Volume 15 Side 4 - Wolfgang Press, Moonshake, Spitfire, Daisy Chainsaw, Sultans of Ping FC

1. Wolfgang Press - A Girl Like You (4AD)

"The Wolfgang Press have been together now for the best part of a decade, in which time they have released a myriad of experimental work from the PiL influenced 'Burden of Mules' to last year's cover of Randy Newman's 'Mama Told Me Not To Come'. 'A Girl Like You' follows on from the success of their '91 'Queer' album".

Well, this is unexpectedly groovy and sultry - an indie take on Barry White, if you will, a short period before Pulp emerged to reinvent themselves as the bedroom activity obsessed indie disco kings.

"A Girl Like You" wasn't a hit and was generally missed by most people at the time, but its growling, seductive style completely pre-empted the tendency for other indie bands to mine the seventies for sexy disco influences. Unlike some of their overly ironic or musically inept peers, though, Wolfgang Press manage to create something that's so slickly produced that you could almost imagine it being a relic of that era. It's so smooth you could almost slip over and do yourself an injury on it. This is a work of admiring emulation rather than rude and slapdash parody.



2. Moonshake - Secondhand Clothes (Too Pure)

"Hailing from various corners of Hackney, Moonshake have quickly established themselves as one of the most innovative bands around. This, the band's second single, captures perfectly their experimentation with hip-hop beats and dub bass sounds and like its predecessor found its way into the upper reaches of the independent charts. Moonshake are a four piece consiting of Margaret Fielder on vocals and guitar, Dave Callahan vocals and guitar, John Frenelt on bass and Mig on drums. They will be releasing their debut LP on Too Pure in October '92"

And of course, Dave Callahan had previously been a member of Indie Top 20 stalwarts The Wolfhounds, who we've already discussed several times over. Moonshake retained his furious, agitated lyrical observations and vocal delivery, but pitched them against deep dub basslines and urban beats. The net result sounded like nothing we'd heard before - comparisons to Public Image Limited were perhaps inevitable, but Moonshake's ideas were much more rounded. The fury is there, but the attack is carefully directed with a calm but vengeful precision.

"Secondhand Clothes" begins like a relatively simple indie track, then gradually gets swamped with squally discordant riffs which almost resemble experimental jazz in places. The net end result is a song that slowly sucks you into its nightmare. "They smelt of ghosts... strangled all my hopes" sings Margaret Fielder about thrift store clothing, shortly before another sonic attack arrives. It's not a happy sounding record, but Moonshake produced unique and daring material which sat way outside the usual pigeonholes that most 1992 groups contentedly sat in. To me, this always sounded like an entirely appropriate and slightly frightening noise to have emerged from the rough edges of London society - and make no mistake, Hackney was ROUGH in those days.



3. Spitfire - Wild Sunshine (Eve)

"Spitfire wear tight back trousers and winkle pickers. They've got long hair and frightening confidence. They describe themselves as 'one of the most talented bands around at the moment'. The NME recently commented that Spitfire are 'sleek, fast and sexy'. Just remember, it's not the car, it's not the plane, it's the attitude".

"Wild Sunshine" does a very good job of continuing my theory that Spitfire simply landed at the wrong time - it's a wah-wah infested rock jam which speeds along like its life depends on it, kicking any doubters out of the way. Ocean Colour Scene were effectively still a baggy band at this point, but they'd have killed to have been riffing and rattling along in this determined a way five years later.

It is a track which demonstrates more "attitude" and instrumental prowess than songwriting skills, though, and it did sound slightly out of place in 1992. You can't fault Spitfire's execution - the drumming here in particular is utterly formidable - it's just they always sounded as if they were having a far better time than most listeners, wrapped up in their own noise, flicking the Vs merrily as they went along. As documented on here before, the one time I caught them live they furiously told the audience off for not enjoying their performance enough. That's proper rock and roll arrogance, folks.



