Box Set: Loungecore

A collection of some of my recent features on mid to late nineties loungey indie dance music...

It looks as though some of you aren't aware that I now have a new website (which you can find here), and are still hanging around here wondering where all the new 'content' is. Well it's over there, obviously. To give you all some idea of where to start, though, I'm adding some new posts here with themed collections of links, and this time it's some of my recent features and podcasts about the long-forgotten Britpop spin-off Loungecore...

Come On And Love Me Now - the enduring appeal of Life by The Cardigans

Amongst Them Trevor The Sheep - what really happened when Chris Morris' Blue Jam got taken off-air halfway through a show?

I Love The Gentle People - how did a kitschy lounge/dance act come to be all over daytime television and 'lad' mags?

Food Processors Are Great! - why I still find Modern Life Is Rubbish by Blur inspiring and exciting, and why the nonsense about it 'inventing' Brexit should be slung into the nearest burning bin.

Looks Unfamiliar: Emma Burnell - Emma shares her memories of nineties Easy Listening radio station Melody Radio.

Looks Unfamiliar: Jenny Morrill - Jenny talks us through her attempts at looking like Justine from Elastica.

I'm Leaner, I'm Meaner, I Ain't No Inbetweener - late nineties Post-Diana moody trip-hop and the bewildeirng rise of unlikely chart star Jimmy Ray.

Je Suis Perdue Dans La Nuit, Dans Cette Ville Où Je Vis- how I discovered 1968 by France Gall.

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Not On Your Telly is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here. And there's several other books to choose from here...

Loaded

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.

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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.

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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.

Russ Conway Day

The only time that I ever queued for annual limited edition vinyl bonanza Record Store Day was for the third event in 2010. I'd participated in, and quite enjoyed, the first two; this had involved nothing more arduous than sauntering along to an independent record shop that I'd been visiting since I was in my mid-teens (and you can find an article about my first encounter with it in Well At Least It's Free) in the mid-morning, picking up a couple of bargains, and generally appreciating the upbeat atmosphere and overall sense of celebration of old-fashioned record shops and their patrons. By the third event, though, Record Store Day was attracting a good deal more media attention, and bemused half-interested reports on the national news were suggesting that 'queues were expected'. As one of the records being released in very small numbers on that day was a brand new single by Blur - their first in almost seven years, and the first to really involve Graham Coxon for even longer - and I was very keen to get hold of a copy, it seemed sensible to err on the side of hype and turn up as early as possible.

When did I arrive early on the Saturday morning, there was indeed a small queue forming, and amongst the line of thirty or so people I noticed one person I knew very well, two others I knew by sight, and many more utterly unfamiliar and steelily determined faces that may as well have had the URL for eBay in front of their eyes. I'd joined the back of the queue and had literally only been waiting for about ten minutes when one of the shop's staff appeared from nowhere and called myself and the other three to one side. In a low voice, he informed us that they hadn't received any Blur, Stone Roses or Rolling Stones singles, and as that's what he had assumed the four of us were variously after, he didn't see any point in making us stand around in the rain for no good reason. We were, after all, regular customers; everyone else he had 'never seen before in my life'. Feeling weirdly relieved, the four of us then went off to have a coffee and, well, a laugh, leaving the mystery shoppers to come to blows over Live At Leeds by Pulled Apart By Horses.

Since then, I've had nothing to do with Record Store Day; not out of any pompous, pious or purist reason, but simply because it doesn't really have very much to do with how I would normally buy records. It's not really aimed at people like me but at a completely different demographic, evidenced by the increasing volume of what I would personally consider rip-offs or money for old rope, but which large numbers of others seem eager and delighted to get hold of; and if they do then good luck to them frankly, as that's what record collecting is all about. Despite what some columnists might have to say on the subject, it's not a case of other people invading 'our' world, but of that world being thrown open to the wider public for a single day, and in many ways that can only be a good thing. I'm aware that I've probably missed out on some quite nice items as a consequence - though not always; there were still copies of the Doctor Who soundtrack EP Sounds From The Inferno and Georgie Fame's R&B At The Ricky Tick easily available even a month later - but also at the same time have managed to steer well clear of shoddy rip-off rubbish. Who in their right mind would fork out a tenner for a coloured vinyl 7" of a Derek And Clive sketch that had already been released several times over, and not even one of the funny ones at that?

This year, of course, there are an unreleased Pink Floyd track and rare early David Bowie outtake on offer, but both of those should have been on recent pricey reissues and weren't so Ian EMI can get to fuck if he's expecting me to queue for two hours and then hand over eighty four million pounds on top of already extravagant purchases. Anyway, if you're a full time record collector on the three hundred and sixty four non-Record Store Day days, then you'll almost certainly have the patience, perseverance and keen observational skills to get hold of anything you wanted a couple of months later for considerably less money.

That's not to say I've been above making the odd sarcastic dig at Record Store Day and its patrons, though. When myself and Ben Baker did an Advent Calendar podcast based on forgotten Christmas Singles recently, one of our choices was Snow Coach by fifties piano-pounder Russ Conway (which, incidentally, you can find on the excellent compilation Saint Etienne Present Songs For A London Winter; and which, equally incidentally, you can find my review of here), the absolute epitome of the clean-cut pre-Beatles pop star whose records all sounded pretty much identical. Russ Conway is something of a recurring obsession of ours, and during the course of our genuinely affectionate discussion of his 'unique' musical stylings, the conversation took the following turn (warning - contains an heroic amount of swearing)...


Needless to say, there wasn't a one-sided Russ Conway exclusive on offer as part of this year's Record Store Day. Even so, as a pointless situationist prank making absolutely no real actual point about anything whatsoever, I thought it would be fun to try and find a Russ Conway record in an adjoining charity shop while everyone else was queueing up in the hope of getting hold of a pink 7" of Barbie Girl by Aqua. And, well, it was harder than you might think.

