FEATURE:
Line Up
Elastica at Thirty
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ON 13th March…
it will be thirty years since Elastica released their phenomenal debut album. Elastica was nominated for the 1995 Mercury Prize. Hitting number one on the U.K. album chart, it was, at the time, the fastest-selling debut album since Oasis’ Definitely Maybe (1994). Come the end of 1995, Elastica had sold approximately one million copies worldwide. The album was a big success in the U.S. About half of the million sales were from the U.S. I am going to get to a few reviews of Elastica. Prior to that I want to bring in an NME feature from 2016. They provided the full story of Elastica’s phenomenal self-titled debut:
“The token girl playing guitar in the back”: that’s how a fed-up Justine Frischmann described her stint in Suede, the band she’d formed with then-boyfriend Brett Anderson in 1989. At personal loggerheads with Anderson after she left him for his arch-rival, Blur’s Damon Albarn, she formed her own group in 1992 with drummer Justin Welch (another early Suede outcast), bassist Annie Holland and guitarist Donna Matthews. That may all sound like a Britpop version of EastEnders, but Elastica soon proved they had something far more substantial to offer. The succinct punchiness of early singles ‘Stutter’, ‘Line Up’ and ‘Connection’ quickly turned heads – ex-NME journo Steve Lamacq, in particular, began championing them on his BBC Radio 1 show and signed them to his label, Deceptive Records.
The story behind the sleeve
Renowned German fashion photographer Juergen Teller, who has worked with artists including Sinéad O’Connor, Björk and Elton John, took the black-and-white snap for Elastica’s debut – a cover that, with its sparse, sparing style, stood apart from the elaborate and conceptual sleeves favoured by Blur and Suede.
Did you know?
1. Now-defunct music paper Melody Maker ran a competition asking fans to name Elastica’s debut LP, but reader’s suggestions – including ‘Edible Liar’ and ‘Tie Me Up And Give Me Toast’ – were all rejected by the band.
2. Another title, ‘Keys, Money And Fags’ – a lyric from ‘Line Up’ – was also nixed due to fears that American fans would have a different interpretation of the word ‘fags’.
3. Damon Albarn contributed keyboards to ‘Elastica’, but the band chose not to credit him with his real name – the pseudonym Dan Abnormal was used instead.
4. Donna Matthews has claimed that the mysterious acronym of the track ‘SOFT’ stands for ‘Same Old Fucking Things’.
5. The Stranglers and Wire took issue with Elastica’s debut: Wire claimed that both ‘Line Up’ and ‘Connection’ ripped them off, while The Stranglers alleged that ‘Waking Up’ borrowed from ‘No More Heroes’. Both bands received out-of-court settlements as a result of the legal disputed.
Lyric analysis
“My heart’s spaghetti junction/Every shining bonnet/ Makes me think of my back on it” – ‘Car Song’
Justine’s saucy, JG Ballard-style tribute to getting steamy in motor vehicles.
“Drivel head knows all the stars/Loves to suck their shining guitars” – ‘Line Up’
Having been in the orbit of both Blur and Suede, Justine was no stranger to groupies. Here, she takes a pot shot at those fans desperate to cop off with a musician.
“We were sitting in waiting/ And I told you my plan/ You were far too busy writing/ Words that didn’t scan” – ‘Never Here’
This was reportedly written about Frischmann’s split with Anderson, taking a vengeful sideswipe at his songwriting.
What we said then
“Fun, loveable and exciting, Elastica’s debut burps out of the speakers like a pissed kid on a spacehopper.” Johnny Dee, NME, March 3, 1995
What we say now
It deserves to be celebrated just as much as Britpop contemporaries like ‘Different Class’, ‘Definitely Maybe’, ‘Dog Man Star’ and ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’: punchy and acidic, full of catchy-as-fuck singles and not an ounce of fat.
