26 January 2014. This came from SWC who keeps us all informed and amused on a daily basis over at No Badger Required.
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Not released on an indie label but very much an indie band.
Whipping Boy formed in Dublin in 1988 and started out in life as a Fall covers band. In 1992 they released their first album Submarine and then signed to the Columbia label. In 1995 they came to the attention of a wider audience with the release of Heartworm their second album.
It is from this that We Don’t Need Nobody Else was taken. It’s a brutal episode of love, betrayal and heartbreak with singer Fergal McKee at first speaking over the wall of guitars in the back ground, then getting angrier and angrier. There is one verse in the song that makes your hairs stand up on end and genuinely made me shiver it’s the bit where Mckee says
“I hit you for the first time today, I didn’t mean to It just happened You wouldn’t let me go to the phone, you wanted to make love and I did not Now I know the distance between us Christ we weren’t even fighting, I was just annoyed”
Is it misogynist? No, well probably not. What it is, is a raw and emotional account of a love lost. Follow the song through, you’ll understand. Listen to A Natural, the very last (hidden) track on Heartworm, and it all becomes very clear, well it did to me. To me, this identified how music can be a very powerful thing, in fact it can tear your heart out whilst you sing along. Lyrically this song is as beautiful as anything I have ever listened to, and yet they are not the household names they should be.
mp3 : Whipping Boy – We Don’t Need Nobody Else
mp3 : Whipping Boy – A Natural
Is it a cult classic? Yes it’s the very definition of a cult classic, it scraped the Top Fifty. The album is better received now than it was 19 (now 31) years ago. The band had very little success when perhaps they should have been megastars, Heartworm was recently voted one of the greatest Irish Albums of all time, I would lose the word ‘Irish’ there myself.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 