If you were looking for endless Blaster Bates albums or about seventeen million copies of that Break Through - An Introduction To Studio 2 Stereo thing, then your luck would have been in. In the market for an Elvis Presley compilation with a bizarre cover showing what appeared to be the HMV dog throwing 'shade' at him? Not that difficult to find. Album with Johnny Mathis forcing a terrifying green balloon with a face drawn on it into a youngster's hand? Some sickly-looking effort called Magical Mystery Man - A Children's Musical By Colleen and Charles Segal? That horrendous bulky Karaoke Party CD that everyone had at every party in the early nineties? A shelf of seven or eight Jeremy Clarkson books inexplicably but deservedly turned upside down? A complete collection of Stargate SG-1 on DVD? Then roll right up and you could walk away with the lot for about a quarter of the price of even the cheapest Record Store Day 'exclusive'. But - astonishingly, and indeed frustratingly - nothing by Russ Conway. Apart from a 1976 album featuring 're-recordings' of his hits, for which there is not enough NO in the known universe.

Three thoroughly ransacked charity shops later, I was starting to feel like a slightly less sociopathic Simon Quinlank (although some would probably argue more), but the hobby had to continue and a long player's worth of authentic Conway originals with the proper actual hit version of Side Saddle on it had to be found. Inevitably a number of things had already shown up that I did want, including a compilation by his hit parade contemporaries Steve & Eydie and a live album by space-age popsters Ferrante And Teicher as well as Ray Conniff's Hollywood In Rhythm which was worth picking up for the redhead on the cover alone, but still nothing at all by the China Tea hitmaker himself. Until, that is, I had the idea of rifling through the CD racks instead, and promptly found a Very Best Of featuring all of his hits and more in their authentic original versions. And all of them sounding exactly the same as each other, so much so in fact that twenty four tracks' worth of it started to feel more hallucinogenic through sheer repetitious weight of Pot Black Theme-resembling force than Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ever quite managed.

It's probably possible to turn this into some kind of serious point about how it's increasingly easy to get hold of popular and modern music on vinyl whereas the forgotten and the neglected hits and misses of yesteryear can only be found on CD if you're lucky, but really, what would be the point? If you're enjoying the 'Vinyl Revival', then good on you frankly and please keep trying new sounds (especially if they're actually not-so-new sounds) instead of relying on what the broadsheets tell you that you have to buy. And in the meantime, everyone else keep rediscovering everything else. That way we might even get a Boys Wonder CD one day. Probably not for Record Store Day, but in all honestly, I'd probably queue for that.

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If you've enjoyed this, you might also enjoy this slightly more charitable piece about Record Store Day.

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If you've enjoyed this article, you can find plenty more about the early days of pop music and black and white television in my book Not On Your Telly, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

London's So Nice Back In Your Seamless Rhymes

It's very difficult to describe from this distance just how exciting For Tomorrow by Blur was back in 1993. It was, though, and like them, hate them, or erroneously write them off as cockernee knees-up chas and dave chimney sweep music and nothing else besides, the fact remains that during a genuinely threadbare and uninspiring stretch for homegrown pop music, it came thundering along like, as the head of their record label put it, "a knight in shining armour". While For Tomorrow stalled outside the top twenty, for better or for worse it set the tone and the template for the much bigger events that lay ahead. You would have to be a currently serving leader of a political party to dispute or dismiss that, frankly.

To be entirely honest, I was already excited enough about the return of Blur as it was. I'd been a fan since their first single She's So High/I Know (nobody ever remembers I Know), and had seen them live three times by the time that Leisure came out. Although I cannot claim that this is how I would have put it at the time, looking back it's clear that - much like a certain Andrew Collins writing in the NME - I had sensed something in their uneven recorded output, particularly in the b-sides, that hinted at a far greater potential when many of the other bands I liked at the time merely left fans hoping that they would scrape together enough half-decent material to make up a worthwhile album. I also - to some derision - stuck with them when the tide of opinion briefly turned against them, and was so keen to get hold of the largely ignored Popscene - still my favourite single of all time, incidentally - that I persuaded my distinctly unimpressed father to pick up a copy on his way back from work on the day of release.

Although they largely managed to hide the turbulent making of Modern Life Is Rubbish from their fans at the time, it was still obvious that Blur had been suspiciously quiet for a long while, and anticipation was steadily building; not least when Mark Goodier announced on Radio 1 very early in 1993 that he had heard some advance tapes of the new material and 'couldn't wait' to play it on the radio. When he did finally give the first public airing anywhere to For Tomorrow, I recorded it off the radio and played it so much that I actually damaged the tape. A couple of weeks later I bought the single - on several formats, as this was the height of 'Part 1 of a 2CD set' marketing madness and I wanted as many new songs as I could get - and then a couple of weeks after that the album. It would probably prove scientifically impossible to even vaguely estimate how often I heard For Tomorrow during that month alone; and even then not only in the same form as I'd taped it off the radio.

Hidden away on Part 1 of the 2CD set was the 'Visit To Primrose Hill Extended' version of For Tomorrow, more or less identical to the shorter radio-friendly version except for a minute-long section towards the end where the band and the brass section go off on a stroll around the chorus chord changes. This is more than just a looped section yanked from elsewhere in the track, and is an entirely new diversion that fits perfectly with the musical mood and the theme of the lyrics; in some ways it also echoes the hurtling-across-London antics of the promo video, despite not actually accompanying them. However, I have long had a theory that this was actually supposed to be the version used for Modern Life Is Rubbish, but was swapped with the more familiar edit at a late stage for not especially clear reasons. And if you'll keep your hands on the rails and try not to be sick again, I'm about to share that theory with you.

