Space 'Neighbourhood (Radio Edit)'

Chart Peak: 11

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Space, in the form of Tommy Scott, Jamie Murphy, Franny Griffith and Andy Parle, brought forth more music from the city of Liverpool including the Top 20 hit 'Neighbourhood'. Their album Spiders was a platinum Top five hit and earned the band a nomination for the Best British Newcomer BRIT Award.

It's a long time since I've lived with my brother, and even longer since he played his copy of the album, so I can't really remember how this radio edit differs from the original version of the song. I do recall that this song had been their first proper single release, entering the Top 75, and was swiftly reactivated after their breakthrough success with the novelty hit 'Female Of The Species'. I also recall reading in the NME that at this point they were playing both their hits twice at every gig.

Having been deeply annoyed by 'Female Of The Species' I thought of this as an improvement at the time and it does at least lack the slightly sexist elements of their first hit. It's perhaps less of a novelty song, with something closer to the observational humour of Blur - but not closer enough, really, it lacks the well-drawn character studies of Albarn and settles for a set of unconnected and mostly unfunny one-line gags. At least it's vaguely listenable musically, although the bleepy production is surprisingly dated and Tommy Scott's Jamaican-Scouse vocal was annoying to start with. Not one I was that happy to come back to.

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Babybird 'You're Gorgeous'

Chart Peak: 3

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A contender for the BRIT Award for Best British Single, 'You're Gorgeous' brought Stephen Jones and his group a top three hit while their Top 10 debut album Ugly Beautiful, including the hit track 'Goodnight', also led to a Best British Newcomer nomination.

Our second dose of Stephen Jones on this album, after his co-writing credit on 'Sugar Coated Iceberg'. Babybird, initially just a solo project by Jones, was one of those names I recall reading about in the NME as he released a series of home-recorded albums - four within a year, funded by his publisher to launch his career. I didn't actually get to hear any of the music until he'd acquired a backing band, signed to a larger label and re-recorded a selection of highlights as Ugly Beautiful. I heard the first band single, 'Goodnight', and thought it was OK, but this hit proved to be the commercial high-water-mark. A song that was (doubtless intentionally) omitted from the early albums, this was everywhere for a while and remains surely his/their best-known hit.

You can see what Jones was trying to do here, contrasting the big pop-friendly chorus with a verse lyric from the perspective of a young girl being exploited by a sleazy photographer. The trouble is that the two parts don't quite seem to fit together, making it seem a bit too much the wrong sort of cynical, as if he's more interested in cashing in on people who don't listen to the words than in actually opening their minds. the lack of subtlety, and his grizzled vocal makes the joke too obvious to be subversive. He literally laughs at his own joke at the end of the wordless middle-eight; what he ends up offering is the opportunity to be smug about getting something you assume that other people don't.

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Ash 'Oh Yeah'

Chart Peak: 4

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Ash - Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray - put Northern Ireland's rock music back on the map when their debut album 1977 topped the charts in 1996. The contenders for the Best British newcomer BRIT Award co-produced the album which includes the Top 10 hit 'Oh Yeah'.

Bet you thought I'd forgotten all about this blog, eh? I hadn't, but I was struggling to fit it around the time I was spending on the Now blog. As I'm taking a couple of days off from there I thought I'd sneak a couple of posts on here in the meantime though.

'Oh Yeah' was no less than the fifth single from the 1977 album, though the first (and only) one to be released after it. A definite change of pace from the punk-pop singles that first got them noticed, it's a slow-building song about the "start of the summer", its teen-love subject matter implying both literal and metaphorical blooming; you can tell that it's a really significant moment when he sings that "her hair came undone in my hands" at the end of the first verse. Ironically, as an actual teenager at the time I didn't consider it one of my favourites, and I even neglected to buy the coloured-vinyl 7" of the single (a decision I soon regretted). Perhaps I was secretly disappointed that this sort of thing wasn't happening to me; or should I say "hadn't happened", since the song is clearly set in the past and the members of Ash aren't much older than I am. It was when I started seeing people born at the same time as me or later having serious chart success (as opposed to novelty hits) that I first started feeling old.

Anyway, I'm almost twice as old now as I was then and I've warmed to the song considerably, rather enjoying the luxuriant string arrangement and Lisa Moorish's (admittedly rather prominent) backing vocal which for all the hype she's had at various times in her career makes this her biggest hit single. Ash struggled to recapture the magic on later releases, although it's partly for want of trying as they seemed increasingly determined to prove themselves as a hard rock band. I think in some ways this plays better to their strengths, and even to their weaknesses - Tim Wheeler's slightly weedy voice suits songs about teenage fumbling better than more confident material - but I suppose it's not a direction they could have pursued indefinitely and some credit's due for not milking it for the cash.

Buy Best of [Deluxe CD+DVD]

Lightning Seeds 'Sugar Coated Iceberg'

Chart Peak: 12

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Nominated in both 1996 and '97 for the BRIT Award as Best British Group, Ian Broudie's Lightning Seeds arrived in a big way last year with their hit album Dizzy Heights (featuring 'Sugar Coated Iceberg') and the nation's favourite football anthem 'Three Lions', featuring David Baddiel and Frank Skinner.

