1. Cherub Rock – Smashing Pumpkins
2. Brassneck – The Wedding Present
3. She’s So High – Blur
4. That’s Entertainment – The Jam
5. Inbetweener – Sleeper
6. Lipgloss – Pulp
7. Brenda – The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
8. Itchycoo Park – Small Faces
9. Jumpin’ Jack Flash – The Rolling Stones
10.
Cucaraca Macara – Harvey Averne Barrio Band
11. Teenage Kicks – Undertones
12.
Deny – The Clash
13.
A Morning Odyssey – The Sea Urchins
14. Try – Razorcuts
15. Maybe the People Would be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale – Love
16. Sweet Jane – The Velvet Underground
17.
She’s so Loose – Supergrass
18. Sour Times – Portishead
19.
Science Friction – Orbital
20.
Sing – Blur
21.
I Don’t Know – Teenage Fanclub
22. Starlust – Lush
23.
Stop Me if You Think You’ve Heard This One
Before – The Smiths
24. You Should All be Murdered – Another Sunny Day
25. Sunflower – The Springfields
26.
Sure to See – 14 Iced Bears
27.
So Said Kay – The Field Mice
28. Sabotage – Beastie Boys
The
Treaty Centre presides over Hounslow like a red-bricked monolith – only the modernist Holy Trinity Church can compete. The Chariot, The Noble Half and the South Western are our pubs of choice, although if we’ve just missed the H37
we’ll stop off for a swift bourbon & coke (easy on the coke) in the Duke of Cambridge on
Kingsley Road while we wait for another. The high street has recently been, and only partially, pedestrianised. In spite of this, people continuously
get in your way, careering out of Boots without due care or attention. Maybe that’s why we seem to spend so much time in The Noble Half,
The Chariot and the South Western.
The
Chariot is what’s been termed a flat-roofed pub. It is not necessarily a description to be taken literally. The appellation is supposed to convey the building’s age, interior decor and its clientele (post-war, brightly lit, hard drinking). The Chariot does have a flat roof but only if you take
into consideration the office space between. Like the Treaty Centre, it has a red-bricked facade. Inside, there are fake plants, faux Roman busts, large mirrors,
paintings of Piccadilly Circus on rain sodden nights and an actual red telephone
box. The people it attracts are a strange mix: students, leather clad rockers and an assortment of downtrodden locals. The jukebox contains Hot Rocks 1964-1971 by The Rolling Stones. Despite the lighting being
a bit on the bright side, it is a wonderful place to drink.
The
Noble Half is also flat roofed but it is smaller and darker.
Tuesday night is student night, and the many students who reside locally, in
shabby semi-detached domiciles with archaic furnishings and neglected gardens, will turn up and take full advantage of the cheap booze. People we know have
organised the event and called it Lyfe. I don’t know why they chose this name
or elected to spell it that way.
The
South Western on Whitton Road is a more traditional drinking establishment. Prodigious
fenestrations flanked by faded velvet drapery, the carpet is well worn. Students
don’t tend to rent around these parts and it pays to be a little more discreet.
We mainly go there to play pool and put money in the jukebox: more Rolling
Stones (Jagger warming up in the wings), and the Small Faces too.
Carrington Avenue is a road
in a residential area of Hounslow rife with avenues (Argyle, Park, Murray, Grasmere).
It lies south of the train line that runs diagonally through Hounslow’s
south-eastern corner, as close to Whitton high street than to Hounslow town
centre. The feeling is of being on the periphery of something, separate from
it.
The South Western
I was supposed to be moving in with a fellow
from Cornwall, the lad who lent me The Sound
of the Suburbs and the guy with the indie tapes. I’m not really sure how
it happened but the guy with tapes backed out after the rest of us found a
house and offered him the smallest room. We
advertised for someone to fill the void and ended up taking in a first-year
student from Brighton, who was our age but had taken a year out to make movies.
The house itself was a bit of
a dive, very typical of student accommodation in the Hounslow area: a semi-detached three-bedroom dwelling with an interior that looked like it hadn’t been re-decorated
since the 1970s, and maybe hadn't. We had to move the dining room table to the lounge to free up
the dining room to be used as a fourth bedroom, which was taken by our Cornish
friend. I took upstairs-front, ‘Sound of the Suburbs’ took upstairs-back and
the bloke from Brighton the box room adjacent to that. The rent on the whole
house was about £700 a month.
Britpop was now recognised as a distinct movement, but the
residents of 23 Carrington Avenue perceived it only as a vaguely entertaining
sideshow. I’d sooner listen to Smashing Pumpkins or The
Wedding Present than the likes of Cast or Shed 7. Actually, I wasn't sure about Smashing Pumpkins but could get on with Siamese Dream, which one of my Plymouth friends played for me while visiting him in Portsmouth. The jukebox
down the student union had 'Brassneck' by The Wedding Present on it, and I then borrowed the album Bizarro
from a Scottish bloke who resembled the ‘control freak’ from an advert for the Volvo 850 T-5. The Wedding Present’s guitars are fast,
repetitive, and David Gedge’s vocal style is droll, almost deadpan. Both these bands
could be described as voluminous, in that guitars – loud guitars – are integral
to their sound. Britpop tends not to paint broadly with guitars. Oasis are the
exception, and in this respect maybe they’re not really a Britpop band at all.