In their own words
“I think we’ve made a record you can put on from start to finish without feeling like you want to kick the cat. You could put it on as you’re going out, before you go to sleep or when you’re having sex.” – Justine Frischmann, 1995
The aftermath
Momentum can be squandered far more easily can it can be gained. Just ask Elastica: after the success of their debut, they took their sweet time to make a follow-up. Matthews and Holland both split before the record was released, and the rest of the band decided to re-record all the material in 1999 (with new contributions from The Fall’s Mark E Smith and Damon Albarn again). By the time the patchy ‘The Menace’ was released in 2000, the Britpop bubble had long burst. The band amicably called it a day the following year, and Frischmann turned her back on music to become a visual artist in the US”.
It is amazing to think that Elastica came out on the same day as Radiohead’s second studio album, The Bends. What a day that was for record buyers back in March 1995! Although they are very different albums, they are among the best of one of the best years for music ever. I am going to move to a feature from Stereogum that marked twenty years of a classic debut back in 2015:
“It’s oddly appropriate that Elastica’s self-titled debut came out on the same day as The Bends, Radiohead’s classic sophomore album. Those two records represent opposite sides of British rock in the mid-’90s. The Radiohead of The Bends was a sober band, one that took itself seriously. They played big, longing, starry-eyed melodies over layered guitars, and their sound was vast and layered and complex. They were still very much a rock band at the time, but they were drawing on prog and postpunk and shoegaze and dream-rock — the most elliptical sounds rock had to offer, basically. You could never be quite sure what Thom Yorke was singing about. And the band held themselves somewhat aloof from the Britpop explosion that was happening far away from their Oxford hometown. Elastica, meanwhile, were the opposite in just about every way. They were hard and pointed and just mercilessly hooky. Their songs were short, sharp shocks. They used guitars and keyboards as stabbing instruments. They probably owned a lot of the same postpunk records as Radiohead owned, but they took different things away from them. It wasn’t that hard to tell what Justine Frischmann was singing about; “Car Song,” for example, was about fucking in a car. And they were all up in the Britpop scene; Frischmann and drummer Justin Welch were defectors from Suede, and Frischmann, at the time, was dating Blur’s Damon Albarn, who played keyboards, under an alias, on the Elastica album. They were a beautiful, gleaming hook machine. And, sure, The Bends is a better album. But it’s closer than you think.
Elastica, amazingly enough, has not aged at all since it came out 20 years ago, possibly because it already seemed perfectly out-of-time the moment it arrived. There was a bit of dance-pop in the synths on the album, especially on the big single “Connection,” but they were mostly utterly uninterested in sounding like they belonged in 1995. Instead, they were a streamlined, weaponized version of a British band from that circa-1979 era where postpunk was turning into new wave. The sounds all come, sometimes directly, from that era, but they’re not weighed down with political struggle or cultural angst. Even at the band’s most psychedelic and furthest-out — the half-acoustic murmur “Company,” say — everything exists to serve the hook. Elastica is one of those albums that sounds like a greatest-hits collection right out of the gate — which is appropriate enough, since the band wouldn’t do much after its release. It’s a giddy 38-minute burst of wound-up guitars and dizzy melody and ice-cold snarl. And right now, off the top of my head, I can’t think of a big major-label alt-rock record that’s been as purely fun.
Elastica were rip-off artists, of course, and they had to pay piles of cash in out-of-court settlements as a result. Wire pointed out, quite rightly, that the central riff in “Connection” was a bald and direct bite from their own 1977 song “Three Girl Rumba,” while “Line Up” has a suspiciously similar chorus to Wire’s 1978 single “I Am The Fly.” The Stranglers got in on it, too, noting that “Waking Up” was distinctly similar to their 1977 single “No More Heroes.” This wasn’t a “Blurred Lines”/Marvin Gaye situation; these songs were direct and provable bites. But in every one of those situations, Elastica improved on their source material. They stole melodic elements, but they made those melodic elements harder and meaner and more direct. They aimed those melodic elements straight at the pop-music jugular. “Three Girl Rhumba” and “I Am The Fly” are great songs, but even peak-era Wire couldn’t take those riffs and hooks the places that Elastica could. For example, word got around in my high school that you could play the “Connection” riff on a touchtone phone: 3-233-3-233-3-233-6-322. (Try it! It sort of works!) Nobody was saying that about the “Three Girl Rhumba” riff, even though it’s the exact same riff. And none of the bands from the Wire/Stranglers era could work up a shimmy as sprightly as the one on “Hold Me Now,” the Elastica song that was a crush-mixtape staple of mine for years.