First of all, there's the small matter that the version of For Tomorrow that did end up on Modern Life Is Rubbish is exactly identical to the one clearly labelled on the single itself as the 'Single Version'. There is absolutely no variance between the two whatsoever, and they have exactly the same mix, exactly the same length, and exactly the same lyrics. This is, it has to be said, something of an anomaly in Blur's otherwise famously meticulously documented sleeve credits, with the only comparable incident being when some formats of M.O.R. erroneously claimed to feature the 'Road Version' when they didn't. There could easily have been another more obscure reason for this misleading description finding its way onto the finished article, but the suggestion that it originally needed differentiating from the album version in some way is plausible to say the least.

Then there's the conspicuously high profile that the extended version has enjoyed since then. More often than not, extended and alternate versions of familiar songs are - usually entirely reasonably - destined to become the forgotten and dispensible corners of an artist's discography, sidelined once they have fulfilled their intended purpose, and generally left off 2CD Deluxe Editions for 'space reasons'. The 'Visit To Primrose Hill Extended' version of For Tomorrow, however, has been distinguished by so much disproportionate prominence that you could almost suspect someone somewhere was attempting to reclaim it as the official version. Not only did it find its way onto the 2CD reissue of Modern Life Is Rubbish, it's also been the one that they've reached for whenever an official compilation or retrospective was in the offing, notably on The Best Of Blur and Midlife, and was specifically used on the long-lost dawn-of-the-Web 'Blurradio' project. It has also pretty much always been this version that has been played live, even when they haven't actually had a brass section with them. Meanwhile, in notable contrast, the 'Acoustic' version of For Tomorrow that also showed up on one of the single formats didn't even find its way onto Blur 21.

You do also have to ponder on why it would have existed in the first place if it hadn't been intended for a wider audience at some point. Blur rarely did 'long' versions of tracks for their singles, and out of their not inconsiderable discography you could only really point to the actual proper bona fide old-skool Extended Versions of I Know, There's No Other Way and Bang, which date from a time when 'Indie-Dance' was still a viable commercial prospect; full-length remixes of There's No Other Way and Girls And Boys done primarily for promotional purposes; a number of 'guest producer' reworkings fitting in with the musical ethos circa Blur and 13, few of which actually found their way onto singles; and last and by all means least the 'Live It! Remix' of Entertain Me, which was accidentally released as a b-side to The Universal instead of being mounted on a flaming anvil and fired into a bin. On top of this, owing to several failed attempts at recording a second album, Blur at that point were already groaning under the weight of decent potential b-sides - ten spread across the various Modern Life Is Rubbish-era singles alone, and a further half dozen or so shelved completely - so there was no particular need to go creating Extended Versions, especially for a song that was hardly going to be 'crossing over' with dance music DJs. More speculatively, the longer version prominently features top session brass ensemble The Kick Horns - who can't have come cheap, especially at a time when the album budget was rapidly running out - along with a couple of otherwise unused guitar lines from Graham Coxon, which doesn't exactly fit in with his usual waste not want not approach.

So, if it was originally intended for the album, why in the name of all that is rational and logical didn't it end up on there? Well, one quite possible explanation for that is simply a lack of space. As the surplus of serviceable b-sides might suggest, there was no shortage of songs being considered for Modern Life Is Rubbish itself; at least twenty were serious contenders at various points, and Graham has described the process of trying to cram in everything they wanted on there as 'horrible'. Everyone involved seems to have had a different opinion, and right up until the last minute the band were trying to get certain songs (notably Turn It Up and Miss America) removed and certain others (notably When The Cows Come Home and Young And Lovely) added, ultimately to no avail. Already a lengthy track even in its 'Single Version', For Tomorrow came into the equation very late in proceedings, and even then there was to be a further complication; when the complete album was presented to them, Blur's American label demanded an additional track to appeal to a more 'grunge'-orientated listenership, and the result - bizarrely - was Chemical World. For both artistic and commercial reasons, there was never any question of leaving this equally brevity-deficient new song off the album, so is it possible that the shorter For Tomorrow was substituted to free up as much space as possible to accommodate it? It's also worth considering that For Tomorrow might not always have been the opening track of Modern Life Is Rubbish, and the longer instrumental section might well have made more sense elsewhere in the tracklisting.

All of this might well seem like a great deal of thought and effort devoted to something that's not even one of Blur's great what ifs, let alone one of pop music's great what ifs, but even so it's a lot more entertaining than splitting hairs over something you're not actually that interested in. And who knows, would the entire course of the nineties - not just in chart music - have run differently if a longer version of For Tomorrow had appeared on Modern Life Is Rubbish? Probably not, but it's worth thinking about. Possibly. If you want to know why Colours and Pleasant Education were missing from Blur 21, though, then I'm afraid I'm fresh out of ideas.

You can find more of my thoughts on Blur and the road to Britpop in Higher Than The Sun, available in paperback here or from the Amazon Kindle Store here.

Higher Than The Sun

Higher Than The Sun is a book about four albums released late in 1991 - Screamadelica by Primal Scream, Foxbase Alpha by Saint Etienne, Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub and Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, and how, long before they discovered Oasis, Creation Records took on the world and nearly won.

Back in the days before daytime radio would touch indie music with a bargepole, and when indie arists in turn were still similarly wary of the mainstream, these four albums, without a shred of compromise, came closer to commercial and critical mainstream acceptability than almost any of their peers had previously managed. Higher Than The Sun tells the story of the closely intertwined making of the four albums - one of which was completed with change left over from the recording budget, whilst another very nearly bankrupted Creation - and the sometimes unlikely shared influences and extra-curricular escapades of the four bands.

