Firing on all cylinders now, Miles and co were about to create two of the finest works in their entire canon…
PART FOUR – OH NO IT’S… THE WONDER STUFF
Now that I didn’t have to hang around for Malc Treece to offer me something to work on I felt completely liberated. It could have gone the other way, I could have buckled under the weight of knowing that the vast majority of the writing had to come from me, but thankfully not so.
The earliest songs that I wrote for the record were ‘Oh No!’, ‘Inner Voices’ and ‘Clear Through The Years’. Something I had learned from doing The Eight Legged Groove Machine, HUP and Never Loved Elvis anniversary tours was that our audiences, wherever we played, always reacted well to the high tempo songs with choruses that hit within a minute of the song beginning. So I thought ‘okay, I’ll write an album for the audience’ instead of writing an album for me. A curious thought you might think, but it worked. Of course I wrote the album for me, but more so than with Escape From Rubbish Island and Suspended By Stars, I was picturing in my mind’s eye how our audience might react to each of these new songs.
Pretty soon Erica and I were writing together for the album and eventually, Fuzz, Mark McCarthy and new guitarist, Stevie Wyatt, previously our live sound engineer, kicked in with some great ideas too. Erica and I wrote ‘Friendly Company’, ‘Steady As You Go’ and ‘Right Side Of The Turf’ together and Stevie and I wrote the song ‘From The Midlands With Love’ from a chord progression Stevie brought to me that I would never have come up with myself. This was exactly the kind of thing I had wanted Malc to do, but he just didn’t seem like he could be bothered to get around to it.
One song from Oh No It’s… The Wonder Stuff that has become a main stay in the band’s live set was from an idea Fuzz gave to Erica and I, ‘Be Thy Name’. He had the violin melody line already worked out and a narrative and vocal melody for me to sing. I kept the melody but completely rewrote his lyric idea which as I recall was something about a saucy bed and breakfast owner in a sea-side town named Nancy. Good grief Fuzzer…
It was a very different band to the one that had made Suspended By Stars but the rejuvenated line up brought a new energy to this album, no doubt about that. I had worried and fretted over the idea of a Wonder Stuff line up without Malc Treece for years and years and as it turned out, I should’ve put my boot up his arse years earlier.
In terms of the actual songwriting that I put in for this record I shall be forever proud that I found the song ‘Oh No!’ loitering around my brain. It must’ve been there for decades. I honestly think it is a song that could be included on any of the first four Wonder Stuff albums, which is a hard call to make because each of those four albums are progressively different from the one that came before it. But oddly ‘Oh No!’ wouldn’t be out of place on any of them.
I felt like I had written the all encompassing Wonder Stuff song and don’t mind telling you that I truly believed that we had a hit on our hands. Particularly when the comedian Greg Davies agreed to star alongside Erica and I in a truly ridiculous promotional video for the song. With this new confidence I agreed with my managers to spend money that we really didn’t have on a top flight radio and TV plugger, something we hadn’t done in years. We contacted Dylan White, not only an old friend but an extraordinarily successful plugger with too many hits under his belt to mention here. He listened to the song, told me that he thought it would be a perfect radio breakfast show hit and went to work on promoting it.
He got nowhere with it. We were all, and when I say all I mean Dylan included, incredibly disappointed. It turns out while there might still be some love out there in the world of media for The Wonder Stuff, the name itself holds no kudos.
Had the game changed since the days when we used to have radio hits? No, I don’t think it had. Maybe it was just that back in the 80’s and 90’s we had the might of a major label behind us to get our records onto the radio and now we were just another skint indie band, like the thousands of other skint indie bands that the radio stations happily ignore. Lets face it, no song ever got added to a radio play list in the UK on the strength of it being a good song. The dirty, greasy wheels of the music industry are always grinding steadily away behind the veneer of glamour and appreciation of talent and ever it shall be.
Fuck it, lesson learned. We made a great record and we spunked a fuck pile of money trying to get it heard. We’ll make another great record, there was no doubt in my mind about that, but there was no way I was ever gonna throw away our hard earned cash like that again. From now on, it was all about the music; the music business could go fuck itself.
In addition to the songs we recorded for the Oh No It’s… album we recorded ten other cover versions under the moniker of From The Midlands With Love.
From Duran Duran to Pop Will Eat Itself and a few extra stops in between. When we released the CD and vinyl versions of Oh No Its… those ten songs were included as part of the package as an extra disc. The music business may be full of low down snakes and purely money motivated creatures of the night, but you can always rely on The Wonder Stuff to give you your money’s worth!
Tomorrow – 30 Goes Around The Sun.
