Kenickie - At The Club
So it’s early 1997. Oasis are a matter of months away from strapping Britpop to their motorbike and heaving its tired carcass over the metaphorical shark. Blur have already evolved their way out of the scene by indulging their Pavement fantasies on their eponymous classic. And Kenickie, with characteristically disastrous timing are about to unleash their debut album At The Club.
Orbital II
Rave culture emerged with such a bang in 1988 that most of its vast following was left in an ecstasy fuelled daze for the remainder of the decade. It wasn’t until the early nineties that some of the producers of the era’s finest tracks began to realise the artistic potential of the acid sound. After all, the warehouse parties weren’t about standing around watching men with long hair masturbate guitars. It wasn’t about image or attitude or ego. It was about the crowd, and it was about dancing.
The Bluetones - Expecting To Fly
There’s a heavy weight bearing down on bands when it comes to naming début albums.
It could make people pick up or turn away – it could make the difference between a lasting career or a brief day basking in the warming sun of musical success.
The Bluetones’ 1996 début was named Expecting To Fly, which spoke more volumes about the band than they could have with their music.
It was a record that tied up their fearful ‘dare to hope’ attitude with a small amount of self-assurance, well-placed in their understanding that they had talent, dammit, and people would see that.
And they did, for a time. Expecting To Fly fired Oasis’ (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? from the number one spot, which was a grand measure of popularity indeed. … Continue Reading
Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
Scathing lyrics, a sinister marriage between guitar and bass, militaristic drumming and a heavy reliance on semitones, minor thirds and clash-clash-clash dissonance. It’s THE album by the Manic Street Preachers – it’s The Holy Bible, of course.
Mark Morriss - Sick
Remember when Britannia ruled
and everyone wanted to be photographed in 10 Downing Street?
Academy 2, Manchester – 06.10.2007
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the summer of 1996. In the aftermath of The Battle of Britpop, a new band emerged in a haze of psychedelia and incense. But after two rampaging rock albums laced with sitars and Sanskrit, as we welcomed in the millennium we bid farewell to Kula Shaker.
Seven years on and Kula Shaker’s return is yet to make an impact on many. For the benefit of those whose reaction to this interview is, “They’re still around?”, I launch into my questions with:
Muso’s Guide: So you’ve been away for a while, how does it feel to be touring again? (unfortunately directed at new member Henry ‘Harry’ Broadbent who discreetly reminds me he’s never been away).
Alonza Bevan (bassist): It’s marvellous but we’ve been back together for a couple of years now.
Muso’s Guide: How, then, has the reformation of one of the biggest British bands of the nineties passed so many by?
Alonza Bevan: We’ve been building it up very gradually, we just wanted to play live and find our pockets again. So we’ve been doing that, trying to write new songs and playing them live in the last couple of years.
The band’s attempts to keep their return quiet included playing a small pub in Leighton Buzzard under the guise of The Garcons, although blackboards outside saying “Kula Shaker live tonight†may have given them away. However, I find staying under the radar for so long while perfecting the third album Strangefolk far more encouraging than churning out any old crap to cash in on a come-back.
Muso’s Guide: What do Kula Shaker think of today’s music scene, and is there still a place for you ten years on?
Alonza Bevan: It has changed, but we’ve still got loud guitars.
‘Harry’ Broadbent: Yes, guitars, drums, bass – we fit in perfectly. We never fitted in back then though, that’s the thing. We were never mad for it!
Muso’s Guide: Alonza, you don’t seem happy about being placed in the Britpop category back then – are you mad for it now?
Alonza Bevan: Maybe a little bit. Maybe we’re a bit more mad now.
Madness must pay off as Strangefolk is more than just a comeback album, it’s a masterpiece in its own right. It has the anthemic qualities of K, a bit less of the experimentalism of Peasants, Pigs and Astronauts but the added wisdom and experience of an older, more mature lyricist.
Muso’s Guide: The track that really intrigues me is ‘Song of Love/Narayana’, and I think to myself, have Kula Shaker covered The Prodigy?
Alonza Bevan: We did a collaboration with The Prodidgy and when Crispian originally sang and wrote those lyrics it was for another piece of music. Then cleverly, with their technology, they swapped it around so the voice was on another piece of music, so we swapped it back again and took the original music, and then he changed his vocal line on it!
Muso’s Guide: We’re confused!
Crispian Mills (frontman): Re-write mash up.
Alonza Bevan: It’s a good moment, big massive mantras, we love that.
That is, of course, what Kula Shaker are known best for, entire songs written in Sanskrit, combining traditional British rock with psychedelic visions and their use of Eastern mysticism and instrumentation. So I half expected them to want to explain hidden spiritual messages in their music, and was taken by surprise by their light-heartedness.
‘Harry’ Broadbent: I like the hippy second half of the album…’Fool That I Am’, that’s my current favourite.