There's also plenty about their friends, colleagues and rivals including Blur, Ride, The KLF, House Of Love, Adorable, Denim, The Jesus And Mary Chain, The Manic Street Preachers, Flowered Up and Fabulous. There are stories of wild parties in hijacked mansions, studios infested by poltergeists, and listening to French football matches late at night. Along the way they cross paths with Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Chris Morris and (almost) Brian Cant. It's a story that starts with a compilation tape, and ends with a jaw-dropping act of career sucicide, and in between someone gets chased by a cow. And what's that? One of the albums wasn't on Creation? Well, that's covered as well...

You can get Higher Than The Sun in paperback here, or from the Kindle Store here.

Ten Reasons Why Dagenham Dave Is Better Than Smells Like Teen Spirit

"Smells Like Teen Spirit - it's no Dagenham Dave, is it?", I recently mused on Twitter. And while that may have been a deliberately provocative throwaway joke, it's also actually somewhat on the true side. For while the deceptively lazy 1995 half-hit in its own bizarre way encapsulates everything I have ever liked about the ideologically-challenged quiff-led erstwhile Smith (and, in fairness, everything that a lot of other people dislike about him), it also in a similarly bizarre way nails exactly what a reasonably well-adjusted youngster from the other side of the Atlantic with a liking for expensive trainers could never quite hope to find in the shampoo-averse caterwaulings of Kurt Cobain (1967-1993) and company.

Not convinced? Well, here's ten reasons why Dagenham Dave is better than Smells Like Teen Spirit:

- Whereas Nirvana have inspired a frankly terrifying volume of column inches' worth of sub-Quietus Cultural Despairers wailing "O TEMPORA O MORES O RED HOUSE PAINTERS" and launching into diatribes about how we failed to heed the message of when Juliana Hatfield was that rubbish ghost in My So Called Life and everything that's going on in the world now is all our fault (especially if you liked Blur), Dagenham Dave only ever inspired Mark Lamarr telling an anecdote about overhearing a bloke sat on a doorstep saying "he's well out of order... I mean, I'm from Dagenham, and my name's Dave...".

- In place of a heavily compressed and distorted guitar solo that inspired million upon million of teenage boys to adopt it as their 'trying out guitars in a music shop' showstopper of choice, Dagenham Dave has an hilariously lackadaisical weedy synth solo that could only feasibly inspire anyone to try and remember how the theme from Simon And The Witch went.

- The video avoids heavy-handed 'symbolism' with cheerleaders and mop buckets in favour of TV's Gripper Stebson doing some Moz-observed comedy business.

- Saying "a denial" sixteen times may well be a profound statement about something or other, but just going "Dagenham Dave/Dagenham Dave/oh Dave from Dagenham/Dagenham Dagenham Dave" is trying to get up people's noses for the sake of it.

- "On the window screen" is a more gloriously pointless distortion of the English language than mispronouncing "albino".

- Smells Like Teen Spirit may well be a clarion call to take up arms against something or other where nobody's actually sure what it is that came from the depths of a tortured yet artistically brilliant soul, but Dagenham Dave was an aimless satire of dull blokey blokes who'd done nothing outwardly obviously wrong written at the height of worries over an impending court case relating to a petty dispute over tedious details of a contract from years earlier. One of these may be slightly more easy to relate to than the other.

- "I would say more/but you get the general idea" is quite simply the best way to end a song ever. And that includes Footloose.

- On a more serious note, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the incident (well, incidents) that actually caused it, Morrissey was ostracised by the music press at that point in a way that Kurt Cobain never, ever was - again, something that it's actually slightly easier for some people to relate to - and the flippant throwawayness of Dagenham Dave could be interpreted as a massive two fingers to certain individuals who had long since given up judging his music on its own merits. Erm, possibly.

- Oh hang on, I said ten reasons, didn't I? Well, I would say more...

The Memorex Years - 35 Summers 'Really Down'

This bit of indie nostalgia wasn't originally an actual The Memorex Years post, but a guest post for music blog Sweeping The Nation, as part of their 'Songs To Learn And Sing' series. To be honest it was a bit limiting to have to write about one track in the established style, and it doesn't really fit with the other Memorex-skewed pieces, but it was directly because of The Memorex Years that I was invited to write a guest post in the first place, so it later went on the blog along with the rest....

"Inflicting boredom, just to try and pass the time"

1991 was not a good time to be in a British indie band. With the music press turning on the 'indie-dance' sound as Last Year's Thing and realigning their attentions towards the more unwashed and less interesting sounds drifting over from across the Atlantic, it was hard enough for the likes of Happy Mondays and The Charlatans to get by, let alone such second division acts as Airhead, The Dylans, The Milltown Brothers and Paris Angels, who generally found themselves either ridiculed or ignored by the NME and Melody Maker and ultimately by the general indie-orientated record-buying public. Candyland, Candy Flip, The Candyskins and any other bands with 'candy' in their name were not going to be ascending to megastardom, no matter how hard their record companies may have pushed them. Needless to say it was the snobby and elitist fashion-conscious music 'fans' who were missing out on this occasion, something that is reflected by the dizzying second-hand prices such bands command nowadays.

35 Summers were even more unfortunate than most, as they were one of a small group of bands who had the misfortune to be saddled with the ungainly monicker 'Scallydelic'. All of the bands that found this label slapped upon them - which included the The Real People, Rain, Top, The Tambourines, Pele, The Stairs and River City People - had only three vague factors in common; a closer geographical proximity to Liverpool than to Manchester, a mild passing interest in a certain sport involving two teams of eleven players, and a tendency towards dance-tinged jangly guitar pop that fell somewhere between the brilliance of The La's and the uneven-ness of The Farm.

