Ocean Colour Scene - Tradition and britpop

The media frenzy that marked the thrilling epic of britpop only sporadically touched Ocean Colour Scene, often merely by reflection, largely confining their glories within national borders.

One could call it an atypical case, given the worldwide echo of the last true "British invasion" and, more generally, the innate ability of Her Majesty's subjects to export their music to the rest of the world. On the contrary, the story of the band led by singer Simon Fowler and guitarist Steve Cradock is the manifesto of a group that built its career by shunning the spotlight: clean-cut faces, zero excesses, no tantrums or grandiose gestures to "stain" their rock record, a sound shaped after the heavyweights of the English scene: Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, not forgetting Jam, not least because they would soon become Paul Weller's first collaborators, Paul Weller. Never over the top, yet capable, thanks to a talent well above average, of reaching number one on the Uk Chart, dethroning the brash, cover-star version of the same coin: Oasis.

Ocean Colour Scene were formed in 1989 in Moseley, a suburb of Birmingham that has given much to English pop: this is where Ali Campbell and Brian Travers of UB40 and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran were born. Simon Fowler (vocals and guitar), Steve Cradock (guitar), Damon Minchella (bass) and Oscar Harrison (drums), having exhausted their respective experiences in two local bands – The Boys and Fanatics – started playing together and quickly put together a handful of songs which they presented to local label Phffft Records, securing a deal that soon passed into the far more capacious hands of Fontana Records, which absorbed the Birmingham label and everything attached to it. OCS's first single, "Sway", came out in 1990 on Phffft: in keeping with the times, it's an unripe track firmly in the Madchester mould, tracing without much backbone the dance-rock of the Stone Roses. The following year came "Yesterday Today", which channels that pace into chart-friendly pop-rock, showing in some way the seeds of what was to come.

The debut album Ocean Colour Scene was released only in 1992 on Fontana Records, and was a total flop from which the band would quickly distance itself: the label remixed the tracks in a Madchester vein, clashing with the group, who were perhaps already leaning towards the first stirrings of britpop. The rift proved irreparable: the contract was torn up and Ocean Colour Scene found themselves having to start all over again.

What the Birmingham quartet needed was a turning point, and it duly fell from the sky, or rather, from the Olympus of British rock, in the shape of Paul Weller. It was the "Modfather" himself who asked OCS to open the dates on his tour, and not only that: convinced by the talent of Cradock and Fowler, he invited the former to record some tracks in the studio – and soon to join him onstage – while the latter was asked to provide vocals on the track "The Weaver", released on "Wild Wood".

The featuring with Weller did not, however, distract the pair from the Ocean Colour Scene project: on the contrary, having gained confidence and treasured what they'd learned from the prestigious collaboration, they decided to abandon avant-garde touches and hybrid forms to start again from a retro sound, effectively aligning themselves with the dictates of much of the new britpop scene. It was thanks to a demo recorded to catch the attention of record labels that the four caught the ear of none other than Noel Gallagher, who invited OCS to open for Oasis on their 1995 tour. Soon after came the signing to Mca. After a complicated start, every piece was now falling into place. The long wave of britpop was just waiting to be ridden, and Ocean Colour Scene were ready. And although history and the numbers crown the following Marchin' Already as the peak of their career, it is Moseley Shoals, released on 8 April 1996 and produced by Brendan Lynch, that stands as the band's artistic masterpiece. The record plays on making its roots explicit both in the cover, showing the four of them posing in front of the Jephson Memorial, and in the title, which pays tribute at once to their birthplace – Moseley, precisely – and their adopted spiritual home, namely Muscle Shoals, the Alabama town famous for its soul music recording studios.

"The Riverboat Song" does indeed seem to travel up the banks of the Mississippi, giving life to a track poised between classic rock and blues, roughened by Fowler's voice at its most "soulful" yet, by Cradock's overflowing solos and by the rhythmic interplay of Minchella and Hamilton. "The Day We Caught The Train" changes gear at once and in no time is back on Albion's shores, evoking the spirit of the Beatles' "I Am The Walrus". Unsurprisingly, promptly released as a single, the track reached number 4 on the British chart. "The Circle" is a love song that stays anchored to British shores while updating itself to contemporary coordinates: vaguely melancholic, once again driven by Cradock's riffs, it is without a shadow of a doubt one of the finest anthems of the britpop season.

In a breathtaking journey between tradition and modernity, mod attitude and britpop, Ocean Colour Scene sum up their way of making music in little more than ten minutes. While the incipit would prove unrepeatable even for themselves, the rest of the album unfolds over another three quarters of an hour at an extremely high level. "Lining Your Pockets" somewhat foreshadows the near future: a ballad in which the acoustic wins out over the electric and which, towards the end, just when it should be fading out, stirs from its torpor, adding pathos and bite; "Fleeting Mind" follows in its footsteps, with a folk opening followed by a bluesy instrumental coda. But it is with "40 Past Midnight" that OCS show their hand, slipping into the Rolling Stones' shoes and putting together a lascivious rhythm'n'blues that twists the riff of "Let's Spend The Night Together" into an interlocking game of rare beauty.

