Reuploads - Blessed Ethel - Rat and Fat Star

Label: 2 Damn Loud
Year of Release: 1994

These days, when a consortium of critics and music industry insiders get together to name who the most important artists of the coming year will be, there's little danger involved.  Trends are easy to predict.  Does the band have 768,000 Facebook 'likes' already?  Have they just been signed for a lot of money by a cash-strapped major label who absolutely has to see a return on their investment?  Are they Brit School graduates?  With every year's announcements, you can almost hear the noise of check-boxes being ticked.

It wasn't always thus.  In the nineties, predictions were likely to be very wonky indeed, which is how Blessed Ethel infamously got voted above Oasis as being the band most likely to succeed at the Manchester "In The City" live event.  This isn't as unusual as it sounds.  In the early nineties, suspicions in the music press were rife that Oasis were nothing more than a re-heated baggy band.  Blessed Ethel, on the other hand, had vitriol and a sneering energy which sounded much more of the moment - elements of the still relatively topical Riot Grrrl movement were apparent, and much was made of the band's oddball outsiderness, an absolute virtue in those pre-Britpop days.  The NME and Melody Maker wanted weird kids in the charts back then, not everyman styled stars.

We all know how the story ended.  Blessed Ethel did not conquer the world, but "Rat" gives some clues as to how they might just have given the impression they could.  It's ferocious garage rock capped off with Sara Doran's urgent and hysterical vocals; breathless, desperate and really rather brilliant in its own way.  True, at the time this would have been no more or less original than Oasis' known output, but the full-throttle nature of the single showcases a band keen to leave a scalding great mark.  Compare it back-to-back with an Oasis demo such as "Cigarettes and Alcohol" (one of the limpest, weediest, least representative demo recordings I've ever heard in my life), and everyone's favourite monobrowed pop stars suddenly sound  less fierce, less full of themselves.

As for any musicians reading this who may have recently lost a "Battle of the Bands" contest... take heart.  It means nothing. (Scroll down past the mp3s for another Blessed Ethel single…)

"Fat Star" is a rather more subtle outing for the group, but great nonetheless - simmering with heated paranoia and relying on a central atmospheric guitar riff rather than sheer aggression, it was the band's last proper single. Released a mere year after "Rat" in 1995, the public had had their chance to familiarise themselves with the band and the major labels had seen their opportunities to wave cheque books around, but it seemed all for nought.

A pity, as Blessed Ethel had an oddness and tension about their work which was utterly missing from so many of the nineties 'big hitters'. They had enough of a pop sensibility to cut through, but somehow missed out completely, and one album ("Welcome to the Rodeo") later, it was all over.

Blessed Ethel - Rat

Label: 2 Damn Loud
Year of Release: 1994

These days, when a consortium of critics and music industry insiders get together to name who the most important artists of the coming year will be, there's little danger involved.  Trends are easy to predict.  Does the band have 768,000 MySpace fans already?  Have they just been signed for a lot of money by a cash-strapped major label who absolutely has to see a return on their investment?  Are they Brit school graduates?  With every year's announcements, you can almost hear the noise of check-boxes being ticked.

It wasn't always thus.  In the nineties, predictions were likely to be very wonky indeed, which is how Blessed Ethel infamously got voted above Oasis as being the band most likely to succeed at the Manchester "In The City" live event.  This isn't as unusual as it sounds.  In the early nineties, suspicions in the music press were rife that Oasis were nothing more than a re-heated baggy band.  Blessed Ethel, on the other hand, had vitriol and a sneering energy which sounded much more of the moment - elements of the still relatively topical Riot Grrrl movement were apparent, and much was made of the band's oddball outsiderness, an absolute virtue in those pre-Britpop days.  The NME and Melody Maker wanted weird kids in the charts back then, not everyman styled stars.

We all know how the story ended.  Blessed Ethel did not conquer the world, but "Rat" gives some clues as to how they might just have given the impression they could.  It's ferocious garage rock with hysterical vocals; breathless, desperate and really rather brilliant in its own way.  True, at the time this would have been no more or less original than Oasis' known output, but the full-throttle nature of the single showcases a band keen to leave a scalding great mark.  Compare it back-to-back with an Oasis demo such as "Cigarettes and Alcohol", and everyone's favourite monobrowed pop stars suddenly sound  less fierce, less full of themselves.

As for any musicians reading this who may have recently lost a "Battle of the Bands" contest... take heart.  It means nothing.

Update - Marnie and Blessed Ethel

The phrase "slim pickings" springs to mind. If it weren't enough that I'm personally quite overworked at the moment, on the recent occasions when I have had a chance to nip into a second hand record store to consider their wares, I've found very little to get excited about. The overpriced sixties hits are all present and correct, but there's little else to shout about. If the only thing you've even been marginally tempted by is a copy of Rory Bremner's legendary "Nineteen Not Out" satirical cricketing disc, then that's a poor month by anybody's standards. Do second hand record stores have summer lulls just the same as everyone else, I wonder?

