Denim

I only just realised that I missed the 2nd Birthday of this place; I'd not expected it to last this long so it was a bit of an odd feeling, especially as more and more stuff keeps appearing in the Facebook group and in my email. So, to celebrate my belated birthday, have another band that I've been meaning to put up for ages and were promised back in July last year, yes, it's finally Denim!

Denim - Middle of the Road (right click, "save as..." to download)
Most of what I can say about the marvellous Lawrence Hayward - his supposedly OCD behaviour, his supposed eccentricity - is back in the Felt post from before, so I'll not go over old ground too much.

Suffice to say that after ten years of putting out Felt records, Lawrence split the band up, took a couple of years off and came back with Denim, a three piece with a far more polished and professional sound, unfortunately a couple of years before Brit Pop would break (and where the band would no doubt fit quite nicely), and we can only assume he was aiming at a whole new generation of indie kids; the first album "Back in Denim" was followed rapidly by the "Middle of the Road" single above; the follow-up album "Denim on Ice" was released four years later when Brit Pop had really taken hold. Blur and Oasis had already committed chart murder with their bloody Country House versus Roll With It shenanigans and we were seriously thinking of getting a new government.

Unfortunately, Denim on Ice didn't get the press coverage it deserved, it's a fantastic album and really should have made more of an impact - if you can face spending a fortune on ebay it really is worth getting hold of. Sadly for us and the face of indie, Laurence gave up with Denim and went off to do his own thing again with his newest band Go Kart Mozart.

So there you go, finally Denim get in. The Trouserpress page is very good and there's a wiki page needless to say.

Happy birthday!

Oh, and the first of Lawrence's new band's albums "Back in Denim"has recently been re-released.

Fat Tulips

We're covering two of my favourite musicky things today with the Fat Tulips; this one is a flexi disk and a cover. Two for the price of one! If only it was on Sarah Records it would be pretty much perfect...

So, Peterborough or Nottingham's (depending who you believe) Fat Tulips were formed around 1987 by artist Mark D (properly Mark Randall) and singer "Sarah C", who quickly left - if Wikipedia is to be believed - to study crop cirles in Peru. She was eventually replaced with the finalish line up of Sheggi Clarkson, Matt Johnson (not the one out of The The) and Paulie H; I couldn't tell you what the fascination with singularly letter-surnamed members is...

So, the band went about being populatr the old-fashioned way. They released a flexi disk before setting up their own label - Heaven - and getting a bit of Peel airplay and meandering about the early 90s twee scene for a few years, before splitting in about 1994.

Today's featured poptacular is this: a cover of Spandau Ballet's firsr release. The flexi in question is a split double-sided effort with Confetti, Mark D's side project.

Fat Tulips - To Cut A Long Story Short (right click & "save as" to download.
Of course, there is a wiki page as well.

Th' Faith Healers

Once more into the London-based world of swooping, swirling indie rock today with Th' Faith Healers, a rather good band that plied their trade on the indie circuit from (probably) 1990 to 1994; and jolly good they were too, despite what is universally considerd to be an unhealthy fixation with Krautrock.

The band were really good live, produced some belting singles and almost had a crack at the really big time (not least as they supported The Breeders on a US tour) but unfortunately never really converted fanbase and critical success into the commercial fame they probably deserved before splitting. They re-formed in the early 2000s for one more crack at the big time, but apart from a short tour and a couple of re-releases, they've not really been seen since 2006, so they are ripe for a mention here.

The All Music Guide tells you most of what you'll need to know and this is a really good Faith Healers fan site which fills in a lot of gaps, so again I'll not copy left, right and center and suggest you pop over there for a read. Oh, and of course the band have, as is fashionable, one of those new-fangled Myspace pages for even more.

Here you go, have Th' Faith Healers - My Loser, an only available in the US on blue vinyl limited edition 7" and everything.

I can heartily recommend buying Th' Faith Healers' Peel Sessions by clicking here

Pop Will Eat Itself

Time for some spring cleaning of the indie notebook I carry around in my dapper manbag. I've been meaning to put Pop Will Eat Itself on here for ages, but keep getting side-tracked by obscurities and bands I'm only just discovering; so it's nice to finally get round to putting on a band I really used to like. I do keep forgetting that some of these bands, although they're "famous" to me and most of the people that read this page, there are still people that have never heard of them. Poor people.

So, another bunch of West Midlands scamps, cut from the same cloth as Ned's Atomic Dustbin, The Wonderstuff and the Senseless things to name but a few, PWEI were probably one of the most prolific and well known of the early 1990s indie bands; they knocked out singles and albums at an incredible rate and, along with CUD and Carter, were probably one of the most recognisable and critically acclaimed bands of the time.

