The Boo Radleys, Classic or Dud?

I love the Boo Radleys again, now. Hurrah!

Cheers!

Search: Boo Faith and the early EPs compilation
Destroy: everything post Giant Steps

best recommendation ever

Please, for the love of god, if you love music buy "Find A Way Out". You'll be very pleased.

When I first heard that they were going to put out the anthology Find The Way Out, I decided to go back and play every album to get ready for it. Worth buying because the remastered songs sound just a bit richer. I would play only one for a solid week or longer then on to the next one. I Love them but was going to be honest with myself and if anything didn't hold up I would have to admit it. Are they really the best band from the 90s bar none? Well I was going to find out.

Learning To Walk was still some glorious white noise. Everything's Alright Forever has some amazing pieces of music on it. They matured quite a bit from those first three E.P.'s, but not the greatest thing. Compared to other things around this time that was similar it's really good but compared to the Boos stuff, sub par. Still really don't give much thought behind Ichabob And I despite owning it.

I was absolutely floored on my rediscovery of Giant Steps. I have played other albums by them moreso recently and haven't played it for a while. It really is their White Album and should be the one that they will be remembered for. So many things ideas and sounds are put on to this record. Truly a masterpiece that many fans say they never were able to touch again. Have loved reading what Martin and the fans have written about this album on the web site. There are some hard-core fans of this very album, astonished to hear that. Some of what Martin wrote about the sound of this album: "I just listened to the album now in headphones for the first time in an age and I can hear Surf's Up/Smile/Pet Sounds, Spiritualized, Suede (well, Bernard Butler), The Flaming Lips, London Calling by The Clash (I think all the dub on the album sounds like the people who made it hadn't heard an awful lot of dub music) Moose, Dinosaur Jr, Sugar, MBV, Forever Changes by Love (of course), Goffin/King, New Order, The Beatles, Spacemen 3, Gershwin. It all sounds very old fashioned to me but that's from a distance of ten years, I could never make an album like that now. I heard Os Mutantes about seven years later and realised that we hadn't done anything that hadn't been done before. I wanted everything to sound like a bootleg, like the Smile CD that we listened to so much in those days, with mistakes and talking and all that stuff but I don't hear as much of that as I thought I would." http://www.booradleys.co.uk/giantsteps

Next came Wake Up! which I like to call their Beatles album. A stage they needed to go through at the time. It's the least sounding Boo Radleys album that they made but was surprised because I enjoyed more then I remember. Better than most Britpop albums around this same time but give me my band back.

I wanted loud, I wanted aggression, I wanted creativity, I wanted C'mon Kids. The record buying public hated this album after the last one. I couldn't be any happier; this is what the Boo Radleys were all about. Maybe throwing in too may ideas on each song but a song like "Bullfrog Green" takes my breath away.

There are times in your life where certain albums mean so much to you that it's impossible to put into words. Kingsize is one of those albums for me as it came along at the perfect time. It seemed to speak for me and not just about me. There is no other album I have played more since its release in late 1998. One flaw is that "Free Huey" doesn't work and I skip it each and every time I play this album. I guess "The Future Is Now" is sort of out of place as well and would be a much stronger closing with "Song From the Blueroom" but I don't mind at all. About a year later I bought the U.S. version of this album for one extra song called "Put Your Arms Around Me and Tell Me Everything's Going To Be OK." It seemed to be the perfect song to close their story. This album is the most misunderstood album of theirs but it's by far the most rewarding.

So yeah classic, everything and that is not going into some of the best B-sides of any band. Hope to see remastered versions of these albums some day along with the B-sides story that needs to be told. Band of the 90's and happy the quit when they did and didn't keep putting out stuff past their peak like it seems SFA have done.

"Just a simple song but God I love it. Embedded in me, so bittersweet. I'm addicted, I'm a melancholic. Sing it again. I'll be your friend forever."

Next stop...probably EAF.

Hey, I like that mistype!

Anyway, as I said on the "celebration" web page, I packed it after Giant Steps as it did everything I wanted to do musically. I note it did not inspire many bands to be as musically adventurous. How could you 'copy' being individual? Who could follow it?

OTMFM. Just this little section was enough to affect me enough as a teen to change the way I appreciate music for ever. You have no idea how much I love Giant Steps. As for "I've Lost The Reason", I always saw it as part of a triumverate of songs along with "Best Lose The Fear" and "Take The Time Around". For some reason these sound like they were written to sit next to each other.

