The track begins with a barrage of energy chords, overtly stolen from the Who’s Received’t Get Fooled Once more. The opening lyrics are mewled out in an estuary accent: “I get bored so simply – that’s why I solely say good day.” And the record of influences from right here contains the Intercourse Pistols and Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie – earlier than it ends with a brazen carry of the coda from the Beatles’ model of Twist and Shout. When it will get to the refrain, every thing turns into clear: this can be a ferocious, splendidly camp blast in opposition to the stifling cultural dominance of basic Americana: “Goodbye Jimmy Dean, don’t inform me what to put on / Goodbye Monroe, if anyone cares.”
All this would possibly recommend a misplaced basic from the mid-Nineties, and the gaudy wonders of Britpop. However Goodbye Jimmy Dean was really by Boys Marvel, a visionary band whose star rose and fell between 1986 and 1988. They had been about eight years forward of their time, and on reflection, their chronically awkward match with their period was in all probability at all times going to be their undoing. However whereas they lasted, they had been nice. In 1987, I noticed them acting on the Channel 4 comedy present Saturday Reside, swaggeringly delivering one other three-minute manifesto titled Shine on Me. I used to be smitten, however given their large-scale blanking by the music press (and the truth that the world extensive internet had but to be invented), I used to be left questioning what on earth had occurred to them.
Now I do know. Boys Marvel launched solely 4 singles. Goodbye Jimmy Dean was the third, put out earlier than the lack of key members and an ill-advised detour into extra dance-influenced music. Even on the band’s peak, journalists had been largely detached or hostile, and their songs had been barely performed on the radio. As their singer Ben Addison now places it: “We had been banging our heads in opposition to a wall. And the wall received.”
Now their prescience would possibly lastly be acknowledged. The band’s quintessential five-piece lineup have simply carried out their first gig in 35 years, with one other to comply with. On the similar time, a few of their authentic stage outfits function in Outlaws, a brand new exhibition centred on “trend renegades of 80s London” on the capital’s Style and Textile Museum. However the principle occasion is an excellent new Boys Marvel anthology titled Query All the pieces, most of which has by no means been heard earlier than.
In the middle of an enchanting two-hour Zoom name, Addison – who’s now a father of two, resident in Dusseldorf – tells me the band’s story. He and his twin brother, Scott, had been art-school alumni from south-east London, who lower their musical enamel because the drummer and bassist with a quartet referred to as Brigandage (“the Intercourse Pistols with a feminine singer,” he says), within the vanguard of a short-lived style generally known as Constructive Punk. As soon as that mission had come to grief, they befriended guitarist Graham Jones, who was about to exit the wreckage of early Eighties pop sensations Haircut 100. He and the Addisons shared a imaginative and prescient of the perfect punk rock being combined with a blinding array of different influences.
Jones, who speaks to me from his house in Cornwall, remembers every day journeys to the Addisons’ flat, the place the three of them would meticulously report songs utilizing a four-track Portastudio. “Whereas Scott was doing his overdubs,” he says, “Ben could be sitting over within the nook with a pad and paper and he’d be drawing outfits. Our girlfriends had been going to trend faculty, so a few of them might create the gadgets of clothes that Ben was drawing. There was extra happening than simply the music: this entire inventive course of was occurring behind the scenes.”
They soaked up as a lot of their favorite music – and its iconography – as they might. “We’d sit down collectively and watch the Who do My Era on [1960’s US TV staple] The Smothers Brothers present,” says Addison. “The [Pistols’] God Save the Queen video. Untold Bowie stuff. Roxy, particularly with the shoulder pads and Brian Eno’s feathers. Tom Jones when he was at his most gyratable, because it had been. And pre-fat Elvis.”
