Higher Than The Sun, a book telling the story of four albums by Saint
Etienne, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Fanclub that
were released within days of each other late in 1991, was a deliberate
attempt to do something a bit different. I was a bit bored of being limited to
primarily Archive TV-related material, and was also a tad unhappy with
some of the less ideologically pleasant ‘better in the old days’ following
that I’d picked up as a result of concentrating on those areas, and so I
decided to literally indulge one of my other great loves – ‘indie’ music from
the days before Britpop came along and changed everything.
For the benefit of those that aren’t familiar with any of this – which
I’m guessing will be more than a few of you – these four albums (all of
which, not even remotely coincidentally, were released by Creation Records
– well, you’ll have to read the book to find out how that applies to Saint
Etienne) were remarkable and musically groundbreaking achievements,
especially for bands working with a low budget and continually embarking
on gruelling tours of dingy venues in the hope of breaking even. What’s
more, they represented what was arguably the last occasion on which
‘indie’ music attempted to crash the mainstream entirely on its own terms,
rather than playing by everyone else’s rules. And, more to the point, they
had a surprisingly intertwined history stretching all the way back to the
NME’s legendary ‘C86’ cassette, and in some cases even further than that.
It’s all a lot more interesting than it sounds, honest.
As I say on the back
cover, it’s a story that starts with a compilation tape, ends with a jawdropping
act of career suicide, and in the middle someone gets chased by
a cow.
I knew this was going to be a much less strong seller than the other
books from the outset, but that wasn’t really the point. I enjoyed every
second of researching and writing it, and it gave me a renewed enthusiasm
and overall I would say it’s the book that I’m most proud of. Also, it gave
me a foot in the door with an entirely different kind of audience, and I
cannot tell you how pleased I was to get the thumbs-up from music fans
well used to rolling their eyes at badly researched and contextually baffling
‘histories’ of the bands and scenes they are devoted to.
Hopefully, though, you might want to give it a try now too. In all
honesty it’s really not that far removed from my more familiar work, both in
terms of subject matter and approach. If you need any further convincing,
here’s an abridged extract looking at how Primal Scream came to record
their landmark single Loaded, which had started off as an entirely different
song that had almost single-handedly put a stop to their career, until help
came from an unlikely source…
Over the next couple of years, many below-par bands would laughably
attempt jump on the ‘Madchester’ bandwagon by effectively doing little
more than buying a drum machine and playing their existing songs over the
top, but for the earliest and best outfits to explore this new possibility, the
influence was more pervasive and fundamental, allowing their exposure to
dance music to deconstruct and rebuild everything about their attitude to
making music from songwriting to arrangement. The most hotly tipped by
some distance, The Stone Roses saw parallels in modern electronic
sounds with their love of The Byrds, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and
Jimi Hendrix, producing mesmerising, transcendental guitar pop with a
danceable swagger that sat somewhere between House Music and
Motown; even on their more laid-back and psychedelic moments, notably
the hypnotic
Waterfall, there was a sense that they were emulating the
insistent sequencer-driven nature of dance music rather than traditional
guitar pop structures. Inspiral Carpets welded thumping, shuffling beats to
a Sixties-influenced organ sound consciously modelled on Acid House
sequencer patterns, while Happy Mondays – who, to an extent, looked
towards early seventies funk rather than sixties influences – were
characterised by the arresting beat poetry lyrics of Shaun Ryder, and the
crucial hands-on support of a rising breed of ‘superstar’ DJ.
Coming from entirely the opposite direction, 808 State and A Guy
Called Gerald were straightforward dance music artists who had started to
incorporate more traditional rock instrumentation into their music,
effectively meeting their contemporaries in the middle; indeed, some of
Inspiral Carpets’ early material was produced by 808 State. In the wake of
this first wave of acts came the no less intriguing likes of The Charlatans,
Candy Flip, Northside and New FADS. More to the point, influenced
whether directly or through association by the communal nature of raves
and the chilled-out euphoria induced by its chosen intoxicant, the music
and the lyrical themes were becoming more upbeat and positive, and were
more likely to be about environmental issues, panoramic landscapes or
cult films than any of the more traditional obsessions of ‘indie’. By the
summer, a huge amount of media attention was being focused on
‘Madchester’, and many of the acts were starting to nudge ever closer to
the top forty. Creation Records, at that point, had no comparable artists on
their roster.
