Volume 23 Tracks 11-16 - Babybird, Heavy Stereo, Pusherman, 60ft Dolls, 18 Wheeler

11. Babybird - Goodnight (Echo)

In the midst of all the hype around Britpop related artists at the time, Stephen Jones - aka Babybird - was an unusual and much discussed character. Issuing three LPs in 1995 and a further three in 1996, of which all but one were recorded on his home four-track recording studio, he represented a side of indie that was in danger of becoming forgotten amidst the flag-waving - innovative, intelligent, unusual and cutting ideas produced by mavericks on a low budget. In retrospect, many of his early records are patchy and perhaps too raw for their own good in places, but they were imaginative and even amusing in a way that the latest big releases often weren't.

Given the volume of press attention and late night radio play he was getting, an army of record company A&R employees began ringing Stephen Jones's phone, despite the fact that that almost all had sent him abrupt rejection letters a mere couple of years before. The first non-bedroom LP, "Ugly Beautiful", was the final result on Echo and allowed Jones to flesh out some of his ideas into bigger sounding productions.

"You're Gorgeous" was his biggest hit and remains the song that allows people to labour under the misapprehension that he's a one-hit wonder. In fact, "Goodnight" was a minor hit before that single broke through, and is arguably the better track. While a large part of the appeal of "You're Gorgeous" lies in its satirical, table-turning, gender based observational lyrics, "Goodnight" is driven by sharp hooks. From the atmospheric keyboard sounds in the opening bars through to the urgent, pressing guitar riff, it's actually a brilliant pop track married to particularly surreal lyrics about relationship frustrations. "Run me a bath, and plug me in/ I'm like a TV learning to swim" sings Jones at one point, which was much mocked at the time, but that may be because mid-nineties listeners expected wry observational lyrics or re-heated sixties cliches, not bursts of bizarre imagery.

To this day, "Goodnight" feels both extraordinarily commercial and yet strangely alienating and bitter. Babybird would slowly drift back underground with ever-decreasing sales for each successive album, but even Gary Barlow had to remark on Jones's keen pop sense when he was asked to review the 1999 single "Together Again" on a TV pop panel. "That's going to be a huge hit", he predicted confidently. It wasn't. It did get to number 22, though, which would be the last time Babybird ever entered the top thirty.



12. Heavy Stereo - Mouse In A Hole (Creation)

By now, most people had accepted that Heavy Stereo were not going to be rock stars, and they had begun to sink from view in the music press and on the radio. "Mouse In A Hole" sounds appropriate under the circumstances, being melancholic and lost sounding, meandering around various sixties styled melodies like the Small Faces at their most despairing.

It's not bad, actually, but it didn't sound like much of a single, and indeed it wasn't. Their fourth and final release, it failed to do what was needed for the group and give them a hit. It instead peaked at number 53, and they split up not long afterwards.

Gem Archer eventually joined Oasis, attracting interested stares in his local pub when he walked in shortly after joining forces with the Gallaghers. This led to the sadly departed comedian Sean Hughes commenting loudly: "He’s in here all the fucking time but until now he’s just been that cunt from Heavy Stereo".



13. Pusherman - The Aim Indeed (Ignition)

I caught Pusherman live in Portsmouth - the lead singer Andy Frank's hometown - in 1996, and they came across as a bunch of slightly bedraggled, decadent dudes producing sprawling, heavy but atmospheric songs. Like a slightly nastier and meaner version of The Verve, there was a darkness at the core of what they did. You couldn't imagine a member of Pusherman claiming they could go astral flying, they seemed much more likely to be the types to sell you drugs laced with Happy Shopper Vim that would make you think you could, before you keeled over helplessly.

Drugs were both in the group's name and a part of their lifestyle, with issues with heroin becoming increasingly problematic over time. "The Aim Indeed" doesn't hint at that, but is a peculiar mix of Britpop attitude and harsh psychedelia. It's threatening and arrogant while also being disorientating and complex, something the majority of the bands of the era didn't quite manage to do. Squeals of feedback meet heavy dub-styled basslines and snarling vocals, and I've only realised listening back to it now quite how out of sorts with the era it was.

The group received ecstatic press, but it all amounted to nothing and they soon disintegrated. The lead singer Andy Frank eventually died in 2008, aged 42.