You knew where you stood with PWEI, if one of their records came on in a club then everyone would be up and dancing and you knew that when the NME had a photo of Cint Mansell on you were going to get a good story. You knew that you were going to get a good show if you went to see them live and by crikey you knew a single was going to be a good shouty sing-a-long of a bit of vinyl.

Of course, the Wikipedia Page covers most of what you need to know and this Pop Will Eat Itself - Bulletproof; is a taster of what we're missing. Although, of course, they did play a comeback tour in 2005...

You can buy Pop Will Eat Itself's best of "PWEI Product 1986-1994: The Pop Will Eat Itself Anthology" by clicking here. You really should.

Jacob's Mouse

I should really draw up an indie map one day; granted most of this stuff will be Oxford, Glasgow or Manchester-based, but here's another entry for the agricultural wastelands of Suffolk.

Jacob's Mouse were a rather nice indie rock band with, and I feel this is important, identical twin brothers Jebb and Hugo Boothby playing bass and guitar. I don't think I've featured twins before; identical or otherwise.

Wikipedia says that they formed in 1991 and

"...despite some critical acclaim, and a successful UK tour supporting Babes in Toyland and Trumans Water, they failed to take the wider world by storm. Following the release of their Rubber Room LP in 1995, Jacob's Mouse split."

There's a good full biog on the Wiija site, so pop along there for more and as usual TrouserPress know all.

They seem to get tagged as "grunge" around the internet which seems rather unfair. Granted some of their stuff is more rock than the jingly jangly indie stuff we all know and love, but still. They recorded a couple of Peel Sessions and released some cracking records, so hats off to them and welcome to the blog.

This particular mp3 is a good ones as well, Jacob's Mouse - Company News, it's from the legendary Rough Trade Singles Club as well, nicely.

Oh, and you can buy Jacob's Mouse "No Fish Shop Parking" here.

Adorable

It's been a while so it's back to Creationland today with Coventry-based Adorable;

There's a few bits an pieces on the old internet about the band, not least on the VH1 site (referencing the All Music Guide again); which gives a nifty bit of the back story, and I also like the assertions on the "Proper Adorable homepage" that the band split "because of several factors: there were problems within the band, creation dropped them, etc", rather than no one wanted to buy their records because, and I apologise if I'm slandering anyone here, they were the shoegaze equivalents of Birdland; all big ideas and snooty interviews, but not as good as they thought they were.

Having said all that, I rather like the mp3 below, it's a snapshot of what indie bands were trying to do in 1992 and is certainly not that far from the Rides and Curves of this world. Maybe they should have been bigger, especially as they were on Creation and could obviously thrash out a pretty good tune when the mood took them; and the more I listen to this particular EP, the more I'm a bit disappointed I missed them the first time around, if I'd ever been any good at meeting hoopy-tighted indie girls, this would have been a belting record to put on the record player while you failed to get a snog out of them at the end of the night...

This is the eponymous first track of the band's first EP; Adorable - Sunshine Smile, and it's a bang on bit of Creationry if ever I've heard one, right down to the Dreams Burn Down-esque wailing guitar at the start. Oh, and you'll note the "I want to be Suede!" sleeve as well.

Buy "Footnotes: the Best of Adorable 1992-1994 "

Mambo Taxi

Congratulations Mrs Internet, it's a post about early 90s riot girl combo Mambo Taxi!

Well, it would be but I can't even remember whey I bought this single or anything else about the band. The best bit of information I could find is from Stewart Mason's All Music Guide and goes like this:

"The short-lived all-female combo Mambo Taxi was born out of the U.K. garage rock scene of the early '90s, but their music mixed garage with punk, pop, and dance influences. The first-names-only group consisted of Delia (ex-Cornershop, future Family Way and Baby Birkin) on guitar and vocals, Ella on vocals and guitar, Andrea on keyboards, Lenie on bass, and Karin on drums. (Karin was later replaced by Huggy Bear's Anjali.) Mambo Taxi released three singles, 1992's "Prom Queen," 1993's four-song EP "Poems on the Underground," and 1994's "Do You Always Dress Like That?" as well as one album, 1994's In Love With Mambo Taxi, before splintering later that year."

Mambo Taxi were part of the "Riot Grrrl" movement of the early 90s, a group of shouty ladies in such illustrious bands as Huggy Bear, Bikini Kill and Babes in Toyland; all bands that were full of energy and oestrogen and who were far more interesting than the latter day Girl Power shit of the Spice Girls et al.

Well, as it's Christmas and this is a pretty crappy post, can I make it up to you by offering you an mp3 of Mambo Taxi - Prom Queen? You'd like that? Well, Merry Christmas to you then! And here's my card to you. Print it out and imagine I posted it to you. For real excitement, why not staple a five pound note to it?