When Primal Scream’s comeback single
Ivy Ivy Ivy appeared in
August 1989, however, it became obvious that they were still looking
towards Manchester, California rather than Manchester, England, and its
bluesy riffing, pounding piano and flighty harmonies found few takers.
Although reviewers seemed to initially be well disposed towards the selftitled
parent album Primal Scream, which would follow in September, even
by the time that it was released it had already been overshadowed by
developments elsewhere and found itself struggling for exposure;
ultimately the album would not only fail to chart, but even fall some
considerable distance short of debut album
Sonic Flower Groove’s less
than staggering sales figures. As the end of the eighties loomed, it was The
Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets who found themselves
grabbing all of the attention and broaching the top twenty – famously
causing the first two of the above to appear on the same edition of
Top Of
The Pops as each other – and they would be followed there in early in
1990 by the likes of Candy Flip and The Charlatans.
Any initial thoughts at Creation and indeed elsewhere that Primal
Scream had made a great album soon gave way to concerns that they had
made one that was desperately out of step with the times. Music press
interest was minimal, to the extent that Creation press officer Jeff Barrett
recalls the band suggesting in desperation that they should do some
interviews with technical guitar magazines as an attempt to at least get
some exposure. Creation rapidly lost interest in the album when it became
depressingly obvious that it was unlikely to take off, and – more worryingly
– the band’s previously considerable fanbase appeared to be following
suit. What should have been a triumphant Christmas show at London’s
Subterranean turned into a disaster when only a handful of people turned
up, with even some of the band’s closest friends making excuses and
staying away. One of the few who did make the effort was Lawrence from
their labelmates Felt, who was moved to conclude that the eighties idea of
‘indie’ was over; he would see in the New Year by heading for America and
planning a serious rethink of his career. Though by all accounts the band
played a remarkable set that night, the members of Primal Scream were
doubtless experiencing similar thoughts, left with several months of
promotional work left to do on an album that they now really wanted to just
put behind them. The last track on the first side of Primal Scream,
I’m
Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have, seemed to have suddenly taken on a new
and ironic meaning. Yet as the nineties dawned, it would be that song, and
a key figure in the scene that they had found themselves excluded from,
that would change everything for Primal Scream.
Although there is always a tendency to greet a new decade with
what can sometimes be misplaced optimism, in January 1990 it seemed
that Creation had finally found the band that would make the label, and
indie music in general, into a commercial force to be reckoned with.
Presciently described in the first issue of
NME of the nineties as ‘the band
who’ll shake up the independents’, Oxford-based Ride combined a keen
desire for stardom with a love of feedback, close harmony and chiming
melodies. Fronted by the photogenic Mark Gardener, Ride were both
musically adventurous and a formidable live act. Having been obsessive
fans of Felt, The Jesus And Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine during
their schooldays, they were also very much in favour of being seen as a
‘Creation Band’, and eagerly signed to the label on a far longer term basis
than any other act had previously. This fairly audacious move was to pay
off handsomely; in January their debut release the
Ride EP, hinged around
infectious lead track
Chelsea Girl and the sweeping drawn-out
Drive Blind,
garnered a good deal of critical praise and became the first Creation single
ever to enter the top seventy five of the singles chart. April’s
Play EP and its
radio-friendly lead track
Like A Daydream then took them into the top forty,
but it was with the release of the
Fall EP in September – and in particular
lead track
Taste, which combined powerful dance beats, cavernous vocals
and a ‘wall of noise’ arrangement with a catchy singalong melody – that
they really demonstrated their full potential. In October, their rapturously
reviewed debut album
Nowhere would only narrowly miss the top ten.