14. 60ft Dolls - Talk To Me (Indolent)

"Talk To Me" is really 60ft Dolls at their snappiest and most straightforward, sounding for all the world like an early Jam track. Caustic, energetic and swinging, it's almost a pop song, but never quite finds a way of easing off enough to appease the Radio One pop kids.

Nonetheless, it was their biggest hit, reaching number 37, despite the fact that later singles "Stay" and the fantastic "Alison's Room" proved that the group were capable of writing songs with much more powerful hooks at their centre. Nowt as queer as the record buying public.

The group ceased activities after being dropped by Indolent in 1998, and lead singer Richard Parfitt went on to discover Duffy and help launch her career, as well as (somewhat unexpectedly) sessioning for Dido.



15. 18 Wheeler - Crabs (Creation)

18 Wheeler had been a long-standing signing of Alan McGee's, and were generally considered to be one of the outsider indie groups on Creation along with The Jasmine Minks and The Jazz Butcher - propped up by the charity and goodwill of the label rather than any expectation they would become mainstream artists.

By 1996 it seemed as if the band were having a change of heart, however, and were beginning to move from indie guitar noises to toy and experiment with Dance music sounds. "Crabs" shows how bouyant and anthemic they were at this point, combining Ravy Davy styled euphoric church organ sounds with crunching guitar noises and pulsing beats. In fact, it sounds not unlike the work of 21st Century baggy revivalists Swim Deep, creating the unusual effect of making 18 Wheeler sound far more current than almost any other group on this CD.

McGee got behind the group's change of direction with enthusiasm and pushed them with renewed vigour, even getting them to perform at the Labour Party Conference where they were incorrectly introduced by Tony Blair as "Wheeler 18". Despite all this, and despite a notable bump in their record sales, they never quite got noticed by the general public and were dropped by Creation not long afterwards.

They are perhaps most notable for being the group Oasis were supporting when Alan McGee first discovered them, so there's an argument to be made for the fact that they were indirectly responsible for that group's success.

Volume 22 Tracks 6-10 - Ash, The Wannadies, Powder, Heavy Stereo, Intastella

6. Ash - Kung Fu (Infectious)

The anarchic, roaring stomp of "Kung Fu" felt like the moment Ash stopped being a fringe cult concern or a teen punk fanzine act, and began to scream through the speakers of evening radio like a serious proposition. It's a full-throttle delight, feeling chaotic enough to sound like a possible accident, but craftily hooky enough to cause listeners like me to suspect that the group were on their way up to bigger and better things.

It feels shorter than its allotted two-and-a-half minutes somehow, seeming like a peculiar minute-long rush of ideas all flashing past each other in an overwhelming fashion. It's not a work of melodic sophistication, as some of their later singles would try to be, but it lives up to its subject matter by feeling like several well-aimed chops to the body.



7. The Wannadies - Blister In The Sun (Indolent)

A somewhat odd inclusion on the compilation, this. It featured as the Swedish indie-pop sensations  flipside to the "You and Me Song", and seems to be another example of Beechwood picking a B-side over the more appreciated main track. A cover of the Violent Femmes song, it manages to jettison a lot of the charming lo-fi scrappiness of the original and replace it with a hard, rocking edge. For many listeners, that will probably cause it to lose an enormous amount of its original appeal - for me personally, it tightens up some of the original ideas and gives it a sheen which can potentially feel more appealing depending on what mood I'm in.

For such a cultish song, "Blister In The Sun" seems to have been covered by every bedroom boy or girl with a spare acoustic guitar and been on every advert and trailer on Earth now. In 1995, though, it was still a reasonably respectable, niche underground track before the floodgates burst open.

As for The Wannadies, they were huge in their native Sweden but never quite managed to have the major success predicted for them in the UK. A scattering of respectable but moderate chart positions later, they finally split up in 2009, but occasionally regroup for one off shows. While a lot of mid-tier Britpop bands around this period released cynical and plastic sounding bouncy songs with advertising jingle melodies, The Wannadies had a more intricate pop craft at their centre which was actually very welcome at the time, and there's no question they deserved at least a couple of bigger hits here.



