SPEARMINT – Sweeping The Nation
A single that many indie boys hold dear, because it fulfils all their dreams. You see most indie boys secret harbour a desire to be in a band. The fact that they are not in any way musically gifted is not the reason most of these bands never surface. It would be a positive advantage to be tonally inept if it was a own label, lousy live and on record standard indie band. Instead it is that lack of gumption that most indie kids have, a geneticically induced lethargy which prevents them from rehersing, performing and then getting beaten up after the gig.
Sweeping The Nation is all about no mark indie bands. And we’re not talking the Senseless Things or Midway Still here. These are bands so tiny, so poor and so lousy that they never even make it into the NME or Melody Maker. To draw an Olympics parallel here – for sake of being topical – for a band to get in the NME is like have the qualifying level at the High Jump being half an inch. Yet our fey voiced singer informs us that this song is for a litany of rubbish named bands in his “Searching For The Young Soul Rebel” style talkie bit. Shirley – the perfect name for such a limp vocalist – then follows this up with some ridiculous cod motivational speech about as longs as you keep you mind to something, you can do anything. he obviously did not keep his mind on writing a decent song then.
The rest of the song is that thing that said indie boys like to call perfect pop. Therefore it rips off Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound production and replaces it with a Wall Of Shit. If such records truely were perfect pop (Cud anyone?) then they would be perfectly popular and soaring to the top of the charts. Instead Spearmint sold about twenty copies of the single, and are now probably Sweeping The Nation, then giving the nations toilets a good disinfecting before getting out of their cleaners overalls and going home to play with their guitar and think of another rubbish band that they could be in.