And while the breezy "One For The Road" flows by quickly though without any real jolts, "It's My Shadow" once again reveals the quartet's ability to craft pop songs with an emotional crescendo (often, as in this case, culminating in a melancholy that is never too overbearing) and never predictable in the passages – including shifts of genre – through which they unfold. "Policemen & Pirates" flexes its muscles again with a groove decidedly more aggressive than average, while "The Downstream" is the second great homage to Jagger and co., a kind of five-and-a-half-minute reimagining of "Angie". "You've Got It Bad" is the fourth and final single lifted from the album, an up-tempo rocker embellished with instrumental passages as remarkable as they are psychedelic. The nearly eight minutes of "Get Away" close the album, staging yet another ballad with a "variation on the theme", in this case represented by the long final jam session.

With four singles in the UK top ten and a run up the Uk Chart that stalled at number two, Ocean Colour Scene were one of the British bands of the moment. In 1996 they were called up to Knebworth, and in the summer of 1997 came their moment at Glastonbury, where they performed alongside Radiohead, Kula Shaker, Supergrass, Placebo, Republica.

Also in 1996 came the compilation B-Sides Seasides & Freeriders, which (also) featured tracks from that same year's EP Beside Ourselves.

Despite numerous live shows and an album that kept churning out hit singles, in September 1997 — barely eighteen months after the release of Moseley Shoals — the West Midlands band released their third studio album: Marchin' Already, once again produced by Brendan Lynch. Where the previous record had thrived on variety, the new one responds with a softer sound, with one notable exception: the lead single and album opener "Hundred Mile High City", which reached number 4 on the UK chart and was used in TV ads and video games. Taut and just dirty enough, inspired by the fact that Fowler, thanks to the sales of the previous album, had finally managed to buy himself a car, ironically declaring he "felt a hundred miles high", the song became the calling card that propelled Ocean Colour Scene to number one on the UK chart, knocking "Be Here Now" by the very Oasis they'd been supporting acts for until the day before. Noel Gallagher, the man who had rescued the band from the doldrums following their first album, sent his congratulations to "the second best band in England". Cradock didn't hold back, replying: "It's an honour to be considered the second best band in Britain, behind the Beatles and ahead of Oasis."

Three more singles were lifted from Marchin' Already: the delicate "Better Day", plus "Travellers Tune" and "It's A Beautiful Thing", on which Fowler is joined by P.P. Arnold — the first of the two making explicit a desire to forge ties with the northern soul scene, paying tribute to Ronnie Lane, the Small Faces member who had died that June after a long illness, and for whom the band, together with Gallagher, Weller and Primal Scream, would record a collaborative EP. The rest of the album is a parade of songs that are never dull, always chasing the perfect melody. "Big Star" returns to favouring acoustic over electric, "Debris Road" veers towards folk. The middle section of the album flattens out into quieter territory, well represented by the ballads "Besides Yourself" and "Tele He's Not Talking", once again indebted to the Beatles. "Foxy's Folk Faced" returns firmly to folk territory, while the instrumental "All Up" lets itself be carried away by piano in the album's only psychedelic passage. The pop of "Spark And Cindy" is the prelude to a finale with more subdued atmospheres: "Half A Dream Away" coasts almost by inertia into the closing, already mentioned "It's A Beautiful Thing", the longest track of the lot at six and a half minutes, anguished and languid, and notably kept out of the UK top ten as a single (it would peak at number 12).

While the golden age of Britpop was slowly winding down, Ocean Colour Scene were at the peak of their career. The album sold a million and a half copies in its first year, and in 1998 the band tackled their first headline tour of English arenas, also taking part in the dreadful anthem accompanying the England football team at the 1998 World Cup, "(How Does It Feel To Be) On The Top Of The World", fittingly in keeping with Beckham and co.'s dismal performances.

