Though it has taken awhile, it seems people are finally coming around to seeing how brilliant the Boo Radleys actually were. Their new compilation coming out on July 4th has been getting talked about alot on different web sites. Find The Way Out is going to open alot of eyes and ears to what they were all about.

http://www.nme.com/reviews/11892.htm

The Coral : The Invisible Invasion

There's a lot to thank The Coral for - almost single-handedly they saved Liverpool's music scene from being totally swamped by stocky guys ploddingly dreaming of getting to fetch supper for Noel Gallagher one day, and reconnected the city with its lost tradition of befuddled experimentation. Reminding the world of the great try-it-and-see spirit of Boo Radleys and great lost psyche-lords Mr Ray's Wig World was a neat trick, but the problem with novelty is that it rubs off faster than a three quid henna tattoo at a rainy music festival. The Coral have suffered from an image problem that has had them linked forever in the mind with the barrel-organ sound of 'Dreaming Of You' - they've become, in effect, oompah-lumpers and have had trouble convincing the world that there's anything new to be had from their corner. Even the bloke who works the Amazon CD warehouse section from Cop Shoot Cop to Costello, Elvis might be a little surprised to discover that this is actually their fourth album. It's clear something needs to change, and 'The Invisible Invasion' sees The Coral attempting to expand their range. It's not a "grow a moustache and move to Bridlington" type of reinvention; more like the change when they put Smarties into a different-shaped packet.

Production-marshalled by Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, this is still clearly a Coral album, but the chirpy psychedelia signature has been calmed down considerably and no longer dominates the speakers. Freed of the need to sound how people expect them to, the seven piece get the chance to show that they can turn in proper, craft-standard pop when they need to. After years of self-consciously trying to sound like nobody else, 'The Invisible Invasion' finally sees the band being a bit more brazen about their influences, from the opening Byrds-in-an-Indian-restaurant of 'She Sings In The Morning' through lead single 'In The Morning' hinting around the mellow end of the Boo Radleys catalogue. There's more than a dash of the Inspiral Carpets ribbed through the tracks, too, although if you get a bunch of Northern blokes to try and build a modern take on late 60s pop using an organ and some guitars, chances are you'd inevitability get some similar results. We don't think the Skelly brothers are going to turn out to have Clint Boon posters on their walls. The shadow of Ian McCulloch is harder to dismiss, though - especially when 'A Warning To The Curious' keeps threatening to morph into Echo and the Bunnymen's 'My White Devil' the minute you let your mind wander.

The lowest point on the album comes during 'Cripples Crown', when James is called upon to sing the word "satellite". He's never been the strongest vocalist - natural frontman, yes, gifted singer, unfortunately not; but on familiar territory that's never proven to be too much of a problem. With The Coral now attempting to expand their musical range, his shortcomings are starting to show themselves. There's a few wobbles elsewhere, but that "satellite" is just too far overhead for him to reach. Sometimes you have to make allowances the size of Paris Hilton's for the limited vocals.

Not that it matters over-much, as this album isn't supposed to work as the Coral's final word. It's part of a process of deciding where the band are going, and the bits that don't quite gel reveal as much about their talent as the many times they make it seem effortless.

One of the album's brightest moments, 'Arabian Sands', is inspired by a Salvador Dali painting, but the artist's influence is more crucial for the whole of 'The Invisible Invasion'. Dali's position in art history is forever hobbled by the weight of his eccentric personality (how it must hurt to that he was being surreal just for the sake of it. The Coral have taken this as a warning, and changed their ways just in time to save themselves from the same fate. When you've got songs as good as 'Late Afternoon' and 'So Long Ago' , you don't need videos with men dressed as bears riding bicycles. In fact, you're much better off without them.

Simon Hayes Budgen
Rating: 7

The NME has always loved the Boo Radleys. In fact, I think the NME and you are the only two entities that liked 'em at all.