Judging from their meagre recorded output, 35 Summers - vocalist Dave Pichilingi, guitarists Ian Greenwood and Duncan Lomax, bassist Robby Fay, keyboard player Jamie Southern and drummer Alan Curry - were definitely leaning towards the La's end of the scale, and although nobody deserves to be bundled in with such a shabby, ill-concieved and non-existent (not to mention ridiculously named) pretend genre as 'Scallydelic', at the end of the day they really only had themselves to blame by making their footballing craziness explicit with a top-selling t-shirt bearing the image of famed Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly. In an age when many indie bands were reputed to be shifting more t-shirts than actual records, this highly popular item of long-sleeved fashionwear did much to build 35 Summers' profile, but also ended up slightly obscuring the fact that they also made rather good music. All the same, this particular t-shirt had the unsual distinction of being inadvertently captured for posterity on film on two seperate occasions - Peter Hooton is seen wearing one in the Harry Cross Out Of Brookside-equipped video for The Farm's Groovy Train, while from a slightly more enduringly watchable perspective, John Peel also sports the accidentally iconic garment while lurking backstage at the 1991 Reading Festival during Blur's fascinating tour film Starshaped.

35 Summers' first release, on a small independent label, was a suitably spaced-out reworking of The Beatles' Come Together (think along the same lines as The Soupdragons' I'm Free, The Farm's (I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone and Candy Flip's Strawberry Fields Forever, along with any of the several hundred other sixties covers done by any of several hundred other indie-dance bands, and you're probably halfway there already), bolstered by spoken word samples from the bizarre but self-explanatory long-player Shankly Speaks. On the strength of this they managed to secure a deal with RCA, for whom they would record and release two singles in 1991 - I Won't Try and Really Down.

Unveiled as part of a Peel session in August 1991, Really Down begins with the singer stating that "self-indulgence, it's a favourite past-time of mine". If it really honestly genuinely was, then you wouldn't know it from this song as the lyrics are an economical, heartfelt and utterly non-self-indulgent evocation of, well, feeling a little bit down in the dumps for no obvious reason, with the chorus complaining - with a possible hint of exaggeration - that "I must be the most unhappy man in the world". There's also a spot of rumination on inarticulacy, or to be more accurate the inarticulacy of others, complaining of how "no-one else seems to take the time to write the lines to express how I really feel". It's a bit of a puzzling complaint given that the lyrics seem to achieve this aim perfectly well by themselves, but not as puzzling as the fact that this lyrical theme seemed to be so common to so many indie-dance bands, and to The Mock Turtles in particular. Did they all think that someone else should be writing their lyrics for them?!?

Musically, Really Down is anything but down in the dumps. Dominated by a bright chord progression, ringing guitars, sparkling harmonies and what sounds like an accordian hiding away in the background somewhere, it's a catchy and upbeat pop song and its only flaw is that the sturdy rhythm section isn't really pushed to the fore, only really coming into its own in a section where the arrangement momentarily strips down to vocals and drums. The standard single edit of the song was joined on its various formats by an 'Extended Version', surely one of the last relics of the days when a 12" Mix simply meant doubling the length of the instrumental bits, and a 'Club Remix' by long-forgotten DJ team The Sound Foundation. The latter should theoretically have put right the minor problems of the original mix, but unfortunately it ends up suffering from exactly the opposite problems - while the remixers make the most of the rhythm section, they also jettison much of the structure and charm of the song itself.

Really Down had all the makings of a summery pop hit, particularly in the indie-friendly summer of 1991, but like all of 35 Summers' releases it didn't make much of an impression on the charts. Not even a reasonable amount of radio support and tours with the fairly highly profiled Northside and the extremely highly profiled EMF seemed to be enough to propel their releases into the lower reaches of the top forty, although the failure of Really Down is perhaps slightly more comprehensible than that of I Won't Try; the song's title is hardly prominent in the lyrics, which almost always seems to impede chart progress for some reason, and whereas the earlier singles had boasted a vaguely pyschedelic pastel-stroke-citrus hued design, the sleeve bears a semi-religious, semi-militaristic and wholly pretentious 'weeping statue' image that hardly suggests that catchy upbeat pop music might be lurking inside.

Sadly, both the lyrics and the off-puttingly maudlin sleeve of Really Down proved to be depressingly propetic for 35 Summers. To accompany the release of the single, they had attempted to replicate the success of the earlier Shankly t-shirts by producing a similar one featuring Leonard Rossiter in full-on Rigsby from Rising Damp mode. Yorkshire Television objected to what was essentially unauthorised use of their copyrighted image for commercial purposes, and the usual legal sabre-rattling resulted in a settlement that, perhaps predictably, was hardly exactly in the band's favour. Following this, their relationship with RCA worsened, and after their lone album Sketch was shelved, 35 Summers called it a day. Needless to say, the original single is now worth a relative absolute fortune, but unless you're particularly desperate to own the Club Mix and Extended Version, Really Down can be easily obtained on a belated Japanese issue of Sketch, and on the fourth volume of Twee.Net's (cough) 'semi-official' compilation series The Sound Of Leamington Spa.

The Memorex Years: Jesus Jones 'Perverse'

Another blast from the past originally written for The Memorex Years, this time taking a look at unfairly erased-from-history early nineties stadium rock giants in waiting Jesus Jones. This was in fact the last entry to appear on The Memorex Years, though there were another couple of guest posts for other blogs that deserve their moment in the spotlight, and also one brand new, previously unseen full-length feature, with Daleks in it and everything...

"This time, we'll split the world once more, there's those that have and those that don't in information wars"

Barring the odd overture to a couple of earlier eighties artists, Jesus Jones were really the first 'indie' band that a major label saw mass market sales potential in. The band had barely been together for a couple of months when a demo tape of their arresting futurist take on the genre, blending angular guitar sounds with elements of hip-hop, sampling and house music, caught the attention of EMI, who duly signed the band to their 'alternative' imprint Food, also home at various times to Blur, Shampoo, Dubstar, Octopus and Diesel Park West.

