SWC has never been short of great ideas for features over at No Badger Required. One of the longest-running is ‘Nearly Perfect Albums’, his regular Saturday series and which, at the end of last month, reached #163 with a look at the eponymous debut by Elastica, released on Deceptive Records back in 1993.
He told us he originally had the album on a very long list for inclusion in the series, but removed it a while back because it maybe wasn’t as near perfect as he’d first thought. One day, the song Never Here came up on random shuffle and it made him think again. His subsequent post about the debut album in a way has inspired me to come up with an ICA. Here’s SWC:-
“Foolishly I thought I was tired of ‘Elastica’ bored perhaps of it or more probably I’d just stopped listening to it, but the truth is ‘Elastica’ is a tremendous record. It arrived at just the right time, just as Britpop was becoming, well Britpop and the thing about it that made it stand out back in 1993 was how Elastica as a band stood head and shoulders above nearly all the other indie guitar bands that were surfacing at the time.
..ultimately it was mainly about the tunes with Elastica. . Their songs were punchy and catchy and quite often blatant rip-offs of songs by Wire, but Elastica didn’t care and made us not care either. Elastica made us dance and smile.”
He does go on to suggest that you should forget about the second album, and in fact the entirety of the rest of their back catalogue and think of them as the greatest one album band that ever existed, with an impact that remains solid to this day. It’s hard to disagree, but I will find some space for a couple of later songs on the ICA.
Let’s get some facts established. Elastica’s entire recorded output isn’t massive but it’s perhaps marginally bigger than most folk think.
There were four singles prior to the debut album, all between 1993 and 1995. There was a gap of four years till 1999, by which time the original line-up had splintered when a six-track EP was issued. A single, followed by the second studio album, was the output in 2000, and finally, there was a stand-alone single in 2001, followed by a 21-song CD compilation drawn from sessions recorded for BBC Radio One.
Some songs, initially recorded for BBC sessions, would have the titles changed by the time they made it to any official release. All told, I came up with 44 different songs for consideration that have been whittled down to this 12-track ICA (the running time of a 10-track ICA would be too short).
SIDE A
1. Stutter
Where it all started. The ‘classic’ line-up of Elastica, comprising Justine Frischmann (vocals, guitar), Donna Matthews (guitar. vocals), Annie Holland (bass) and Justin Welch (drums) had been together since late 1992, and were soon being highlighted as ‘ones to watch’ by the UK music papers and monthly magazines, whose contributors were clearly delighted to have that rare thing of a decent band from right on their doorsteps to go and see and subsequently write about.
The debit single was released in the UK on 1 November 1993 and on 7″ vinyl only. A fast-paced and energetic number which was very obviously heavily influenced by the new wave/post-punk era, with a wry lyric about drunken impotence and the excuses offered up by non-performing males. It still sounds great more than 30 years on. I never picked up a copy of the single, but was aware of it thanks to it being voted in at #38 in the Peel Festive 50, despite having only been released just a month previously.
I finally picked up the song on CD, courtesy of being one of 18 songs on the NME Singles of The Week 1993 compilation, which I recall buying in early February 1994, just after I’d seen Elastica play at King Tut’s in Glasgow. It was an excellent, if short performance, and I came away knowing I had all the neccesary evidence that the band was worthy of the hype accorded them by the London-based papers.
2. Vaseline
Sex was always a big factor in the appeal of the band. All four members were cool and incredibly good-looking in totally different ways. The debut single, of course, hadn’t shied away from messy sex, and one of their next songs to come to wider attention is, according to SWC, ‘possibly the greatest song about female masturbation ever.’.
Vaseline was aired on via a Peel Session in December 1993, the first of what would be four such sessions for his show, while there would also be three others over the years for other Radio 1 DJs. The Peel session version of the song is, as you’d expect, a bit rough’n’ready. Their next version to reach the public was the demo, issued as a b-side to the single Line Up. I feel they nailed it best on the debut album, especiallt that ‘la la la las’ which sound so like Blondie in their 1979 pomp, and that’s the version on offer today.
3. Car Song
Let’s talk some more about sex. Car Song, from the debut album, is about enjoying a bit of what I used to refer to as ‘bare-bum-boxing’ in the cramped confines of the back seats of small vehicles, with Ford and Honda referenced in the lyric. Despite the subject matter, it was actually released as a single in the USA in January 1996, promoted in part by a Spike Jonze-directed video, elements of which clearly inspired the Beastie Boys when it came to ideas for Intergalactic a few years later. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why Annie Holland is absent from the video, then that’s down to her having left the band in August 1995, citing exhaustion from the constant touring.
4. How He Wrote Elastica Man
Other than one BBC Radio One session in July 1996, the band were incredibly quiet for over four years. It would later transpire that personality clashes, issues around drug dependencies, ill-health and a touch of writers-block had contributed to major problems behind the scenes. The sudden and unexpected release in mid-August 1999 of the Elastica 6 Track EP didn’t contain too many clues as to what had been happening, but Justine later explained that it wasn’t a big comeback release but instead was intended to try and capture for posterity what some of the recordings in the intervening period. The highlight was its opening track, one on which Mark E Smith offers a co-vocal and on which Julia Nagle, a member of The Fall between 1995 and 2001, is given a credit for the lyric. A different recording of the song would later appear on The Menace, the second and final Elastica album, released some eight months later.
