It Was This Or Football
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- It Was This Or Football
- 歌手：Kid British
- 語種：英语
- 時間：2009年10月
- 公司：Mercury Records
The year 1979 does not invite dewy nostalgia. It began with the Winter
of Discontent - pause for grainy footage of a rat-infested rubbish dump
in Leicester Square, and an angry man standing by a brazier - and ended
with Margaret Thatcher lecturing the nation in a voice, as Clive James
memorably put it, "like the book of Revelation read out over a railway
station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age
wearing calico knickers". In between, you could enjoy the charts, in
which the artists pop cultural history tends to associate with 1979
were being vastly outsold by Dr Hook's When You're in Love With a
Beautiful Woman and a man called Randy VanWarmer, who had overcome the
theoretically insurmountable obstacle of sounding like a female
character from Confessions of a Driving Instructor to inflict his
terrible ballad Just When I Needed You Most on a defenceless Britain.
So you have to marvel at the Specials' reunion gigs, where the
singalong jubilation comes with a distinct wistful undercurrent for the
year when, as Simon Bates would have put it on The Golden Hour, we lost
Lord Mountbatten and Blair Peach but gained this from the Dooleys. Did
anyone present bellow along to Too Much Too Young without being struck
by the thought: why aren't there any bands like this today? After all,
there were loads then.
The reformed Specials, however, think there are still bands like them.
The support on their tour came from the Mancunian quartet Kid British,
whom guitarist Lynval Golding claimed are "carrying the baton", which
must come as some recompense for the Daily Mirror describing them as
Chris Moyles's new favourite band - the kind of endorsement that would
make anyone consider a visit to the musical instrument exchange.
You can understand why Golding sees the Specials in Kid British, a
mixed-race UK rock band with a taste for choppy ska rhythms. Equally,
you can see why people think they'll do good business. The band's sound
occasionally resembles a pie chart drawn up by a major label A&R man: a
slice of Hard-Fi's reggae-inflected dance rock on Lost in London, a
sliver of northern-accented Arctic Monkeys social realism on She Will
Leave, a bit of rapping over the kind of thumpingly obvious pop sample
that's delivered hits for British MCs recently, some Britpoppy chord
sequences and, on Gorgeous, a brass arrangement by way of the Beatles'
Penny Lane. They can also write tunes: really undeniable ones, the kind
that sound strangely familiar on first listen. Virtually every track on
their debut album comes spring-loaded with a fantastic melody, among
them Sunny Days' brash north western take on mid-60s sunshine pop, and
the heady reggae of Cosmopolitan, which sounds like UB40's parched,
spooky debut single, Food for Thought, reimagined as a woozily euphoric
paean to all-day summer boozing.
And yet you find yourself enjoying It Was This or Football despite
yourself, so gaping are the flaws in Kid British's approach. The
problem with sampling Madness's Our House is that it sets the bar
incredibly high. It's probably the greatest evocation of British family
life in pop history, a song that's managed to retain its universal
emotional impact despite being recently used to sell fish fingers with
added Omega 3 - so you'd better have something worthwhile to add. The
title of Our House is Dadless, and the way it alights on Our House's
most melancholy line - "something tells you that you've got to move
away from here" - suggests Kid British might have something to say
about paternal abandonment. They have, but unfortunately, only that
"our house is dadless, that's why it's madness", perhaps a little less
penetrating an insight into the single parent family than you might
have hoped for.
It's not the only moment when you feel Kid British aren't going to let
the fact they have not got much to say preclude them from saying it.
Lost in London spends four minutes building up to a dizzying pinnacle
of excitement in which the protagonist gets on the Northern line
instead of the District. The present critic spent a great deal of time
trying to unravel the extended metaphor behind The Delivery Man, before
realising that it's actually a song about waiting in for a delivery
man.
For all that, there's definitely something here: a spark that never
quite catches alight. It might do with time, but whether Kid British
will get time is another matter. That's another big difference between
1979 and now: major record labels rarely give second chances.