Category: Soup Dragons

I’m going full wiki this week:-

“The Soup Dragons formed in Bellshill in 1985. The line up was Sean Dickson (vocals, lead guitar), Jim McCulloch (guitar, second voice) who replaced Ian Whitehall, and Sushil K. Dade (bass). The original drummer, Ross A. Sinclair, left the group after the first proper album, This Is Our Art, to pursue a career in art, and was replaced by Paul Quinn. Most of their songs were written by Sean Dickson.

The Soup Dragons recorded their first demo tape, You Have Some Too, after playing a few local gigs, and this was followed by a flexi disc single “If You Were the Only Girl in the World”.

They signed to The Subway Organization in early 1986 and their first proper single (The Sun in the Sky EP) was Buzzcocks-inspired pop punk. The band’s big breakthrough came with their second single for Subway, “Whole Wide World” which reached No. 2 on the UK Independent Chart in 1986. Dickson and McCulloch also moonlighted in BMX Bandits at this time.

The band were signed by former Wham! co-manager Jazz Summers‘ label Raw TV with further indie hits (and minor UK Singles Chart hits) following during 1987 and 1988. Over the course of six singles (the first three collected in 1986 on a US-only compilation, Hang Ten), they gradually developed a more complex rock guitar sound, which culminated in their first proper album This Is Our Art, now signed to major label Sire Records. After one single from the album – “Kingdom Chairs” – was released, they then returned to original label Raw TV and Big Life Records.

In the year following This Is Our Art, The Soup Dragons’ sound underwent a change from an indie rock sound, to the rock-dance crossover sound; this was mainly due to being without a drummer and buying a sampler and drum machine and experimenting with sound with the release of the album Lovegod. This change can be attributed to the rise of the ecstasy-fueled acid house rave scene in the UK. In 1990, they released their most successful hit single in the UK, “I’m Free”, an up-tempo cover of a Rolling Stones song with an added toasting overdub by reggae star Junior Reid, which reached No. 5.

Subsequent albums continued in the band’s own style and in 1992, they enjoyed their biggest US hit with “Divine Thing” which reached No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also hit No. 3 on the Modern Rock chart.

The Soup Dragons disbanded in 1995.

Paul Quinn joined Teenage Fanclub.

Sushil K. Dade formed the experimental post rock group Future Pilot A.K.A. and is now a producer for BBC Radio 3.

Sean Dickson formed The High Fidelity, came out as gay, had a breakdown, then met his husband and established a successful career Djing as HiFi Sean.

Jim McCulloch joined Superstar, wrote and recorded music with Isobel Campbell, and formed the folk group Snowgoose.

Ross A. Sinclair had a successful career in art, winning a number of international awards and becoming a Research Fellow at Glasgow School of Art, and still makes music to this day.

The story of The Soup Dragons is traced as part of the 2017 documentary Teenage Superstars.”

A group whom I thoroughly enjoyed throughout their career.  Why I’ve never got round to compiling an ICA is beyond me…..it’s a genuine failing on my part.

mp3: The Soup Dragons – Hang Ten!

A personal favourite…..two minutes and a few seconds of rollicking, fun-filled indie-pop.  But really, today’s choice could have been one of many fabulous songs they delivered over the decade they made music.

I’ll also take this opportunity to mention that Hi-Fi Sean’s next album, which he’s written and recorded with David McAlmont, is being issued by Last Night From Glasgow this coming September.  I was lucky enough to be at LNFG’s HQ a while back when a test pressing had been delivered, and I got to hear the opening track.  On the basis of those few minutes, it promises to be one of the best albums of 2022.

JC

I know…..it’s an absolute bummer to find it’s me and not SWC on duty today. I thought I’d take a leaf out of his book and regale you with a tale from my life.

It’s August 1991. I’m outside a football stadium in Glasgow on a Tuesday night gearing up to watch Raith Rovers take on the might of Celtic in a cup-tie. My best mate is a centre-half for Raith Rovers but he’s a product of the youth development at Celtic and he’s still friendly with a number of the opposition players. It’s a game he’s been looking forward to since the draw had taken place two weeks previously. As usual, there’s a complimentary ticket (referred to as a ‘comp’) waiting for me, but it’s been left by one of the other players and not my mate which seems strange.

I make my way in and as I look around to take in the scene, I spot my mate sitting in a separate area of the stand, somewhere that I can’t access from where I’m sitting. Nowadays, it would be a case of texting/phoning, but remember this was 1991 when mobile phones were anything but. I start waving frantically to get his attention, and after a number of minutes he signals that he’ll make his way over to where I’m sitting.

‘I’ve been dropped’, he tells me. First time in his career and he looks devastated. It turns out he’s one of four changes to the normal team as the manager tries to catch Celtic on the hop by playing a number of younger players. I’m really upset for my mate and I’m tempted just to head home instead of watching the game – it’s the night before Rachel’s birthday and we have a lovely day planned for the Wednesday, and I’m thinking I could get extra brownie points by coming back unexpectedly. My mate talks me out of it by saying he’d appreciate it if we could go for a post-match beer when he can reflect a bit on what’s happened to him as well as giving us an opportunity to dissect the game.

