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 13 Side 3 - Pixies, Spitfire, Babes In Toyland, Smashing Pumpkins, Pooh Sticks

1. Pixies - Planet of Sound (4AD)

Pixies drummer Dave Lovering has been known to perform occasional magic shows at rock festivals and other events - though I must admit that I haven't been following his solo career closely enough to get a keen grip on where most of his bookings come from. (Well look, you don't expect me to research absolutely everything, do you?)

He performed his magic show at an early All Tomorrow's Parties festival once, and a friend of mine approached him to ask when he began this rather unusual performing sideline. His reply was simply: "When my band started making shit records".
"Ah! Trompe Le Monde!" replied my friend, but didn't get another answer.

"Trompe Le Monde" is the Pixies LP which tends to get the most stick. Is it a bad album overall? Not really. There are some solid moments there, and it's by no means an out-and-out failure. Is it a bad LP by Pixies standards? Unquestionably, yes. It was an unfortunate situation for the band. They had been an overwhelming inspiration for the biggest emerging names of 1991, not least Nirvana, and yet they chose this precise period to lose many of the touches that made the so unusual and appealing. Instead of getting some kind of payback for their groundwork, they received critical brickbats.

"Planet Of Sound" was the first single off the album, and in typical form for this time, it's a hollering beast of a brief record which is all sound and fury and not particularly eccentric. The angular riffs are gone, and the rock and roll noise pollution dominates completely. On the first few listens, that was enough to make "Planet Of Sound" seem impressive - it's a spray of cold water and a slap to the face, a song which is so damn loud and aggressive across its two minutes that initially you can't tear yourself away. Unlike "Debaser", though, it stands up to fewer repeat plays, because while that track had fascinating riffs and intricate little diversions, there's not much else going on with "Planet of Sound". It is what it is. It's one big Frank Black dominated howl.

The end of the band was nigh, and Frank Black would drift off to a solo career while Kim Deal made The Breeders a full-time concern, but it's not for no reason that most of the band's LPs are still raved about and played fanatically to this day. "Trompe Le Monde" was just an unfortunately sloppy kiss goodbye.

As for the music they've made since reforming, it is in my opinion better than "Trompe Le Monde" but not as good as their earliest work, but some of it is still pretty damn compelling - but that's all way outside the timeline we're talking about on this blog.



2. Spitfire - Superbaby (Eve)

Spitfire were a curious group who never seemed to achieve a real breakthrough moment, but always seemed to be with us throughout the nineties. Eventually deemed to be part of the NME's "New Wave of New Wave" movement alongside the likes of S*M*A*S*H and These Animal Men in 1994, when that collapsed and most of the other groups either died off or were subsumed into Britpop, Spitfire continued their own path despite widespread indifference. And I do mean indifference - they performed a gig at my University in the mid-nineties and lost the audience who began to talk among themselves, which caused the lead singer Jeff Pitcher to tell us we were "all a bunch of cunts!" Clearly he forgot the cardinal rule that you should never berate an audience who are otherwise busy ignoring you.

Spitfire were also slightly unfortunate with their drummers, losing one talented member, Justin Welch, to a fledgling Elastica.

Really though, Spitfire sat awkwardly in any period of the decade, sounding like a snarling, bluesy garage rock band rather than chirpy Britpoppers or sharp New Wave revivalists. "Superbaby" proves this, bringing particularly 1969 sounding guitar licks against clattering basslines and vocals dripping with attitude. Like the sound of mod-rock just as mods grew out their fringes and got interested in Led Zeppelin and the blues, it's got a drive and energy that can be very enticing if you're in the right mood, but wasn't really what the kids of 1991, or 1994 or 1995 were really looking for. They would have been better off emerging around the point of the New Rock Revolution in the noughties, at which point they could have cleaned up. Timing is everything, kids.



