Catherine Wheel

You don't get much in the way of rock and roll from Great Yarmouth; it's not your hot bed of music like Manchester or Liverpool. Granted that bloke out of sub-van Halen cover band The Darkness was from that neck of the woods, but apart from him, the only real contributers to music - and certainly the only ones we're interested in, were Catherine Wheel.

Formed in 1990, the band had Bruce (off of Iron Maiden) Dickinson's cousin on guitar; Fortunately for all of us however, he was far more interested in swooping shoegaze feedback and vocals than cod-metal.

In true indie style, the band split in the mid-90s, then reformed to chance their arms in the indie-revival of 2000, before finally calling it a day and going their separate ways.

The official website now redirects to newer bands, but this list of their gigs suggests that they toured extensively. And I've a nasty feeling I saw them at the Boardwalk in Manchester being supported by Bang Bang Machine; but I can't be 100% as they appear to have played the city a lot in the years I was there so it might have been upstairs at the Hop & Grape with someone even less famous...

Check wikipedia for more information and listen to Catherine Wheel - Crank. It's very good and true to form, I've got a "not for resale" 12" version of the single. Of course, "not for resale" these days means "cheap off of ebay".

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.

Milltown Brothers

I don't know why, but I had in my mind that the Milltown Brothers were from Ireland; they're not of course, they're from a little town in Lancashire called Colne - which I discovered as soon as I opened up Wikipedia.

And do you know what only just occurred to me? The band are called the Milltown Brothers; we know that. We also know that the band contains two brothers, Matt and Simon Nelson, so far, so Columbo. But, hang on, Colne is a Lancashire mill town. So, hold your horses here... You mean they're brothers, from a mill town? Christ I must be thick, it's taken me the best part of 20 years to work that out...

I shan't bore you with all the details of the bands history, that's well documented on their myspace page, which is well worth a visit. But suffice to say that the band can be added to the long list of "indie bands that were far better than you remember and should have been far bigger than they were, if only the record company had spent some money and nobody had invented Nirvana".

The Milltown Brothers are, almost inevitably, still pottering along; they released a new album in 2004, but for a perfect slice of 1991 indie pop, have this here mp3: Milltown Brothers - Which Way Should I Jump?, it's got the standard "ding-ding-ding-dinga-dinga-ding-ding" jingly-jangly indie guitar riff in it, so that rates an 8/10 on the Carter Scale of indieness and frankly, dear reader, that's all you need to know. Get the fringe flicking and have a dance round the lounge. You won't regret it.

Thrum

The internet is an amazing thing. You can find all kinds of long lost and barely needed information (and photos) about Headmen gigs, but try and find out when the mighty Thrum were formed and you'll be searching in vain.

What we do know is that they were Glaswegian (probably), had a female lead singer called Monica Queen who, as you'll hear on the attached mp3, has a haunting voice that deserved greater success and that courtesy of the Ready Steady Go website, that if you

...imagine a band with Tammy Wynette on vocals and Neil Young on guitar. That’s the deal with Glasgow’s country rockers, Thrum.

All I can remember about Thrum is that I saw them in early 1994 - and I've pinned this down courtesy of a Manchester Academy website and a bit of good, honest, hard thinking.

I remember that me and a bunch of friends won two pairs of tickets to any gig at the Manchester University Student Union or Academy; a big prize in those days. I went to see Thrum support somebody - and there's a good chance it was the Sultans of Ping - with my mate Daisy, and my other mate Stu went to a Megadog (proto-rave-hippy-bollocks club nights, you took loads of cheap speed and danced to Transglobal Underground and the like; they were great).

The only other thing I've managed to glean about the band is that Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley were big fans. I have this on good authority; specifically a genuine sighting of Ms Hurley and Mr Grant standing at the side of the stage as the band played at the 1994 Phoenix festival (now, whatever happened to that festival?)

So here you go, the wonderful Thrum - So Glad for your delight and delectation.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to buy some cheap amphetamines and dig out my Drum Club - "Live in Iceland" CD.