I re-take my seat in the stand and he goes back to where the club officials are sitting. I notice that I’m surrounded by a lot of unfamiliar faces and it hits me that the remaining comps are most likely in the hands of the family and friends of the incoming players as well as those who don’t come along to the run-of-the-mill matches.

Much to my disbelief, the manager’s tactics work out well as Rovers get the opening goal, which is cancelled out just before half-time. As the second-half progresses, Celtic see a lot of the ball but get no end product. Rovers fashion a great chance but the young, inexperienced centre-forward makes a mess of it. Almost immediately, Celtic score to take the lead and within a couple more minutes grab another to take a 3-1 lead. My frustrations boil over and I let rip with a volley of abuse at our centre-forward for his earlier ineptitude. As I do so, two folk sitting directly in front of me, what looks like a mother and teenage daughter, get up and leave.

I meet up with my mate outside the main entrance and we get in his car to take the drive into the city centre. I’m still wired from the disappointment and I tell him that I’d lost it when we had gone 3-1 down, taking it out on the player who had missed the sitter. When he tells me that the young boy had nearly been devastated in the dressing room after the match, I feel a lot of guilt, shame and remorse. It was senseless behaviour on my part.

The next night, which remember is Rachel’s birthday, I get home around midnight to find a message on the answering machine from my mate asking me to give him a bell, no matter how late. I decide that midnight is just too late….

I’m wakened up by the phone ringing at 7am the following morning. It’s my mate. I’m expecting him to ask how my day away with Rachel had gone, but instead, he unleashes a volley of abuse. He’d gone to training and he’d heard the manager say to the players present that he was unhappy that someone who was sitting in the area where the comps had been allocated had been overly abusive, to the extent that one of the players mum and sister had to leave early, in tears, as the abuse was unacceptable.

My mate didn’t throw me under the bus in front of his team-mates, but he didn’t miss me with this phone call. Let’s just say that I was rightly chastised…..and I can say, in all honesty, that I have never at any point over the past 29 years, ever singled out an individual player for stick at a football match. Well, when I say ‘never’, what I mean is I don’t scream and yell at anyone at the top of my voice – you just never know whose mum might be sitting close by….

All of which brings me to the latest piece of vinyl in Badger’s Box, a single dating from not too long before my rant:-

mp3: The Soup Dragons – Mother Universe (12″)

The original version of the song was released as a 45 in March 1990 but, like every other single by The Soup Dragons, it proved to be a flop. A few months later, and their cover of I’m Free was given the indie-dance treatment. As I said when I looked at the charts of July 1990, those of us up here in the Glasgow area who had watched The Soup Dragons be part of the twee, occasionally shambolic but always guitar-based Bellshill scene (along with the likes of BMX Bandits and Teenage Fanclub) were stunned, bemused and delighted to see the band take the singles charts by storm by hitching their wagon to the Madchester sound.

A remixed version of Mother Universe was issued as the follow-up to I’m Free in October 1990. It should rightly have featured in the recent post looking at that month’s new entries, but knowing I had been asked to write about it as part of this particular series, I left it well be.

I think Mother Universe is a great song…far superior to the better-known I’m Free. I actually have a copy of the 12″, but it’s quite different from the one in Badger’s Box. His has a white sleeve, with two live tracks on the b-side:-

mp3: The Soup Dragons – Dream-E-4-Ever (live)
mp3: The Soup Dragons – Softly (live)

There’s at least three other 12″ versions kicking around with different b-sides or versions. The one I have has a black sleeve and comes with a poster, with one track on either side of the vinyl:-

mp3: The Soup Dragons – Mother Universe (dub version)
mp3: The Soup Dragons – Mother Universe (Original ’89 version)

It proved to be the last time The Soup Dragons enjoyed any commercial success in the UK although Divine Thing would give them a hit in the USA in 1992. Lead singer, Sean Dickson, continues to make excellent electronic and dance records under than name of HiFi Sean. Here’s a collaboration of his from 2017. If this doesn’t put a smile on your face, there really is no hope for you.

JC

Just as last week’s lot (Pop Will Eat Itself) did a great job in reinventing themselves, so too did The Soup Dragons.

Named after a character from a weird and wacky children’s animation show that was hugely popular in the UK in the 1970s, the band formed in Bellshill which is a former mining town some 15 miles south-east of Glasgow. The fact that such a small place – its population is a smite over 20,000 – also gave birth to Teenage Fanclub and BMX Bandits gives credence to those who claim that it is the epicentre of Scottish indie pop.

The original four members were Sean Dickson (vocals, lead guitar), Jim McCulloch (guitar, second voice), Sushil Dade (bass) and Ross Sinclair (drums) and after no more than a handful of gigs and a demo tape their blend of loud guitars and pop riffs landed them a deal with The Subway Organisation in 1986. Their debut EP, The Sun Is In The Sky, was the second ever release on the label and is quite hard to track down nowadays unlike the follow-up Whole Wide World which sold in really decent enough numbers for an independent label and was re-pressed on a number of occasions. It is that single which appears on CD 86:-

mp3 : The Soup Dragons – Whole Wide World

They were enticed over to the RAW TV label on which there were four more terrifically catchy indie-pop singles…I’m a particular fan of 1987 release Hang-Ten….with which they caught the attention of Seymour Stein and his crew at Sire Records for who they recorded debut album This Is Our Art in 1987.