Along with the likes of Chapterhouse, Moose, Lush and fellow
Creation signings Slowdive, Ride were part of a wave of My Bloody
Valentine-influenced bands primarily from the South of England, whom the
music press had rather dismissively tagged together as ‘Shoegazers’, in
reference to their alleged habit of spending more time looking at their
numerous guitar effects pedals than at the audience. Though few would
have conceded it at the time, the ‘Shoegazing’ sound actually had a good
deal in common with that associated with Madchester, and
correspondingly there was a significant amount of crossover between their
respective fanbases. This was certainly good news for the supposed
Shoegazers, as 1990 saw many of their Northern counterparts on the
verge of becoming phenomenally successful. The Stone Roses would only
narrowly miss out on topping the charts with
One Love[1], and staged a
series of landmark live events – most famously the Spike Island concert
held on an actual island in the River Mersey – that were virtually minifestivals
in their own right. Happy Mondays meanwhile enjoyed ever
stronger chart showings, particularly following the release of their third
album
Pills’n’Thrills’n’Bellyaches in November, and despite their
occasionally somewhat haphazard approach to promotion they were even
starting to make inroads into the American market. The Charlatans –
whose early releases had served notice that there was much more musical
substance to them than the initial accusations of bandwagon-jumping had
suggested – scored a series of sizeable radio-friendly hits, while the more
personable Inspiral Carpets were not only rarely out of the charts but rarely
off children’s television; indeed, one of the strangest offshoots of the
whole Madchester phenomenon was that the BBC launched an unusually
fashion-conscious Saturday Morning children’s show named
The 8:15
From Manchester, produced at their Manchester studios and intended to
capitalise on the popularity of the scene. Its catchy theme music was a
rewrite of the band’s recent single
Find Out Why.
As the year progressed, all manner of geographically and musically
associated acts from Candy Flip to Northside would find themselves the
subject of unanticipated chart success and media attention, something
that was often evidenced by certain bands’ uncomfortable and recalcitrant
nature in interviews, while countless others desperately tried to readjust
their sound accordingly in the hope of sharing in indie music’s sudden
commercial viability. Even Primal Scream’s old rivals The Soupdragons
managed to get in on the act with a wah-wah drenched gospel-influenced
cover of the obscure Rolling Stones album track
I’m Free, which brought
them a top ten placing and earned them the disdain of the music press for
some years to come. Meanwhile, in London, a young four-piece band who
seemed to combine the best qualities of both Madchester and Shoegazing
and boasted a highly photogenic frontman and an immensely talented
guitarist alongside impressive songwriting skills were being hurried into the
studio by EMI’s alternative subsidiary Food; at the insistence of the label,
they had recently changed their name to Blur.
Primal Scream’s most recent album had hardly exactly found
favour with followers of either vogueish indie-dance genre, but almost by chance it caught the ear of one of the DJs who had helped to shape the indie-dance
sound in the first place. Andrew Weatherall had initially sought a
career as a writer rather than a musician; with his associate Terry Farley,
he had started a fanzine called
Boy’s Own, an ebullient and ramshackle
affair that sought to draw a connecting line between their shared passions
for football, fashion and music. At that point, their favoured listening
matter was ‘Rare Groove’, the obscure rediscovered seventies deep funk
tracks that had become a short-lived phenomenon in London clubs[2], but
this would change in a dramatic and career-defining fashion when their
work on the fanzine brought them into the orbit of the pioneers of a new
and radical dance music scene. Having – more by accident than design –
chimed with the widespread obsessions of the emergent movement,
Boy’s
Own had become favoured reading matter amongst the early ‘Balearic
Beat’ crowd that converged on Danny Rampling’s club Shoom, intended to
cater for dancers who had discovered the laid-back House Music-spinoff
sound whilst on hedonistic holidays to Ibiza. As an avid reader of
Boys
Own, Rampling had sensed that Weatherall and Farley would enjoy the
sounds he was playing and invited them along to Shoom; the effect that
exposure to this new and fairly radical strain of dance music and clubbing
culture would have on them was both immediate and revolutionary.
Virtually overnight, Weatherall and Farley had become devoted
converts to the emergent scene, putting their previous experience as DJs
to good use and securing a residency at Shoom, as well as Paul
Oakenfold’s Phuture and Spectrum club nights, and Nicky Holloway’s Trip.