If Elastica had gone away forever after Elastica, it would’ve been one of the all-time great pop-history one-and-dones. They almost did. They made videos for five of the album’s 15 songs, and they served as token Brits on that summer’s Lollapalooza tour. (I saw their set, but I don’t remember anything about it, possibly because I was preoccupied with the urgent need to get high before Cypress Hill came on.) As soon as they got home from that tour, they went through a chaotic years-long series of lineup changes and personal issues and false-start recording sessions. In 2000, they finally got around to releasing their flop of a sophomore album, The Menace, which flirted with electroclash and which was pretty good but nowhere near as good as their debut. A year later, they broke up forever. These days, Frischmann is an abstract painter in the Bay Area. It’s hard to say they had any direct influence on the music that followed, since their own music was a distillation of its own influences. Savages has a similar visual aesthetic and set of influences, but they mine those influences for confrontational power, not for hooks. And even though SPIN called the Is This It-era Strokes the “male Elastica” in 2001, the comparison doesn’t really do justice to either band. (At their best, the Strokes were closer to being the male Go-Go’s, anyway.)
But Elastica’s influence does linger in some weird, indirect ways. For one thing, 13, one of Blur’s best albums, is entirely about Albarn’s painful breakup with Frischmann. As it happens, Albarn stopped trying to write punchy guitar-pop anthems at pretty much the exact time that he and Albarn split, and that can’t be a coincidence. Meanwhile, when Elastica toured North America behind The Menace, they brought along a young videographer named Maya Arulpragasam to document the tour. As this great Pitchfork piece points out, Frischmann would go onto become a sort of mentor to Arulpragasam, and together they made the squiggly bare-bones beat to what would become “Galang,” M.I.A.’ first single. There may not be a direct line of influence between Elastica and Arular, but the band did set in motion a few things that are still reverberating around pop music today. More importantly, though, they made one of the great mercenary guitar-pop albums of all time. Radiohead can claim a lot of victories, but they can’t claim that”.
In 2020, The Quietus looked back at Elastica’s debut twenty years after they released their second and final studio album, The Menace. After that 2000 album, that was it. It is important to look at the context of music in 1995. It was male-dominated and this tabloid era. One of laddishness and scandal. There were not many bands like Elastica around in 1995. Led by Justine Frischmann, she took her band into battle in a cultural that celebrated men and Offred sexism and misogyny to women:
“I don’t think it’s possible to overstate just how grimly blokey culture was in the mid-1990s. For those of tQ’s readers who haven’t read my other articles on the matter, here we go again: the media loved Oasis’ cartoonishly boorish antics. Blur had sniffed the wind and followed them into a dull interpretation of provincial masculinity (as Frischmann would later say of Albarn, "I think for Damon it was about becoming a yob. Finding his football friends and becoming quite playful about it. Just starting to assume the character of the insensitive yob and letting that get you through"). Every Friday Chris Evans turned up on TFI Friday to take the piss out of celebs, humiliate his colleagues, and present a dismal train of live sets from bands of lads with guitars. There was the constant air that all the wazzocks were just desperate for post-Take That Robbie Williams to be gay, just so they could take the piss out of him. Against this, Elastica’s insouciant androgyny was a revelation. We had Jarvis Cocker, sure, but he was a sort of weird beacon of hope for the unconventionally attractive male. Suede of course, but for all the blurring of gender in Brett Anderson’s personae, they were still all men. Elastica had something else – I am probably not alone in buying their debut album in a lusty haze for the record sleeve. The Jurgen Teller photographs of three boyish women and a cute twinky lad on the cover and inside the booklet might not look revelatory in an age where gender fluidity is everywhere, but my God they were then.
