Extreme Listening Mode!

Good day to you all, my fine friends. We are all buzzing here after seeing one of Glasgow’s finest bands, the mighty Fram , perform a surprise acoustic gig in the city last night. And that has been good for my mood, as ELM has not been very well this week. I know. It’s a sin for me. The Wookie, however, is in tremendous spirits after whizzing about Alton Towers like a kid fuelled by blue smarties and Quosh. But we are both happy to have reached Friday in one piece.

This week, as I have been ill and whiny (I’m a bloke) I’ve been thinking about the nasty things in life. And, while whizzing through some old albums to stick on my iPod, I kinda got to thinking about what happens to those guys who leave a successful band and how they follow it up. To borrow from TV, some go on to do a ‘Frasier’, some go on to do a ‘Joey’. But why? Who can tell why someone is going to soar to previously unexplored levels, while some will plumb depths only Gary Barlow can attest to ?

As usual, in ELM-land, we focus on the fuck-ups, the ones who promised much but delivered little and, as it is Friday, we’ll point and laugh as we go.

Wings – Of course, how do you follow up being in the band who utterly revolutionised pop music single-handedly? You can’t, it is a hiding to nothing. But possibly recruiting your missus when she can’t really play, moving to a farm and wilfully writing even when you have nothing to say might not be the best idea. Not everything Wings did is bad; McCartney is simply too talented for that. But with no-one to rein him in, the ideas flowed and made it onto tape time after time. And as for the haircuts…oh, Lord.

The Seahorses – When the Stone Roses split up, it was pretty much common consent that John Squire was the talent. Ian Brown couldn’t (still can’t) sing and as good musicians as the rhythm section were, they didn’t contribute too much to the songwriting side of things. So great things were expected of Squire’s post-Roses project. Except…well, by then the guitarist (by his own admission) was fairly heavily into the old charlie and that does not do good things to a man’s sense of judgement. Witness the excruciating amount of guitar wank on ‘The Second Coming’. He saw a busker he liked in York and, emm, asked him to join the band. No, really. The chap, Chris Helme, had a pleasing enough dadrock voice but was nothing special. Which was fair enough though, because he was being asked to join a dadrock band that was nothing special.

With Squire’s guitar (what else) pushed to the front, the band released a couple of clunky singles (‘Love is the Law’ and ‘Blinded by the Sun’) which did ok and then a truly awful album called ‘Do It Yourself’ (apt) which sold a few copies in the post-Britpop hangover year of 1997. Never had ‘Elephant Stone’ seemed so far away. Sadly for Squire, people suddenly realised why the Roses weren’t in existence any more and blamed him and his band of busking nobodies. He’s never really recovered and, bar one poorly-received solo album, now concentrates on his painting.

Angels and Airwaves – You are Tom Delonge. You are the guitarist in chartpop-punks Blink 182 and your band are massive. Not big, not doing great, but stadium-filling in America. What’s more, your core audience is aged 12-30, meaning you have years and years of this if you stick to the plan. We are talking serious cash here people.

Sadly, you are visited by ‘God’ who tells you that you shouldn’t be wasting your time with this disposable pop crap (even though you are good at it.) You owe it to your audience – nay, the world – to ratchet it up a notch. To be the next U2. So you leave, and you form a band who…sound like Blink 182 sans tunes, but don’t have the humour or the self-awareness and instead concentrate on lyrics dealing with, like, issues? And you sell about 25 copies while your former bandmate Mark Hoppus figures, fuck it, forms a band called +44 who sound exactly like Blink 182 and coins it in.

And what can you do? You can’t go back to the band as that would involve telling God to go fuck himself. So you are stuck.

Blind Faith – I mean, it should have worked. No matter if you are a fan of Clapton and Winwood, you have to admit that both of them are talented. But again, perhaps you can blame the times; it was all about ‘freedom’ and doing what you wanted. What they wanted was a hotchpotch of blues and soul that never comfortably fitted into either and in the end just doesn’t hang together as a complete album. And that cover – the topless pre-teen girl holding a very phallic toy aeroplane…neither big nor clever, lads.

The Tears - Bernard Butler and Brett Anderson have a sense of timing and decision making which, had they been a couple, would have led to many an unwanted pregnancy. Suede were trailblazers for what would become Britpop when, wisely, the guitarist decide to sling his amps in the lift in 1994 meaning that the band failed to release a record in the Summer of 95, Britpop’s 67. The band fizzled out and then, in 2005 just as re-union tours were becoming so popular that Shed Fucking Seven can fill decent sized venues, decide to re-form…under a different name, meaning nobody knew and even less cared. The record was all right; stick the Suede name on it and it would have done a bundle. There is a bit of me that admires these guys though; their hapless dedication to fucking up each other’s career, even without knowing, is touching.

Lessons? Do a Stones. Do a Ramones. Even if you can’t stand the rest of the bastards in your band, stick with them. Times are hard y’know.