Craig Stephen revisits a lost noughties classic (well, sort of … just go with it) from Glasgow …
If Glasgow indie band
Yummy Fur were to reform today they’d be heralded as a supergroup.
Despite making as much
presence on the music scene in their several years of existence as a provincial
election in Guinea-Bissau makes on global politics, the band gave the world
Alex Kapranos and Paul Thomson of Franz Ferdinand, and Jackie McKeown of the
band known simply as 1990s. Not a bad record then, even if their own ones
weren’t much cop.
After Yummy Fur, McKeown
eventually formed 1990s (no The) in the 2000s alongside Michael McGaughrin and
Jamie McMorrow – who was also a founding member of Yummy Fur. It was a good
time to be a Glasgow band, Bis were in their heyday, Franz Ferdinand were
stratospheric and, erm there were The Delgados too. The city was far enough
from the feeding frenzy of London to do things its own way.
The band’s debut single ‘You
Made Me Like It’ opens the album and what better way to introduce yourselves.
It’s a preening 70s jigabout rekindling memories of Mott the Hoople and early
Supergrass.
One of the verses is
somewhat esoteric: “T.B Sheets, Irma T, money back guarantee/ Lady drum, Lady
Di/ How'd you make your baby cry/ FTQ, FTP, Bobby D's in Mozambique/ Me, I'm on
Decatur Street .”
Google is your friend
here, but if I hear that last line correctly, we’re in New Orleans.
The second single was ‘You’re
Supposed To Be My Friend’ which appears to be about those people who say
they’re your their mate, but reality tells a different story.
Friendship and lovers are
something the band keep coming back to. While most tracks could be centred in
Any Town, ‘Pollokshields’ is a reference to the ‘garden suburb’ of southern
Glasgow. It’s more appealing than New York: “Chelsea Hotel, did it ring my
bell?/ I'd rather be … in Pollokshields .”
‘Cult Status’ is one of
those risqué tracks that could still have been acceptable in 2007 but you
wouldn’t try that trick now. As with most of the tracks on Cookies, the drums
are simple and the guitar chords not too overbearing. While McKeown sounds
positively perverted. "Strange faces ... not too clean / Wrong side of
16".
‘Arcade Precinct’
celebrates the humdrum banality of being young and walking the streets of your
own town. Teenage girls who are “just getting away from their dads/ Busy
tea-leafing, grabbing things for free,” while hanging around arcade precincts
and foodhalls as they embark on their tentative steps into the big bad world of
adulthood.
Sometimes the songs aren’t
about much at all, like ‘Enjoying Myself’, which is a rather humdrum tale of
partying. Like, that’s never been done before, right? But the basslines, the
working class life manifestos, the cocksure attitude and the spirit of the west
coast of Scotland make Cookies a vital and musically faultless album. It’s the
sound of Britain in the 1970s updated for the 2000s by a band called 1990s.
A couple of years later
1990s delivered another excellent album in Kicks, which was again produced by
Bernard Butler, and which I’ll review later this year. In 2011 the band
appeared set for a third long-playing release with a single preceding it, ‘My
Baby’s Double Espresso’, but the LP sadly and strangely never appeared. It
wasn’t until 2022 that Nude Restaurant was released on limited edition green
vinyl. Needless to say it was excellent.
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