However, after just one more single they found themselves back at Raw TV which by now was aligned with Big Life, a label which had aims and aspirations towards the big-time. By now, Ross Sinclair had left the band and there was a significant shift into the indie-dance sound that was becoming all the rage – the Soup Dragons new sound fitted right into Madchester and it was no surprise that come 1990, their take on I’m Free, a relatively unknown album track by the Rolling Stones, hit the Top 5 thanks in part to a guest vocal from label mate Junior Reid who had previously come to prominence as lead singer with the reggae band Black Uhuru.

They maintained that sort of sound for the remainder of their career before disbanding in 1995. They also enjoyed a major hit with Divine Thing in the US in 1992 although it was a relative flop here at home.

I always felt The Soup Dragons had it in them to be pop stars and in all truth they should have enjoyed better commercial success with the earlier singles before they made they hitched themselves to the baggy bandwagon. They were good fun when they started out and they still seemed to be enjoying themselves when they broke up ten years on.

Here’s the b-sides to the 12″ version of the single on CD86:-

mp3 : The Soup Dragons – Pleasantly Surprised
mp3 : The Soup Dragons – I Know Everything

Just three more bands to feature before I unveil the fresh idea for a new regular series for 2016!!

Enjoy

From wiki:-

The Soup Dragons were a Scottish alternative rock band of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Named after a character in the 1970s children’s television show Clangers, the group is best known for its cover of the Rolling Stones’ song “I’m Free.”

The Soup Dragons formed in Bellshill, a town near Glasgow, in 1985. The line up was Sean Dickson (vocals, lead guitar), Jim McCulloch (guitar, second voice) who replaced Ian Whitehall and Sushil K. Dade (bass). The original drummer, Ross A. Sinclair, left the group after the first proper album, This Is Our Art, to pursue a career in art, and was replaced by Paul Quinn. Most of their songs were written by Dickson, while some were co-written with McCulloch.

The band recorded their first demo tape, You Have Some Too, after playing a few local gigs, and this was followed by a flexi disc single “If You Were the Only Girl in the World”.  Originally inspired by Buzzcocks and lumped in with the C86 movement, along with fellow members of the Bellshill Sound, such as the BMX Bandits and Teenage Fanclub, they went through a number of stylistic changes in their career.

The band signed to The Subway Organization in early 1986 and their first proper single (The Sun in the Sky EP) was Buzzcocks-inspired pop punk. The band’s big breakthrough came with their second single for Subway, “Whole Wide World”, which reached No. 2 on the UK Independent Chart in 1986.  Dickson and McCulloch also moonlighted in BMX Bandits at this time.

The band were signed by former Wham! co-manager Jaz Summers’ label Raw TV with further indie hits (and minor UK Singles Chart hits) following during 1987 and 1988. Over the course of six singles (the first three collected in 1986 on a U.S. only compilation, Hang Ten), they gradually developed a more complex rock guitar sound, which culminated in their first album proper This Is Our Art, now signed to major label Sire Records. After one single from the album “Kingdom Chairs” failed to chart, the band were dropped by Sire and returned to Raw TV.

In the year following This Is Our Art their sound underwent a change from an indie rock sound, to the rock-dance crossover baggy sound, popular at the time with the release of the album Lovegod. This change mirrored that of fellow Scottish band Primal Scream, and can be attributed to the rise of the ecstasy-fueled acid house rave scene in the UK. In 1990, they released their most successful hit single in the UK, “I’m Free”, an up-tempo cover of a Rolling Stones song with an added toasting overdub by reggae star Junior Reid, which reached number five. This single featured on the Happy Daze compilation and in 2013 it appeared on the soundtrack to British science fiction comedy film The World’s End.

Subsequent albums continued the rock-dance crossover sound. In 1992 they enjoyed their biggest U.S. hit with “Divine Thing” which reached number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also hit number three on the Modern Rock chart and its video was nominated by MTV as one of the year’s best, though beaten by Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.[6]

The Soup Dragons disbanded in 1995. Paul Quinn joined Teenage Fanclub and Sushil K. Dade formed the experimental post rock group Future Pilot A.K.A.. Sean Dickson formed The High Fidelity and currently deejays as HiFi Sean. Jim McCulloch joined Superstar, wrote and recorded music with Isobel Campbell, and formed the folk group Snowgoose.

I’ve a bundle of Soup Dragons 12″ singles in the collection, mostly picked up very cheaply in second hand stores.  The lead track from this 1986 release is a particular favourite:-

mp3 : Soup Dragons – Hang Ten
mp3 : Soup Dragons – Just Mind Your Step Girl
mp3 : Soup Dragons – Slow Things Down
mp3 : Soup Dragons – Man About Town With Chairs

Enjoy