There are few bands as deeply woven into the fabric of Joyzine as Art Brut. We first crossed paths in the very earliest days of both the band and this site’s existence at a South London Music Tourist Board event hosted at The Paradise Bar (RIP) in New Cross by the wonderful Caffy St Luce (who remains our musical fairy godmother to this day) and attended by many bands who would feature regularly within these pages in the months and years that followed. It was to all intents and purposes the night that the ‘New Cross Scene’, which had a brief but brilliant moment in the national media spotlight, was born.
That night, Art Brut guitarist Chris Chinchilla handed me a CDR with the word “Brutlegs” scribbled on in marker pen, housed within a clear plastic sleeve, with a label looking very much like it had been printed on his home computer, giving the title of the three tracks contained within. A bit over 20 years later the postman rings my doorbell to hand a rather more luxurious package – a sleek trichromatic construction of folding card, concealing five cds of recorded material from the band’s first half-decade, along with photographs from the era, liner notes by frontman Eddie Argos and a signed art print.
Back then, Argos’ semi-spoken word vocal (to which this box set’s title and the lyric from ‘Formed a Band’ refers) seemed an anomaly in a sea of Libertines inspired urchin-rock dullards, and the early shows I attended in pubs and tiny basement venues were met with many a furrowed brow and comments along the line of “I don’t get it”. The thought of them not only still being around two decades later but playing to venues many times bigger and releasing a two-part career retrospective seemed unlikely in the extreme. Despite (or perhaps because of) this I loved them from the first time I span that CDR and fell absolutely head over heels when I saw them live, breaking between songs to share anecdotes or to represent artistic movements through sound, filling the Buffalo Bar with bubbles from a toy gun – it was theatre and comedy and poetry and punk rock and capital P Pop music all at once, and it sounded nothing like anything else around at the time. As time went by, more and more people “got it” and a cult following began to form around the band.
What perhaps resonated most of all was the love of making and listening to music that sat at the heart of their live shows. ‘Formed a Band’, which would become their breakthrough track, cut straight to the heart of why so many millions of people around the world take the foolhardy decision to pick up an instrument or a microphone, get up on stage in front of a room of strangers and pour their heart and soul out for 30 minutes in exchange for £50 and a couple of pints of the venues cheapest lager (if they’re lucky). At their live shows this was accompanied by Argos’ zealous entreaties for every member of the audience to go out and form their own band – they even started a franchise system with more than 100 AB bands worldwide playing Art Brut covers and songs inspired by the band – there was even an Art Brut franchise battle of the bands at The Luminaire in Kilburn.
Their debut album Bang Bag Rock and Roll followed in 2005, released by veteran indie imprint Fierce Panda, bringing them to an ever wider audience, with single ‘Emily Kane’ falling just two sales short of being eligible for reaching Argos’ dream of appearing on Top of The Pops. This success led to a deal with Mute Records (part of industry giant EMI) for the follow up It’s a Bit Complicated, released in 2007. It was originally recorded with Pulp’s Russell Senior at the helm, but re-recorded with Dan Swift after the label rejected Senior’s version. This box set spans the period of these first two LPS, with a second collection due at some point in the future, which will presumably pick up with 2009’s Art Brut Vs Satan.
So what’s in the box? You get both albums, along with a comprehensive selection of b-sides, rarities and live recordings from ULU in London (featuring a horn section!) and Paris along with an integrated booklet featuring Eddie Argos’ recollections of the period and a selection of photographs: posed, live and behind the scenes and an art print signed by Eddie Argos.
Bang Bang Rock and Roll inhabits CD1, and for my money the trio of tracks that kick of the album, ‘Formed A Band’, ‘My Little Brother’ and ‘Emily Kane’, still rank amongst the most wonderfully poptacular openings to a record that I’ve cover in my 20 and a bit years of Joyzine-ing. Fizzing, technicolour, bounce on your bed belting out the words at the top of your lungs bangers the lot of them. Add to that ‘Modern Art’s WOO! filled chorus and skint-rock classic ‘Bad Weekend’ with its instant quotable refrain of “Popular culture no longer applies to me” and it’s easy to see why the band were still able to pack out venues for the album’s reissue tour a couple of years ago.
