Ashley's take on, well, everything
1 Nino Temple and April Stevens - I Love how you love me (Nancy and Lee lite type duo rip off The Byrds, but throw in bagpipes - brilliant!)
2 The Church - Under The Milky Way (Their biggest hit, such a classy song)
3 David Devant and His Spirit Wife - This is for real (Really sinister bagpipes kick in at the end of this amazing song)
Back in the late 90s a highlight of the Devant's stage show featured a man grating carrot on another bloke's head - which in my book just about sums the band up, anarchic, innovative, theatrical and utterly bonkers.
Based around the very considerable songwriting talents of lead singer The Vessel DDAHSW produced a trio of albums, two of which are quite the equal of anything else recorded in the 90s. http://www.myspace.com/daviddevantandhisspiritwife
They sounded like no one else too. Think pre-Space Oddity Bowie (my fave era for Mr Jones) hanging out with early Roxy and add a dash of Syd's Floyd and you are there. The songs were astonishingly good. In a parallel universe This is for real, One thing after another and Pimlico would have been more than enough to clinch The Vessel a Novello or two.
He still makes records today under the guise of Mr Solo, and they are almost as good as his band in its heyday, which quite frankly is so much better than everyone else it is laughable. http://www.myspace.com/mistersolo
They are playing live soon http://www.facebook.com/n/?event.php&eid=99907172559&mid=beaca9G1fb86cb4G2d88... turn up and watch grown men weep with joy.
There were loads of bandwagon jumpers in the mid 90s who ditched the longn hair and plaid shirts and suddenly started writing songs about English Tea. There's no way you could level that accusation about west London's Aadvarks though, they'd been playing mod/sike/garagey pop since the late 80s.
By 94 though they suddenly found themselves surprisingly fashionable and were rewarded with a couple of TV appearances like this one on The James Whale Show. Around the same time they delivered a great pop album in Bargain, which sounds like all those amazing English pop sike albums all mashed up together. It was certainly a much more exciting collection of tunes than wannabee mods like Ocean Colour Scene and Cast.
They split up at the end of the decade but not before recording Bad Clothes, a fantastic mini pop opera.
More here http://www.myspace.com/theaardvarksuk
Martin Newell's Greatest Living Englishman could well be my most played album of the 90s. It is a genius pop record that really ought to be celebrated with a box set containing B sides, live recordings and video very soon (come on Cherry Red!)
Lyrically it captures the end of the Thatcher era brilliantly. Newell's wonderful words (these days he's a full time professional poet) reference the great hurricane, the stock market crash, the growth in the number of the homeless, at a time when everyone else was writing songs with cheesy drug references.
Its very English sensibilities - think XTC, Robyn Hitchcock, The Beatles and The Kinks, make it a Brit Pop record released a few years before Brit Pop actually happened. And I do wonder if Damon Albarn pinched an idea or two from it for Modern Life is Rubbish, especially as the two acts shared a producer in XTC's Andy Partridge.
Ray Davies has written better songs than Martin Newell, but I don't think that The Kinks ever made an album as good as this one.
There's very little evidence online that The Younger Younger 28s ever existed. No videos on YouTube, no misty eyed obits on blogs. Just a solitary MySpace page http://www.myspace.com/youngeryounger28s which feels like it could disappear and no one would care. Which in my book is a tragedy for they were not only a brilliant pop band but utterly unique for the time.
The easy comparison (two northern blokes, keyboards, two female singers) is The Human League and yes they did sound the Sheffield electro popsters on occasion. But rather than the glam of Don't You Want Me, YY28s wrote about Teenage Mums, strippers with HIV and lives on seedy drug-ridden estates. What made them brilliant was that the lyrics were wrapped in the most uplifting hummable tunes that even your grandma could love.
Best of all is We nearly Made It (it is on the MySpace page) a kind of Nancy and Lee Jackson-style break up ballad, but set in Mansfield rather than Mississippi. The album, Soap, even finished with a stirring version of Inbetween Days, and this at a time when it was cooler to admit to a soft spot for S Club than own anything by The Cure.
Sadly Soap sold about three copies, though lead singer, Ashley Reaks had made a couple of pretty good albums since. He really should have been a huge star.
For me Jack were probably the best kept secret of the mid 90s. Coming on like a Divine Comedy (without the schoolboy humour) or My Life Story (minus the camp) they made three great albums all of which feature wonderfully dramatic songs soaked in strings.
The first album Pioneer Soundtracks, from which the tune stems from, delivers just one classic after another, but for me it is album two that sets them apart from all their peers. The Jazz Age is an astonishingly great album, in many ways every bit as good as the artists (Scott Walker, Echo and The Bunnymen) whose sound Jack were trying to replicate.
Things dipped on the third album and they split up soon after with lead singer Anthony Reynolds going solo and penning a book on Scott Walker http://popjunkietv.com/2009/05/06/two-walker-brothers-biographies-imminent/ and a few other members ending up in the wonderful mid noughties band The Boyfriends http://www.myspace.com/myboyfriendsback
It is still quite incredible how overlooked they were and still are
