Classic Album Review: The Boo Radleys – C’mon Kids (1996)

For a brief period in the mid-Nineties, Liverpool band The Boo Radleys strode across the indie landscape like a colossus thanks to the success of its critically acclaimed 1993 album Giant Steps. Having emerged from the so-called shoegaze scene via Rough Trade onto the Creation label, pop credibility was theirs following a run of relatively successful singles, most notably ‘Barney (& Me)’, ‘Lazarus’, and ‘Wake Up Boo!’ … and the widespread critical praise for the albums which spawned them.

However, the 1996 release C’mon Kids catches the band three years on, five albums in, and occupying rather uncertain terrain. This is the sound of a band struggling to find their place in the natural order of things. C’mon Kids is supposedly the band’s anti-pop album in so much as main man Martin Carr had a distinct reluctance to embrace all of the bullshit that came with that whole Britpop thing. And for a while his band seemed very much in danger of being lumped in with all of the other faux Sixties prototypes frequenting that particular scene. 

But if you proliferate your album with Gallagher-esque vocals, and add trippy little Sgt-Peppery interludes into the middle of tracks, then you really are just inviting trouble. 

Having said that, this isn’t really anything like any of the instantly accessible polished muck that dominated the charts for much of 1996 either. Combine the aforementioned poppy elements with walls of grinding guitar, copious amounts of feedback, lots of fuzz and distortion, then turn the vocals right down in the mix, and what you end up creating is something far too left of the mainstream to even threaten the charts. 

It all leaves me wondering what exactly the band had hoped to achieve on C’mon Kids. What they end up with is like some kind of psychedelic sludgy Britpop/grunge pick‘n’mix assortment. 

Ultimately though, it’s the layers of buzzsaw guitar that give the album its overall feel, and even beyond their short flirtation with pop stardom, it’s clear that the band’s instinct for shoegaze had survived. 

Maybe that’s its problem? … 

Three years and one album later, The Boo Radleys were no more. 

I picked up C’mon Kids on the (very) cheap but it’s nowhere near as bad as I first thought it might be. That doesn’t mean I’ve worked out what it is supposed to be yet. 

Highlights: most would say the title-track (also the opening track), and/or ‘What’s In The Box’ (a single and the album’s centrepiece), or maybe even ‘Everything Is Sorrow’; but I’d reckon ‘Bullfrog Green’, ‘New Brighton Promenade’, and ‘Ride The Tiger’.