, guitaring, and playing the drums." - Don Flemming

This remains one of my favourite Teenage Fanclub tracks. It sounds amazing from the first second - starting off with that buzzing guitar riff, then steadily building to a clattering, pissed off anthem of betrayal, it's the halfway house where the moody melodies of "April Skies" era Mary Chain meet with American underground rock and Big Star. From the sulking chorus right up to the basic but marvellous guitar outro, it feels oddly effortless and yet wonderfully constructed. If anyone had dismissed Teenage Fanclub as being a scratchy indie band, this was the point at which they would be proven wrong - and things would get better and more powerful over the coming years.

The group were about to up sticks and sign to Creation in the UK and Geffen in the US, and while they never quite achieved the commercial wonders many predicted (it's often forgotten that circa "Bandwagonesque", they really were regarded as possible future stars) a string of acclaimed albums and moderate hits would ensure that their legacy would be the envy of many of their peers. Staying respected and relevant twenty-five years down the line is arguably preferable to stadium success followed by rapid burn-out.



3. Pale Saints - Half Life Remembered (4AD)

"Gustav Holst is the horse's mouth in whose saliva we take our baths".

If "Sight Of You" had been maudlin, "Half Life Remembered" is disorientating and slightly frightening, from its strange video featuring dated psychedelic effects and an overload of custard, pasta and beans and dentistry related nightmares, to the track itself - airy vocals meeting a vaguely threatening and malevolent melody. "It's eating you away, and some will never know its taste" we're informed, while ambitious drum patterns smash around and angelic female vocals coo along.

To all intents and purposes, "Half Life Remembered" really is Pale Saint's equivalent of "White Rabbit", and is so obviously about hallucinogenic matters that it would have been banned in a less enlightened age. While psychedelic ideas were incredibly prevalent in this period through the noises of both the so-called Madchester bands and the shoegazing stars, this really was unbelievably explicit. When they're not twanging away in an early sixties style, even the guitar riffs veer close towards sitar-mimicking scales in places. Far out, man.

But it's unbelievably good. It could make the mistake of spanning ten minutes and repeating its best ideas endlessly, but instead, for four and a half minutes, it's an interesting and ever-evolving piece of wonky pop that explores every possible melodic nook and cranny.

The Pale Saints always were one of the more interesting and inventive groups in the so-called shoegazing movement, which makes it strange that they appear to be less raved about during the present revival.



4. Welfare Heroine - Cry - Blood (Dub) (Non-Fiction)

"It's hopelessly sad, hopelessly lonely, probing, while always attempting optimism... but already I can feel tears pricking my eyelids, more of an emotion than a song".

A real oddity of the period, "Cry - Blood" mixed Gregorian monk chanting with a post-punk dub sensibility. While it was released slightly before Enigma's "Sadeness" which unexpectedly rose to Number One in the early part of 1991, its subsequent credibility has nonetheless probably been slightly damaged by the obvious similarities.

Nonetheless, it's an incredibly uncommercial slice of minimalism which finds its groove early on and remains firmly locked into it. The shuffling rhythm is pure 1990, it's only the deep dub basslines and faintly jazzy riffs which make it sound outside of anything else being produced at this point.

Welfare Heroine consisted of NME journalist Dele Fadele - so the fact the track earned an NME single of the week is slightly suspect, to be frank - Dave Egan and Ian Jones. Like their labelmates The Honey Smugglers, they were very quickly dropped from Fiction's slightly half-arsed Non-Fiction subsidiary label after a couple of singles and left to fend for themselves.



5. The Shamen - Oxygen Restriction (One Little Indian)

"A sub bass collision with techno pop minimalism... but Teutonic it ain't"

The Shamen's unbroken run of tracks on the "Indie Top 20" series starts at Volume Three and ends right here, and it's been possible to track their evolution right through that period, from politically outspoken psychedelic guitar noiseniks to disco biscuit spiritualists. Seldom has one band changed their style so much and so recognisably in such a short space of time.

