The Smile - Apricot Face/ Why Should I

 

Mysterious nineties indie single on Irish MOR label

Label: Play

Year of Release: 1992

Now this one is baffling. The Play label was Irish and tended to feature quite middle-of-the-road artists from its home country, such as Brendan Shine, Ann Breen, and perhaps less relevantly Radio Two DJ Ray Moore who gave the label its only two UK hits with "Children In Need" related product (the "Blog Eyed Jog" sidebar on this website is partly named in honour of one of them, though this is the first time I've ever bothered to mention it in the context of anything else. I'm astonished it took me fourteen-and-a-half years to get around to it, frankly).

It was exactly the last place you would have expected to find a nineties indie band littering the place up with their vim and brio, yet the final record to have slipped out on the label before it disappeared completely was this one - a none-more-1992 piece of post-baggy alt-rock. A paean to a girl with "eyes like diamonds" and skin like an apricot, it comes from the same sonic stable as The Real People, Bedazzled and other sixties-indebted tambourine shakers and groovers from the same period. 

The flipside "Why Should I" really highlights their main influence, though, with a whopping great Beatles-esque harmonica riff running straight through the middle and a gentle jangle to go with it. Clearly these chaps were just as interested in the beat end of the sixties as Lee Mavers.

The "Kaiser Keller" writing credit is another big giveaway to the group's influences. Named after the famous Hamburg club that hosted the pre-fame Fabs, it was also the name of a 1988 group who had one single out on their own Clock label. That record is almost as under-documented as this one, with no YouTube or blog site documentation of its existence, but it doesn't seem too unfair to surmise that there's a strong probability that The Smile are the same (or close to the same) group under another name.

To confuse matters further, there's also a Beatles tribute band on the circuit called Kaiser Keller who may or may not be the same bunch - though it seems unlikely. 

If anyone's able to clear the facts up conclusively, you know what to do.

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