FROM THE ARCHIVES (16)

It’s time to partially close down the blog for the period over Christmas and New Year.  This time around I’m going to put up a re-posting from times gone by, and I’ll try my best to have all of them feature musicians whose appearances have been infrequent.

This dates from 3 November 2014.

SCARED HITLESS

I hope you agree that Scared Hitless is a cracking name for a record label – although it is seemingly a name adopted by many a hapless baseball team.

As far as I know, there were just six singles and one LP ever released via the label:-

FRET 001 : 3 and a half minutes – Peep (1992)
FRET 002 : 3 and a half minutes – Bled Me Dry (1993)
FRET 003 : Veruca Salt – Seether (1994)
FRET 004 : Skyscraper – Never Again (1995)
FRET 005 : Oslo – Talk To Feet (1999)
FRET 006 : Oslo – Skriker (1999)
FRETLP 001 : Oslo – Daylight (1999)

I’ve only one of the above records, but it’s an absolute belter:-

mp3 : Veruca Salt – Seether
mp3 : Veruca Salt – All Hail Me

Formed by Nina Gordon and Louise Post as an acoustic duo, they soon realised that wasn’t the sort of music they wanted to make and so they enlisted bass player Steve Lack and Jim Shapiro (Nina Gordon’s half-brother) on drums

They released a self-funded demo tape and shopped it to labels while playing a handful of small club shows. The buzz around the band grew furiously, and after only a few live gigs, the band was signed to Minty Fresh Records for whom they re-released Seether which then became a huge hit on MTV in the States and ultimately led to Veruca Salt signing a contract with Geffen Records.

The Scared Hitless release of Seether in the UK was June 1994 but after the single had picked up momentum in the USA, it was re-released in the UK on Hi-Rise Recordings in November 1994. I’ve got the 12″ version of this in the cupboard as well:-

There were two tracks on the b-side taken from a BBC session:-

mp3 : Veruca Salt – Straight
mp3 : Veruca Salt – She’s A Brain

Seether only reached #61 in the UK charts but was hugely popular with listeners of the John Peel Show who voted it in at #3 in the 1994 Festive Fifty .

Happy Listening

JC

PS……..the blog returns to normal over the weekend, with the return of the Saturday series on Scottish songs, followed on Sunday with a single from The Wedding Present.