The latter is widely considered to have been the first to use a musical label
that was quickly becoming associated with the scene – ‘Acid House’, in
reference to a particularly harsh and repetitive yet anthemic variant of the
sound – and many credit the eclectic and adventurous Weatherall and
Farley, who would think nothing of mixing musically suitable tracks by
artists as diverse as abrasive prog rockers Van Der Graaf Generator, indie
janglers The Woodentops and MOR rocker Chris Rea into their sets if they
suited the beat and tempo, as the true pioneers of not just Acid House
itself but also both the modern dance music mix style and the ‘superstar
DJ’ culture in general. The pair also soon established their own record
label, named
Boy’s Own in tribute to the fanzine which had by now
undergone a radical change in approach, and their eclectic tastes had
stood them in good stead when they were commissioned late in 1989 to
work with Oakenfold on a series of remixes of Happy Mondays’
breakthrough top twenty hit
Hallelujah. This latter experiment would
subsequently prove to be the catalyst for another collaboration that would
dramatically change the fortunes of everybody involved.
The popularity of
Boy’s Own had also led to Weatherall developing
a sideline as a music journalist, and it was in this capacity that the
NME
sent him to a Primal Scream concert late in 1989; this was largely at the
instigation of live editor and longtime fan of Primal Scream Helen Mead,
who had astutely realised that what the floundering band really needed at
that point was support from someone outside of their core audience.
Though largely unimpressed with their set as a whole, feeling that the
songs were not really strong enough and that the more upbeat numbers
simply didn’t work in live performance[3], he had nonetheless been
somewhat taken with the mid-paced ballad
I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever
Have, going on to mention it favourably in his review and subsequently
working it into his DJ sets. The band had been introduced to Weatherall
after the show and had got on well with him, despite his mixed feelings
about their musical approach, to the extent that he was booked as the
warm-up DJ for the ill-fated Christmas show at The Vortex. Already the two
unlikely allies were finding something approaching a common ground, and
with a planned single release of
I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have in the
offing, guitarist Andrew Innes began to formulate an idea for a way out of
their apparent creative and commercial dead-end.
As Creation had already recorded a recent Primal Scream concert
in New York to plunder for forthcoming b-sides, there was room within the
single’s allocated budget to allow for a dance remix; this was not really an
option that Creation had ever pursued before with any other acts, but
recent developments in the music scene had left them with little choice but
to at least experiment with the concept. Innes, however, felt there was little
point in simply adding new drums to an existing track when they could
theoretically make a dance record of their own, and duly approached
Weatherall with the idea of rebuilding
I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have
from the ground up as a new track in its own right; or as Innes put it to him,
‘just destroy it’. Excited by the suggestion, Weatherall had enthusiastically
agreed, and over the course of a handful of sessions, the new track began
to take shape. Far from being simply being engaged as a producer,
Weatherall was treated in the sessions as essentially an auxiliary member
of the band with ideas and contributions of his own; lead vocalist Bobby
Gillespie would later remark that using a dance music artist in this manner
was something that he saw as being very much in the spirit of punk rock.
Weatherall was given access to the original multitrack master tape
of
I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have, and elected to break the song down
into its individual instrumental components; a short brass flourish from
near the end of the track became a huge fanfare that drove its new
incarnation[4], and the band were called on to re-record some instrumental
segments to go with it. Adding samples of a drum break borrowed from the
typically unlikely source of a 12” mix of
What I Am by American folk-rocker
Edie Brickell[5], the chorus from seventies funk act (and Rare Groove scene
favourites) The Emotions’
I Don’t Want To Lose Your Love, and Gillespie
singing a couple of lines from thirties guitarist Robert Johnson’s
Terraplane
Blues to compensate for his unease about the removal of his vocals, the
new track was virtually complete when Weatherall decided that what it
really needed was an arresting spoken word intro. Inspiration came in the
form of a rebellious speech by Peter Fonda in the controversial 1966 biker
movie
The Wild Angels[6], which chimed neatly with the growing feelings of
anger at the government’s plans to crack down on rave culture. It was this
defiant, confrontational burst of speech that gave the new track – the word
‘remix’ was no longer really applicable – its name;
Loaded.