It took me a long time to realise how sad and depressed the lyrics were to "Wake Up!" and I'm only just getting round to this fact with "Giant Steps". I guess GS is a concept album in nostalgia, uncertainty, being 23 - that stage between being a young adult and an adult when people won't take you seriously despite all your greatest ambitions. "Wake Up!" is a concept album about being 25 and being granted your independence and having the world as your oyster, but still feeling somehow unsatisfied with this pseudo-utopian setting, revealing itself to actually be a bigger burden than you had expected. And of course it's all set to the most wonderful offbeat psychedelic pop music.

Woops, my mistake, I thought you were talking about "If You Want It, Take It". No this song is a goodie and it kinda points towards how they'd sound on "Wake Up".

Heartbreaking reallly.

I should one day learn to shut my gob about the Boo Radleys.

Realised a few years ago that I was so wrong and Giant Steps was their crowning acheivement and I'll echo everything dog latin has said, brilliant record. It was Martin's lyrics that pushed them over into greatness for me though right enough. Also the whole thing of them dreaming of being pop stars and being on TOTP as kids, actually acheiving it then realising it was crap whilst writing about this in the songs. Brilliant.

I've lost track of Brave Captain though I did like the first few releases. Saw him live at King Tuts and got to talk to him a bit on his first solo tour and he was a thoroughly nice chap and happy to give credit where it was due to the other guys in the band, didn't seem to be any animosity. He also played an absolutely blinding gig. Mind you, also saw him a year or two later with a different (inept) band and he was shit and since then I don't think I've listened to any BC stuff at all.

It's on Spotify, so looking forward to listening tonight.

Is this Giant Steps tour going to be any good without Martin? The London gig hasn't sold out yet so I could possibly go, but I'm not convinced.

Yeah, it’ll be great

The last album to me made some sense as it had a Boo Radleys sound. The problem with that is you no longer have Martin Carr who's the real genius. I grew to like the album and played it many times last year. This album is different, not a 180 turn but a turn nonetheless. It was strange as I felt like it had no guitar's until about 3/4 through it. These songs are just different so it's throwing me for a loop.

Just seen their first set (they're coming back out to do Giant Steps in a bit). First time I've seen them since 1992.

Sounds like fun. I got to see them back in the day and even at Lollapalooza.

Wish I was there and looking forward to your review.

That was actually really good. Glad I went.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08Qldx37Gz8

A belated review of sorts (of the London gig). Sice had got the stage times wrong (which he apologised for) as he got them mixed up with the following night, so they came on at 8pm for the first set instead of 8:30pm and I missed the first 20 minutes or so. Everything I heard from this set was new (either from the new new album or the one a year or two ago) so I didn't know them, but I was surprised to find I quite liked these songs. The exception was The Finest Kiss, which they closed with. As you can see from Paul's video above, they were augmented by a pretend Martin, which solved the missing guitar sound problem that had been making me reluctant to go to the gig originally.

The Giant Steps set later was pretty faithful to the album and did a good job of recreating the sound live (e.g. the feedback sounds at the start of Upon 9th and Fairchild). They played nearly every track: Sice announced mid-set that they would be missing out 'the shit noisy one' and asked 'how many people really want to hear Run My Way Runway?' - the answer was a lot of us, so he said he'd go and get a hoover and mike it up as this would do the job. It was largely in order apart from a medley section (can't remember exactly what was in this - One Is For definitely, maybe Spun Around and Best Lose The Fear). They messed up the opening to If You Want It, Take It twice before finally getting it right and then Sice got the chorus wrong (singing the second bit twice instead of "there's nothing bright about being undecided"). The only problem sonically was that Tim was singing the "do you know my name before you tear me apart? do you care who I am?" lines from Rodney King and it was almost inaudible, which was odd because his backing vocals were clear most of the rest of the time. I was surprised at how many people were there and the band seemed delighted by the audience response - broad smiles on their faces at the 'ba-ba-ba-ba's from the crowd during Lazarus. I took little video clips, but no whole songs. If I can be bothered I could stitch them together and put them on YouTube, but don't hold your breath.

Still not sure how I feel but came across this:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/the-boo-radleys/eight-review

Just found this sublime acoustic version of Everybird from a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kovwtpD26ng

Rob playing bass AND a bit of hi-hat too? Nice!

Why is C’mon Kids not on streaming?

are you also in the USA? might have something to do with Mercury records’ rights

It's on Spotify in the UK, um, kids .

Boo

At it not being on Spotify US