4. Daisy Chainsaw - Pink Flower (One Little Indian)

"AC/DC, Bowie, Can, Dead Boys, Everly Brothers, Fugazi, The Gap Band, Hendrix, Iggy, Joy Division, Kinks, Lords of the New Church, Motown, No Means No, Orange Juice, Psychedelic Furs, Suzi Quatro, Rufus, Supremes, Temptations, Uriah Heep, Gene Vincent, Stevie Wonder, XTC, Young Gods, Tabitha Zu... with a list of influences this long and varied, Daisy Chainsaw can  be nothing else except out of this world".

Following "Love Your Money", there was an expectation that Daisy Chainsaw would continue having chart hits and eventually become a band with a large, devoted cult following. In reality, their work tended to be met with both critical derision and public confusion, and they quickly slipped back underground again.

"Pink Flower" is an example of where this problem arose from, being quite literally a song of two distinct halves - the treble-heavy uncomfortable thrash of the first part, sounding almost but not quite like "Love Your Money Part 2", rapidly followed by the disorientating and bewildered sounding post-punk ambience of the last two minutes. It's jabbering, psychotic, agitated sounding art-punk, effectively, containing as many child-like twists and turns as a Cardiacs single, and really wasn't something most indie kids felt ready for at this time.

Minor fame also seemed not to agree with the lead singer Katie Jane Garside, who slipped away after their debut LP "Eleventeen" to apparently "go into seclusion", leaving the group to release one more LP in 1994 - "For They Know Not What They Do" - with Belinda Leith on vocals instead. Later, various members would be reunited with their original frontwoman in Queen Adreena, but so far as the early nineties were concerned, their work rose up into the mainstream like a terrifying swamp hydra before disappearing just as suddenly again, leaving people with only baffled memories. Did it really happen, or was it all a dream? Oh it did. It really happened.



5. Sultans of Ping FC - Stupid Kid (Rhythm King)

" ...The Sultans follow-up to their mind-boggling debut single 'Where's Me Jumper', a pean to the horrors of losing one's best jersey at the discotheque. Their debut album will be released around September '92". 

Sounding like a cheeky Spitting Image parody of The Fall at their most absurd, "Where's Me Jumper" was hilarious for the first three listens but rapidly became very trying. How many times did your favourite indie club DJ finish the evening with its nonsensical, barking prattle? I think I counted thirty times with mine, and that's possibly a conservative estimate. No, I don't need to be reminded of how it goes, thank you. It's etched on to my memory like the five times table. Still, it was easy to dance to like an idiot by yourself, which could be a comfort at difficult moments.

Most people banked on Sultans of Ping being a joke band with only one idea to their name, but they were a surprisingly deathless force in the early nineties, continuing with a string of quirky singles which managed to land reasonably respectable Top 75 places. "Stupid Kid" is another piece of agitated adolescent observational comedy, this time focussed on pseudo-intellectual student youths who in reality have as much depth as an episode of "Made in Chelsea". "Oh yeah! I like your rounded glasses/ make you look real coooool/ make you look real CLEVER!" sneers Niall O'Flaherty sarcastically, before turning his attention to the other pretensions the girl on the end of his accusing finger has. Trouble is, the line "Most of all, you like men with big bodies" always sat uneasily with me, as if this were the most damning thing you could say about someone. Had the skinny indie star, perchance, been given the cold shoulder by the stupid but probably quite attractive kid on question, and was now throwing a bit of a tantrum about it?

Whatever was going on, this is two minutes of jabbing mockery, and isn't going to go down in the history books as being any sort of indie classic. For some of us born around the early seventies, though, it will remain almost as dominant a memory as their first single, partly due to the equally enthusiastic manner club DJs got behind it in our teens and early twenties. In retrospect, I have to wonder if my local DJ, upon seeing lots of teenagers on the dancefloor gibbering "La-la-la, la-la-la, yeah yeah, la-la-la" in unison, thought "What a bunch of pricks - I'm surely too old to be dealing with this bullshit?" And if he didn't, he probably should have. After all, what were any of us but stupid kids while dancing along to this two minute burst of punk noise? In fact, what were any of us but stupid kids in general? Perhaps Sultans of Ping were more insightful than we ever gave them credit for, beckoning us with one hand, then pointing and laughing at us with the other.