By this point, the group were poised to take on the world. "Oxygen Restriction" was a track on their LP "Entact" and was not actually released as a single, so it's hard to hear the commercial chops they had developed; but if you were in any doubt, "Ebeneezer Goode" wasn't terribly far around the corner.

As for "Oxygen Restriction", it is indeed a stripped back and bare piece of techno which judders by at a mid-tempo without leaving an enormous impression. It seems to have been dropped on to "Volume Eleven" of this LP to take advantage of The Shamen's rapidly growing reputation at this point. And perhaps, of course, it would have been a horrible pity to have left them off the tracklisting, since they had been such mainstays until this point.

By Volume Twelve, however, we will find ourselves doing without them.

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Volume 10 Side 4 - Pixies, Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes, Teenage Fanclub, Telescopes, Carter USM

1. Pixies - Velouria (4AD)

"...is taken from Pixies fourth LP 'Bossanova'".

"Velouria" is a strange one, by general standards at least. It comes crashing through your stereo speakers like an epic rock tune at first, scaling a mountain-face like David Lee Roth at his keenest, but constantly gets distracted on its way. It seems to be constantly building towards some grand anthemic chorus, only to deliver Frank Black's barked shout of "Velouria! My Velouria!" It beckons you forward with one hand, then pushes you away with the other.

It's still a strangely beautiful record, though, from those scaling, powerful verses right down to the Kim Deal vocalised outro. It's slightly unpredictable form also creates something a damn sight more interesting than your bog-standard piece of FM rock, twisting and turning around to ensure there's more to draw you back than the obvious initial hooks. Truly horrible and pointless video, though, which looks more like a "Chart Show" home-brew effort than an official product.

This was the group's first Top 40 hit in the UK, peaking at number 28.



2. Jesse Garon and The Desperadoes - Grand Hotel (Avalanche) - Vinyl and Cassette Only

"Shine on Patrick Magee, shine on! Ceadh mile failte."

Mmm. As a teenager, I found the references to the Brighton Grand Hotel bombing in this song exhilarating and hilarious, and considered it a true piece of punk rock. Now it feels uncomfortable - a key indication, if any were needed, that we get less flippant about these artistic gestures as we get older. Also, it perhaps shows how politically divided Britain was in 1990, with bilious and murderous hatred being targeted at those who weren't on the correct side of the left-right divide from a variety of sources, and never mind anyone else who might happen to be caught in the firing line. Ladies and Gentlemen, those were the days, and we're set to recreate those days...

Jesse Garon and The Desperadoes were actually old-school Scottish indie-poppers from the mid-eighties who seemed rumly out of place with the rest of Volume Ten's offerings. That said, "Grand Hotel" sits neatly enough next to "Velouria" with its abrasive sound and angelic female backing vocals. It's also a total headrush of a track, scruffy and scuzzed up but ferocious and full-on - an innocent slice of C86 this isn't, obviously.

It was also an unusual Indie Top 20 track in that it wasn't a big seller at the time, even in indie terms, and one EP later (the "Hold Me Now" extended play issued in November 1990) and the group would be no more. Its appearance on this compilation was the first time I was ever made aware of it. Even the Daily Mail's feathers clearly weren't ruffled by its existence, and it seemed to slip under a lot of people's radars. The eighties had been filled to the brim with furious, stabbing and occasionally controversial left-wing records or even anarcho-punk records - the steady flow would continue into the nineties until John Major's government was at its absolute weakest, but interest post-Thatcher began to deplete quite rapidly. The Family Cat's B-side "Bring Me The Head Of Michael Portillo" is the most recent example I can think of, but there may be others which you good readers can think of...



3. Teenage Fanclub - Everything Flows (Paperhouse)

"Teenage Fanclub are going to be as big as The Ronettes hairdos, the Beaverbrook Foundation and Van Gogh's sunflowers".