There was an early plan to name the band Batman & Robin, however the expectation of copyright issues led them to place an ‘s’ on the latter character’s “Boy Marvel” tagline, and the ensuing title caught. A visible breakthrough got here with the Addisons’ bowl-contoured haircuts, which defied the 80s’ tyranny of quiffs. “A great good friend of ours referred to as Andrew McLaughlin was a rising star inside Vidal Sassoon,” says Addison. “He turned up one night time on the Greenwich theatre bar, which was one in all our favorite hangouts, with this bleached, fully extreme fringe, like Henry V. He appeared like one thing out of black and white Physician Who. I stated, ‘Fucking hell, Andrew – that’s the bomb. That is what we’re going to do.’” Ben mixed his new barnet with eyebrows nearly comically thickened with an eye-pencil, and immediately had his signature look.
“It simply felt simply so thrilling, to be doing one thing that nobody else was doing,” says Jones. They quickly attracted the eye of Seymour Stein, the legendary American impresario who had beforehand signed the Ramones, Speaking Heads and Madonna to his Sire label. After working with the Smiths, the Treatment and Depeche Mode, Stein was on the lookout for extra expertise from this aspect of the Atlantic, albeit with out a lot of a price range.
“We had been doing night-time recording classes,” Addison tells me. “And one night time, on the cellphone, we requested him for some extra money. There he was, on a lounger in some Vegas pool with a cocktail, however he advised us we had been dwelling in a dreamworld by asking for a bit extra. To coin the cliche, I feel we actually had been extra of a tax write-off than anything.” So it was that their time as a major-label act abruptly got here to an in depth; a brief spell with the Tough Commerce label proved no extra profitable.
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The brand new anthology reveals that within the midst of those disappointments, Boys Marvel’s music was constantly excellent. If that they had a defining sound, it was the meld of punk, glam and ideal pop aesthetics that cohered not simply on Goodbye Jimmy Dean and two different singles – Shine on Me and Now What Earthman? – however different songs whose titles illustrated the singular pondering at work: Woman Hangover, Child It’s No Joke, We All Hate Honesty. The opposite aspect of their inventive universe took its lead from English musical theatre, as evidenced by such songs as Soho Sunday Morning, such an augury of the flip British music would take within the 90s – proper all the way down to its parping brass – that it now sounds downright prophetic.
Which takes us again to Britpop. By the mid-90s, the Addison twins had fashioned Corduroy, a quartet signed to the Acid Jazz label who retained a London-centric sense of place, however combined it up with every thing from 60s movie soundtracks (their first two albums had been largely instrumental) to Steely Dan. They now watched as Blur, Suede and Pulp – in addition to the period’s numerous wannabes – seemingly walked in Boys Marvel’s footsteps. To some extent, the identical might be stated of Oasis, definitely when it got here to their shameless plundering of rock historical past.
“If I hadn’t been doing Corduroy, then I’d in all probability have been a bit extra depressed,” Addison tells me. “I’m not making an attempt to place anybody down: Blur, for instance, used to make use of Corduroy’s track London, England as their intro tape. They requested us to do their Alexandra Palace gig [in October 1994], so I’m indebted to them for that.”
There may be one other Britpop connection: Addison says he remembers a gig on the College of London Union (AKA ULU), the place the polarities had been reversed: Boys Marvel had been supported by the nascent Blur, who had been then referred to as Seymour. “I don’t wish to declare something,” he says. “However that’s what occurred. There was a proximity between the 2 issues … it felt very unusual as a result of Britpop was so unglamorous. Adidas shell toes, Adidas fucking T-shirt. What? For me, that was the principle distinction. No type. It was simply scratch-the-surface pondering.”
Like his Boys Marvel colleagues, Addison – who nonetheless makes music, and can be a visible artist – is now in his early 60s. Once we converse, the band is about to play its first reunion present. “On the draw back, I’m manner older now,” he says. “I’m not leaping about as a lot. I’m not going to do the eyebrows or something like that. So there’s trepidation over that. But it surely’s boogied out of the best way by the boldness within the songs, which is renewed.”
Returning to their previous glories, in truth, has prompted him to attempt to flip the basic technology hole on its head. “I’m not on a mission,” he tells me, breaking into a smile. “However I feel if there may be something to be identified, the message is: your grandparents had been far more attention-grabbing than you’re.”