If there is a signature Britpop sound – and you’ll struggle to identify one –
then it’s the stabbing, staccato guitars of punk and new wave.
This not to say we were completely disinterested in
what was going on. When a chap I’d got to know towards the end of my first year
(who would later introduce me to Sarah Records) informed us that he was going to see
Blur at Alexandra Palace, the residents of Carrington Avenue expressed
interest. The chap who later introduced me to Sarah Records went on ahead with
his associate from Ealing, while the rest of us – save our Cornish friend, who wasn’t up for it – went about the business of trying to find tickets. With a limited budget our situation initially looked precarious, but we were given hope after a tout said to us, 'don't go home just yet.' We found a
pub, played some pool, put on The Jam to get us in the mood, returned about an
hour later and managed to buy three tickets at pretty much face value. We missed Corduroy and Supergrass but did arrive in time to
see Pulp. For any Blur fans out there, here’s the set-list:
Lot 105 /
Sunday Sunday / Jubilee / Tracy Jacks / Magic America / End of A Century / Popscene
/ Trouble in the Message Centre / She's So High / For Tomorrow / Chemical World
/ Badhead / There's No Other Way / To The End / Advert – 1st Encore: Supa
Shoppa / Mr. Robinson's Quango / Parklife (with Phil Daniels) – 2nd Encore:
Girls & Boys / Bank Holiday / This Is a Low.
We
were especially pleased when they played 'She’s
So High', which was a ‘can night' favourite. Can
nights started off as a precursor to Friday evenings at the student union but
might often happen before a Saturday night at The Chariot, or just randomly in
the middle of the week. As the name suggests, they involved buying four cans of
cheap lager or bitter – in my case Castlemaine XXXX – and then sitting around
in someone’s room – usually mine – and listening to records, often at great volume.
Can’t remember who picked up a copy of The Jam greatest
hits compilation Snap! but I recall taping what of it I could onto the B-side of my Rolling Stones compendium. I think the Stones material had been recorded off of Shaky Tim, a music student who had been my neighbour in our halls of residence and was now living with the girl who was a massive Blondie fan (not in the biblical sense). The girl who was a massive Blondie fan was also into Manic Street Preachers, Senseless Things, Jane's Addiction, Porno for Pyros, and she had recently discovered Green Day. None of this appealed to me, shedding some light on our increasingly rocky relationship.
According to lead singer Louise Wener’s T-shirt, Sleeper were just ‘another female fronted band’. She had a point – there was Elastica,
Salad, Echobelly, and more on the way – but if Wener was trying to
utilise irony to suggest Sleeper offered anything different she was wide of
the mark. 'Inbetweener' is a jolly
enough single though, as is the lesser known B-side, 'Little
Annie'.
Pulp's His ‘n’ Hers had
been out since April '94 but I’d invested more time listening to Intro – The Gift Recordings, released
the previous October. I eventually bonded with His
‘n’ Hers on a National Express coach back to London at the start of a new
term, disembarking at Heathrow Airport whereupon I got on the tube
to Hounslow Central for a pint(s) in the
Bulstrode with the chap who was to introduce me to Sarah Records. His 'n' Hers is probably the best record of the Britpop era. Take your pick: 'Joyriders', 'Lipgloss', 'Have You Seen
Her Lately?', 'Pink Glove', 'David's Last Summer'. These songs invoke the spirit of Britpop in the way others seldom did. They spoke of people and situations that were relatable, if only from a distance. As opposed to Blur, whose lyrics were informed by the novels of Martin Amis and the city of London. Or Oasis, who didn't really sing about anything at all.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion are chaotic, exultant – punk meets
blues. I taped the album Orange off of the guy with the indie tapes. I liked it so much I later bought it on vinyl. The record did well.
Despite Britpop, there was still an interest in things like this, in Beck or
Pavement or Sonic Youth, even if it wasn’t what was getting the mainstream
airplay.
Britpop's sense of fashion was confused, a diffuse spread of influences ranging from '60s mod to '70s punk to '80s casual, consisting of desert boots, Ben Sherman button-down shirts, roll neck sweaters, Chelsea boots, anything by Fred Perry, Harrington jackets, anoraks, wide collared shirts in man-made fabrics, flares, corduroy trousers, Adidas tracksuit tops, old-school trainers, blazers, even ties (especially if you were in Blur). It should be appreciated that wearing this sort of gear bid trouble. Having your hair layered, over the ears but not as far as your collar,
invited derision. People would laugh openly at your flared jeans. You were neither a 'townie'
nor a 'metaller' or a 'raver' and therefore an
object of suspicion. We didn't let it bother us, and tunes
like 'Itchycoo
Park' and 'Lazy
Sunday' by the Small Faces and 'Jumpin’ Jack Flash' and 'Wild Horses' by The Rolling Stones provided a backdrop to games of pool in the back room of The South Western in amongst the locals.