Volume 14 Side 4 - Gallon Drunk, Daisy Chainsaw, Shonen Knife, Captain America, The Pastels

1. Gallon Drunk - Some Fool's Mess (Clawfist)

"Thundering out of London come Gallon Drunk, with this, their fourth single for Clawfist. This sexy little blistering baby ploughed the independent charts for two months and established the band as the slicked-back gentlemen of dynamic tunes. These righteous preachers released their debut LP in February. How can anyone go wrong with Gallon Drunk? After all, they do smoke their own!"

Gallon Drunk were yet another one of those indie bands you couldn't seem to escape in the media throughout 1992 and 1993, even being nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 1993 for their album "From The Heart of The Town". A peculiar mix of influences from twangy fifties rock and roll, through to The Birthday Party, blues, garage rock and sixties film soundtracks, they produced a unique cocktail which shook up the occasionally quite unadventurous and dour early nineties gig circuit.

"Some Fool's Mess" is probably their best known single, and highlights their strengths well - filled with drama and menace, it rattles along urgently, fuelled by a nagging, twangy guitar riff and discordant car-crash organ breaks. It's the theme to every gothic fairground nightmare, and hardly anybody else was making a noise like this in 1991.

The group remain active, and continue to have a keen live following, to this day.



2. Daisy Chainsaw - Love Your Money (Deva)

"Daisy Chainsaw are a London foursome whose debut 45 'Lovesick Pleasure' set the world alight in January of this year. Achieving airplay on daytime radio and crashing into the Top 40, Daisy Chainsaw are definitely going to be the surprise success of '92".

Careful with the use of the word 'definitely', Tim. "Love Your Money" was one of those wonderful moments which happen in music once in a blue moon - a self-released indie record which somehow managed to vault from the evening playlists on Radio One on to daytime radio, causing the likes of Simon Bates to declare that he had "discovered the new Transvision Vamp". The problem was, of course, that he hadn't. For starters, singer Katie Jane Garside really wasn't much of a Wendy James type (apart from the blondeness of her hair) and instead tended to lean towards a caricatured, childlike image. On stage, she seemed half-gleeful, half damaged, like a semi-starved child in her nightie scrabbling through the rubble of a house fire for spoils.

Also, while "Love Your Money" was a determined, full-throttle beast of a song, with its distorted, treble-heavy guitars and insistent chorus chant, a lot of the rest of their output was less straightforward and less radio-friendly. We'll come on to those moments eventually, but perhaps I should mention a packed live performance I saw at the height of their fame at a local club. There were two support acts that evening - one was a performance arts group who seemed to be following the Garside theme of worrying childlike imagery, featuring a woman with her hair in bunches and a vacant smile rattling away on an old-fashioned typewriter while being yelled at by a disturbed looking man. The other support were Sheep on Drugs, who chased the performance artists offstage like unwanted rodents when their turn in the spotlight came, with a yelled "Get the fuck off my stage!" And all this was before Katie Jane Garside emerged onstage babbling away with a rictus grin. I would genuinely struggle to recall the events surrounding other gigs I saw in 1992 in such detail, but moments like this are rare.

The baffled expressions from some audience members were also memorable, and it was clear that this was a group who were never seriously going to make a leap from the fringes to platinum success. They were weird and occasionally alienating - sometimes in a way that worked, and on other occasions in ways that appeared forced and faintly pretentious (the fact that Garside could sometimes be seen sucking on a child's milk bottle was, to be honest, a bit contrived and silly).

Brett Anderson, a member of a group nobody cared about called Suede, caught them live at around this time, and was moved enough to write "Metal Mickey" about Katie, but by the time it got released as a single he was strangely reluctant to reveal who his muse was. By that point, Daisy Chainsaw had largely disappeared back into the dark depths of the underground on the back of a slightly rough critical ride, and talking about being moved by their performances might have destroyed any credibility Suede had.



3. Shonen Knife - Space Christmas (Seminal Twang)

"Shonen Knife are three talented Japanese women whose debut 45 in the UK, 'Space Christmas', reached number one in the independent chart. After touring with Nirvana and Captain America, they are now attracting interest from Japanese, American and European record companies. Shonen Knife's 'Zany World of Animals, Sea Shells, Marshmallows and ice-cream' will be entering the lives of a lot more people over the coming months."

