The Boo Radleys, Classic or Dud?

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.

As much as I really love this band I also overlook EAF even though I know everything on it is excellent. The poll would be a good reason to revisit.

Listening to Almost Nearly There followed by To a Galaxy Far, Far Away and thinking how these guys are basically my dream band... Big Blood, Happy End, the Boo Radleys -- my favorite genre of music is psychedelic folk-rock, and these groups are *exactly* how I want my psychedelic folk-rock to sound.

And Martin writes with his heart wide open! Alongside Giant Steps, And Tomorrow the World, and Wake Up on repeat, I've been blissing out to The Canton Hours, Martin's "oh never mind, I'm not actually going to finish this album" collection from last year. The arrangements are sometimes brilliant and sometimes on the dinky side, but either way, the songs are awesome.

The EPs collected on Learning To Walk are all good, if in thrall to MBV's Loveless

Hmmm, maybe Glider, etc? Even Everything's Alright Forever was apparently in the can before Loveless's late '91 release.

I believe Martin had heard an early version of "Loveless" which inspired "Losing it (Song for Abigail)"

ah interesting. some real hot “glide guitar” on that song for sure

Hmmm, maybe Glider, etc? Even Everything's Alright Forever was apparently in the can before Loveless's late '91 release.

― Nag! Nag! Nag!, Thursday, 28 May 2026 02:39 (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Really good point. I'm getting my timelines mixed up possibly because early Boos is often described as "second wave" shoegaze.

But I was listening to EAF in the car yesterday and not only was it the perfect soundtrack for a hot hot day (it is inseparably a summer album for me), but I was struck at how much they'd developed their own sound by this point, away from their peers. There are specific effects and techniques, especially on the guitar, that feel peculiar to the Boo Radleys even at that stage in their careers.

Oh yeah, the UK/Euro heatwave keeps making the news here! Suddenly compelled to get my olde CD out for a... winter airing here.

Certainly didn't occur to me that they might have had inside intel, at least by EAF. *blushes* I guess they were suddenly on the same label, even, by mid-'91.

the lesser-heard Ichabod & I is a non-essential curio....The EPs collected on Learning To Walk are all good, if in thrall to MBV's Loveless (which is not a bad thing). There are some moments of brilliance throughout.

I suspect I'll be repeating things I've already said on this or other threads, but I can't be bothered to check. I don't think early Boo Radleys stuff sounds like MBV. I seem to remember them saying their big influence at the time was Dinosaur Jr? Ichabod & I was the first thing of theirs I bought and I liked it enough at the time (well, some of it - there's a few duds on there), but it's kind of impossible to listen to alongside anything else they've done because the production is so cheap/lo-fi/bad. It sounded good enough on a walkman on the way to college in 1990, but isn't great with today's technology. The two EPs from 1991 were a definite step up and I'd say that there are several *essential* tracks: Naomi, Everybird, Sometime Soon She Said, Foster's Van. If I'd had to describe their sound in 1991, I'd have said they were the most aggressively noisy band I had come across - layer upon layer of extreme distortion. I do remember thinking that Everything's Alright Forever sounded more MBV influenced, but I've just had a quick review of it now and the influence is much less than I'd remembered. What's more noticeable is the increased use of acoustic guitar. I think EAF would have been even better if they'd moved further away from the 'every song must have really loud bits' mentality.

Just remembered what I meant to say: I liked Icahabod *because* it was the first thing of theirs I had heard, but they unambiguously got better after that. If you are working backward from Giant Steps, it's unlikely you'd appreciate it - it sounds quite cheap and nasty by comparison.

Really wish someone would do the EAF poll, I can’t as you'll see next week. Love everyone's stories that they're sharing.

This is a ridiculous band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-XB5gKmk-8

Here we go: The Boo Radleys - Everything's Alright Forever (Poll)