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

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 :(

It was quite fashionable at the time to diss Salad because their singer was a) female and good looking and b) an MTV presenter but I liked them. Their 2nd album was a bit of a let down though.

Crispy Mills was many things but ironic was not one.

Anyway, I voted for Ride, even though, after the second album, they were exactly the kind of "quarter-decent three-chord knobheads" RW is moaning about.

The frequency with which Slight Return by The Bluetones pops up on 6music does my head in and makes me think it's some kind of NHS prescription for sad sack 30-somethings. Like me.

Col Poo, yes, Ride count as the previous era too, sorry, that really wasn't clear on my part. Salad don't, obviously.

I prefer Drugstore to Salad but I guess it's purely the 'foreign female singer' thing that makes them comparable.

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

Hmm, good point, I shall go count up:

Right, my definition here is "Things", i.e. more than one single/album by the artist listed.

Two.

(Menswear (2 singles, one album) and Sleeper(most of their stuff) )...

I'll rep for one other, "Dark Entries" by Echobelly, that were good that..

HI DERE!

i'm not really here, obv, but:

Crispian Mills directed a film with simon pegg in, the early interviews for which entirely failed to mention Peela Tater

Symposium featured young polish lads, not finnish one of whom is now in Thee Faction with Billy Reeves from the audience.

Menswe@r (call them by their name) drummer Matt everett is now the music news guy on 6music

ride and hurricane #1 gtrist andy bell was is oasis and is now in beady eye

pearl from powder is now best known for being Daisy Lowe's mum

any more questions? *britpop face*

Back to Rob:

NOW THIS WAS AT THE HEIGHT OF WHAT WAS BRITPOP AND MAINSTREAM INDIE.

RECORD COMPANIES DON'T/DIDN'T HAVE THE RESOURCES TO GAMBLE?

I THINK NOT …

ANY QUARTER-DECENT 3 CHORD KNOBHEADS COULD AND DID GET A DEAL IN THE 90'S ….

I wouldn't have thought signing 1/4 decent 3chord knowbeds in the age of Oasis and Blur was much of a gamble, we're not talking CabVolt are we?

As long as those bands sold slightly more value than they cost, and could get dropped before the balance sheet got too claret, what gamble are we thinking of?

I have tried searching for some of the more distinctively named minor members of these groups and disappointingly they all seem to be on linkedin and doing respectable music-related jobs.

Things mostly meant singles there but I did have albums by some of these.

In retrospect I'm most embarrassed about owning an album and 2 singles by the Bluetones. That can only really be explained by peer pressure I guess. I didn't even like them then, I saw them twice in 1995 and they were shit both times. But some of my friends liked them. I dunno, the follies of youth.

I'd much rather listen to a Bluetones record than the lumpen laddishness of a lot of these twats.

Probably didn't have anything by the laddish bands, maybe one or two depending on which count as laddish.

xp co-sign. First album is p decent if you can ignore all the "New Stone Roses" nonsense.

Tell you what, if any of those record labels signed one of those type bands now, that'd be a gamble..

The anti-Robbie Williams

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/mar/21/devendra-banhart-i-love-britpop

Also Johnny Dean from Menswe@r had this to say:

http://nuisanceclub.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/god-bless-johnny-dean/

Is it fair to say you're a Britpop fan?

It's very fair to say. I love almost every Britpop band. I'm going deep here.

Including Shed Seven?

Sure, sure.

Really?

To be honest, no.

xxxp What I meant by "the last blowout" was financial. There were a lot of landfill bands, and he music was probably worse on balance, but there weren't the same torrents of cash behind them as there were in the 90s. Labels were already feeling the pinch.

that may be the greatest thing I have ever seen Devendra Banhart say

Dev would love Shed 7 if he heard them. Willing to gamble on this. Especially 'At The Link' or whatever it was.

pretty dumb question tho Is it fair to say you're a Britpop fan? as if it were controversial somehow to like some rock music that was v popular in the mid 90s. He also collects headshots of TLC, some SWV and some En Vogue. Perhaps he liked those bands at the same time omg.

xpost -- Let us gauge reactions. How does this make you feel?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbpVJYh4V_s

As for it being a pretty dumb question, he was in the US rather than the UK, I thought? So it was a little more out of step there.

The Bluetones were regularly playing shitty pubs in Lewisham a couple of years back, amazing they plugged away for so long. Cautionary tale of what happens when you don't split up at the right time, even the reformed Ultrasound* were probably playing bigger venues.

*Speaking of bands with way too much money thrown at them.

The Bluetones' commercial success waned after the fall of the Britpop movement, yet they continued to tour and release new records and were therefore often labelled as "Britpop survivors".

The band's final album A New Athens was released on 31 May 2010.

The band split on 1 October 2011 following a farewell tour which ended with a concert in Osaka, Japan.

I'm trying to imagine any of that.

Man their entire Wikipedia biography reads like a fake band dreamed up by a bad author for a book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bluetones

The second album, Return To The Last Chance Saloon, was released in 1998. While failing to generate the commercial success of their debut, it did spawn hits in the form of "Solomon Bites the Worm" and "If...".

Whilst many of their mid 1990s peers had disbanded by 2000, The Bluetones released their third album, Science & Nature, which again reached the Top 10 and featured the hit singles "Keep the Home Fires Burning" and "Autophilia".

After releasing a best-of album in 2002, the band followed up with Luxembourg, an album which received mixed reviews.

all i remember from the mid-late 90s is dave grohl and johnny depp constantly praising britpop bands, paul whitehouse, black pudding etc. but n/m

Gorblimey.

Madlib time:

Mark G, Is it fair to say you're a Britpop fan?

http://www.dogsandbabieslearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/no.jpg

Northern Oproar

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.