This week I’ll mostly be listening to…Intastella August 29, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, This Weekend I'll Mostly Be Listening to....trackback
A funny one this. I heard their song Mary Jane, taken from the What You Gonna Do album, around 1995 and really liked its beats and then sort of forgot about them. From time to time I’d pick up their albums in second hand shops and think about buying them… but wouldn’t. Shame on me.
From their first full length release Intastella and the Family of People they were always more clued in and ground-breaking than their subsequent relative success would seem to credit them. A sort of Madchester sound, one foot in indieboy camp with the wah wah guitars, one foot in pop dance with no small amount of bleeps… but somehow a bit more than the sum of the parts that that juxtaposition might indicate led on to a broad range of styles, all underpinned by Stella Grundy’s voice.
And it’s not as if they didn’t get the nod from people with higher profiles. Tricky produced a single, they regularly got plaudits in the music press. Hard to say what went wrong, perhaps they were just a bit too clued in. Or maybe they never quite wrote the immediate songs they threatened to, but their ones needed that little bit of time to sink in. Which would explain why from time to time I find myself humming phrases from them…
Needless to say difficult to find their stuff at reasonable prices, or indeed any price, now… but sort of classic in their own way.
Century
Skyscraper (Huff and Herb Club mix)… barely recognisable in some ways.
This is Bendy
The Night (Live)
The final track ‘The Night’ was a Frankie Valli song that was recorded on Motown but not released in the US. It was minor hit in Britain but was popular on the northern soul scene.
True indeed. I’ve read that they released that as a sort of bid to pull in that side of their fanbase…
[...] were a tad cheesy, even for my tastes which is saying something. But as with groups like The High, Intastella [not strictly speaking in baggy but of it], the Charlatans first album, the Happy Mondays and so on [...]