Not even true. I have been bringing them up quite a bit on various message boards and on ILX someone had a thread "Who is a genius that no one knows about?" or something like that. I wrote Martin Carr and on the next response was "no Martin Carr has big, big cult following." Than on a thread the next day "Whom do you miss most?" someone else completely unrelated to that wrote "the Boo Radleys." It brought a smile to my face.

I’m overboard, I know but I’m really only that way with this one band. I don’t expect some to understand and that’s OK. Six albums all completely different and there are a few fans even on Obner.

edit, i think this will work now

Proof and only showing the two examples I brought up, there are many, many more.


I’m the only one who realizes that _____ is a musical genius

Who do you miss?

ILX is the biggest music board on the web, so the net is thrown over a much bigger pool of people. Hell their current thread on Cure remasters has over 400 responses alone.

In The Morning totally reminds me of the Radleys.

He's right about this but it was probably a lucky guess, correctly assuming two individual things he dislikes intensely would gravitate towards one an other.



He's wrong about this since there is a sizable Obnerian Giant Steps Appreciation Society.

Nope. I got suckered in to buying a Radleys album after reading an NME review of Everything's Allright Forever that proclaimed it one of the best albums of the last decade. I sold it after about a month of trying to like it. And it's not like I absolutely despised the thing - it had its small charms - but it just sounded so ephemeral and wispy and timid to me. I felt the same way about Ride and the Stone Roses and a shitload of other polite Brit bands around the exact same time.

My deal is that all my immediate relatives (and parents) are British, so I find nothing exotic or intriguing about the culture. I've said it before, but in general the Brits don't know shit about rock 'n' roll. I believe that not only could your average, garden-variety Brit not be able to discern the difference between rock 'n' roll and skiffle, but 99% of them would prefer the skiffle. The Boo Radleys, the Stones Roses, etal., are all cases in point.

Uh oh! I sense a cage match with Dalen coming. 8)

Well now I know were you are coming from, not sure but do you hate the Beatles and Stones as well?

Your right about NME loving the Boo’s as each album received a 9 rating with only C’mon Kids getting an 8 instead. A place to start with them wouldn’t be Everything’s Alright Forever as that was their most limited album. It was their My Bloody Valentine album with the stuff before that being noise, noise, noise and played homage to Dinosaur Jr. Giant Steps is considered their masterpiece with ILX rating it 101 best album from the 90s and Stylus Magazine giving it the 106 best albums of the 90s, not sure about Pitchfork at the moment. AMG also calls it a classic and is actually a double album and will have nine songs from this on the new compilation. Epa has, on several occasions, professed his love for Wake Up!, which is very Beatlesish. PopTodd’s favorite, if I’m not mistaken, is the remarkable C’mon Kids album. It seems that most hard-core fanatics chose Kingsize, as that album is so emotional and powerful with Martin Carr’s best lyrics. I wish I knew someone who has done an album similar to that one in the history of rock, because if it exists than I need to hear it now.

np: Auteurs – After Murder Park

Skiffle! Unlike you I'd be impressed if 1% of Brits even knew what skiffle was! You really are trapped in a some distance throwback world aren't you?

Basically what your saying is your mum told you to "turn that racket down" and you've harboured a grudge against an entire people ever since. Fine, I quite like irrational behaviour. I'm partial to it myself. You form an opinion and it doesn't matter if there's a veritable avalanche of evidence that contradicts it - IT'S YOUR OPINION AND YOUR KEEPING IT!

It's odd that you're so ambivaulent to British culture because you are straight out of a P G Wodehouse novel. Step up The Right Honorable Sir Galahad Threepwood! A man out of time, continually goading and hectoring the 'polite' young people of the day. Always harking back to a sepia toned nostalga were the music is good and the people don't give a damn for niceties...

Hmm. To dismiss an entire nation of not knowing shit about rock n roll, especially one that has such a rich and essential history of is truly among the most ridiculous things I've read but well... sadly, you are entitled to your opinion, as incongruent it may be with other statements you have made in the past regarding music.