5. Rock ‘n’ Roll (Mark Radcliffe Session)
A year after the debut album had gone to #1 in the UK, the band was invited to record a new session for the Marc Radcliffe show on BBC Radio One. Such sessions normally were made up of four songs, and bands often took the opportunity to play some new material. Elastica played four old songs, two of which had been on the album while the other two were what could be described as obscure, consisting as they did of previous b-sides. Rockunroll had, like Vaseline mentioned above, been a b-side on Line Up, but here it was with a slightly different title and harder edge airing on national radio almost two years on. It’s not their greatest moment, but it makes it onto the ICA for its ‘novelty’ factor.
6. Never Here
The song which caused SWC to reconsider the debut album as being worthy of inclusion in his series. At just under four-and-a-half minutes, it is the longest in the entire Elastica catalogue, and perhaps that is the key to why it such a great one to listen to. It is supposedly about Justine’s break-up with Brett Anderson with whom she had formed Suede in 1989, only to take her leave of the band when the relationship ended.
SIDE B
1. Line Up
This was the band’s second single, released in January 1995. It reached the Top 20 of the singles chart a couple of weeks later, so you can imagine that the live show I saw at King Tut’s around this time was a hot ticket, and I’m convinced the numbers in attendance was a fair bit over the venue’s official capacity. The sort of thing that nowadays would piss me off but back then, at the age of 31, it was an enjoyably hot and sweaty night.
The relationship between Justine Frischmann and Damien Albarn was all over the music papers, and on hearing Line Up, I was convinced that he was a silent partner when it came to writing Elastica’s songs, such was this one’s similarities to the Modern Life Is Rubbish era of Blur. Other folk thought Line Up was awfully similar to I Am The Fly and that Elastica were mere plagasists of Wire. I wasn’t so sure at that point in time……..
2. Connection
3. See That Animal
…..and then came the next ‘big’ song from the band. Those making that plagiarism accusations were given all the ammunition they needed with Connection, a song that had aired in a BBC Session in March 1994 and later released as the third single in October 1994. It is impossible to deny that its opening was identical to Three Girl Rhumba, a song that had been written and recorded by Wire for their 1977 album, Pink Flag. Connection was credited to Frischmann/Elastica which rather pissed off the members of Wire. It all ended up in the hands of lawyers, and in due course an out-of-court settlement was agreed.
The b-side to Connection was a bit of an oddity in that the writing credits are attributed to Brett Anderson/Justine Frischmann/Elastica, which clearaly indicates See That Animal was an early Suede song, but one that not taken any further. Its inclusion on the ICA is, again, more to do with the novelty factor, albeit it is one that wouldn’t have sounded too out of place on Elastica’s debut album.
All this stuff about ripping-off other bands must surely have made everyone wary going forward.
4. Waking Up
The song chosen to immediately preceed the release of the debut album. Waking Up is probably the most readily identifiable of all the Elastica songs and it did provide them with their biggest selling single, entering and peaking at #13 in February 1996, just a few weeks before the album entered at #1 prior to enjoying a 12-week stay in the Top 50 all the way through to mid-summer.
Guess what? It was another that led to a lawsuit, this time from the Stranglers, who won the arguement that Waking Up took the riff from No More Heroes. Again, it was settled out of court and this instance, part of the settlement involved Elastica agreeing to co-credit the Stranglers as song writers.
5. Generator
The credits on the back of The Radio One Sessions CD, released in October 2001, helps to highlight how often the personnel changed and helps illustrate the choas surrounding the band.
The five sessions between August 93 and March 95 feature the ‘classic’ line-up.
The sixth session, in July 1996 has Sheila Chipperfield playing bass in place of the departed Annie Holland, with the sound being augmenteed by Dave Bush, a past member of The Fall, coming in on keyboards.
The seventh and final session, for John Peel, in September 1999 had six musicians involved. Justine Frischmann and Justin Welch remained ever-presents and now Annie Holland was back in fold; however, Donna Matthews was no longer involved, having left a few months earlier, unable to cope with her heroin addiction. Dave Bush had shifted from keyboards to programming, and coming in new were Sharon Mew (keyboards) and Paul Jones (guitar).
The Menace, the second Elastica album would eventually be released in April 2000, having been recorded, in the main, by the six musicians who played on that September 1999 Peel session. But a number of the songs on the album were taken from earlier recording sessions on which Donna Matthews had played prior to her departure and on which Sheila Chipperfield had played prior to Annie Holland’s return. Given how messy it all was, it’s not really too much of a surprise that the overall quality of the album is lacking, but I’ll argue that Generator is more than listenable.
6. The Bitch Don’t Work
Deceptive Records had closed down in early 2021, and their American label dropped Elastica following the poor sales of The Menace. Sessions for an intended third album were abandoned and in October 2001, Justine Frischman spoke to the NME:-
“Yes, we have split up. It’s actually not official yet. We’ve got a Peel Sessions album coming out and we’ve got a farewell single coming out. I’m actually hugely relieved, to be honest. I’m feeling much happier. I don’t want to say I’ve got other projects, because it’s such a cliche, but I have. It will be music, I’m not suddenly going to have an acting career.”
The farewell single was released by Wichita Recordings in November 2001, and it makes sense to close off the ICA with it.
So there you have it. 12 songs from Elastica, neatly wrapped around the story of how they came to be, how they came to enjoy success, how it all unravalled and how it ended.
A damn near perfect debut album and some decent enough stuff from elsewhere.
JC
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 