[12/9/2022 - updated with added data, images + videos]
"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good", it says up there at the top - a blog motto borrowed from Uncle Brian Eno.
Does seem like there's more food for thought from contemplating failed 'n' flawed art / entertainment , whether music or film or TV or fiction. Especially if the shitness can be taken as epistemically indicative, a symptom of some larger formation.
Mostly, though, there's the amazement factor - how did this come to be? how did its creator ever imagine this was a good thing to do? how could they stand to play this tune night after night in concert? To labor over it protractedly in the recording studio? And how on earth did they persuade the Money People to invest in this until its shitty fruition? Perhaps most mysterious is the creator's pride, and their confidence - their sheer self-belief and conviction that the world is crying out for this shit and will clasp it to its collective bosom!
There is definitely a corruption of sensibility that sets in when you've been in this music-listening / music-evaluating / music-thinking game for an exceedingly long time... It gets to the point where the pungency of shite is more stimulating than all but the most supremely splendid.
And so I present: ShitBrit.
Mostly this is an exercise in pointing at things and going "Why?!?" Occasionally a thought will be ventured.
Attentive readers of this drivel-blog will notice that this episode is to some degree a return to that sporadically picked flaky scab o' mine known as the Bad Music Era... But there has been some mission creep, or Era Sprawl, so the trawl sweeps beyond the 85-86 Nadir and into the '90s... The later examples are very much spiritually of a piece with the BME stuff - and the connective is nationality, of course.
Partly it's a structural thing, to do with the UK nexus of weekly music papers, publicists, radio pluggers and radio producers, people who book bands for television shows. Really truly shaky musical propositions can get surprisingly far - onto music paper covers, TV youth programs, record deals, and even into the charts. There is also the native tradition of the novelty single.
But there's something more... Every country in the world has its musical shit - schlager, or some phoney local version of a Anglo / American trend or scene. But there is something unique about Britshit. America's shite has a totally different texture and tang. Something quintessentially British, or even English, animates this aural offal. So in a funny way, there's a curious inverted patriotism lurking here too: only my homeland produces this precise type of crap.
Nominations for future installments most welcome - as are ShitBrittier examples of tunes / videos by the groups below.
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Boys Wonder
Evidence in support of the "really awful > pretty good" proposition, insofar as I've watched this clip many more times in the last decade than any group from the same timeframe that I adore and revere.
The Ben Elton introduction really adds to the inglorious ShitBritness.
Ahead of their own time in one element only - the hyper-accentuated eyebrows seem totally 2010s
Grebo in general is a rich seam o' ShitBrit. I have had the misfortune of seeing Gaye Bykers live. And they were probably the stand-out entertainment in that whole bunch.
MM shoulders some of the blame (although Arsequake League was solidly opposed - on the grounds that grebo quaked no arses)
Did they all hail from the Midlands? The word Stourbridge springs to mind unbidden.
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Sleeper
Now there’s loads of mediocre music in the world... and then there’s the vast mundane plain of the well-made middlebrow. To properly qualify as Shitbrit, there needs to be an extra level of imposture and fecklessness - a “getting away with it” element. The group relies on attitude and front to compensate for the fact they can’t be arsed to work up a basic level of competence.
So for instance you might hate Fatboy Slim - or in a different area, Housemartins. But there is a basic level of competence in execution that is undeniable. The product, misconceived or appalling for other reasons, does its self-designated job. Most Madchester, the bulk of Britpop - it is lame or unimaginative, gauche or plain naff, but a base-level solidity passes muster. The failings of The High or the Mock Turtles or Cast are on the level of conception rather than execution.
Sleeper, though - the ShitBritness is flagrant, writ large in the writing itself (the ungainly structure, the bandy-legged rhythm, the ill-hewn lyric) and the performance (the lion's share of infamy here going to Wener for her singing - there is no voice as such - and "dancing").
MM - a hit with the Shit Girl
creepy-creepy interview from ginger nut
eeuw, even creepier start to this interview from one Ralf Little
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Fabulous
Managed by a music journo James Brown (then features editor at NME but soon to start Loaded) and fronted by another NME journo with alleged sex appeal. 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 and the gumption to cop off with someone after the show, they don't deserve to be in Fabulous".
A comp of Fabulous recordings released this very year would you Adam and Eve it?
Girls driven crazy by Simon Dudfield's crotch, we are supposed to believe
They tried the same sales pitch at the time
1991 - so a little bit too far in front of the coming Shitegeist that was the New Wave of New Wave
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Flowered Up
Admittedly Flowered Up do have a semi-redeeming moment - "Weekender". It's almost-great. But I suspect that the group may not be doing much playing on the record - the epic-ness of the sound, never so much gestured at on the earlier F-Up records, gives off a whiff of Frankie Goes To Hollywood on "Relax" and "Two Tribes". And a lot of the almost-greatness is down to the video - really a short film about the ups and downs of the raving lifestyle, full of echoes of mod and "Friday On My Mind", and actual samples from Quadrophrenia etc.
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Moonflowers
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Head
the debut Head LP - A Snog on the Rocks
A track from their major label debut Tales of Ordinary Madness - "1000 Hangovers Later"
The singer Bertie really fancied himself - the group's repertoire includes a cover of "Me and Mrs Jones"
They carried on the hard boozing theme - and the erroneotion that the singer was a sex symbol - with another album for Virgin
In between PG and Head, Gareth had led this other, wildly different outfit, whose haplessness would almost qualify for ShitBrititude, but they have better intentions and sources - arguably better outcomes, although personally I've never managed to make it through either God or I Am Cold.
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Sheep on Drugs
What a weedy vocal.
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Robyn Hitchcock
After catching this on Old Grey Whistle Test at the time, I have never been able to take Mr Hitchcock seriously.
Intro from Mark Ellen boosts the ShitBrit Factor
Strangely I love Martin Newell's stuff.
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Garage rock (The Prisoners, Thee Milkshakes, etc)
A recreation that comes out wrong - the lust for the lost "real" producing a false and forced energy.
With the first group, you can hear that before they went "garage", they were probably a mod revival band.
BritShit factor always intensified three-fold when framed by Jools Holland.
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Blaggers ITA
I mentioned the structural factor (weekly music papers, TV bookers, etc) causing this churn that requires new stuff, not-ready stuff, shaky propositions... But you can only blame the system so much - a lot of the fault lies with the audience, what they are prepared to put up with. There is something about the British tolerance for deficiency that is unique (I wonder if it goes back to the rationing era - and how for decades after rationing was over, "ice cream" in the UK was basically made of vegetable fat, it was margarine with a lot of sugar and flavorings. Or the kind of muck they serve for school dinners, all those ghastly desserts like spotted dick, milk pudding, blancmange).
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 if prepared to go to the bother of learning how to deliver it.
