Super Bowl

There’s something about those early Inspiral Carpets records that’s really great. And by early I’m talking about the pre-Tom Hingley, pre-chart, pre-baggy (eugh) records; tunes formed and fermented in garages, coated in a dusty Nuggets-inspired layer of authenticity and woven together through sheer punkish energy over anything resembling finesse.

Well, yes, Clint Boon was undeniably a whizz on the Farfisa and, given that he was at least 42 years older than the other Inspirals, it’s perfectly logical reasoning that he should be skilled on his instrument of choice whilst the others faffed around with open chords and one-finger bass lines played through the same sort of Peavey amps that my very own garage band would use to blast our own hamfisted first attempts at songwriting out into the neighbourhood, but what those early Inspirals perhaps lacked in subtlety led them to create a sound that was unlike anything I’d heard. I know now about Nuggets and what have ye, but back in 1988, the Inspiral Carpets were something of a revelation. To these ears, they were dynamite.

Lazy naysayers would often point to The Doors as the obvious point of reference. For me, though, Inspiral Carpets had much more in common with Teardrop Explodes. It’s there in the second-hand ’60s references fed through an anything-goes indie attitude, the organs and rat-a-tat drumming…the over-arching sense of melancholy that’s created in their maelstrom of noise.

I saw them live a handful of times in those pre-Hingley days and they were always worth catching. And the early records always came with wee folded flyers -‘Moos-letters‘ they were eventually called, with a pudding-bowled nod of the head to the trippin’ cow that would become their logo and record label. You could send away for tapes and t-shirts, proper cottage industry stuff, a product of the fanzine scene of the mid ’80s and a precursor to today’s Bandcamp era. Handily, each Moos-letter charted the band’s rise to success, from Glasgow Tech to Strathclyde University to Barrowlands to the SECC, that Dung 4 cassette steadily rising in price to a giddy £4.49 before being finally unavailable by the time of Moos-letter 5.

Like many of you reading this, I sat with a tape permanently ready to record anything of interest on the John Peel show. Peel loved the Inspiral Carpets. Between 1988 and ’91, they recorded four sessions for his show – that’s the same number as The Smiths in about half the time, although only a mere 20 sessions short of the total set by his beloved Fall.

Not long after seeing Inspiral Carpets open for the Wedding Present, they did their first Peel Session (August ’88) and I sat itchy-fingered by the Grundig music centre, expertly de-pressing the pause button in the exact moment between each track fading and Peel’s warm voice of encouragement announcing the name of the track just played.

“That’s Inspiral Carpets in session tonight with ‘So Far’. Mighty fine stuff indeed. And we’ll be hearing more from them later on. Which I’m rather looking forward to.” I wish, in hindsight, that I’d thought to leave the tape running and capture more of his iconic voice.

Inspiral Carpets – Greek Wedding Song (Trainsurfing EP version)

One particular track on that session stood out. With a title that screamed ‘working title’, Greek Wedding Song is the perfect microcosm of that early Inspirals’ sound; shouty vocals atop that urgent, Teardrop Explodes-ish bassline and fizzing guitars buried deep in a swirl of ’60s-inspired swelling keys that fall somewhere between wasp-in-a-jar stylophone and noodling Ray Manzarek classicism.

In just a minute and a half, the band lays out their punkishly amateur stall, only for the tune to come waltzing back in after the false ending on a ne-ver a – never a frown Golden Brown coda. ‘It’s a bit short for a Peel Session, lads‘, Clint Boon might’ve said beforehand. ‘Let’s stretch it out by going full-on Stranglers for another minute or so.’ Influences worn proudly on sleeve, it’s a cracker.

That full session from ’88 can be heard below…

Peel Session – first broadcast 1st August 1988

Clint and one of his roadies in 1989.