If Daisy Chainsaw were possibly, underneath the grime and the noise, trying to say something serious with their childlike approach - and I've never been able to quite make up my mind whether they were or not - Shonen Knife were just being absurd and playful. Their world of boiled sweets, ugly zoo animals, and bright primary colours combined with simplistic, garage punk riffs, and appeared to exist as part parodical pisstake (which, one suspects, was slightly lost in translation from Japan to the west) and part joyous adrenalin rush.

"Space Christmas" was a bemusing slab of festive vinyl which nonetheless set the group up as cult figures in the UK from that point forth. It's difficult to analyse its Ramones inspired approach to songwriting in any depth, and it would probably be foolish to do so - however, the naive frivolity of it makes it one of the best indie Christmas singles of the last twenty-five years. It's a world where Santa is dragged along in his sleigh by bisons and the arrival of Christmas Eve seems like a momentous occasion again. Many years later I would find myself spending Christmas Day in a traveller's hostel in New Zealand, and watching Japanese travellers experience a "western" Christmas for the first time, the song remained trapped in my head. Not all approached the wine and party poppers enthusiastically, though - one gentleman sat in the corner with his head in his hands and his wine untouched, and looked as if he was about to cry. Anyway...



4. Captain America - Wow! (Paperhouse)

"The rise of Captain America over the past few months has been quite amazing. Fronted by ex-Vaseline Eugene Kelly, they recently supported Nirvana on their British and European tour as well as releasing their debut EP for Paperhouse. At the moment they are working on their first album which on the strength of 'Wow!' promises to be something else".

I'll give Nirvana one thing, they really helped to increase the visibility of all kinds of marginal indie figures. Captain America, of course, would not remain Captain America for long - their name violated the copyright of the Marvel comics character, and they would soon find themselves relaunched as Eugenius.

On the surface, "Wow!" is really just the Vaselines sound beefed up and given a grungier edge. Whereas The Vaselines were often thrashy, trashy and spindly in their work, Captain America have a much more muscular approach. The DIY punk elements remain intact, though, and it's uncanny how easily a C86 artist could leap into 1991 and be embraced into the bosom of grunge without anyone complaining.

Critically, though, "Wow!" is a fairly basic, chugging piece of punkorama, and didn't really change anyone's lives.



5. The Pastels - Thru' Your Heart (Paperhouse)

"After a two year absence The Pastels are re-establishing themselves on the independent music scene. A cover of Daniel Johnsons' 'Speeding Motorcycle' was their first proper release since the 'Sittin' Pretty' album of 1989. 'Thru' Your Heart' was a Melody Maker single of the week and bodes well for their forthcoming album, 'A Truckload of Trouble'".

Bit of an error in the above description - 'A Truckload of Trouble' was a compilation rather than a bona-fide Pastels studio LP, and mostly consisted of previously released material (It is great, though).

Where Eugene Kelly managed to find appreciation from American grunge superstars, Stephen Pastel remained a somewhat underground figure, but that's not overly surprising. The Pastels didn't push down on their distortion pedals like angry truckers trying to get their destination at double-speed - they produced frequently naive, delicate and rainy singles with chiming melodies. Even in 1991, you could sense their mid-eighties roots showing through.

"Thru' Your Heart" is probably one of their finest singles, though. Had it been written or even covered by an artist wishing to push it in a slicker or more commercial direction, it could actually have been a hit. It's an unashamedly romantic and wistful ballad, filled with heart squeezingly good guitar lines, lyrical asides which seem to underline the preposterousness of romance and ballads in general ("You'd never let me/ But I'd die for you") and simple but incredibly effective songwriting. Progressing from start to finish in an effortlessly fluid way and packaged up as one neat, carefully bundled parcel of a tune in a heart-shaped box, it's The Pastels at their finest. It's also possibly the only track on this compilation I still listen to frequently, if I'm being honest.



And on that note, may I just say that I'm so glad this volume is done and dusted now. It's arguably the darkest and dingiest Indie Top 20 volume of them all, and while it's not without some good moments, it's incredibly difficult to listen to from start to finish.