Fronted by the mouthy and ambitious Mike Edwards, Jesus Jones had no trouble attracting 'indie' and mainstream attention alike with their somewhat radical but chart-friendly sound, with their debut album Liquidiser and its attendant singles (some of which were drawn directly from that original demo tape) troubling the lower reaches of the top forty during 1989. The unashamed adoption of a slicker and more commercial (but still drenched in ear-worrying guitar effects) sound for second album Doubt saw them break the top ten singles and albums charts, while the band themselves jabbered enthusiastically in interviews about the future of music and how much they hated New Kids On The Block (leading to a flood of angry letters to Smash Hits, who to their credit seemed to enjoy writing about Mike Edwards and company far more than they did NKOTB) and for a time it looked almost certain that, against all odds, Jesus Jones would break through to megastardom.

Doubt was released early in 1991, but had been 'in the can' for some time already by then; indeed, the Big First Single Real Real Real had been released almost a year earlier. The band and their label had always intended holding off until they had another big hit to launch the album on the back of, which was exactly what they got with International Bright Young Thing, but what nobody had bargained for was the ensuing slow-burning international success of the album. Almost twelve months after it had fleetingly nudged into the UK top forty, the fantastic Right Here Right Now suddenly took off in America and slowly but surely climbed to the top of the charts, with EMF's Unbelieveable in hot pursuit. The Second British Invasion (Of Shouty Blokes With Techno Rhythms) was apparently on its way, and EMI's promotional campaign to take full advantage of this inevitably stretched out to the end of 1991 and beyond.

The band had in fact started work on their next album shortly after Doubt was released, and by the summer of 1992 had most of the tracks finished and ready for release (and even played a couple of them during the short-lived regular 'Works In Progress' feature on BBC Radio 1's The Evening Session), but such was the mechanics of ongoing record company hoo-hah that a convenient slot in the overbooked diary could not be found before January 1993.

Doubt had contained a song (well, some people would class it as that) called Stripped, a deliberately atonal blast of rage ("everyone is hungry, everyone needs to know") built entirely around electronically generated samples with no 'real' instruments featured on it whatsoever, and was quite possibly the reason why the album contained a warning that it could damage loudspeaker equipment if played at high volumes. Mike Edwards was clearly quite taken with this new way of working with music, as for Perverse he effectively dispensed with real instruments altogether. The album was indeed originally recorded in one quick session with the full band playing, but after this he spent several months tinkering with computerised approximations of the individual instruments to create angular artificial tones to suit his musical vision. Absolutely nothing of recognisable traditional guitar group sounds remained on the completed tracks, and when the album was finally released, the other members of the band were simply credited according to the sonic frequencies that their 'sounds' spanned.

At the time of release, the overall sound of Perverse took some adjusting to, even for loyal Jesus Jones fans with some peripheral knowledge of pop music's technologically avant-garde fringe. More than a few early plays of the album - in some cases, possibly the only play it ever got - were met with cries of "turn it off!" halfway through, with the harsh virtual tones serving to perplex rather than excite.

It is one of popular culture's cruel ironies, though, that nothing dates faster than something that was ahead of its time (and what's most amazing is that initial work on the album had started as early as 1991), and where Perverse once sounded, well, perverse in its futuristicness, it now resembles nothing more than it does the sort of pop sounds that the likes of Christina Aguilera were making back at the dawn of the century. Albeit with slightly more ambitious lyrical concepts.

For no readily obvious reason, the cover art of Perverse features repeated shot-within-shot images of a pair of identical masked American wrestlers; elsewhere are feature film-style credits for 'The Virtual Players', and, in lieu of anything useful like song lyrics or information about how the album was put together, a set of standard issue Jesus Jones song-by-song sleevenotes penned by Mike Edwards. These range from the really rather thought provoking ("Nothing. No, more malevolent than that... a vacuum" for Spiral), to a load of meaningless twaddle about how the modern political lanscape looks disconcertingly different when viewed through the wrapper off a bottle of Lucozade or something.

Opening with a zappy intro that sounds somewhat akin to a robot wasp chewing a late eighties Pet Shop Boys single, Zeroes And Ones sets out the album's agenda in no uncertain terms, proclaiming "this time the revolution will be computerised" and boasting that "zeroes and ones will take us there". Back in 1993 the average indie kid was inclined to view computers and everything associated with them with some degree of suspicion (as they were, after all, a tool of 'the man'), but there's a confidence and assurance in Mike Edwards' words that suggests that maybe they aren't so much of a cornerstone of Orwellian nightmares after all. Then again, it's quite possible that the leverage of new technology into 'alternative' culture provided by Zeroes And Ones ultimately indirectly led to the overwhelming flood of not-particularly-good would-be 'indie' bands with their own flickering and badly-designed MySpace page. Sometimes, you just can't win.

Anyway, rightly or wrongly, there's no denying that the tie-dyed megalomaniac's vision of the future was absolutely spot on, and in fact it's not the only time he manages to pull that off on this album. Unfortunately, though, the message is somewhat undermined by some of the supporting rhetoric, most notably a Think Of A Number-standard explanation of how computers communicate with each other, and far too much cheerleading for so-called 'virtual reality'. In fact, the lyrics to Zeroes And Ones are the most dated thing about the whole album; while the sense of optimism and enthusiasm still strikes a chord, most of the terminology now seems embarrassingly primitive and more than a little redolent of Channel 4's attempts to 'explain' the internet with the aid of none-more-1990s 'glamour model' Jo Guest.

When you're presented with a song as fantastic - not to mention hard-rocking, without featuring a single recognisable guitar sound - as Zeroes And Ones, such technological naivety is easy to forgive. An obvious first single that was released second, it stalled undeservedly low in the charts but still sounds great now.