Yet Elastica’s gender play was quite at odds with what was happening elsewhere in leftfield music at the time, with none of the rage of Huggy Bear, Hole or PJ Harvey. You could argue that ‘Line Up’s tale of a groupie called ‘Drivel Head’ who "knows all the stars / Loves to suck their shining guitars / They’ve all been right up her stairs" isn’t terribly sisterly. Similarly, Frischmann had little time for the Riot Grrrl movement, in a 1994 Vox interview saying that "I went to a couple of gigs and couldn’t make head or tail of it. I just thought, ‘Go home and do something you can do!’ Really, it’s not that hard being a girl in music. In fact, there are lots of advantages to it, and it’s that kind of optimism I’d like to get across rather than moaning about what sex you are." Perhaps this frustration at Riot Grrl’s default amateurism stemmed from the frustration of being a member of Suede in their lean and hopeless pre-fame years –"Apart from anything, I couldn’t deal with being the second guitarist and having this strange, Lady Macbeth role in it, along with being general mother to four blokes," she reflected in 2003. These days the well-off privately-educated daughter of an engineer who worked on London’s Centrepoint tower would no doubt be told to check her privilege for her Riot Grrrl comments (and indeed in later years she largely went back on them).
Instead, it’s when we look to Frischmann’s lyricism that a more interesting, nuanced picture emerges. If most male rock and indie music is the driven by sexual frustration and bitterness, then Elastica exudes a suave confidence. Two of the landmark albums of the period, Suede’s debut and Blur’s heartbroken 13 were written by men about Frischmann. Where Brett Anderson’s lyrics for the likes of ‘Animal Lover’ were the snarl of the wronged party, Albarn’s ‘Tender’ felt like a desperate plea for healing as his relationship with "the ghost I love the most" slipped away. Frischmann’s words on her band’s debut album, on the other hand, displayed no such angst, instead exploring sexuality with explicit wit and a twinkling eye. She is always in control and the men are proving hapless in songs that range from the Viz-like puerile ("when you’re stuck like glue / Vaseline!") to a the recurring theme of erectile dysfunction – the party man who’s kept her "sitting here waiting / yeah, and it’s getting frustrating" in all ‘All Nighter’ to another flopping disappointment in ‘Stutter’ – "And it’s never the time, boy / You’ve had too much wine to stumble up my street". It’s a rather delicious antidote to the braggadocio of Oasis’ "feeling supersonic / drinking gin and tonic". Combined with Elastica’s tight aesthetic (black clothes, DMs, flouncing hair), it was a deeply seductive package for all of us kids trying to work through our sexualities.
While some critics churlishly complained about Elastica‘s lack of originality, it became one of the fasted-selling debut albums in UK chart history. Hundreds of thousands couldn’t give two hoots about how original these songs were – and neither did Elastica themselves, always perfectly frank in interviews about how they enjoyed making music that paid tribute to the artists they loved. Honesty was always part of the appeal. In an age when so many of their peers were taking downwardly-mobile trips in class tourism, Elastica were refreshingly honest about their origins, Frischmann never trying to hide her languid upper-middle-class drawl. You could say it was part of the band’s sonic identity and Elastica were, like many of the best British groups, a complex mix – Frischmann’s family came to the UK as refugees from the Holocaust, and the rest of the band were from working class backgrounds. A pursuit of class authenticity is frequently as reductive as complaints of magpie tendencies in musical creation.
Elastica was a record that almost propelled the foursome to great heights. Pulp, Oasis, Suede and Blur all failed to break America – indeed, it became a bogey country that in the case of Suede and Oasis would break them. Elastica, though, were subject to a frantic record label bidding war in the US that led to them signing a deal with Geffen and flogging half a million records in a year. And then… silence”.
On 13th March, it is thirty years since Elastica released one of the biggest, most popular, important and enduring debut albums of the 1990s. One that no doubt has influenced so many artists today. This year, we mark some stunning albums turning thirty. I do hope that there is a lot of attention paid to Elastica. From a band that sadly burned brightly for a short time, their legacy remains. Entering a music scene geared to male artists, they made an impact and stood out. No doubt paving the way for bands led by women or featuring all women. This incredible album still sound amazing and vibrant…
THIRTY years later.