A FEW LOW BLOWS
I’ve done the archives, and it’s even left me enough time to have a go at the High, a job which in fairness even Bob The Builder (“You want the top of your charts looking at? That’ll take three weeks and several million quid”) would polish off swiftly.
The High are a sad example of that peculiar-to-indie phenomenon, Before-They-Were-Famous Bands. You have a band, yes? By some freakish mischance they become successful and famous. But in your bandular career you have left certain stragglers, and as Artful Dodger are all too keen to remind us, it’s all about the stragglers (a pitiful plea for love in the wake of their guest singer’s craply-bearded megastardom, but I digress). Said stragglers are individuals too shit to be in your band: what then happens to them? Do they see their former friends coining it in, smile ruefully and say, hey, them’s the breaks? No they do fucking not. They form another, by definition even worse band. Examples: Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy (too friendless to even manage a band), The Creepers, The High.
Andy Couzens you see used to be in the Stone Roses, back when they were Goths. Then they invented baggy and became a roaring success with the young folk. A miracle they kicked him out, actually, when his musical development seemed to match theirs so very closely. For Mr.Couzens also went baggy – imagine the surprise – and had a couple of minor hits. Foremost in this snail’s pace race was “Box Set Go”, a somewhat overoptimistic title for a band never likely to amass more than a 3″ CD single ‘best of’. Or perhaps the ‘box set’ they spoke of was a Shreddies packet, since the High were a band tailor-made for giveaway compilations, nestling uncomfortably alongside Crystal Waters and a Mica Paris remix.
“Box Set Go” you may recall asked us, “What’s the sound, the real sound, of government?”. Let me see: rustling of papers and a bunch of overfed schoolboys grunting, belching, farting and yelling “SHAME!!!!!” every five minutes? Ah no, it’s a baggy beat and a wah wah. Although considering Tony Blair’s pub rock pedigree maybe the High had a point. Anyway they soon enough got the point and vanished from the charts – curiously like their parent band. But here the pop mastermind that was Andy Couzens slipped up. There were rumours that the Stone Roses were making a rock LP. So the High emerged triumphantly from their hibernation with….a rock LP! If only Andy had just waited a few short months before shooting his hard-riffing bolt, he’d have been able to see the hoots of derision that greeted Second Coming and adjust his game plan accordingly. But it was not to be: box set gone.