And the Scottish fuzziness and scuzziness continues. "Everything Flows" is a ballad hiding under a fog of grungey guitars. It's melancholy, snail-paced and yet slightly noisy too. Lyrically it's confused and vague - "I think about it every day/ but only for a little while/ and then the FEELING" sings Norman Blake. Enough said, obviously.

"Everything Flows" feels like waking up in the middle of the night from a dream about an ex, alone, and with a sleep-fogged brain, knowing that your past decisions perhaps weren't the wisest, and not certain that you're any more sure-footed in the present day. It ends with distorted guitars swimming all around the mix, never once picking up the pace or offering a clear resolution. It's beautiful in a horribly disconcerting way. Perhaps unsuprisingly, it was wildly popular with John Peel listeners and did indeed do a lot to launch Teenage Fanclub outside of their existing cult following.



4. The Telescopes - Precious Little (Creation) - Vinyl and Cassette Only 

"Obsession always was one of the most terrifying of human emotions. It's when the noise stops that you silently start to scream." - Melody Maker

We're on side four of Volume Ten of "Indie Top 20", and is that... can that... can that really be a contribution from Creation Records? Well, switch my knickers! Apart from contributing the video to Tangerine's "Sunburst" to one of the Indie Top Videos, they had avoided the series like the plague until now for reasons known only to Alan McGee.

Of course, "Precious Little" is a piece of distorted, sinister and not entirely reassuring noise about love, or perhaps as the Melody Maker scribe pointed out, obsession. Had it been written for my benefit, I think I would have been a bit worried. You could quite easily give the lyrics and the melody to a twee girl with an ukulele in the present day (note to anyone reading - please don't do this) - it certainly starts appropriately enough with "Precious little look outside the sea crashes for you" - but The Telescopes, being The Telescopes, ramp up the volume and turn it into a threatening, obsessive attack, not a simple love song.

It's not their finest single, in truth, but it's certainly never short of being interesting. Stick it on in the company of friends, and witness the silence afterwards.



5. Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine - Rent (Big Cat)

"I've been waiting half of the twentieth century for my housing benefit so that I can pay my rent, I am pissed off" - Fruitbat.
"I like the Pet Shop Boys and I'm more than happy to make them a little bit of cash to help them out, stuff the Poll Tax" - Jim Bob.

The second cover version on Volume Ten takes the same approach of taking the basic template of the original but completely transforming it. Or, if your views of this are unfavourable, it might feel actually as if Carter simply scrawled childishly and furiously all over the Pet Shop Boys original melody with a variety of Crayola crayons.

Obviously, The Pet Shop Boys version of "Rent" was largely deemed to be about male prostitution (subsequently denied by Neil Tennant in recent years) something I doubt either Jim Bob or Fruitbat would have been terribly successful at. Perhaps because of that, rather than due to a deliberate misunderstanding, they seem to have made it about paying the rent in general and turning into a screaming punk assault. It starts calmly enough with a gentle (if cheap) synthesiser pulse, then slowly begins to rumble like a volcano before exploding into a disconnected, screaming rant about the contents of DSS forms.

An unpopular view started to form approximately around this time that Carter were like a rather punkish take on very late Pink Floyd - and when I say "late Pink Floyd", I very much mean the Roger Waters dictatorship years. Initially that might sound ridiculous, until you surf away and listen to "Not Now John" and hear similar spittle, samples, swearing, despair and melancholy rolled into one ball, just with much more careful production values (and classier backing vocals and more saxophones). Even the epic war ballads on "The Final Cut" with their tinkling pianos bore vague similarities to the likes of Carter's take on "The Impossible Dream". Whatever your general view, "Rent" here sounds truly hilarious at first, then weirdly gripping thereafter. It's a marvellous tantrum of a cover.

It was the flipside to their single "Rubbish" rather than an A-side, obviously, so its inclusion here is a bit strange. Clearly either the band or Beechwood Music deemed it more worthy, but I'm glad I got to hear it when I did.