As further proof of the band's prolific output, in September 1999, ten years after Ocean Colour Scene's formation, came One From The Modern, their fourth studio album. The twelve songs are another parade of pop-rock tracks inspired by the sixties, alongside ballads with a folk aftertaste. The first single, "Profit In Peace", drew attention mainly for its anti-war message, inaugurating a distinctive trait of the band's future output: protest songs or, more broadly, songs dealing with current affairs. More significant from a musical standpoint is the second single, "So Low", a rhythmic, melancholic track, unmistakably "brit" and timeless in the best Ocean Colour Scene tradition, destined to become a classic. "I Am The News" was also released as a single: a blues-rock number accompanied on tablas by Steve White, on loan directly from Paul Weller's band — and Weller really is present behind every move the OCS make: not only does he provide backing vocals on "No One At All", but the band also dedicate the funky "Soul Driver" to him, embellished by the sax of neighbour Brian Travers of UB40. Also noteworthy are the decadent Britpop of "The Waves", the refined pop of "Emily Chambers" — somewhere between the Beatles and the Go-Betweens — and the heartfelt ballad "I Won't Get Grazed", which closes an album that, while without any particular jolts, confirms that the Birmingham quartet's songwriting remains solidly reliable. The English public responded well, and the album reached number 4 on the UK chart, though by now it barely made headlines.

The new millennium opened with some substantial changes: in 2001 Ocean Colour Scene released their fifth studio album, Mechanical Wonder, which would also make the UK top ten — albeit for the last time in the band's history. The wind had changed, Britpop was already the stuff of retrospectives, and even sixties-flavoured classicism no longer held the appeal it once had. Even Brendan Lynch was absent as producer, replaced by Martin Heyers. Nevertheless, Mechanical Wonder serves up another twelve songs that could pass as outtakes from any of the previous albums (with the exception of Moseley Shoals, of course). The crystalline pop of the title track counterbalances the Weller-esque rock of the lead single "Up On The Downside", which in 2010 would find an unexpected second wind of global fame as the soundtrack to the video game Pro Evolution Soccer, confirming the thoroughly timeless nature of the OCS sound. Back then it "only" reached number nineteen on the UK chart. "In My Field" pays homage to The Who, "If I Gave You My Heart" is the inevitable big ballad, and the only surprise comes at the close, when "Can't Get Back To The Basement" wraps things up in atypical fashion, accelerating into a lysergic blues-rock journey that only increases the regret for a band that almost never ventured into straight-up rock, despite showing, in its sporadic forays, total command of the form.

A few months later, in early November, Ocean Colour Scene's first best-of came out, Songs From The Front Row, essentially a collection of the singles lifted from their first five albums. The following year came their first live album, Live On The Riverboat, documenting a show performed by just Fowler and Harrison — Cradock and Minchella being on tour with Weller at the time — aboard the Renfrew Ferry on the Seine.

Punctual as a Swiss watch, on 7 July 2003 the Birmingham band released their sixth album, North Atlantic Drift, no longer on Island but on Sanctuary Records. Martin Hayes was behind the desk, and while its 58 minutes set a new record for the quartet, the album will be remembered above all for two reasons: falling out of the UK top ten, and the departure, shortly afterwards, of bassist Damon Minchella. The album perpetuates the usual formula straddling mod-rock, Britpop and folk, but in a more convincing way than the previous records.

In the meantime the world had changed: the Twin Towers had fallen, and G.W. Bush's United States and its allies — the UK included, as the album's title pointedly notes — were attacking Iraq. Although far from earth-shattering, "I Just Need Myself" reached number thirteen on the UK chart, while "Make The Deal" and "Golden Gate Bridge", decidedly better songs, stalled at numbers thirty-five and forty respectively. The inspired "She's Been Writing" is dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention, "For Every Corner" returns to Beatles territory, "Oh Collector" plays between epic lyrics and a genuine wall of sound, and "On My Way" hits the accelerator, alternating pop melodies with rock grit.

On 1 September of that same year came Anthology, a double CD collecting forty songs in strict chronological order. It includes B-sides and, in the limited edition, demo and live versions plus a cover of the Who's "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere". In September 2004 came One For The Road, a live album featuring the band's greatest hits along with a few tracks from their more recent albums.

The curious thing is that One For The Road came out, at Sanctuary's explicit request, in place of Ocean Colour Scene's seventh studio album, which therefore had to wait another six months before hitting record shops. It was 21 March 2005 when A Hyperactive Workout For The Flying Squad finally saw the light of day. For the first time the band doesn't appear photographed on the cover: the classic line-up had lost a member, Damon Minchella, replaced on bass by Dan Sealey; what's more, Ocean Colour Scene had effectively become a five-piece, with Andy Bennett joining as second guitarist. Having also bid farewell to Martyn Hayes, production duties went to Dave Eringa, who had already worked with Manic Street Preachers, Idlewild and Massive Attack.

