Boo Radleys - Britpop outsider

When retracing the history of the British pop renaissance of the 1990s, alongside the inevitable quartet of Blur–Oasis–Suede–Pulp, all sorts of names come to mind, but a band like Boo Radleys is often forgotten, despite a career that spanned the entire decade and, while certainly uneven, was still remarkable, earning glowing reviews and impressive UK chart positions (including a number one on the British charts with the album Wake Up).
Their rise and fall, starting out lumped in with the shoegaze scene before more or less willingly and knowingly drifting towards britpop, peaked in the mid-90s before tapering off into a slight, natural decline. Yet every one of the band's albums differs from the one before, always showing signs of real interest, proof of a creativity and versatility often lacking in far more celebrated groups who kept recycling the same formula over the years (just think of Oasis). Their constant shape-shifting, while a virtue in one sense, on the other hand prevented them from building lasting loyalty among listeners less keen on novelty. And so, also due to a lack of star-quality fisique du role (their frontman's ordinary looks and bald head couldn't compete with the heartthrob faces and sixties-derived fringes of the likes of Gallagher, Albarn, Cocker and so on), they ended up relegated – at least outside British borders – to cult-band status, if not mere also-rans, when in fact they deserve far greater consideration.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Boo Radleys, whose name is taken from one of the key characters in Harper Lee's literary masterpiece "To Kill a Mockingbird", read and loved by the band members in their youth, formed in the late 80s in Wallasey, an unremarkable town not far from Liverpool, in the Wirral district and, more broadly, in Merseyside, the area that cradled the Merseybeat movement in which the Beatles took their first steps. The band's core is made up of Sice Rowbottom (singer and guitarist) and Martin Carr (guitarist and songwriter), close friends since early adolescence and precocious music fans, having grown up in an area where pop music (especially that of the Fab Four) is practically everywhere. The line-up is completed by bassist Timothy Brown and, on drums, initially Rob Harrison, later replaced by Steve Hewitt (a future Placebo member), who was in turn replaced after the first album by Rob Cieka, who then became a permanent fixture.
With their final line-up in place, Boo Radleys now had to decide which musical direction to take: in the mid-80s in the UK, new wave was starting to loosen its grip in favour of more pop-oriented, introspective bands like the Smiths; from Scotland, a more underground strain of indie-pop was emerging; while by the end of the decade the new developments were the baggy movement, blending dance and rock and taking hold around Manchester, and the more introverted, noisy, psychedelic shoegaze scene, to which the band was immediately linked.

In 1990 the band made its full-length debut with the album Ichabod And I, released on the independent label Action, made up of eight tracks and running under half an hour. Critics lumped it into the shoegaze bucket, probably somewhat carelessly, since the genre only surfaces here in fits and starts (notably on the melancholy "Kaleidoscope", incidentally one of the album's best tracks), while the more direct points of reference are American indie-rock, starting with the opening one-two punch ("Eleanor Everything" and "Bodheim Jr."), closer to the abrasive assaults of Dinosaur Jr. or the pop-core of certain Husker Du records than to the sonic rarefaction of My Bloody Valentine. In the construction of some tracks, alternating between quiet and loud, the model is instead the Pixies, as on "Sweet Salad Birth", between an oblique gait and guitar lashings bordering on hard rock and noise, or on the electro-acoustic "Walking 5th Carnival", caught between pop enchantment and electric flashes.
On their debut, the band offers its own take on the noise-melody marriage, but the trouble is that the former sometimes becomes almost excessive (on "Hip Clown Rag" the verse's surf-pop hook is buried under a racket so infernal it outdoes the Jesus and Mary Chain), while the latter is only memorable on rare occasions. Besides being weighed down by inconsistent, not especially high-calibre songwriting, and undermined by an inexperienced, careless self-production that favours an overly raw sound, Ichabod And I suffers in comparison with contemporary masterpieces like "Nowhere" or, the following year, "Loveless" and "Just For A Day", which, stylistic differences aside, belong to another league entirely - so much so that the band itself would later distance itself from and disown the record. Still, this debut remains a decent starting point to build on, and it caught the attention of Rough Trade, who would release the band's next three EPs.

The EP trilogy

The move to the legendary label marked a new sonic course, thanks in part to production finally placed in more capable hands, bringing greater balance, attention to detail and a more pronounced shift towards the shoegaze genre then on the rise. Starting with the first EP, Kaleidoscope (1990), recorded with Rudi Tambala of A.R. Kane, Boo Radleys' music began to change, taking on a more measured sound, stretched-out structures and suspended atmospheres. Alongside the title track, already present on the debut, stand out electric yet visionary pieces like "How I Feel", where the dreamy atmosphere is abruptly interrupted by sporadic guitar blasts worthy of Smashing Pumpkins, while "Aldous" is a mesmerising spell woven from guitar effects and the repetition of a single phrase until it becomes a dream-pop mantra; finally, "Swansong" floats amid dark mists in a personal take on British neo-psychedelia.
If with Kaleidoscope Boo Radleys truly began to "stare at their shoes", partly edging towards the My Bloody Valentine template, with the following Every Heaven, produced like the next EP by Alan Moulder, they took a further step forward thanks to the reverb-soaked guitar of "Tortoiseshell", which lends the track an arcane allure not far from that conjured by Led Zeppelin's more famous "Kashmir" or by the more exotic side of Morrissey, but above all thanks to "The Finest Kiss", where a new-wave bassline is submerged beneath a thin, liquid layer of feedback streaked with dreamy foam released by a sweet, melancholy vocal melody - a precious, perfect alchemy that anticipates the more palatable Slowdive of "Souvlaki" or bands closer to our own era like Radio Dept.
Closing out the EP are the muscular "Bluebird", a holdover from a more turbulent past, and the dreamlike yet vibrant "Naomi", further proof of a variety that resurfaces on the following EP, Boo Up, where electro-acoustic solutions dominate, starting with the opener "Everybird", which starts slow and unplugged before exploding into electric flare-ups in a constant back-and-forth, while on "Foster's Van" the band ferries the psychedelic gospel from the lysergic Sixties to the narcoleptic 90s, and finally, with "Song For Up", they fire off an adrenaline-fuelled power-pop-punk bullet (an unusual style for them that would return late in their career) followed by an unprecedented post-rock coda. The three EPs would later be gathered on the compilation Learning To Walk, a testament to a band in evolution, enriched by a couple of treats for fans drawn from the 1991 Peel Sessions, such as an electrified cover of Love's "Alone Again Or" (a song loved across the board by musicians of very different stripes, to the point that Calexico often play it live), sadly far from the heights of the original, and a personalised version of New Order's "True Faith" renamed "Boo Faith", which loses the synthetic pulse to become more modern indie-rock.

Learning To Walk came out in 1993, but in the meantime the band hadn't been idle, and was also gaining greater visibility: the previous year they released Everything's Alright Forever, their second album of new material, put out by Alan McGee's Creation Records - the famed talent-scout who wasn't about to let one of English pop's new hopefuls slip away. It's a transitional work between the shoegaze of the earlier EPs and the pop of their later output, softening the MBV blueprint, with distortion and effect-laden guitars underpinning dreamy yet always catchy melodies, even when the chorus is entrusted to six strings ("Towards The Light") or treads the razor's edge of Jesus and Mary Chain-style killer feedback ("Memory Babe").
On the even poppier side, "Does It Hurts?" stands out, a circular composition built entirely around the repetition of a perfect melody that loops for four minutes but could go on forever, while the opener "Spaniard" foreshadows the arty gloom of Radiohead's "The Bends", albeit enriched with Spanish-flavoured guitars and trumpets, as the title suggests. Rounding out the picture, the psych vein is expressed through more sprawling, visionary rides like "Skyscraper" and "Firesky", as well as the acoustic brushstrokes of "Sparrow" and "Song For The Morning To Sing".
The band juggles different stylistic registers, often hitting the mark, and only losing its way in the more experimental grooves of the abstract "Room At The Top", listless and aimless, and in the hazy middle section of "Paradise" - but these are minor flaws that don't undermine a record that showcases the band's abilities and sets the stage for an even brighter future.

Giant Steps towards success

A year after the release of Everything's Alright Forever came the pivotal date for English music and for Boo Radleys themselves: 1993, when the debut of Suede (along with, to a much lesser extent, that of the less celebrated Auteurs) served as the big bang for the birth of the britpop universe, while the band released what is universally, and rightly, regarded as the best album of their discography: Giant Steps. Among the lead singles, placed at the opening of the record, "I Hang Suspended" stands out - a song with scheming harmonies and lit up by neo-glam guitar glimmer that might suggest imitators of Brett Anderson's band (as does the similarly styled "If You Want It, Take It"), but it's just one of countless facets of a rich stylistic prism, skilfully built, proof of the versatility of a band in a state of grace.
Having now fully attained artistic maturity as well as solid songwriting craft, Boo Radleys now look to the inexhaustible pop tradition of the Sixties, updating it for their own time and anticipating future developments: if the jangle-pop perfection of "Wish I Was Skinny" anticipates the delights later dispensed by Belle And Sebastian and similar bands, "Leaves and Sand" seems to be the forerunner of Coldplay's "Yellow", very similar in its use of quiet-loud dynamics, guitar tone and electric explosions within a melancholy context. But beyond these neat, well-rounded pop devices - to which can be added the electro/indie-rock collision highlighted by the fluorescent synth of "Rodney King (Song for Lenny Bruce)" and the Smiths-like "Barney (…And Me)", which confirm the band's status as genuinely substantial authors within the canon of the pop song - what truly surprises the listener, then as now, are those shape-shifting tracks that juxtapose disparate elements and styles into baroque constructions, the product of experimentation no longer tied solely to guitar effects but to the building of complex structures, complete with layered, curious orchestral arrangements: "Upon 9th And Fairchild" starts off-beat with dub basslines before gradually morphing into a clattering art-rock fugue worthy of the most electric Radiohead; the folk-pop opening of "Butterfly McQueen" picks up pace only to be torn open by trumpet blasts and restart in acoustic uptempo; "Lazarus" juxtaposes a reggae soured by lysergic synths with a crescendo of epic trumpets acting as a chorus, and a delicate verse with pop backing vocals tying it all together; finally, on "I've Lost The Reason", Bacharach-esque swoons (honeyed vocalisations and soft-soundtrack atmospheres) are swept away by electric guitars and pulled into an acid whirlpool of distorted voices. These unusual juxtapositions within the same song are startling at first, but above all they work within the realm of the most creative, stimulating pop, while the softer side emerges in the pastoral idyll "Thinking Of Way", a delicate watercolour embellished by a pastoral flute, and in the brief "One Is For", a crystalline purity rooted in primal folk. The indie-gaze soul only returns in the electric jolts and spasms of "Take The Time Around", the odd one out on an album that closes, significantly, with the twee nursery rhyme "The White Noise Revisited", where the chorus "Ehi what's that noise? Do you remember?", repeated like a singalong mantra, seems to mark a distancing from the band's noisy beginnings.
Arriving at the end of a record with no weak spots, rich in melodic gems, potential singles and baroque flights of fancy in miniature suite form, of undeniable charm, one would be tempted to place Giant Steps (a title borrowed from John Coltrane's masterpiece) alongside, with due proportion, 60s pop works of the calibre of "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", "The Who Sell Out" and "Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake" (Small Faces), even without a concept or thematic cohesion, but for its inspiration, creative genius, artistic ambition and final result. Few bands have managed to match the greatness of the classics without excessive adherence to the models, while remaining on the margins of mainstream attention, at least outside their own borders (one thinks, for instance, of the sadly forgotten Olivia Tremor Control), and Boo Radleys pull off the feat with a record that was hailed by critics at the time, enough to top year-end lists in magazines like Select and Melody Maker, while on New Musical Express it placed second behind Bjork's "Debut", but first in the readers' poll. More recently, Sic Magazine has even called them the best band on the planet (of that era), while Pitchfork, in compiling its (debatable) list of the best britpop albums, grants it a stingy 25th place, and an equally baffling 25th in its list of shoegaze records - a genre only barely touched on in Giant Steps. The thunderous critical success wasn't matched by an equally huge rise in sales (which did climb nonetheless), but for Boo Radleys it was only a matter of time - to be precise, just two years.

The following two years saw the explosion of the britpop phenomenon: in '94, with the debut of Oasis and the release of Blur's "Parklife", two of the greatest manifestos of Cool Britannia, as well as the emergence of a host of bands more or less legitimately hyped by the press; and the following year the movement took on such media prominence that it became a cultural phenomenon going well beyond the purely musical.
It's in 1995 that Boo Radleys released their fourth album, Wake Up, preceded by the single "Wake Up Boo!", which vied for the title of pop anthem of the year with Supergrass's "Alright", as well as with the flagship tracks of the era's most prominent bands. Written after a night on acid while the band watched "The Big Breakfast", a British entertainment TV show, and opening with Beach Boys-style polyphonic harmonies, "Wake Up Boo" is a sparkling uptempo number, propelled by blaring horns (courtesy of Tom Jones's band), a melodic sixties-pop triumph with an irresistible, upbeat chorus that nonetheless hides, in the folds of its lyrics, a darker side at odds with the music's joyful mood (the incriminating line being "You put the death in everything"). The single was the most played on British radio in 1995, reaching number nine on the UK chart and, crucially, propelling the album to the top of the charts, the biggest sales success the band would ever achieve.
Following in the footsteps of "Wake Up Boo!" is the other single, "Find The Answer Within", another retro fanfare on the Beatles-Kinks axis, equally joyful and radiant. These tracks serve as the gateway to what would be their poppiest, sunniest, most Beatles-esque record, as shown by the irresistibly rhythmic power-pop of "It's Lulu" and the Teenage Fanclub-flavoured "Twinside", as well as, on the softer side, "Fairfax Scene", which bridges the legacy of the Fab Four with the gentle folk of Belle & Sebastian, while the ironic "Charles Bukowski Is Dead", with its breezy, almost childlike gait, could almost pass for a cartoon theme tune.
Only in a few cases does the band pursue the compositional experimentation and bold juxtapositions of Giant Steps: for example, on "Joel" Sice's sweet, hallucinated harmonies disappear beneath Madchester-style funk broadsides, and "Martin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clock" features several tempo changes while still staying within indie-pop territory. All in all, the collage genius of the previous record is missing. Counterbalancing the more cheerful tracks are the ballads, at least partly the record's weak point, carrying the same emotional ambiguity as the lead single - not so much "Reaching Out From Here", which brandishes a brit-pop chorus almost like a gauntlet thrown down at Oasis, or "Stuck On Amber", which nonetheless waters down the Rough Trade era without reaching the heights scaled in the past, but rather the dramatic "4AM Conversation", probably out of place here, and, in part, the closing "Wilder", with a piano and melodramatic melody lifted straight from Elton John, albeit enriched by (once again) Beatles-esque vocal harmonies - songs in which, for the first time, Boo Radleys seem to take themselves seriously without ever slipping into banality, maintaining a certain taste and perhaps breaking the hearts of quite a few listeners.
If, in terms of quality, the comparison with Giant Steps favours the latter, Wake Up remains, for many fans, the most beloved album, thanks to an immediacy and formal perfection that make it the culmination of a gradual journey towards the purest pop, earning huge acclaim not just from critics but from the public too.

Shapeshifting as a creed

Having reached such heights, many bands would rest on their laurels, replicating the same winning formula, but that's not the case for Boo Radleys, who carried on down the path of constant transformation with C'Mon Kids (1996), one of their most controversial works. On one hand, it was welcomed enthusiastically even by fellow musicians, including Tom White of Electric Soft Parade (for whom it's even his all-time favourite album) and Radiohead, who listened to it during the sessions for "OK Computer"; on the other, critics were lukewarm if not downright hostile, accusing the band of trying to scare off listeners by following an anti-commercial path compared to the previous album - though Sice would later counter that it was simply a matter of the will (and freedom) to express themselves differently, without necessarily wanting to unsettle anyone.
Yet another change of style follows two main lines: the first, and most obvious in the opening stretch, is a return to a muscular, rock-driven approach, expressed through the electric power of most of the tracks, starting with the opening title track, through the massive riffs that barge their way even into the poppier moments ("Meltin's Worm", "Melodies For The Deaf", "Get On The Bus"), and finally reaching its peak with the single "What's In The Box (See Whatcha Got)", a frenzied hard-beat power-pop number worthy of the Who, but charged with pop-punk electric jolts à la Buzzcocks in its hyperactive chorus; the second line attempts to recapture the compositional splendour of Giant Steps, more successfully in the dizzying eclecticism of "Four Saints", a blend of shoegaze, indie-rock, electronics, psychedelia, folk and who knows what else, but failing in the electro hip-hop of "Fortunate Sons", which sounds like the offspring of a lesser Beck. Amid this electric, stylistic chaos, the standouts this time are the gorgeous electro-acoustic ballads "Everything Is Sorrow" and "Ride The Tiger", enhanced by carefully crafted string arrangements that wouldn't have been out of place on britpop (master)works like "What's The Story, Morning Glory" and "Urban Hymns".
While it doesn't reach the heights of Giant Steps or the immediacy of Wake Up, and despite a few stylistic missteps, C'Mon Kids remains a solid work, one that requires several listens to reveal, beneath its electric shell, still-interesting harmonic constructions and a compositional ability still operating at a high level.

More uneven and questionable is the following Kingsize from 1998, the band's final album and its most troubled, both in its genesis, with the group torn apart by internal conflicts, and in its uneven final result, which was met with a lukewarm reception. The promising start of the opening tracks, enriched by elegant arrangements - the classical-leaning strings of "Blue Room In Archway", the jazzy horns of "The Old Newstand At Hamilton Square", as well as the almost prog flute of "Monuments For A Dead Century" - is definitively sunk by the needlessly frantic, even tasteless "Free Huey", a dance-rock track that feels more like something you'd expect from a Robbie Williams chasing approval but lacking in inspiration, rather than from a band that only a short while before had been getting its hands dirty with shoegaze and psychedelia; a lapse in taste that can't go unnoticed, given that the track was chosen as a single, proof that Boo Radleys bet on what is probably the lowest point of their entire output.
The band recovers when it returns to classic britpop territory with "Heaven's At The Bottom Of This Glass" and "High As Monkeys", which blend the Oasis gospel (catchy, British-flavoured melodies) with the cheeky swagger of Blur, and above all with "Comb Your Hair", one last melodic gem à la Suede, while it loses ground again when it updates itself to the second wave of 90s English pop with tracks like "Kingsize", "Eurostar" and "Adieu Clo Clo", saccharine, mediocre compositions, a sign of the times when the UK was being dominated by not exactly essential bands like Stereophonics.
In the finale, the band funks around pointlessly for seven minutes on a track titled "The Future Is Now", inviting easy jibes: one might think "if this is the future, better to take refuge in the past...", but fate would prove even crueller, as the band would have no future at all, undone by a sudden break-up that left fans orphaned for good.

The epilogue

While the band's story came to an abrupt and definitive halt, it's worth remembering that its two main members, Sice and Martin Carr, tried to carry on making music, albeit with differing results: the former with his sole album "First Fruit", released under the moniker Eggman in '96, in which the poppier Boo Radleys formula is somewhat watered down; while the latter, under the name Brave Captain, has released a handful of albums, EPs and singles from 2000 to the present day, in which the sixties psych-pop foundation is lightly smudged with lo-fi and electronic touches, with results that are at times interesting. Both projects remained in the shadows, followed by few fans and accused by critics of producing Boo Radleys B-sides, although Martin Carr certainly outdoes his former bandmate in both quantity and quality, a reminder of who the group's principal songwriter actually was, and creating a gap between the two far wider than the one that would later open up between the solo careers of the Gallagher brothers.

In the new millennium, alongside any self-respecting britpop retrospective, what keeps alive the memory of Boo Radleys' golden years are two compilations released just two years apart: Find The Way Out (2005) and The Best Of Boo Radleys (2007). For those interested, there's no real contest between the first, a double album (a full 35 tracks) that manages to represent the band's various stylistic phases, and the second, slimmer, less representative, and with a few questionable choices.

So, surprisingly, in 2023, thirty years on, the British band returns to the fray by using their magnum opus as a blueprint on Eight, where the same elements from the past are recombined: the heavy use of horns within a pop song format, bouncing now off granite-hard electric guitar riffs ("Seeker"), now off their beloved off-beat rhythms ("The Unconscious", a timid, watered-down take on Teardrop Explodes), enriching the various tracks with lush arrangements ("Skeleton Woman" among others), giving rise to intricate, pleasant compositions that nonetheless can't hold a candle to those of the glory days. Not just because of the inexorable passage of time and the natural dimming of creative urgency, but also because of the loss of a fundamental element like guitarist Martin Carr, who was evidently decisive on the compositional side, especially on the more complex tracks.
Despite this major defection, Sice and co. prove they haven't lost the melodic flair injected into the melancholy chorus of "Hollow", dusted with glitter of the Suede variety, and into the epic, lyrical crescendo worthy of Manic Street Preachers running through the otherwise grandiloquent "Way I Am".
Elsewhere the band even succeeds where the Gallagher brothers' solo work has often fallen short, both on the clearly Beatles-inspired ballad "Sometimes I Sleep", embellished with sublime strings and angelic harmonies, and on the rougher, more nostalgic evolution of "Dust", as if staking a claim to a central place in the Brit universe - a claim also pursued by harking back to the device used in their biggest hit "Wake Up Boo!", namely the jarring contrast between bleak lyrics (in this case angrily directed against all forms of violence, war in particular) and the sunny, Merseybeat-rooted sound of "Now That's What I Call Oscene", even if it doesn't quite yield a new instant classic.
Further proof of a greater leaning toward more direct songs with less cluttered sound is the fact that the standout track is the explosive "I Was I To Know", the most power-pop song of the bunch, just as "What's On The Box" was back in the day on "C'mon Kids": this is probably the album closest to "Eight" in terms of its perhaps excessive length, uneven inspiration, but with some good arrows in its quiver and, overall, decent enjoyability: britpop connoisseurs will appreciate it, though probably without hailing it as a miracle.

What does justice to the band - which, while it never changed the course of pop music, did leave its mark on it, for better or worse - are still the albums of the 90s, with at least two high points (Giant Steps, the more artistic and creative one, and Wake Up, the more accessible and commercial one): will they be enough to shake off the ungenerous, if not downright irritating, label of britpop outsiders?

In 2026 it's the need to process grief that drives the writing of In Spite of Everything

Bassist Tim Brown, here also acting as producer, experienced the making of In Spite of Everything as a form of survival. It marks the Boo Radleys' return three years after their last release, Eight.

By a strange twist of fate, In Spite of Everything comes out on the very same day as What Future, the solo project of former band guitarist Martin Carr.

Although the theme of processing grief might suggest a gloomy, self-absorbed record, In Spite of Everything instead moves along a path of hope, alternating between different emotional landscapes: suffering is present, but it's experienced as a passage toward a new awareness.

The Boo Radleys' latest work indeed presents a wide range of sonic solutions harking back to the '90s, the band's golden era, though it risks coming across as somewhat dated.

Echoes of Stone Roses can be heard in the melodies of "Affected / Rejected", Caribbean flavours surface in "Solarcide" and "King Budgie", along with synth-pop touches and a dash of XTC in "Do Better, Know Better". "Bring Them Back Again" is a hymn to hope carried by a funk groove and a rhythm guitar in great form.

Wrapped in ghostly synths and an obsessively repeated lyric, "Song for Natalie" is the record's most emotionally exposed moment, immediately followed by the touching shoegaze confession of closer "Wasn't I Enough?", driven by Tim Brown's distorted bass.

Elsewhere, though, some cracks show: the songwriting leans too often on easy solutions, as in “This Is the Place” or the repetitions of “Living Is Easy”, where the pop instinct risks tipping over into predictability.

In Spite of Everything confirms that the Boo Radleys are a mature, seasoned band, capable of building effective arrangements that showcase each song, over which Simon "Sice" Rowbottom's elegant voice moves with natural ease.
But it's also a record that almost entirely forgoes risk. If anyone was hoping for a new Giant Steps, it must be said that freshness and the urge to surprise no longer seem to be among the band's priorities.

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