That being said: Deon - I really appreciated you making me that Boo Radley's best of cd you sent me a long time ago but despite your obvious passion for the band, they didn't do anything for me. I didn't think it was bad though...just didn't move me after many spins.

...and what is this ILX board? I must investigate.

I'm not dismissing an entire nation, fer chrissakes. Here, let me waste a ton of effort trying to explain myself...

The countries of the invading hordes in North America are relatively young, and it only stands to reason that our mythologies and cultural touchstones are also going to be based on something newer and less traditional. Rock 'n' roll, jazz, and blues are our folk music, all born out of the same melting pot that is currently shaping whatever culture we have and all the very fabric of our musical heritage. In other words, we don't see those genres as passing trends, we see them as bedrock. Music that has always existed and will always exist.

Europeans, on the other hand, come from a much older culture. Their musical heritage stretches back much further and incorporates everything from celtic reels to the complexity of classical. To them, rock 'n' roll was just another trend - and an overly simple one at that. Right from the start of the "rock revolution" (as it used to be called) the Brits were intent on turning that simple sound into something more respectable. They didn't see the profundity in Chuck Berry (for example); they felt the need to add sophistication to those 3 minute blasts (and did in the form of orchestration, rock operas, etc.).

That condescending attitude towards rock 'n' roll exists to this very day. Examples over the years are too many to count, but let's point at one of the most notable: the Clash. They put out one punk landmark album (their debut), then followed that up with a failed hard rock attempt to sell themselves in America, and then, finally, squeezed out an undeniable, eclectic classic. But even by the time that London Calling was hitting the shelves, the Clash had already disowned rock 'n' roll. I clearly remember Mick Jones stating that they'd already "done" rock 'n' roll and were now bored by it - and for sonic proof of the seriousness of his statement I point you towards Sandanista! The simple truth of the matter is that even the Clash thought of themselves as too smart for rock 'n' roll.

And then there's Radiohead. Their condescension towards rock 'n' roll is entirely obvious. In their minds, of course, they tried their hand at it and saw it as a dead end. But Pablo Honey is no rock record, just a bad imitation of one, so of course it was a dead end for them, because they couldn't play it. They wisely moved away from the genre and did what Brits do best: intellectualize. And Americans are eating that shit up (hell, why do you think Madonna is trying to speak with an English accent these days? It's because she wants to appear intelligent, and North Americans hear that accent as proof of superior education), but then again, we always have. The difference is that here we'll always return to the basics, while in Britain they're just biding time until the next trend washes ashore.

So I'm saying their musical heritage is different than ours. They do not see rock, jazz, or blues as sacred, they see them more like dancehall tunes and the aforementioned skiffle - that is, just something to fuck with. And don't get me completely wrong, I appreciate a lot of the experimentation and sophistication that the Brits have brought to the table - but they just don't quite understand the depth in something as seemingly simple as Chuck Berry.

All exceptions, of course, prove the rule.

This reminds me of an argument a friend of mine picked with some girl from Stanford in a pool hall in Burlingame, CA. For some inebriated reason, the small talk that was bandied about had turned to financial and macro-economic history. She said something inane about the Hoover administration and extolled FDR and his social programs. My friend countered with, "It would have been interesting to see how we'd've done in the late 20's had we had a strong monetary policy"...your basic Milton Friedman stuff.

This set the girl off kilter, and she began railing and spouting Keynesian propaganda, lambasting supply-side economics, etc. etc.

As we left shortly thereafter, my friend remarked that it was the first time he'd ever gotten shot down by a girl over John Maynard Keynes.

Only here it's the Boo Radleys. Tsk tsk.

Billz, that's gotta qualify as the most obtuse chastizing I've ever received.

Not meant to chastize at all. Just remarking that at various times, heated debate has erupted over the most inconsequential of things (at least for the context in which the eruption occured, not to imply that monetary/fiscal theory is inconsequential).