Recorded near Kirriemuir (Bon Scott's hometown, but that's another story) in Scotland, A Hyperactive Workout For The Flying Squad owes its title to a phrase overheard on BBC Radio 4. The style is the usual one, yet Eringa's touch is clearly evident in the arrangements, which are more baroque and bombastic than in the past. "Free My Name", the lead single, employs a string backdrop framing a track that once again pays homage to the esteemed firm of Townshend-Daltrey-Moon. Just as striking is the second and final single, "This Day Should Last Forever", laced with traditional Celtic instruments. Brit classicism can take many forms, and Ocean Colour Scene seem determined to revisit them all, one by one. Now far from the spotlight and their days of glory, the five Birmingham lads stubbornly keep churning out pop-rock songs that still manage to hit the mark. Their long-declared love for the Beatles translates into a sumptuous, simply wonderful cover tribute to George Harrison's "Wah Wah". "Start Of The Day" opens with an acoustic guitar riff closely recalling "Wish You Were Here" and features Chris and Tony Griffiths of The Real People. Stripped of drums and vaguely Stones-y, "Have You Got The Right" showcases Fowler's voice at its most dramatic. The jazzy "Move Things Over" and the needless Spector-esque opulence of "Another Time To Stay", on the other hand, push the band too far from its natural habitat, almost making it sound uncomfortable. More broadly, A Hyperactive Workout For The Flying Squad is an album of two souls: on one hand it shows that Ocean Colour Scene can still write dynamite songs, on the other a production far removed from the band's usual standards distorts its character, giving rise to a work marked by light and shade.

Ocean Colour Scene's already considerable discography was further enriched on 8 May 2006 by a new live album, this time acoustic: Live At The Jam House is the title of this limited-edition recording, featuring tracks drawn from the band's most recent albums and thus excluding all the nineties classics. Those, meanwhile, took centre stage on the BBC Sessions, released on 12 February 2007.

Another two months passed, and with their usual punctuality came the eighth studio album, On The Leyline. Having bid farewell, without too much regret, to the excesses of the previous record — and, along with them, to Eringa, replaced by John Rivers — OCS returned to a sparer, more recognisable sound, reflected in the decent Britpop of the two singles lifted from it, "I Told You So" and "I Just Got Over You". The album includes "For Dancers Only", written by Paul Weller and later performed by him alongside Graham Coxon, as well as Sealey's "first time" as a songwriter on "Man In The Middle". On an album less inspired than usual, "Go To Sea" stands out, poised between pop and rock just like in the old days.

In late August another Collection swelled the already dense ranks of releases under the Ocean Colour Scene name: a few classics, a few live tracks (this time the obligatory cover is "Day Tripper"), collector's fodder and nothing more. Around the same time, Cradock made his solo debut with the album "The Kundalini Target".

Just when the English band seems to have hit rock bottom, their next turn brings them back to the standards they're known for. Produced by David Monaghan, fresh off the success he'd achieved with Editors, and released by Cooking Vinyl, Saturday comes out on February 1, 2010 and shows a group that's inspired and on form. "100 Floors Of Perception" sits halfway between blues and the Who (yes, them again!) of Baba O'Riley. Released as a digital download, "Magic Carpet Days" is a blast of freshness set to sweep away any doubts about the health of Ocean Colour Scene. Even better is "Mrs Maylie", in which the most psychedelic Beatles materialize. "Postal" is written and sung by Cradock, "Fell In Love On The Street" is the classic, inspired ballad courtesy of Fowler. Saturday reaches number thirty-five on the UK Chart, outperforming its predecessor as well.

The following months are a genuine dive into the past for Ocean Colour Scene. On October 18, 2010 21 comes out, a four-CD box set tracing the various eras of the English band, complete with further gems in the shape of live versions and previously unreleased demos. In 2011 the deluxe edition of Moseley Shoals is pressed, and OCS headline a triumphant tour in which they perform the 1996 album in full, later captured on the DVD "Moseley Shoals – Live In Birmingham". Meanwhile Cradock releases his second solo album, "Peace City West"; the following year it's Fowler's turn with "Merrymouth".

February 11, 2013 marks the arrival of the tenth official studio album, Painting, again for Cooking Vinyl. Recorded in five weeks at Vada Studios in Warwickshire with producer Matt Terry, it gathers the band's now well-established range of pop/folk-rock songs, ballads and gentle anthems, though favoring a less abrasive approach than in the past (even the recent past) to put melody back at the center once again. While the title track, the first single lifted from the album, is yet another dive into vintage britpop, current events surface in no fewer than three songs: "The Winning Side" is about the news of the deaths of two English soldiers in Afghanistan, "If God Made Everyone" concerns the mass killing carried out in Norway by Anders Breivik, and "The New Torch Song" is a - frankly unpresentable - anthem for the London Olympics that had just wrapped up. "Goodbye Old Town" veers toward folk, "Professor Perplexity" toward an alt-rock tinged with the Cramps. "Mistaken Identity" is John Lennon in pure form, "Here Comes The Dawning Day" pays tribute to Bert Jansch, "I Don't Want To Leave England" is the inevitable, impeccable ballad: the latest in a long line, its title sealing a quarter century of great, quintessentially British songs.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google