The only track on the entire album to enter the chart in 1997 itself (though several others hung around from late 1996) is also the first not to have peaked at 7, though it remains their highest-charting original song other than the various versions of 'Three Lions' over the years, even if it's not a song that seems much remembered nowadays. Co-written by Stephen Jones of Babybird, it's an even more unashamedly pop confection than 'Marblehead Johnson' but again a rather bitter confection, as the title suggests when you think about it. And it has, if anything, an even sillier video.

I was very fond of the band - to the extent that they were a band - back then and I still think they're a somewhat under-appreciated musical force, possibly because Ian Broudie never claimed to have any sort of attitude and pop music wasn't considered as respectable as it now is among the sort of people who pronounce on what sort of music should be respected. This song was a particular favourite then, although the slightly cheap sound of it hasn't dated all that well. It remains a song I enjoy listening to and I even pull out the album once in a while, more than can be said for some stuff I was into then.

Buy Like You Do: The Best Of The Lightning Seeds

The Fun Lovin' Criminals 'The Fun Lovin' Criminal'

Chart Peak: 26

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The hip-hop trio of Fast, Huey and Steve emerged from New York to register chart success on both sides of the Atlantic with their debut album Come Find Yourself. The top 30 hit 'Fun Lovin' Criminals' [sic] was the third hit from the group nominated as Best International Newcomers.

Of all cultural phenomena of this era, there weren't many I found more tiresome than gangster chic. Of course it mostly revolved around London gangsters from the Sixties (presumably there were gangsters in other parts of the UK too, but they must have had less smart suits); however FLC represented a sort of New York wing, combining self-consciously cool rap lyrics with AOR. Generally I couldn't stand them but I did have to make an exception for this track mainly because of "Fast" (Brian Leiser)'s contributions on trumpet and harmonica, which make the backing track enjoyable enough for me to put up with Huey Morgan's posturing. Admittedly, even he isn't that annoying on this track, but it's not really him I'm listening to. It's a pity this wasn't among their bigger hits, although reaching the chart at all is more than any of their releases has managed in their homeland.

Buy Bag of Hits: 15 Interglobal Chartstoppers

The Bluetones 'Marblehead Johnson'

Chart Peak: 7

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The intriguingly titled third hit single in 1996 from the quartet of Adam Devlin, Mark and Scott Morriss and Eds Chesters. The Bluetones' debut album Expecting To Fly reached Number One and earned producer Hugh Jones a BRIT Award nomination as Best British Producer.

Again, the notes are oddly reluctant to mention the band's own nomination (for Best British Newcomer) and eny fule kno that Marblehead Johnson is a reference to the late comedian Bill Hicks, who used that name for his musical projects. It is true that it has nothing to do with the lyrical content of the song, though, and at least all the band members' names are spelt correctly.

The scale of the Bluetones' success is sometimes forgotten, possibly because they were never quite the biggest band in their field. Still, there was an impressive run of success early in their career with the chart-topping debut album and three hits from it; and not long after this standalone hit. Perhaps the silly video and ingratiating appearance of the band distract from the top-notch musicianship on board and the outstanding voice of Mark Morriss, but I loved the witty lyrics which add that slight touch of sourness to stop this sounding too much like a cozy pastiche. Unfortunately, nobody seems to remember they did anything other than 'Slight Return' nowadays and after a long spell as the last of the big Britpop acts in continuous operation, they finally called it a day late last year.

Buy A Rough Outline: The Singles & B-Sides 1995-2003

Kula Shaker 'Govinda (radio edit)'

Chart Peak: 7

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'Govinda' was the fourth hit single from Kula Shaker's chart-topping platinum debut album K. Crispian Mills and his three cohorts earned themselves an impressive total of four 1997 BRIT Award nominations including one for 'Tattva' as Best British Single.

And here we have a pretty close repeat of the Manics track: fourth single from the album, peaked at 7, not the single that was actually nominated in its own right (for the record their other nominations were Best British Group, Best British Newcomers and Best British Album). I suppose you could argue that the two bands were both outsiders to the Britpop movement that granted them their biggest commercial success, but they have only one other significant thing in common: a fondness for controversial statements. It was a few months later when Mills talked in an NME interview of the attraction of putting giant flaming swastikas on stage "for the f___ of it" and their career never recovered, especially once said publication delved into some unsavoury incidents in his stepfather's past.
It's difficult to warm to Mills himself as a person or frontman, if I'm honest, and sensationally easy to mock the band's preoccupation with the romance of Indian culture as stereotypical upper-class cultural tourism. But with a decade and a half of nostalgia, I have to say that they did at least add a little bit of colour and I'm pretty  this is the only Sanskrit-language track ever to appear on a Brits tie-in. It's horribly dated now, but I sort of admire the wilfulness of making this a single in the first place.

Buy Kollected - The Best Of Kula Shaker