3. Babes In Toyland - Handsome & Gretel (Insipid)

Courtney Love has made much of the fact that while she has become a mainstream media figure, Babes In Toyland lead singer Kat Bjelland ("who was my main rival!") has largely returned to the underground. Love has generally tried to paint this situation as an unjust one she feels slightly concerned about, but in reality, I suspect there's a feeling of smug triumph behind it too. After all, back in the day the pair really weren't terribly keen on each other.

So much was this the case that there were continual media rumours that "Handsome and Gretel" was in some way about Courtney. And was it? Well, it's very difficult to tell. It's filled with very explicit insults, such as "My name is Gretel, yeah/ I've got a crotch that talks/ It talks to all the cocks", but they could be about anyone. No clues are offered. It's teenage schoolyard level fury, a stabbing finger pointing in the direction of a hated female figure, and it's utterly impossible to clearly identify who that is. It's snotty and brattish stuff.

With its stabbing bass lines and cackling laughter, it's a two minute taunt, an onslaught. I listened to it a lot at the time, but now it strikes me as the kind of thing that seems fascinating, threatening and foreboding when you're a teenager, not so much when you're a grown adult - that or the sheer shock of it has a very limited impact. No question that Babes In Toyland were hugely influential and deserve some kind of payback, though. The inspiration they gave the Riot Grrrl movement alone can't be understated.



4. Smashing Pumpkins - Siva (Hut)

Now I'm in trouble. The simple truth is, I generally can't abide Smashing Pumpkins, from their pretentious pseudo-profound lyrics to their Classic Rock leanings. They always seemed like a rather worthy and dull mainstream Rock group who had somehow entered the playlists of alternative club DJs and alternative radio stations by stealth. I also briefly shared a flat with someone who was obsessed with the group, meaning that I heard Billy Corgan screaming "THE WORLD IS A VAMPIRE!" from a bedroom stereo most mornings and evenings - there's nothing like being forced to listen to a group you don't like much to really breed contempt for their work where shrugging indifference might otherwise have existed. (In fact, even if something is clearly amazing work, over-exposure can lead to boredom - for similar reasons in completely different accommodation sharing with another obsessive, it was years before I could ever listen to Jimi Hendrix again).

But I'm undermining the group more than a bit by failing to acknowledge that, compared to many grunge acts of the era, they did possess quite a varied spread of influences, taking in shades of goth rock, industrial, and blues into the mix. While a lot of the other big names of the period practiced sincerity and "Keep Music Live" styled prissy purity, the Pumpkins did at least benefit from Corgan's varied listening tastes.

Not that you'd know any of this from "Siva". It's mostly a heavy blues-rock grind, broken only by the tinkling gentleness of its middle section, which brings a few unexpected twee moments to an otherwise prowling monster of a track. It's not much, but it's an early indication that Smashing Pumpkins were slightly different from their peers.

These days, of course, Billy Corgan has been one of the few rock stars to speak out vocally in favour of Donald Trump, adding "Social Justice Warriors are like the KKK" and talking about "Fake News". I always knew there was something wrong with that boy.



5. The Pooh Sticks - Young People (Cheree)

Swansea's Pooh Sticks were so C86 it almost hurt in the mid-eighties, and in fact they were usually almost certainly taking the piss. With tracks like "I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee Quite Well", they were almost a cheeky parodical take on the British underground.

By 1991, however, they had moved their attention to powerpop, and seemed to be approaching it from an equally affectionate and light-hearted angle. "Young People" takes the endearing cuteness of their sound and tacks it on to super-sugary rock and roll, creating a noise somewhere between The Archies and Cheap Trick, never quite tilting the balance in favour of one extreme or the other. They don't sound completely comfortable in their new environment - some of the vocals in particular still have a very indiefied tortured yelp to them, rather than a rock swagger - but that somehow adds to the overall effect.

It's this period of their career, rather than their earlier twee work, which lead them to cult success, and while I don't pick it up to listen to it very often, it's always a charming burst of sunshine when I do. It's sweet and almost over-reaching bedroom mirror rock and roll, something the early nineties was sorely lacking in and indeed, we're little better off in that respect today.