This common misconception that Kula Shaker take themselves too seriously may have been the reason for the softly softly approach of their comeback. There is a more laid-back delivery of Mills’ political attacks in the new material, and with comic delights such as ‘Great Dictator’, there is also a real sense of fun. The live show is no exception, as Kula Shaker are preceded by Dr Joel, a south Indian vocal percussionist who must be seen to be believed, putting a packed Academy Two into incredibly high spirits (or is that just the incense?).
Kula Shaker enter the stage, sharply dressed in tailored suits, to a series of clips from cult movies, which have also been a source of inspiration in their latest videos. And then psychedelic rock n roll fills the venue and old meets new as ‘Hey Dude’ slots in perfectly next to ‘Out on the Highway’. For anyone who had forgotten Kula Shaker it’s a real wake up call to how bloody good they were! In the middle of all the madness, Crispian strums the opening to ‘Shower Your Love’ for a truly spiritual hands in the air type moment, a chill out tune to rival ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
Crispian commands the stage and works his magic not just as a performer, but a conductor, a great dictator and spiritual leader. For the final song, the band begin an eastern sounding build up and you know it could only be ‘Govinda’. As Crispian sings the Sanskrit lyrics, he conducts the audience with fascinating flowing arm movements until, as if by some miracle, everyone in the Academy is singing in a foreign tongue.
Welcome back to the cult of Kula Shaker.
There are those subscribing to a certain school of thought, uttering their views far away from the earshot of the sometimes fanatical, dyed-in-the-wool Morrissey-ites. They suggest that The Smiths and Morrissey’s solo forays, due to the attitude and lyrics concealed in the material, would have benefited from more robust and faster paced accompaniments than they were generally afforded.
Well, Morrissey is on the brink of releasing a greatest hits collection to celebrate twenty years plus of going it alone. This new single, one of two new songs to appear on that forthcoming album, possesses spikier riffs and a generally quicker pace for old Maudlin Morrissey’s vocals.
Therefore, the chance to compare this approach against the old one is afforded the perfect opportunity. Maturity is espoused and life perspective is proffered with assurance and wisdom. Is this the start of a new Morrissey?
Picturedrome, Holmfirth – 22.09.2006
For those of you unfamiliar with settlements in West Yorkshire, let me explain. Holmfirth is an idyllic place not very far from Huddersfield, and is widely-known as the place where Last Of The Summer Wine was filmed. Not too far from Sid’s Cafe, Hounslow’s The Bluetones were playing in a working, albeit antiquated, cinema.
The venue was unique enough for the band to comment on it; as they stood on the stage in front of the cinema screen, the audience squashed into a small standing space at the front, or sat in the worn old rows of cinema chairs. Mark Morriss and his band have been around so long that they barely raise an eyebrow in most circles, except for those who are surprised that they are still together.
The Bluetones suffer from a problem that is faced by many, many established bands: the need to get the new music across to an audience who have come to hear the old stuff. Morriss is almost apologetic in his cause, and promises to play some classics within the set. We are even treated to ‘Slight Return’, a song that the band vowed never to play again a few years back.
The songs from the new album sound like The Bluetones always have, and present songwriting qualities that show what has kept them in the business all these years. Their Britpop stylings are still obvious in new single ‘My Neighbour’s House’, which goes down well, as do the glut of old singles: ‘If’, ‘Solomon Bites The Worm’, ‘Keep The Home Fires Burning’ and encore closer ‘Bluetonic’.
Morriss coos “I don’t love you anymore” in the song of the same name, taken from their forthcoming self-titled album.
The question is, how can you fail to love The Bluetones?
Funny how it all falls away… Let’s get things straight from the start. Pulp are up there with The Beatles, The Bee Gees and ABBA as the crème de la crème of world pop. Not that you’d ever hear ABBA singing about life oop north and its grimy bedsits, but that’s beside the point.
Does anyone else remember a TV show called Naked City? I’m sure it’s not just something I dreamt (unlike the romantic tryst between myself and Eddie the Eagle Edwards that scarred me for a while but was definitely not real). Well it was on Naked City that I first saw Eddie (Izzard not The Eagle) AND Babies by Pulp. Life-affirming stuff indeed.
His ‘N’ Hers is bristling with confusion, teenage assignations, pervery, hopes, dreams, mistakes and tiny, tiny but overwhelming sadnesses. Catchy as a rash pop gems such as Babies, Lip Gloss, Do You Remember The First Time? rub up along danker sexual soirées from Acrylic Afternoons and She’s A Lady. Finger pointing and lofty superiority are executed deftly within that millimetre turning circle between arrogance and worthiness on Joyriders.
At times Jarvis is singing the sounds of sex, at times the sounds of brutal pity. Quotable and infinitely singalongable His ‘N’ Hers fills a whole in any lonesome night, reassures that while, yeah, your weirdest thoughts might not be strictly normal, they can at least be exciting.
Of course it was with the era-defining Different Class that Pulp cemented themselves in the intelligent, estate dwelling, commentating-and-shaping troubadour role, but like Bowie’s Hunky Dory sometimes the journey to the pinnacle is as exciting to watch as the main event itself.
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