mr dave

Almost as if you had become a cow that was sacred?

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i am the universe

Urban Hat€monger ?

Today I went shopping & saw 3 music magazines in a rack.

One had Nirvana on the cover
One Had The Smiths on the cover
The other had Green Day on the cover

I laughed when I realised it was 2012

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Goofle

Greenday are still relevant unfortunately.

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The Batlord

I don't know how you managed to find the perfect internet pic to describe the Sex Pistols, but bravo.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

I think I may have seen the greatest 'artist history' ever on Last FM...

Ramases and Selket
Ramases was the creation and alter-ego of Martin Raphael (sometimes known as Barrington Frost), born in Sheffield, UK. Formerly an army PT instructor, whilst involved in a central heating business in Scotland, was inspired to assume the mantle of the Egyptian Pharaoh of whom he believed himself a reincarnation, and take up a musical career.

As you do.....

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Urban Hat€monger ?

While I was digging through some old CD's today I came across S*M*A*S*H's self titled E.P. from 1994.
'Oh, I remember this' I thought to myself, 'I bought this the very same time I bought Definitely Maybe by Oasis.'
Then I remembered the circumstances of me buying them.

I was in Gatwick Airport patiently waiting for my flight home reading a battered copy of Melody Maker after a Doctor Who convention (shut up), when I was reminded by the magazine that Oasis were releasing their debut album that day. So I took off and decided to go have a look for it. I'd already bought a stack of albums on the previous Friday before I spent the weekend in a hotel trapped with a bunch of geeks and Daleks and figured a few more wouldn't cause any harm.

I'd been reading about Oasis ever since the beginning of 1994. I remember seeing their first ever interview in Melody Maker written next to a photo session they did the John Lennon memorial at Strawberry Fields in Central Park.
Actually it wasn't the band that interested me in the slightest it was the photo shoot as I had visited Strawberry Fields just a couple of months earlier. So after all the 'Cool, I've been there' thoughts left my head I read the interview and loved how arrogant they were. I was so used to reading stuff with boring miserable indie saps who would mope around whining on and on about how pained they were and how they took it out in their music. Here was a gang of working class lads (much like me) who were saying 'We're gonna be the biggest band in the world', and I loved them for that. I bought the Shakermaker single & loved it. I also bought the Live Forever single and loved that too. I couldn't wait to hear a whole album.

Picking up Definitely Maybe proved to be easy enough, there was an enormous f*cking display of it with a rack holding about 1000 copies of it in the doorway at the airport's branch of Our Price/ HMV/ Tower/Virgin (I forget which, it seems to change every time I pass it).
Feeling rather disappointed that the whole escapade only killed off around 2 minutes I decided to see if I could find anything else of interest.

After several minutes or possibly 2 hours I excitedly found the S*M*A*S*H E.P.
Why was I so excited? Well I had just spent the previous year reading about them and how they were going to be the next big indie thing, totally oblivious to the fact that in my total youthful nativity there was no way in hell that a bunch of 3 skinny dweebs from Welwyn Garden City who had spent their youth listening to too many Clash & Manic Street Preachers albums would take over their local pub let alone the world. But that didn't matter because I had the next big indie thing (On Virgin Records) and I was the only person I knew who owned it.

I feel I should take some time here to explain the reason why S*M*A*S*H were being so hyped by the music press at the time.

1993 was a weird year to be a fan of new British bands. When people look back at the Britpop era they tend to think of it beginning in late 1993 early 1994 because that's when a lot of the bands started getting attention. But the truth is very little of these bands had anything in common and it wasn't until mid 1995 with the whole Blur vs Oasis thing that they began being lumped in as a 'movement.'

The music press seemed desperate to cling onto anything remotely British so they didn't have to feature just grunge bands all the time. Even by 1993 they had already turned their back on the whole 'Madchester' thing and Shoegaze, which they had spent the best part of the previous 2 years building up. I can distinctly remember bands like Chapterhouse & Ride getting absolutely slaughtered in the press during 1993 on almost a weekly basis for no real reason other than they probably just got bored of writing good things about them. there was Suede of course but they had already spent almost a year building them up and people were beginning to get bored of the mass coverage they got. Even the reliable Manic Street Preachers had put out Gold Against The Soul and did a tour supporting Bon Jovi which made many of the music press assume they had decided to go mainstream and the Manic's backlash in the press started, or at least it did until they put out The Holy Bible but that's a different story. The music papers wanted something new.

S*M*A*S*H were a part of the 'New Wave Of New Wave' a term forcefully coined by the music press to label a movement consisting of about 2 bands (These Animal Men were the other) who basically sounded like early Manic Street Preachers that they were desperate to get behind. Writing songs about drug addiction, suicide and the hilarious Lady Love Your Cunt which was inspired by the feminist writer Germaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch just made the press love them even more.

It didn't last long, maybe a matter of months. By the time their full length album came out almost a month after the day Oasis released Definitely Maybe the writing was on the wall. It got good reviews but not great ones. Music journalists just sort of moved away from them.These Animal Men who released their debut album the same month befell the same fate. It was just a stopgap until Blur put out Parklife, Pulp put out His n Hers, then by the end of the year you had singles out by Elastica, Supergrass, Shed Seven, Lightning Seeds, Menswear, Echobelly, Sleeper ...... and Britpop proper as we know it began.

Now it's hard for me to believe all this stuff happened 18 years ago already. As for my own personal tastes S*M*A*S*H stayed a favourite for a while but at the time I wasn't just discovering Britpop, I was also listening to dance music for the first time, I was listening to American bands such a Tortoise & Slint, I was listening to the what would later become post rock with early releases by bands such as Mogwai & Flying Saucer Attack. (I can still remember Mogwai selling their demo tapes & 'I Hate Blur' T-shirts through the Melody Maker classified ads). It was also around that time I began finding my love of Krautrock when I picked up Can's Tago Mago. After maybe a year or 18 months it was consigned to the back of my CD collection.

I do remember picking the S*M*A*S*H E.P. a couple of years ago while I was uploading music onto my HD and rather enjoying it.

As for Oasis I was dragged along by the hype for the next 3 years and I quite enjoyed it for a time. I was firmly in the Oasis camp for the Blur vs Oasis thing, but that was more to do with Blur putting out the God-awful Great Escape album than for any great love of Oasis. I knew Blur were the better band overall. By the time I heard Be Here Now I lost interest. I bought Standing on the Shoulder of Giants and played it maybe once. It was around that time that I stopped playing ANY Oasis albums at all. I also bought Don't Believe The Truth, or had it bought for me, I forget which. It's currently on the CD shelf still in it's plastic wrapping.

Looking back now liking Oasis made me feel like I fitted in because everybody else liked them and I felt a bit of 'Well I found them first and now everybody loves them so I must be cool... right?'. S*M*A*S*H made me feel like I was the only person that liked them and who gives a shit if I am, and that's a much nicer feeling than fitting in with everybody else.

I think S*M*A*S*H were more my band.

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The Batlord

^^^

That reminds me of the time that some friends and I were sitting down at some Chinese restaurant, and some old man that we'd never seen before sat down at our table for no apparent reason, and rambled on about his interest in historical fiction novels for ten or fifteen minutes, and then left.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

I want some pork balls with my rambling.

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Trollheart

Did he happen to have a Doctor Who scarf on, and was he clutching a copy of "Definitely maybe" and muttering to himself?

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

mr dave

Should it really come as any surprise to learn that I really like the Great Escape

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i am the universe