I happen to agree with you. I find that it is in the former colonies, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that rock and roll arose. I think the mother country (UK) seized upon our creation, much like they gravitated to the "wild west" at the end of the 19th century. Let's face it, North America and Australia were uncharted, peopled by "savages", and only for the adventurous, the "frontiersmen". Contrast that to merry olde England, which had been fully mapped and tamed for centuries. Pretty dull.

The Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, Animals, Pretty Things, etc. seized on American blues and rock and roll--thus all the Willie Dixon covers, Chuck Berry covers, Little Richard covers, etc. They proceeded to latch onto every subsequent movement--the hippie psychedelia of the mid to late sixties, and eventually punk in the late seventies (lifted from the likes of The Ramones, Stooges, Dolls, Birdman, Saints, even early AC-DC).

Probably the only rock genre that was created in England would be Sabbath's heavy metal.

However, where the Brits are not adept at "creating" rock, they certainly show an appreciation for it. This, I believe, is why the likes of Sparks, Cheap Trick, Hendrix, etc. found their earliest succes in England, and only "hit" here later on.

I could agree with this but only in the same way you could do a global replacement of the word "Brits" with "Americans" or "Canucks". The fact that there are more exceptions that prove the rule in the US is really only due to the fact that we are a much larger country.

Yes, Rock n' Roll was born in the US but we really haven't done much of better job in respecting or emulating the simple brilliance of Little Richard and Chuck Berry than the Brits have in a long time. Plenty of noodlers throughout the western world, Brits don't have a monopoly on them.

np: Black Heat "Declassified Grooves"

Ah, the interesting things you find while following links around the internets:

Wednesday 22 June 2005
7:45 pm
Queen Elizabeth Hall
The Coral Sea featuring Kevin Shields, Cat Power and Patti Smith
Series: Patti Smith's Meltdown 2005
£15 - £12.50

And the interesting people you meet:

Shirley Temple's daughter played bass in the Melvins for years n years.

-- Christopher R. Weingarten (fakebullshi...), May 7th, 2005

Yeah, it has a bunch of music critics that post there. It took me a long time before I stated posting because of the intimidation factor. I believe Whiney is brand new but I think Tom has been posting for a while: http://ilx.p3r.net/thread.php?msgid=5768318 I’m not sure it’s the same one but I believe it is. There are quite a few Obner types that post there and I discovered KPH just last night. I turned on F’n’B to the site also because I think he will like it, he will check it out when he is in a better mood…

This is when I like Obner best, when we actually talk about music and why we like and dislike certain things. We seem to be getting away from our bread and butter recently, though it still there people seem to post in the other forums moreso.

np: Andrew Bird – the Mysterious…

That site is pretty scary. Jesus.

What it led me to though was the "I Love the WWE site"; this somehow led me to a Matt Harty forum (http://thematthardy.com/phpBB/ ); Jesus, there are 3019 registered users on that thing!. Thanks Bee, you have indirectly caused me to waste an hour of my life that i cant get back.....

I haven’t even been to the I Love Everything part of that board yet, only the music site. I bookmarked the new answers part, which is just posts from that day: http://ilx.p3r.net/newanswers.php?board=2

Usually just hit ‘new answers’ after that, but I Love Music (ILM) from each month is a gold mine.

Nope wrong Tom, that one is the founder of ILX.

In some sense I agree with Radcliffe. To me the most undeniable rock bands after the fifites were Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground. As much as I love the Beatles and the Stones, alot of it was repackaging and giving it back to us. The Beatles are probably my favorite band ever, but I've never found them ground breaking. I think it's pretty much been the same pattern sense. We lead and forget, and they revent it (often better). Nothing is absolute but if you look it, UK has really been a table setter.

For me it’s always about bottom line, I can care less who came first and so on. It is who has done it better and who I want to listen to?

late 60s – British
70s – British
80s – British
90s – British (but the Americans made some great strides)
00s – Americans

Edit: What is that old saying: Artists create, Genius’ steal.

yeah, the British don't know shit about rock n' roll, and there's nothing intriguing about their culture.