Sensing that they had produced something truly exceptional,
Weatherall arranged for Terry Farley to produce another alternative version
of
Loaded, this time introducing more elements from
I’m Losing More Than
I’ll Ever Have itself including several of the actual verses; this was an
astute move that would widen the track’s appeal considerably, based on
their observation of trends within the dance music scene that suggested
that DJs enjoyed having a ‘different’ version to experiment with, and indeed that fans enjoyed collecting multiple remixes. In addition to this,
and at his own instigation, Weatherall himself came up with a 7” edit of
Loaded that cut the running time from seven minutes to just short of four
without losing any of the impact, and was intentionally crafted to suit the
demands of daytime radio; accompanied by a video that cunningly
combined trippy tinted slow-motion visuals of the band with
The Wild
Angels-inspired footage of them on motorbikes, this was perhaps the most
carefully mainstream-targeted single that the label had released to date.
Although many at Creation were initially unsure about the project – and
indeed, only a couple of months earlier, Gillespie had made a point of
stating in interviews that he felt that he could never produce anything
resembling a ‘dance’ record – virtually everyone who heard the advance
tapes of
Loaded was immediately bowled over by it, with the result that a
last minute decision was made to promote the edit to the a-side of the
forthcoming single[7]. Test pressings had drawn encouraging feedback from
club DJs, with one crowd reacting with sufficient enthusiasm to provoke an
excited Weatherall to telephone Gillespie at 4am to tell him about it. Back
at Creation, recently appointed press officer Laurence Verfaillie had set
aside an afternoon for phoning music magazines to draw their attention to
Loaded, only to find that virtually every office that she called already had
the track playing in the background.
However, even despite these positive signs, few were prepared for
just how decisively the single would break through to a wider audience. On
its release in February 1990,
Loaded was unexpectedly playlisted by Radio
1, and as a consequence it slowly started to climb up the top forty,
eventually peaking at number sixteen in March and earning the band a
well-remembered appearance on
Top Of The Pops. That
Loaded was so
well received is in retrospect hardly surprising; it stands apart from pretty
much anything else that was happening in dance music around that point,
audibly positioned somewhere DJ culture and ‘real’ music, and it was clear
that whether by accident or design, Primal Scream had stumbled across an
exciting and truly original direction. How far they would be able to pursue
this direction, though, was a different matter; as if to underline the
difficulty that they would find in distancing themselves from their musical
past and long-established image, the cover art featured Robert Young in a pose
very much recalling the previous album’s imagery, while the primary b-side
of the single was a live cover of MC5’s
Ramblin’ Rose.
[1] Many of their earlier singles were also reissued during 1990, becoming
substantial hits in the process.
[2] ‘Rare Groove’, largely based around forgotten funk/soul records by the likes of
The Jackson Sisters and James Brown associates Sweet Charles, Lyn Collins and
Maceo Parker, went hand in hand with the early UK house and hip-hop scene,
which would look very much towards the early seventies for cultural reference
points; the influence of Rare Groove can be clearly detected in early singles by the
likes of Bomb The Bass, S’Express and The Funky Worm.
[3] Their live set still included a number of songs from Sonic Flower Groove at this
point, purely in the hope of at least retaining their existing fanbase, and it’s
possible that Weatherall may actually have been reacting to these rather than to
anything from the second album.
[4] This was a gambit that Weatherall would use in several other remixes around this
time, notably his reworking of James’ 1990 single Come Home.
[5] What I Am had been a minor hit in the UK early in 1989.
[6] Widely described as ‘banned’, The Wild Angels had in fact had a UK cinema
certificate – albeit in slightly cut form – since the late sixties. However there had
been some debate over its proposed home video release in the late eighties.
[7] This decision was in fact made so late in the day that there wasn’t time to recall
the first batch of pressings of the single, with the result that early copies on some
formats featured Loaded as the third track despite being listed first on the sleeve.
If you want to read more about how I came to write
Higher Than The Sun, then you might enjoy
this interview I did with Creation Records.
This is an abridged excerpt from Higher Than The Sun, the story of Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Loveless and Bandwagonesque (and much more besides), which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.