Dr Phibes and the House of Wax Equations

Likened by many to Jimi Hendrix's band because, well, because their guitarist was a black chap with dreadlocks, Dr Phibes and the House of Wax Equations were an "an underground indie psychedelic rock band based in the north west of England in the early to mid 1990s" (thank you once more myspace.

From humble beginnings - meeting on a music course at South Cheshire College of Further Education - and taking their name from a Hammer Horror film, the band experienced moderate early 90s success: releasing a couple of albums, a handful of EPs, playing at Glastonbury in 1992 and recording a Peel Session and very possibly a session for Mark Radcliffe.

Unfortunately, once more there doesn't seem to be a lot around to remember the band by, although they do seem to have inspired something of a cult following, leading to a sketchy wikipedia page and a few internet-recorded memories of people, like me, who can say "I saw the band play at [pub] in [town], [supporting/being supported by] [other band] and they were [brief critique]; where mine is "The Wharf", "Huddersfield", "being supported by", "a local band called, if I remember correctly, The Walking Seeds" and "pretty good if you like that sort of thing, but we were only there because they'd serve 16 year olds and there was an indie disco after".

Rummaging around ebay and the like seems to turn up the possibility that there was a 12" version of the 1991 Hazy Lazy hologram EP - of which an mp3 to follow - that included a free copy of the 7" version. This is the lead track from the EP: Dr Phibes etc etc - Hazy Lazy Hologram. This is the radio edit version of the free insert 7" single as, to be honest, the 12" version is rather long and you'll hear everything you need to in this version.

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!

The Headmen

How did we manage before the internet was invented? Before everyday people recorded everything they ever knew on web pages, I'd have been left with a vague recollection of a Huddersfield-based band called The Headmen who I saw play a few gigs at places like the Top Spot Snooker Club when I was a lad - presumably where I picked up the 7" plastic here - but really nothing more.

Now of course I know that they did indeed play at Top Spot - with other local band of legend Fluffpulp - thanks to a collection of photos here and that courtesy of bass player Dave Pattern's blog they

"were signed to a local label (Positive Records) and released a demo tape ("The Happy Shoebox"), a single ("Kissed to Pieces") which got quite a bit of Radio 1 airplay, and a 12" EP ("Reach the Sky") — the demo tape was supposed to named "The Magic Shoebox", which was the name of a shoe shop opposite the "4th Wave Records" shop in Huddersfield."

There is also a flickr group of photos from their gigs here. I've been looking through the photos for the past half hour and mercifully they're all from Halifax and Hipperholme gigs so I'm not in any of them.

So actually I feel a bit dirty posting an mp3 of the music; so dirty I'm going to email Dave and ask him if it's ok. But because you've probably not heard of them and they are as deserving of going on here as any one else, catch while you can, The Headmen - Kissed to Pieces.

Blab Happy

So, who the hell were Blab Happy?

I really don't remember buying this EP - Mad Surge, from 1991 - and only stumbled across it while looking for something else. But it's a lovely, sign of the times piece of early 90s indie twiddlery, and that's what I'm here for.

According to the sleeve of this EP, quoted from no less an organ that Time Out:

"Leicester's Blab Happy are a raw, rockin' cross between the Beatles harmonies of, say, The La's (only a little less retro) and the fuzzy guitars of That Petrol Emotion."

This of course means what we expect by now, they sound a bit like Teenage Fanclub.

Googling around I find two useful pieces of information about the band. Firstly, this bit of vinyl is worth 9 US Dollars to the good burghers of ebay and secondly, according to this 2003 article in the Guardian, the band had supported such noteables as Radiohead and Kingmaker. Yes, Kingmaker.

So, long-forgotten, but briefly famous Blab Happy, we salute you; and here is Blab Happy - Never No More in all its crackly vinyl glory.

As I've now been pointed to a video on youtube, by the band's singer/guitarist of all people, it's probably best to embed it here as well; by crikey those are proper indie haircuts...

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