The Pooh Sticks

More jingly jangly Welsh indie pop today with The Pooh Sticks. Although they keep cropping up on blogs lumped in with twee and shoe-gazing music, we all know they were far more pop than that, and if there'd been any spirit of humour and irony in music in 1991 they'd have been far more successful than they were.

Let's face it, if Blur can drive the country wild by knocking out shit like Country House, then such pop-comedy-classics "Indie-pop ain't Noise Pollution" and "I Know Someone who Knows Someone who knows Alan McGee Quite Well" deserved more than a brief mention in the NME's indie charts.

If you want a good biography, visit The Pooh Sticks fan page (it's on Tripod, so get it while it's hot!) For the meantime, take this from the same site:

Perpetual teenagers and perennial losers, The Pooh Sticks are the best-kept secret of the British indie scene. This is a band that swears eternal allegiance to the unholy trinity of the MC5 ("Back in the USA" era), 60s bubblegum music and mid-70s big pop. Girls are 'groovy' and, for the men, slouching and smoking in the boys' room are compulsory, as the sweet dreams of sussed but cute adolescence burn long and deep.

Formed by Hue Williams (vocals) in late 1987, the line-up was completed by Trudi Tangerine (tambourine/piano), Paul (guitar), Alison (bass) and Stephanie (drums) - they are loath to reveal their surnames. The early sound was a bizarre genre-hopping hybrid of two-minute jangle pop, 'enthusiastic' harmonizing, three-chord punk, girl-group cuteness and, beneath it all, a sharp wit aimed squarely at the po-faced indie scene of the time.

In the best spirit of marketing disasters ... early Pooh Sticks singles were released in a boxed set, prior to being transferred on to the debut album, Pooh Sticks (1988). Japery occasionally lapsed into tweeness ('Goody goody gumdrops, my heart is doing flip flops'), but generally The Pooh Sticks sidestepped smugness in favour of genuine charm and enthusiasm.

So here you go, some cracking early 90s Monkees-style indie pop to listen to: The Pooh Sticks - The World Is Turning On in all it's 'less than two minutes long' glory. Bloody lovely stuff it is too.

Oh yeah, and this particular mp3 is copied from a really fantastically warped blue vinyl 7" single. Don't let anyone tell you that digital downloads are the best way of listening to music. Oh, don't get me wrong, you can use the above to capture the overall essence, but I've got a wobbly 7" that you need to put a weight on so it plays; and even then it's 50:50 whether you'll get the whole thing. That's music. The kids of today just don't understand. Wankers.

Oh, and you can have the video too if you like:

Kitchens of Distinction

I get a lot of google searches for Kitchens of Distinction coming in to this page from an earlier mention, so it's about time I got about to doing them properly.

Looking about, you get a nice little quote about the band here:

Formed Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1987; Cult band Kitchens of Distinction like to shroud their origins in multiple myths. Sometimes they say that they met in a Turkish sauna; sometimes in a satanist temple in Amsterdam; sometimes - most credibly - at a Dutch gig by the reggae legend Burning Spear.

The band are/were another of the early 90s swooping guitar, wailing feedback, muffled vocals bands that we all love so much.

There's loads about the band around on the internet in places like the One Little Indian site, so I feel a bit like I'm cheating putting them up here, but at the very least I've posted one of these for September and let you have a listen to a nicely scratchy post-vinyl mp3 of one of my favourite recordings.

I've actually got a white label of this: Kitchens of Distinction - Breathing Fear, but it appears that there are more of them out there than actual bought versions, so I'm not going to retire on the profits just yet...

On a side note, there's a shop just up the road from where I used to live that advertises Kitchens of Distinction; it always raised a smile when I wallked past.

The Popinjays

Just for the sake of it, open this mp3 (The Popinjays - Monster Mouth) and take a guess at who produced it? Which influential indie legend was heavily involved in the career of the Popinjays?

Anyone who didn't answer "Why, Ian Broudie off of the Lightning Seeds" should probably leave now.

The problem now of course is that I remember nothing about the band other than they were a twee little band on the semi-mythical One Little Indians label. Oh, and if the sticker is anything to go by, my 7" version of the attached single apparently cost me 99p.

The entire wikipedia entry is:

Popinjays were a pop band from the late 1980s and early 1990s on One Little Indian Records. Members included Wendy Robinson and Polly Hancock.

Anyone able to help?

In the meantime, enjoy the top notch jingly jangly pop of the Popinjays; it's rather lovely and catchy. It makes me remember just how much fun being young and stupid in the early 1990s was.