Still, such disappointments give me a chance to do a bit of an update on people we've previously featured on the blog. Ever since starting this site up I've noticed that no sooner do you write about a band and upload their material than you spot another single or album of theirs weeks later you could quite easily have added to the original entry. It may seem as if I'm lumping two female fronted indie bands together for the sake of it here, but the reality is just that more material of theirs showed up quite recently.

Artist/ Title: Marnie: "Voices/ Vision"
Label: Progression
Year of Release: 1996

First out of the traps here is Marnie. I put out a request for further information about them last time around, and got no responses at all from anybody. I will repeat my plea again now - it's extremely rare for any band, however marginal, to simply "disappear from view" after they released a few records in the nineties. Most acts from that era leave a dirty great Internet snail trail, or are such keen vanity Googlists that they pop up to say hello within weeks of you posting the original entry. Unlike the sixties hippies and beat bands, they don't simply get dayjobs running pet supply stores and forget that anything ever happened. This single is really more of the same scratchy, angsty melodrama from the girls known as Olga and Michelle, with the same snappy A-side/ doomy, atmospheric B-side combination as their last release. Once again, Roman Jugg out of The Damned was at the producer's controls, but beyond that I know nothing. Come on, somebody must have seen Marnie live once or have something to report about them.

Artist/ Title: Blessed Ethel: Dog (b/w "Something Weird" and "Crystal Tips")
Label: 2 Damn Loud
Year of Release: 1993

Then, of course, there's Blessed Ethel, the band who famously beat Oasis in a Battle of the Bands contest, winning a battle but plainly failing to win the war.

Information on them is rather more conclusive since they generated quite a bit of press at the time, but I have nothing much to add beyond my last entry. "Dog" is a bit psychotic, sounding part Suzi Quatro, part grunge fed through a variety of gnarling studio effects.

Download it Here

End of update. Soz kids - there is some new stuff waiting in the wings, but I'm waiting until I've got a decent enough pile of it before I have a vinyl ripping session.

Blessed Ethel - Fat Star

Label: 2 Damn Loud
Year of Release: 1995

Yes folks, I most definitely was waiting for a quiet January day to upload this one, and that's for one pure and simple reason - Blessed Ethel don't seem to be quoted frequently enough as a reminder of just how much folly is involved with attempting to predict the future of music. Splattered all across the pages of the British broadsheets and music press this month we've heard all about how ladies with synthesisers are going to "define 2009". Based purely upon a bunch of guesstimates, wishful thinking and the close inspection of major label A&R activity (as plenty of other bloggers have already pointed out) I have real, serious doubts that this will come to pass, to the extent that I've been considering taking an actual bet against it down my local Paddy Power. I'm not too sure that the odds I'd receive would make it worth my while, though.

We need only look back to 1993 to witness the music industry making a similar bizarre prediction. At the Manchester In The City event, a bunch of journalists and music industry "movers and shakers" declared that Blessed Ethel were the best new act of the year. The band they beat were Oasis. Hopefully I don't need to point out how askew this particular prediction was. Blessed Ethel scraped the Indie Top 10 a few times before disappearing, whereas Oasis still have a successful career and a string of ridiculously highly selling albums behind them - somewhat baffling though their longevity actually is.

Blessed Ethel have now fallen by the wayside so badly that they don't even have a Wikipedia page - how's that for infamy? - but for the record, I can state that they hailed from Malvern, were fronted by Sara Doran, and much was made in the music press about their 'outsider' status. Although I don't have the article to hand anymore, I used to have a clipping from the NME which made much of the fact that they were considered weirdos in the very provincial, posh town they stemmed from. It made them sound like mutant renegades stuck in commuterville - although it was written by Steven Wells, so it's quite possible he was just projecting his rock and roll ideas on to them.

Whatever (no pun intended), the press they received definitely made them sound more interesting than Oasis, but unfortunately sometimes the weirdos don't necessarily have the best tunes. Blessed Ethel had one complete stormer entitled "Rat" which rightly received rave reviews, then a few other singles slipped out which were quite good - which obviously wasn't enough to justify their initial hype. "Fat Star" is but one of them, and whilst there's a creepy moodiness about the track which makes it sound comparable to Elastica at their darkest ("S.O.F.T." or "Never Here") there's nothing to suggest they were in any way unique or ahead of the pack at the time, although if we must lump them in with other female fronted bands, I'd argue they deserved success more than Echobelly or Sleeper ever did.

What we're left with seems to be the typical story of a band who the music press would rather forget about, purely because any mention of them just highlights their woeful wrongness in the past. They shouldn't be so coy - apparently Alan McGee was the only person at Creation Records who thought Oasis would make it as well.

http://sharebee.com/530da51d

Somebody has uploaded a clip of "Rat" to Youtube as well, but it's only thirty seconds long: