Rod Siddall? Stuart Arfield? Anybody? Steve Fellows? Comsat Angels, I hear you reply. So what? So it just shows how arbitrary success sometimes is for folks in Sheffield’s Broomhill. Record Collector was not only an eclectic little goldmine for all those students flogging CDs for the price of a night out down the Broomhill Tavern it was the seeding ground for Gomez – catalysts for what now must rate as one the big musicial retrograde steps of the last twenty years when bands suddenly discovered it was cool to actually have some degree of musical competence and, more importantly, that you could be butt ugly to boot. For the musty, fusty folks of Sheffield University this amounted to nothing less than a resounding RESULT! For Steve Fellows, one time member of Sheffield’s Comsat Angels it was nothing less than a meal ticket – and deservedly so, given his propensity for recording sessions that could span the duration of a cold war. So when Ian Ball stumbled into Sheffield’s Record Collector, ignoring the bargain bin vinyl door and plumping instead for the very reasonably priced second hand CDs, little was he to know that the unkempt assistant with an encyclopaedic knowledge of every obscure band known to music was about to take the freshly unsolicited demo-tape thrust into his hand and turn it into a Mercury Music Prize winning, multi-million pound selling record that sounds as vital and fusty now as it did back in ’96. Yes, alchemy strikes in the strangest of places. And to think it could have been me, Rod and Stuart.
As something of a celebration of this success and by way of a lardy handshake for doing all the hard work for the likes of The Coral, Gomez release the thick wedge of gold that is ‘Out West’ on the 7 June. A live album, the record is the first released with ATO records, the label co-founded by Dave Matthews, after the group broke up the contract with the dastardly Virgin and who had refused to publish the album.
Hear you’ll find all that genre straddling beastliness, the syncopated beats, the classic tunes, the grizzly psychedelic skiffle and the beautiful rasps of Ben Ottewell that dazzled you so on ‘Bring It On’ plus the highlights of the ever so slightly inferior ‘Liquid Skin’, ‘In Our Gun’ and ‘Split The Difference’. For the purists (and especially for those looking for incontrovertible proof that Ottewell is the devil spawn of Tom Waits) there’s a cover of the old bone rattler’s ‘Going Out West’.
Tracks include: Get Miles, Shot Shot, Going Out West, Here Comes The Breeze, Do One, Bring It On, Blue Moon Rising, Whippin’ Piccadilly and Get Myself Arrested.