FEATURE:
Second Spin
Kenickie - At the Club
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HERE is an album that I did…
PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Sweet/Rex Features
not experience the first time around in 1997. I came to Kenickie’s debut album, At the Club, in the 2000s. Listening back now, I can hear other bands who have been inspired by Kenickie. At the Club still sounds utterly fresh and thrilling. One of the big albums of 1997, it reached number nine on the U.K. With incredible, distinct and hugely impressive singles like Punka, Millionaire Sweeper, and In Your Car, it is an album that has more than its share of gems. I feel that it is not played as much as it should be. At the Club was produced by John Cornfield, Andy Carpenter and band-member Peter Gofton (Johnny X). Reviews for the album were largely positive. Maybe one of the albums from a sensational year that got buried because of the sheer quality around it, I wanted to revisit a record that turns twenty-five on 12th May. If you have not heard Kenickie’s amazing debut album, then get on it now! The Sunderland band were led by BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Lauren Laverne. I have a lot of love for the band. With her brother Peter Gofton (Johnny X) on percussion, and Marie du Santiago and Emmy-Kate Montrose providing sensational musicianship and vocals, the band were an amazing force in the 1990s! I believe that an album such as At the Club is deserving of fresh inspection now. I want to bring in a couple of positive reviews/articles about the album.
This is what NME had to day about At the Club back in 1997. Despite some minor criticisms, they were impressed by what they heard from such a young band:
“With their spiky punk-pop scrongling deepened and softened by Supergrass producer John Cornfield, Kenickie now sound wide-bodied and ready for take-off. Guitars shimmer like Hard Candy nail varnish throughout. Reference points are adopted and discarded at disorienting speed: early Blondie for the girls-with-guns playground games of 'Spies'; the Shangri-Las for the call-and-response vocals and synchronised handclaps of 'In Your Car' and the ever majestic 'Come Out 2Nite'; even Dinosaur Jr for the warmly chugging hymn to how downright classy Kenickie are that is, erm, 'Classy'. It's all PVC and parties, champagne and lip gloss, tacky glamour and fruity banter. But if it was only this -; the giddy rush of first love, classroom crushes and furtive youth club snogs -; then Kenickie really would be the shallow cheap-thrills merchants their dissenters would have us believe. If they truly were one-trick Shetland ponies in spangly threads, then those Shampoo and Fluffy parallels would make sense. Indie Spice Girls accusations could be flung with impunity, and Kenickie would be whoring themselves around the TFI Friday circuit until the cash cows staggered home.
That, of course, is not the case. Because as well as evoking adolescence's dizzying sense of immortality and hormonally charged confusion like no other album this decade, 'At The Club' consolidates an oft-overlooked strand of Kenickie's vision which throws the rest into stark perspective. Because there is vulnerability here behind the invincible posturing, a crushing sense of youth's transience and a prescient awareness of disappointments to come. Bloody hell -; and still not turned 20.
So 'People We Want' might ring with Lauren Laverne's teenage impatience to gallop out and seize the long-promised adult prizes of love and stardom, but she also sounds tremulously uncertain that these treasures even await her at all. The gushing guitar gradients of 'Brother John' tell us that, "Everyone looks better when they're sad," while 'How I Was Made' quietly evokes the fragile bodily self-disgust of Richey or Kurt at their most morbid. Even the Lottery winners of 'Millionaire Sweeper' end up lost and lonely, while album-closers 'I Never Complain' and 'Acetone' find Lauren hunched forlornly over her acoustic guitar, her breathy sighs tinged with suicidal intent. Crikey. Party time, anyone?
OK, 'At The Club' isn't the best album ever made. For that, Kenickie will need to learn how to distil their huge, witty, tragicomic and obscenely gifted personalities into musical form -; and, so far, no songs have been invented which can take that level of sassy charisma without collapsing into a black hole of dense antimatter.