8. Powder - Afrodisiac (Parkway)

Powder (often the group the entire Internet splutters "WHO?!" about whenever the BBC repeat their "Britpop Now" programme) were a peculiarly ever-present band throughout 1995. Signed by the PR gurus Savidge and Best to their Parkway label and fronted by Pearl Lowe, there were deeply held suspicions among some listeners that the band were mere "scenesters", hyped beyond measure and given opportunities above their rightful station. Lowe hit back by saying that they were signed by Parkway because they were "too uncommercial" to be on a major.

Unfortunately, I must admit to being one of the cynics. Powder are responsible for one of the most awful live music reviews I've ever written - awful in the sense that I absolutely lambasted the group and also awful in that, as with many scathing reviews, it reflected worse on me than the group themselves. I've long since shredded it in shame, but the irritation I felt around Powder had been building for some time, and peaked with a live show which was essentially a competent, pedestrian presentation of basic punk ideas delivered with smug arrogance and self-belief. Pearl Lowe strutted and pranced around, grinning from ear to ear, while delivering songs like "Afrodisiac" which sounded suspiciously similar to a lot of unsigned band demos I'd been hearing around the same time. Staring aghast at the band right at the top of the gig bill, I couldn't understand why them, or why now. 1995 wasn't short of chancers, of course. Menswear were often regarded as the top criminals in this respect, but what's often been overlooked since (even by some of their members) is that Menswear actually had at least three or four good tracks to their name. Powder didn't.

Listening to "Afrodisiac" again now, I still find myself cringing and getting increasingly angry when I hear the "It's a wrap/ take it back/ do ya feel crackerjack" chorus. Glued together in a mend-and-make-do fashion and then presented as the next big noise, it feels hollow - neither adrenalising, nor imaginative, nor witty, it's just another slice of slightly disappointing indie stomp.

Of course, far from brimming over with smugness and confidence, we've all since learned that Pearl Lowe ended up with serious drug addiction issues during this period. Sometimes it's difficult to remember that the stage persona in front of you is not necessarily the person as they really are, and nor does it reflect their self-belief or general state of mind at the time. Pearl Lowe's later musical work was also far more considered and much less scrappy than this, and Powder never really did make a proper album - so getting hot under the collar about their shortcomings really was a waste of my and everyone else's time.



9. Heavy Stereo - Sleep Freak (Creation)

Heavy Stereo were unfortunate enough to get signed to Creation right at the point when the music press were treating Alan McGee - aka The Man Who Signed Oasis - as an A&R guru who knew exactly where the action was. Getting news and gossip column inches purely on the basis of being the label's hottest new property, they were never really given a fair hearing, with opening expectations being far beyond reasonable.

When I first listened to "Sleep Freak" myself, my reaction was one of pure disappointment that the group clearly weren't the next big thing. As time wore on, however, its incessant glam stomp and power-driving chords won me over. In common with a number of other groups at this point, it half-inches ideas from a variety of sources, most notably T Rex and John Lennon's "Instant Karma", but manages to present something which sounds punchy and relatively fresh.

Heavy Stereo would never become proper contenders, and sure as hell weren't the "next Oasis", but frontman Gem Archer would later join the line-up of that band, which seems like a pretty reasonable runner-up prize.



10. Intastella - The Night (Planet 3)

Intastella had been around since the baggy era, and at the height of that movement were as critically acclaimed as many of their better known peers. Fronted by the confident, glitzy and glamorous Stella Grundy, tracks like "Dream Some Paradise" were minor club hits, but not big enough for their parent MCA Records, who were quick to drop them when baggy died.

The group are genuinely worthy of greater investigation if you haven't bothered already, and I'm saying this mainly because this cover of the Frankie Valli Northern Soul classic is a total misfire, and we won't get the chance to discuss them again. The original is filled to the brim with brassy flourishes, a rich atmosphere, creeping basslines and dramatic vocals, which are here replaced with a somewhat minimal electronic backing and slightly laissez-faire sounding vocals. Reduced to the basic kernal of its ideas, the band unfortunately "lose more than they found" and reduce it to a pulsing stomp - it's a good example of how a fantastic song can lose almost all of its appeal once its arrangement is radically altered.

Nonetheless, it acted as the group's fourth Top 75 entry, reaching number 60. They also continued until 1997, outlasting many of their peers.