The Devil You Know, the not even slightly obvious first single that was released first, takes an entirely different approach to the techno assault of the opening track, slowly sauntering in with a moebius strip-like jangly pattern that slowly builds up to the intense and hammering song proper. Nothing to do with Kylie Minogue's original hotpant-accompanied pop anthem, and less still to do with Sonia's jaw-droppingly irritating Eurovision entry of around the same time, the lyrics bemoan popular culture's insistence on recycling its own past instead of striving for new and innovative ideas, summing it up beautifully with the line "look at you now, look at you then, see how you will be".

Nobody in their right mind could ever accuse Jesus Jones of not having tried to do anything 'new', especially with this particular album, but while the sentiments are easy to sympathise with, the precise targets of the lyrical ire are more obscure. If anything, they're more than a little offbeam for coming in the immediate aftermath of a number of bands (Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets etc, all of whom Mike Edwards was keen to stress his enthusiasm for in interviews), comedians (well, Vic Reeves, at any rate) and assorted other artistic types achieving so much by mining the ideas of the past and combining them with modern and forward-looking approaches. And yet, as a cruel quirk of fate would have it, when Jesus Jones disappeared for the best part of four years post-Perverse, they were comprehensively sidelined by the steamrollering runaway success of a band who actually seemed to take some warped sense of pride in the mindless and artless revivalism of the sounds of yesteryear.

Anyway, irrespective of all that, the lyrics to The Devil You Know are top notch and deal with a difficult and abstract subject highly effectively, and the moody and powerful backing still sounds great too. In this track and Zeroes And Ones, Perverse has a brace of barnstorming openers that go a long way towards proving that Mike Edwards' vision of the 'Virtual Players' had something in it after all. The unfortunately titled Get A Good Thing, however, undermines this by proving that such an approach is best used sparingly. Not that there's anything wrong with the song itself, just that it's not exactly well served by its somewhat tinny and abrasive backing where the Jesus Jones of a couple of years earlier would have had neat synth sounds and a hefty bassline. Actually, just a discernible bassline would have been nice.

Seeing as its lyrics refer obliquely but heavily to the Gulf War of early 1991, From Love To War somewhat gives away how long the album took to make it to release. Sung in a croaky whisper over an ominous burbling backing melody, the song starts off as a straightfoward admonishment of unspecified but easily guessed world leaders, and turns in the middle eight into a quite remarkable rant on the impotent fury associated with making such statements in an apathetic and unheeding world, delivered with such venom that you can almost hear him "throw myself at the walls" in frustration. Although that might just be one of those swanky new electronically generated sound thingys.

From Love To War seuges virtually seamlessly into Yellow Brown, which replaces Week-Ending-swallows-a-dictionary style satire with something far more musically and lyrically ominous. Over a suitably smoggy and choked backing, Edwards sings with evident disquiet of how "a colour now spells our end", charting the global progress of a massed pollutant ("in the city air, in all our seas, you can see every other colour bleed into Yellow Brown"). Free of pretentiousness, self-righteousness and hand-wringing, and all the more direct and alarming for it, Yellow Brown simply states that pollution is here and increasing, that public and politicians alike are not doing anything about it ("and I won't do, and you won't do, cause we know there's nothing they will do about Yellow Brown"), and that they haven't got forever in which to stand around not doing anything about it ("there is no time to spend, concerned that this is just a trend"). Although the song was scoffed at by some reviewers on the album's release, in this age of the stable door being closed after the global warming has bolted, it's hard not to picture Mike Edwards wryly noting that he told everyone so. And what's more, told them so in straight language without any hyperbole.

Magazine ("all of life in fun size!") on the other hand, is a rather patronising swipe at those stupid, stupid fools who spend their time leafing through loosely bound collections of pages. The lyrics make no distinction between different types of magazines or different types of readers, and therefore appears to be focusing its ire as much on Private Eye, New Scientist and The Listener as it is on What's On TV. This is something of a hypocritical stance for someone who at the time was regularly to be seen on the front of various music magazines talking up their band with headline-friendly soundbites, not to mention a rather daft attitude to have if you're also hailing the burgeoning information revolution of the internet in the same breath. On top of all that, it's not even a particularly good song.

Thankfully, obvious first single that was released third The Right Decision is on hand to lift proceedings slightly. Underpinned by some neat wooshing/thudding guitar-esque noises and zingy high-pitched synth melodies, as well as what appears to be some cunningly disguised sampled Arabic singing, on face value it would appear to be little more than a string of Rory Bremner-esque observations of Life's Great Ironies, somewhat akin to Leonard Nimoy's Highly Illogical, or Alanis Morrissette's Ironic if she actually had some semblance of an understanding of what the word might have meant. The recurrence of those wry observations on the Gulf War don't exactly help matters much either.

However, this is not the work of someone who thinks that rain on your wedding day constitutes irony, nor indeed a Vulcan perplexed by our primitive human notions of parking spaces. Instead it's a collection of wry musings on the legality of tobacco and marijuana, police brutality, and the worry that "the problem with success is you become what you detest". So which New Kid On The Block did Mike Edwards become, then?

It may have wildly underperformed as a single but The Right Decision is in all other respects probably the most successful track on Perverse. It achieves a perfect balance between the familiar Jesus Jones sound and the scary new world of virtual music, and has a catchy hook to boot, and if this had been released as the first single (and if the various record companies had got their act together and got it released straight away while the band was still at its peak of popularity), things could have turned out very different indeed.

