Chugga chugga chugga goes the 12 bar space age (bachelor pad) blues. In the same way a pot of your granny’s soup comes to be more than the sum of its secretive parts, the far-out music bubbles and squelches and fizzes and farts in all the right places, all gnarly, knotted wood Fender fuzz bass and pigshit-thick hairshakin’ drums. The lost half-sister of the Super Furry’s Guacamole, Stereolab‘s Heavy Denim is a heads down, no nonsense, rumbling, tumbling, Moog boogie….. and utterly fantastic.
Stereloab – Heavy Denim
Surfing the crest of this noo wave nonsense is an ever-spiralling Marxist call to arms, a 25 year-old lyric that could’ve been written very much for these times….
We’re not here to get bored
We are here to disrupt
To disrupt, to disrupt, to disrupt, to disrupt
To have the time of our lives
….but by the time you get to the kiss-off line you’ll very much realise that Stereolab, uber cool Anglo-French upstarts with a fascination for library music and the more outre elements of Brian Wilson’s back catalogue have ripped off Status Quo’s Caroline, lock, stock and double denimed barrel. Which makes the whole thing even more fantastic, of course.
It’s there in the 12 bar boogie…..and the gear change as the chord drops midway through the verse….and the ‘Come on sweet Caroline/Have the time of our lives‘ high melodic chorus. Status Quo’s Caroline runs through Heavy Denim like the lettering on a stick of Blackpool rock and Stereolab are guilty as charged, m’lud.
Originally released on the b-side of 1994’s Wow And Flutter EP – a ridiculously elusive 10″ to track down, and one that would have you parting with serious cash should you find a copy – Heavy Denim – surely another head-nod to the originators – has since appeared on the Oscillons From The Anti-Sun compilation, bang in the middle of disc 3 and as under-the-radar as the band might’ve hoped for. Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. And everyone knows that the early Quo is where it’s at – not the really early hippy shit Quo, but the heads down, no nonsense mid 70’s three chord boogie Quo.
Francis Rossi! Parfitt Estate! If you’re reading, I’d be contacting a lawyer tout de suite.
I jest, Stereloab. When the world went lad rock and Beatles-bore crazy, you turned your attentions to the kosmische sounds of mid 70’s East Germany, and for that I owe you. Through your music I discovered the other-worldly meanderings of Can and Neu! I was made aware of the high majesty of the High Llamas and I marvelled as you rocked The Word playing a single that had already been deleted by the time I’d ping-ponged my way down to Our Price the very next day. Pretentious and obtuse, you plough a distinctly groovy furrow. Long may you run (and continue to lift from the unlikeliest of sources.)
Plain Or Pan 