"Any quarter-decent three-chord knobheads could and did get a deal in the ’90s." POLL

Ride will take this in a walk, but I expect Curve to finish a solid second.

Original Robbie blog:
http://www.robbiewilliams.com/news-blogs/just-musing-a-supposed-brett-anderson-quote

Salad were really good and enormously underrated.

I'm slightly obsessed with the money-drunk signing spree of the 90s - like that great recent list of the weirdest post-Nevermind major label deals. It was the last blowout.

nah the 00s landfill indie era was way worse

Much worse

Sorry, that sound like I was correcting your use of English when in fact I was agreeing with you... probably should be "far worse"

... and "sounded", of course

Best??? this isn't in the spirit of shit 90s Brindie polls

If I had to prepare a thesis on one of these bands actually being objectively good, if there is any such thing, it would be Ride, which is a really boring answer.

So I'm voting Salad, just for "Drink the Elixir", which I find as strikingly inexplicably transcendent as I find pretty much any Robbie Williams single striking inexplicably horrible.

that is impressive knowledge on Williams' part, though of course any cratedigging is likely to be done in charity shops for these lot. Still astounding after all these years that Northern Uproar got a record deal.

I know nothing of this Salad tbh

i might vote Shed 7 because a) i have oddly warm feelings to the odd single as being "decent" and b) fuck off the ILM shoegaze massive

Wik tells me however that one of them ended up in Gay Dad... not the drummer :( (xp)

Cud don't really belong here, post C86 chancers who i'm sure couldn't believe their luck at getting a major deal and probs pished it away without a thought

Please remove CUD and Ride
by I know you dran… - 21 Mar 2013 - 7:04pm
Please remove CUD and Ride from that list. You obviously don't own anything of their music and have probably been trawling through old NME's indie charts for bands around at that time to take a swipe at.

xxxp their Wikipedia entry is really something: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shed_Seven

With five UK Top 40 entries in 1996,[3] Shed Seven had more hit singles than any other act that year,[1]

Robbie Williams' titular description of these is pretty much otm tbf to the lad

iirc did robbie himself not try out an edgy indie alterna-phase for a brief bit

i was gonna say Britpop was his whole shtick when he first left Take That

Robbie Williams still taking potshots at Sophie Ellis Bextor after all these years.

took me 18 months to realise Robbie's songs weren't written by the bloke out of House of Love

Despite Noel Gallagher describing him as that fat dancer from Take That (xxxp)

only when Noel Gallagher tosses a lazy zing in one's direction does one know one has truly arrived

was Symposium that bunch of 13 year-old Finnish psychobillies?

i wonder how long the band meeting was that settled on "Powder"? or if they rejected "Deodorant" and "Toothpaste" and "Old Spice" first?

look back fondly on the heady days of saying rude things about Kingmaker in interviews in our local fanzine

oh god i've wasted my life

Kingmaker, the band perpetually in the shadow of The Wonderstuff.

re: Shed 7..

I was sent a promo of one of their singles, the press release with it stated the proud boast that "all of their singles have hit the top 40"

funnily enough, so did the single they sent me. But that was the last time...

Enticed by the promise of free stuff I filled in a BMG Music questionnaire once and ticked the "indie" box so they spent the next 2 years sending me Northern Uproar and Out Of My Hair badges

i hope you learned your lesson

I learnt the lesson of free stuff but not the lesson you're thinking of, no :(

Someone needs to do a where-are-they-now? feature on all of these bands

there's only so many ways you can write "Call Centre"

I'd love it if Crispian Mills was my Job Centre advisor.
No wait I wouldn't.

In 2010, Spacehog guitarist Antony Langdon gained notoriety for his role in the controversial mockumentary starring Joaquin Phoenix I'm Still Here. Langdon, who was one of Phoenix's assistants as well as a musical partner,[14] staged a falling-out with the actor during the documentary's filming and is shown (in the film's most shocking scene)[according to whom?] defecating on the troubled actor in retaliation for an earlier argument. In an earlier part of the film, there is a similarly shocking scene involving Langdon getting out of the shower.

Pondering The Zutons.. They got dropped by Sony about 6 months after their last (top ten) album, the websites have gone, but no official 'split' as such..

Probably living off "Valerie" royalties..

I hate Ride. Nowhere is just useless rubbish, taking shoegaze and showing how it can also be used to make boring rock songs just like they've always been make. So dumb. So it was hard to vote for anything, but I ended up at Kula Shaker, as I've actually heard their albums... Not good, not really.

Hoping it's past the bed time
by karen490 - 21 Mar 2013 - 10:42pm
Hoping it's past the bed time of the silly idiots who seem to have found their way here today to post their nasty small minded and mainly inacurate crap. Wouldn't you think they would at least get the facts right -----------------------Just wanted to say congratulations on yet another award and i loved your baseball cap.

*yoink*

Anyone who doesn't vote Curve is a disgusting savage iirc

I still have something of a soft spot for 'Tranquiliser' and 'Into The Blue' by Geneva. I remember when they first appeared and the press was all 'lol he sings like a girl' and now you'd be hard pressed to find an indie frontman who doesn't attempt an excruciating falsetto.

That dude must shake his fist at the capricious gods every time Chris Martin appears on TV.

You left off Ocean Colour Scene by the way...

Think they fall short of the quarter-decent requirement

Ride, obviously. Wasn't a massive Salad fan at the time, but their singles do still stand up. Chapterhouse/Cud/Curve/Adorable/Kingmaker I kind of think of as being from the era previous, but I don't know if that's just me? Not all good, obv (though I was a 12-yr-old Kingmaker fan, I confess).

Chorus:
Hey dude
Don't lean on me man
Cause I'm losing my direction
And I can't understand, no no
Hey dude
Well I do what I can
But you treat me like a woman
When I feel like a man

^ these guys were being ironic right?

Adorable for "Homeboy"

xpost to emil.y -

If Chapterhouse etc are a previous era, then so are Ride surely, esp since they predate some of those!

Ride were basically shit by the time the other bands were around.

At some point in my life I have owned things by 12 of these bands :(

Voting Echobelly mainly because of On, which somebody mentioned upthread. Trying to remember how I became aware of them, oh yes, Addicted To Noise.

Sure I remember hearing about anther Salad, a bunch of hippies whose name stood for Sex And Loving All Day and who sued indie Salad over the name, but Internet has NO RECORD.

Salad's first album was in fact called "Drink Me" because I owned it! Unlike Lush and Ride, they never made it to Texas.

Echobelly - Only really remember the singles from the second album like Great Things and King of The Kirb. Think they released a couple more albums after people gave up caring. I think they went in a brave dance direction for those albums.

Shed 7 - Their first single Mark is great song but nothing of any worth after that, maybe Disco Down if I'm being very generous. Changing the lyrics of Speak Easy to "At the link it's easy" for an advert was probably something they'd like to forget.

Symposium - Andrew Lloyd Webber was a big fan of them apparently. Three of them went on to form Hell is for Heroes who were a poor man's Hundred Reasons.

Menswear - Loved them at the time, most of the first album still sounds good today (especially The One and the bonus track) Second album as terrible, I paid a fortune for it back in the day. What the hell was their last single, We Love You? (I bought it on all formats)

Sleeper - I can still enjoy Sale of the Century today but nothing else. She's a writer now and I've read her first book which is about an indie band trying to make it big!

Hurricane #1 - "These days you gotta kill yourselves just to stay alive" I do feel sorry for them as Alan Mcgee forced them to use that song for an advert for The Sun which completely ended their career.

Ride - First two albums and their early EP's are classic, seriously Robbie why are they on the list?

The Bluetones - First and third albums are really good, they have a few other decent songs spread out over their career.

Northern Uproar - Loved their attempt to go Motown for their second album, poor sods.

Chapterhouse - One great single, not much else.

Curve - Never really heard them. Didn't people say Garbage sounded like them when they first came about?

Salad - First album was okay. Drink The Elixir remains a brilliant single. I had a big thing for the singer when they came out.

Adorable - Just listened to one of their albums recently, I don't really remember anything about it right now.

Cud - Never heard them.

Spacehog - They were from my hometown (Leeds) the singer married Liv Taylor which was just strange. The singer's brother had a band called Cube who were equally useless.

Kula Shaker - Nothing really to say about these guys that hasn't already been said. I will say that I did own some of their singles and a B-side called Crispian Reading From The Mahabharata is the funniest song ever recorded. He reads it over the music from Tattva.

The Audience - Still like the Pessimist is Never Disappointed single but the album was rubbish. The guy doing the songwriting was majorly creepy, especially him writing "If you can't do it when your young, when you can do it" for a 18 year old Sophie Elis Bextor to sing.

Powder - I loved that first single she did as Lodger with guys from Supergrass and Delicatessen (where are they on your list Robbie?) Only remember Afrodisiac which they did on that Britpop Now show presented by Damon Albarn. That show is well worth a watch by the way.

Kingmaker - I rememeber a couple of their singles, Queen Jane and Ten Years Asleep. Didn't Justine from Elastica have an affair with the singer when she was still with Damon? Maybe that was one of those odd Britpop dreams I keep having?

Geneva - Loved them at the time. Second album was total nonsense but the singles on the first album remain great, especially Tranquilizer and that bassline on Into The Blue. I always thought JJ72 were really stealing their sound but with much worse lyrics "boo hoo why won't it snow" etc.

Funny that Robbie slagged off all these bands as his first album was probably influenced by him trying to sound like at least half of these bands. Lazy Days, Old Before I Die and fucking South of the Border would fit in with the worst of Britpop. He toured with The Supernaturals and the reason he fell out with Sophie Elis Bextor was because he was desperate for The Audience to support him but she slagged him off calleing him a tart, he went and had a big cry and called her a moon face in repsonse.

So in summary, Ride by a mile. I do still like most of his Robbie's Rudebox album though and No regrets.

Curve is so much better than Ride it's not even a contest

Saw Marion sometime in the past... 7 years? when they had their massive comeback

― kinder

Here is more about their massive comeback.

http://www.nme.com/blog/index.php?blog=10&title=whatever_happened_to_marion_1&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

I still like most of their album and the comeback single from their (quite shit) second album was rather excellent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7ER_g3VYBI

Oh man, that's grim reading. Feels almost wrong to let him say all that stuff.

Curve - Never really heard them. Didn't people say Garbage sounded like them when they first came about?

they said this because it was enormously true

Didn't Justine from Elastica have an affair with the singer when she was still with Damon? Maybe that was one of those odd Britpop dreams I keep having?

they were flatmates (post-Kingmaker I think, and writing songs together that never came out, probably bcz drugs)

Curve is so much better than Ride it's not even a contest

'Strue

quarter-decent three-chord knobhead sampler - a spotify playlist

http://open.spotify.com/user/onimo/playlist/7Cwanv1rx9W9EtZotmZe1T

spotify:user:onimo:playlist:7Cwanv1rx9W9EtZotmZe1T

(three or four artists not available on spotify)

That Marion interview is pretty grim, but the most startling revelation is that he still gets four grand a year in royalties.

Ride wins due to having the best album, although Spacehog "In The Meantime" is probably the best song by any of these bands. Also I'm pretty sure Adorable's "Sunshine Smile" was cool. I've heard about 2/3's of the others on used/discount comp CD's (which was how I tried to find bands in the late-90s/early-2000s) or in archived "Festive 50" streams, the types of songs that never stuck in my head or got my attention enough to go back and listen again. I also recall Kula Shaker unimpressively covered "Hush."

In other words OTM Robbie.

Why did he feel the need to take a pop, exactly? Obama doesn't have a go at the kids from the debating club in the other school on the far side of his home town.

boost his pop credentials

Auditioning for the role as Morrissey's understudy

Because he thinks that no one ever thought these bands sucked before, and he wanted to be the first one to say it.

He's bitter that he couldn't shift his Shine compilations on ebay.

Thanks, onimo, although surprisingly quite a few of those are unavailable in the US.

One that went missing, Echobelly's "Kings of the Curb":
http://youtu.be/epqZrkxZ3_o

Aargh. It's spelled "King of the Kerb"

Kerb your Enthusiasm

So is the song "Statuesque" by Sleeper built around the metaphor of someone being a statue made of stone?

Kula Shaker is among my most hated ever.

Why the ire? I know they're silly, but Tattva and Hey Dude are jams.

Wait, and Shower Your Love was terrific - everyone forgets that one.

I can't believe I'm forgetting Sound Of Drums! What a band!

Might be inclined to vote for Lush if they had been on this list.

Oh yeah. I just had a big Lush revival and was surprised by how well it held up.

Reviving right now. Forgot about the Jarvis Cocker duet.

the reason why Lush isn't on this list is because even Robbie Williams remembered that they ruled

So he's not all bad?

On December 18 2006, Robbie Williams played the last of 59 stadium shows in a row, announced he was going to spend Christmas at his home in Los Angeles, and then basically disappeared. He was hardly seen at all in 2007. He briefly checked into rehab. He spent quite a bit of time hiking and playing football (he owns a football pitch on Mulholland Drive). Then he stopped hiking and playing football. His record company, EMI, announced he had no plans to release an album in 2008. Today he unexpectedly calls me to ask if I want to go with him to the desert in Nevada to meet UFO abductees.

"I've been spending so much time at home on the internet on sites like AboveTopSecret.com," he says. "I want to do something. I want to go out there and meet these people. I want to be a part of this. I want to do something other than sit in my bed and watch the news. And it starts with the UFO conference in Laughlin, Nevada, on Thursday. We can hear people's testimony about being abducted by aliens. There's an entire family of abductees going to be there, apparently."

I log on to the conference website. It's taking place at the quite down at heel-looking Aquarius hotel and casino. The conference slogan is Educating The World One Person At A Time, which makes it sound as if there won't be many people attending. The speakers will include Ann Andrews, from Lincolnshire, who claims her son Jason has had "disturbing experiences at the hands of many different alien species", and a surgeon, Dr Roger Leir, who claims he has extracted from patients 15 metallic implants that are not of earthly metal.

"I wonder if he'll bring the implants along," I say.

"So you can see with your own eyes whether they're earthly or not?" Robbie asks.

"Yes," I say.

"According to Jon," Robbie says.

He seems a bit disapproving of my scepticism. I tell him that my problem with spaceships is this: if they exist, why do they reveal themselves to the human race only in ambiguous ways? "I think maybe they're making mistakes," he replies. "I think the shield comes off by mistake and they were there all the time." He pauses. "I don't want to hear any debunking because I want to believe."

I wonder if he is a fan of Reality Bites?

now we know why the corrs get a pass

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

One of yr less surprising results.

Kula Shaker 6 votes SMDH

Strange truths

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/401978_10152261293673797_974893272_n.jpg

looking good grady

Top two unsurprising, then it gets refreshingly odd.

did some folk think they were voting for 'worst' not 'best'?

Hallo Spacehog

i still listen to, and enjoy, the first spacehog album ..

revival glam is always going to get airplay @ hq (see that other reviled album by loius xiv !)

OK, Kula Shaker strong showing was a little surprising tbh.

suspect that for others as well as me, the 1st album is massive guilty pleasure ...

Some acquaintances started saying 'kula shaker' for 'cool' around that time; for me that ruined them forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW3LyVPa2gE

"the first time i did Heroin was with Elastica.. " "alex james is the bassist in Blur. my nan could do that" and "here's another song by Damon Albarn, Connection by Elastica."

he likes a laugh and a joke this lad.