They could also benefit from stretching their pop palette to match their skyscraping ambition, acknowledging the electronic age which shaped them as much as geetars: after all, their primary school days were brightened by the likes of ABC, the Human League and Duran Duran. The only clear sign of this on 'At The Club' is 'Robot Song', the longest and finest number here, an android-pop ballad with a whiff of Blur's 'Boys & Girls' about it which relates the saga of a cyborg who craves human feelings but, when he gets them, is overwhelmed by sadness. Smart, tinged by tragedy and clever beyond its years -; in other words, totally Kenickie.
Even so, despite its minor shortcomings, 'At The Club' fizzes with pure spunk, drop-dead cool and blinding potential”.
Before I finish things up, this Back Seat Mafia feature discuses an impressive and brilliant album that has been forgotten a certain amount. Not often ranked alongside the best debuts of the 1990s, that is something that needs to be revised:
“The guitar bands that rose to prominence in the UK through the mid 90s in the UK were a mixed bunch. There were a handful of thoroughly enjoyable bands, but on the whole as it was largely either ridiculously pretentious, impossibly dull or lowest-common-denominator rubbish. It was even worse for the female fronted groups, as they were either frowny and miserable or just useless .
Other than PJ Harvey, Britain hadn’t produced a genuinely talented and enjoyable female fronted rock band for years and the masses were turning to identikit mouthy girls wearing shrunken T-shirts, fronting groups of anonymous blokes with guitars. Things were bleak. Then, at what looked to be the darkest hour, when the most vital females in music were The Spice Girls, three whip smart Northern lasses decked out in leather, PVC and leopard print, with big guitars, big choruses and a bloke who played the drums staggered out of the gloom and into the hearts of those that could recognise a genuinely subversive band when they heard one.
For all their attempts to mirror working-class attitudes and experiences, the majority of Brit-pop bands had fallen short. Not Kenickie though. On At the Club they sang songs of cheap nights out, booze, partying, seducing blokes because they drove flash cars, self doubt and bitchiness. On top of this they were fun too. This earthy approach did much to hide the fact that Kenickie were far more intelligent and knowing than most gave them credit for. Yes they wrote singalong songs about partying and picking up blokes, but they weren’t afraid to acknowledge the dark underside of this lifestyle as well. Despite their girly choruses both “How I Was Made” and “Acetone” are strangely sad and moving songs and a tune like “Robot Song” is strangely unnerving.
At the end of the day though, this is a pretty accurate picture of the lifestyle of British girls who were in their late teens during the last five years of the 20th century (or at least those that I knew anyway). It has big, supercharged guitars, stomping beats, marvelous singalong choruses, songs about the joys of wearing “P.V.C.” and listening to lo-fi music.
They may have followed up At the Club with a downbeat album which saw the band end on a whimper, but this joyous debut stands as a monument to one of the great forgotten bands of the late 90s. There weren’t many bands willing to blend power-pop with girl-group stylings at he time, but in recent years there seems to have been some belated acknowledgment of Kenickie’s inherent brilliance. These days former Kenickie frontwoman Lauren Laverne is now a much-loved radio and television presenter and is probably better known now than she’s ever been. The other band members, despite each still being part of the music scene to varying degrees, little has been heard from, apart from Laverne’s brother and his bewildering array of contributions to the UK music scene over the past decade.At the Club is one of those albums that is an audio time-capsule of its time, yet anyone who journeys onto West Street on a Saturday evening can confirm that its themes have remained oddly timeless. Who knows, maybe it is finally time for Kenickie to be given the respect that they were always due”.
An album I have bonded with and explored a lot over the past few days, 1997’s At the Club was the exciting and hugely talented Kenickie coming into the music with a bang! Maybe one will hear Punka now and then, but what about, Brother John, Robot Song, P.V.C., or I Never Complain?! An album chocked with great songs that are worthy of a spin, go and listen to a tremendous album. Ahead of its twenty-fifth anniverssary in the summer, I wanted to highlight an amazing album that…
EVERYONE should hear.