CD2 brings us on to It’s A Bit Complicated, an album that took the band’s predilection to pop culture references to an extreme by naming tracks ‘I Will Survive’, ‘Jealous Guy’ and ‘Nag Nag Nag Nag’ as well as quoting ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ and ‘What Becomes of The Broken Hearted’ elsewhere. With a cleaner sound and higher production values it loses a little of the DIY charm of its predecessor but makes up for it with Argos’ confessional (and often amusing) lyrics and embracing a wider range of the guitar pop spectrum. We get cheeky odes to music fandom ‘Pump Up The Volume’ and ‘Sound of Summer’, the crisp guitars of ‘Post Soothing Out’, indie dancefloor filler ‘Direct Hit’ and the charmingly lackadaisical ‘People In Love’, all of which retain the spirit that made us fall in love with the first record, whilst edging ever so slightly into new territory.
The third disc is made up of b-sides, rarities and a smattering of live recordings from the Bang Bang Rock and Roll era. As tends to be the case these will be of most interest to die hard fans and completists, but there’s plenty of gold to be mined by the more casual fan or newcomer too. ‘These Animal Menswe@r’ could (and perhaps should) have been an A-side in its own right, the staccato Spanish guitar influenced opening of ‘Really Bad Weekend’ is an unexpected treat and ‘Enrique Gatti (Subliminal Desire for Adventure)’ showcases a different side to the band with a rare foray into instrumentalism. I’ve got a nostalgic fondness for the Brutlegs versions of ‘Formed a Band’, ‘Modern Art’ and ‘Moving to L.A.’ and the punky romp of ‘Top Of The Pops!’, recorded for an Angular Records compilation and featuring a role call of half the bands Joyzine were covering at that time is an important document of a scene that while small in scale, was a big part of the lives of everyone who was involved in it, whether musician or fan. The disc is completed with a fun live set, recorded at ULU and featuring a three-piece horn section.
We’re then provided with a similar collection from the time of the second album. The b-sides all stand up well, with ‘I Found This Song In The Road’s bright guitars and wonky hand-clap filled ‘I Want to be Double A-Sided’ particularly pleasing. The real intrigue here though comes from the three tracks from the discarded Russell Senior sessions – a strangely jaunty version of ‘Blame It On The Trains’ and weedier take on ‘Post Soothing Out’ suggest that the label bigwigs might have made the right call, but a lithe, punkier version of ‘St Pauli’, that brings its filthy bassline to the fore and adds some rare Argos screaming is rather more appealing. Again this side is brought to a close with live recordings, this time from the Eurockenennes Festival in 2006 (watch out for the tongue in cheek musical introduction to ‘Formed a Band’).
The box set is rounded off with a full 15-song live set recorded in Paris in 2006 (and featuring another cheeky ‘Formed a Band’ intro). Art Brut’s musicianship is often underestimated, but this set perfectly showcases the incongruity of the band’s tightness and Argos’ tendency to ramble (often hilariously) off script and ad lib his lyrics, challenging them to keep the song on the rails as he does so.
These two albums were the soundtrack to an important time in my life, and listening to this collection brought the memories flooding back. But, importantly, the music stands up to the test of time – I wouldn’t expect any newcomers to splurge on a box set, but thankfully a companion ‘best of’ album, A Record Collection Reduced to a Mixtape, has also been released, spanning the bands entire existence, giving those not yet familiar with the band a perfect entry point, and with the prevalence of sprechgesang indie punk outfits making waves over the past few years, Art Brut are definitely worthy of a resurgence.
Listening to these tracks in such a condensed block has also given me the opportunity to reflect on why it is that Art Brut, perhaps more than any band from our early years, have remained important both to Joyzine and to me personally. I think it might be that despite giving the site the name JOYzine, most of the music I loved at that time (and still do) fell more into the categories of ‘miserable’ or ‘angry’ (those didn’t make for such a good title). Art Brut stood out from the brooding crowd with their optimism, their love of pop music and for just being bloody good fun, and they’re still making me smile almost 21 years later.
Review and Photography by Paul Maps
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And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice! is out now via Alcopop! Records and Demon Music Group – get your copy here
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