Sugar Rays

A brief yet invogorating diversion here from vague recollection to absolute obscurity. Ladies and gentleman, I give you The Sugars Rays. Who the hell they were is something I think i'll never know, but they certainly infringe on 'indie pop' by the sounds of the attached mp3.

All I know about this flexi disk (I certainly have no idea where it came from, I'm not even 100% sure it's from 1992) is what's on the insert, a promotional quote that says:

"The Sugar Rays are Nottingham's finest cartoon guitar band. With a garage load of energy they leap and bound the smallconfines of the stage like they actually enjoy the music. And so you can't help liking them because you know they couldn't give a flying one about the number of record companies present. This attitude shows through the music which hooks and winds its way around the three minute song with nonchalant affection and grinning humanity."

And that's it, the one mention on the internet I can find is here: that seems to suggest this flexi is the only thing they ever created.

It seems like a bit of a shame, I've certainly heard an awful lot worse music scraping into the charts, and I'm pretty sure it holds up against some of the other stuff on here fairly well.

So here it is Sugar Rays - Sugar Rush. Surely this can't be the only living memory of the band? Shame. The Sugar Rays, we salute you (and then leave you in the box marked "HX2").

Hang on, it just occurred to me! ebay! Home of all the world's jumble! And there it is £2.99 ONO to you sir!

Midway Still

I guess this blog thing is called what it is because Midway Still are up there with the greatest of the early 90s indie pop bands. More directly it's called what it is because I was in the pub with my mate Rich and he made some lucid and forceful point about early 90s indie pop bands by tapping his finger rather too hard on the table and making his conclusion by saying "you've got to remember this stuff, because Midway Still aren't coming back!"; or words to that effect.

Really it was more the point that noone remembers these bands and noone wants their vinyl any more (well, except me), but he could have used any of the bands listed so far, or those that are coming - and let me tell you, I'm looking forward to Kitchens of Distinction...

Anyway, Midway Still, as it turns out, capture everything that was good about indie in 1992. The music is jaunty and happy, the words are apparently carefree but turn out to be well written when listened to. And most of all, they sound like Teenage Fanclub who in turn, of course, are just a Big Star covers band.

And this is a good thing. Here's their biography from the Fire Records site:

Taking their muse from Husker Du, Midway Still have described their music as being just the noise and tunes of a punk rock band into The Byrds and The Beatles. Yet their power-chord melodies catch classic strains of The Who and the Jam and in another era, they would have made a great mod band.

So even the band and their label admit it. Sort of. (The wonders of Fire Records is another project all in itself of course).

But the point for me is, sort of, that they epitomise the 90s music that I loved and want to remember here; listen, if you will, to this offering ("Midway Still - Better Than Before") a couple of times and tell me you're not singing along and tapping your feet, yearning for those happy days of snakebite and cheap roll-ups at the student disco.

As a footnote: Midway Still did of course make a brief comeback last year in London to celebrate the life of the late Darren 'Wiz' Brown, erstwile Mega City Four singer/guitarist.

PS. Arse, Mega City Four. I'd forgotten about them...

Buy the Best of Midway Still

A House

That's right, it's flexi-disk time once again! This one courtesy of Irish indie funsters A House. formed in the mid-80s, once more this is a tale of not living up to potential; the band never hit the big time as was hoped, with "Endless Art" - an indie disco favourite nonetheless - the only release to even think about possibly trouble the chart compilers.

The band's wikipedia entry suggests that they were signed to some big labels (Parlophone, Setanta, Blanco y Negra, MCA), and also suggests that the band are still going, but there's not a lot of information around. Mind you, that's not why you're here...

The flexi pictured and featured was apparently sent to their fan club members in the Christmas of 1992. I don't remember being a member of the fan club, but there's the flexi with my name and address on, so I must have been. Drinking in Manchester in the early 1990s was a dangerous thing for the impressionable and gullible music fan like myself.

A House - Slang

Sultans of Ping

Formed in Ireland in 1988, the Sultans of Ping leapt to public consciousness with their catchy singalong pop masterpiece "Where's me Jumper?" - a searing tale of sartorial loss at a disco. Something we can all relate to.

Signing to Epic Records the band almost went from strength to strength and could have been contenders. They recorded with Japanese funsters Shonen Knife, did sessions for John Peel and toured extensively. Although for some reason I'll always associate them with Frank Sidebottom.

As with so many of our early 90s favourites they mae a brief comeback in 2005 and played a number of gigs with Jim Bob from Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine.

To avoid being overly cliched, this is the Sultans' second single, "Stupid Kid". Still as catchy and energetic, still as funny as Where's me jumper. An indie pop classic.

Sultans of Ping FC - Stupid Kid