Managed by a music journo James Brown (then features editor at NME but soon to start Loaded) and fronted by another NME journo. Not promising, eh?
I remember a Fabulous feature in which they were playing a gig in the provinces and Brown explained to the reporter that he never booked a hotel for the band in such circumstances - "if they don't have the nous to cop off with someone after the show, they don't deserve to be in Fabulous".
1991 - so a little bit too ahead of the coming Shitegeist
Every country in the world has its musical shit but there is something unique about Britshit.
Really truly shaky musical propositions can get surprisingly far - onto music paper covers, TV youth shows, record deals, and even into the charts.
There is something about the British tolerance for deficiency that is unique - Joe Carducci talks about a kind of listening where you sense the group's intention and supply it aurally even when it's not achieved or barely even gestured at. He was talking specifically about how after punk and its ethos of deskilling, you had a lot of rhythmically substandard outfits who got very successful - how British rock in the '60s and '70s had been all about great drummers and rhythms sections but after punk you could prosper as a band with barely adequate drumming, feeble rhythms etc. That only got worse with indie and Britpop.
There's a kind of solidarity-based listening where you like the attitude or line of patter that the group puts out - support their values or reckon they are good people - and as a result are prepared to turn a blind ear to the manifest failings in sonic execution. You imaginatively project the kind of musical substance that they ought to have and would supply if capable of it, or prepared to go to the bother of learning how to deliver it.