The influence of punk and new
wave, although slightly diminished since that new wave of new wave thing had been supplanted by Britpop, persisted.
As well as The Jam, groups like The Clash and The Undertones would find their way onto any respectable
indie DJ’s set list. 'Teenage Kicks' was ready to go courtesy of The Sound of the
Suburbs and I found The Clash’s first album in a charity shop in Plymouth, probably
while shopping for second-hand Fred Perry polo shirts and Adidas tracksuit tops.
The
chap who introduced me to Sarah Records came around with a stack of records he
thought I might like: Storyteller by Razorcuts, Stardust
by The Sea Urchins, Loaded by the Velvet Underground, Forever Changes by Love, Singles Going Steady
by Buzzcocks, a couple of Field Mice albums and EPs, and a few Sarah Records
compilations. The Sarah Records’ records made a firm impression. Formed
in Bristol in 1987, the record label was resolutely anti-fashion, anti-London
music scene and anti-lad rock, which is what Britpop was mutating into. This political sensibility was married to a very British sort of
aesthetic. But if Britpop fixated on, say, Get
Carter, Blow-Up and Quadrophenia as its cinematic archetypes then Sarah Records channelled more the spirit of Kes or Billy Liar, as well as French New Wave.
The Sarah Records’ band I really took to was probably the band least representative of that particular scene: The
Sea Urchins. In Sam Knee’s excellent indie-fashion retrospective A Scene In
Between he describes The Sea Urchins as veering off 'in a more militant pop-art mod fashion direction'. Think Jeff Beck in
the Yardbirds.
The Razorcuts could have very easily been a Sarah Records act but were instead signed to Creation. I put their album Storyteller onto the other side of the cassette I recorded The Sea Urchins’ Stardust,
a tape I would often listen to on the two mile walk into college, along Whitton
Dene and past Twickenham Ruby Stadium.
If 23 Carrington Avenue had a specific soundtrack then it would be Love’s third album, 1967's Forever Changes. I’d never heard of it before but was quickly won over by its string arrangements, Tijuana horns and Flamenco guitar. The chap who introduced us to it – who would often join us for can nights – was quite taken aback by our enthusiasm and returned to his record collection to bring us Da Capo, Love's earlier work, which was almost as well received.
Loaded was Velvet Underground’s last proper LP (Squeeze was a contractual
obligation written and recorded by Doug Yule featuring none of the original
group members). Having wasted the opportunity to get to know the band during my
first year, I wasn’t well versed in Velvet Underground mythology and so took
the record at face value. It's probably the band's most accessible work, and the reason why the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records had hold of it. The idea of him grooving away to the noise-rock of something like 'Sister Ray' or 'Venus in Furs' is barely conceivable.
I wonder if I’d seen Supergrass supporting Pulp supporting Blur at Alexandra Palace I would have liked them more. I didn’t have
anything against Supergrass per se, but their whole shtick seemed a little silly. Almost 20, maybe I was too old for it. Nevertheless, 'She’s So Loose' is a very good tune, and so lip service is paid.
Orbital and Portishead were a portent of things to come, the
acceptability – nay, the expectancy – of absorbing genres that beforehand had been
perceived as tribally distinct. I came across Dummy by Portishead on the same trip to Portsmouth that had me re-evaluating
the Smashing Pumpkins. The hype surrounding the record had yet to transpire,
and I didn’t see it coming, but I ended up copying the copy I took back with me to London for a number of friends. The Orbital album was recorded off of my
brother in the summer before I left for university but proved less popular
among my inner circle. Such eclecticism reflected the limitations of Britpop.
I even took to playing some of my old Acid Jazz records, much to the delight of our cohabitant from Brighton who fell for 'Cucaraca Macara' by the
Harvey Averne Barrio Band in a big way.
Which leads to
the missing pieces of this aural jigsaw: techno, acid and trance. This sort of
music came ready-mixed, be it via the DJ Tsuyoshi cassette somebody copied for
me or the tape exploring similar themes compiled by my brother, who was bang
into this sort of stuff. It couldn’t very well be assimilated into my other, more identifiable, auditory explorations and so stood alone, to be listened to
on my Walkman. This, along with hard house, was the music that would play at any student house party worth its
salt. The idea of a load of kids jumping around in someone’s living room to an Oasis
record appals me. Fortunately such abominations never came to pass.
Carrington’s classics were confined to my bedroom mostly, or my headphones, or
around the house of the guy who continued to amass tapes.
By the time we moved out there were eleven empty bottles
of High Commissioner whiskey lined up on the mantelpiece and we owed a couple of months’ rent –
taking into account the deposits we’d already surrendered in lieu. A few days after the May
Ball my Cornish friend passed out in Debenhams and was taken to hospital
concussed, requiring stitches. The cohabitant from Brighton had abandoned university altogether and I'd lost too much weight through not eating enough.
It had been a strange and
tumultuous year. The summer would usher in the farce that was Blur vs. Oasis.
It is amazing how quickly Britpop revealed itself for the asinine nonsense that for the most part comprised it, and so I got back into the Beastie Boys and continued
to harvest my brother’s record collection for sonic alternatives.