Your Crusade starts out with a rattle of Adam Ant-liked drumming, then diverts straight into what sounds like a backing track of an unreleased Doubt track being played through one of those massive alert loudspeakers from a sixties spy film, full of wooshing buzzsaw guitar (well, virtual guitar) sounds and dramatic synth sweeps with a bit more of that sampled World Music vocalisation thrown in for good measure. Despite the awful opening line "include me out", this is one of the most lyrically arresting songs on the album, a pointed rejoinder to those who would seek to hijack the Jesus Jones 'cause' to further their own personal political agendas ("don't need your approval, your safety in numbers, you stay in your team, I don't care enough to share your dream").

Your Crusade is easily one of the best songs that Jesus Jones ever recorded, and it can only be hoped that it succeeded in shaking loose whoever it was that was trying to use avant-garde indie-techno as some sort of sample-friendly stepping stone to something or other. Its only weak point is the inclusion of a sort of 'character jumping in ZX Spectrum game' sound at seemingly random moments, which sounds not only of out place but also plain daft.

Although the release of Perverse tied in very neatly with the transmission of the fourth series of One Foot In The Grave, Don't Believe It doesn't appear to be any form of tribute to Richard Wilson, rather a vague continuation of the theme of Your Crusade. This time, over a slightly more jaunty backing, the lyrical bile is confined to someone who "came at the right time, filled the right space" and seemingly then spent most of their time putting down the Jones boys in public. There's some nice turns of phrase ("you're evil personified come to avenge, our perfect enemy out for revenge"), particularly the cunningly self-referential "you'll get no excuse in this song", and it's a decent enough tune too, but the song overall seems a little too subdued for its purposes and doesn't really quite have the impact that it perhaps ought to. And anyway, it's impossible to listen to without thinking of Victor Meldrew.

A similar Coincidental Comedy Conundrum surrounds Tongue Tied, which most would surely identify as a fantastic pastiche Motown number originally heard in a second series episode of Red Dwarf, which proved so enduringly popular that it was released as a single (in a noticeably inferior arrangement) early in 1993, rather than a humble Jesus Jones album track. Starting off promisingly as a weird Eastern drone created from wholly non-natural sounds, with Mike Edwards doing his own non-sampled World Music-style singing over the top for once. Then it gets a bit more uptempo and rock-ish, albeit still with a pleasingly wailing atonal edge to the melody. The lyrics aren't really much worth dwelling on, although given that their theme is inarticulacy perhaps this was entirely intentional.

Your Crusade, Don't Believe It and Tongue Tied all seem to occupy common thematic ground, presenting a bullish and self-assured defiance towards detractors and doubts. This is hardly surprising given that in interviews around the time of the album's release, Mike Edwards suggested that most of the album was written in the throes of an attack of depression that followed the band's commercial breakthrough. Despite this, they're also all on the musically pleasant side of the virtual fence.

Spiral, however, kicks off with a harsh and abrasive zapping sound, giving way to a subdued cacophony of buzzing, humming, and ominously rumbling basslines. This is the darker side to the preceding tracks both musically and lyrically, charting the breakdown of order, method and indeed 'right time' and 'right place', phrases that crop up numerous times elsewhere on the album. "Catch the light a different way and all the bullshit falls away and I stare into a heart of darkness, there is no good no evil, only me", runs the oh-so-cheerful chorus, and while it makes for entertaining listening it's probably best not to ruminate on which dark corners of the mind this might have been dredged up from.

Idiot Stare doesn't exactly serve to lighten the mood, referring as it does to "a shadow that hugs me", "the corruption between us" and being "caught in an idiot stare". It is, however, the point where everything about this album falls into place, where the disorientating new sounds stop being treated as a Perrey & Kingsley-Go-Digital style gimmick and are shaped into a cohesive and thrilling rock sound with a seamless segue into an orchestral breakdown, and where a solid melody is finally called into service. It's one of the album's highpoints, and fittingly was the only non-single Perverse-era track to be included on the band's greatest hits collection Never Enough. The problem is that as this is the last track on an album that even at a mere twelve tracks already seems too long, it's come along a bit too late.

Incredible as it may seem, Perverse was very nearly even longer (and not just in Japan, where so-so b-sides Phoenix and Caricature were slotted in as extra tracks). Another song named Hang On Every Word was seemingly removed at literally the very last minute, having been talked up by Mike Edwards in pre-album interviews and even making it as far as the first batch of promo copies. This was something of a shame, as it featured both an impressive Zeroes & Ones-like arrangement built around a vocal sample and lyrics that tackled the slightly less culturally ephemeral subject of jargon designed to confuse and alienate. If this had been included and one or two other tracks taken out, and the whole tracklisting shuffled around a bit, the result could well have been an album that was significantly easier to listen to in one sitting.

Mike Edwards was a rarity among indie musicians in that instead of drawing influence from the past he looked almost exclusively to the future. Unfortunately, it was a future that didn't necessarily view his band with mutual enthusiasm. The by now standard record company jitters saw the following Jesus Jones album - ironically titled Already - repeatedly pushed back in the schedules until it ended up coming out early in 1997. By that time Britpop and its ensuing descent into tedious Noel Gallagher-endorsed post-Britpop had put paid to any chances of a Jesus Jones revival, even EMF having long since thrown in the towel, and the band became the constant target of sneering music press jokes at their expense from writers determined to prove how 'down' they were with the latest new bands. The album's inevitable failure to generate any interest in this atmosphere pretty much put paid Jesus Jones' future career prospects. A sad and wholly undeserved fanfareless fade-out for one of the most promising bands of recent times, if we're being honest about it.

Along with the rest of Jesus Jones' albums, Perverse is still available to buy on CD, and perhaps more appropriately as a digital download. Although it might not quite have been in line with what he was thinking of at the time he wrote the lyrics, in a sense Zeroes & Ones really have taken Mike Edwards and his oft-overlooked music 'there'.

You can read more about the early nineties indie scene in my book Higher Than The Sun, available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.