Well well, here's a blast from the past I hadn't envisaged would be blowing this way again.
For those of you without detailed knowledge of the Madchester/ baggy explosion of roughly 1988 - 1991, you may not realise that although The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and dark horses The Charlatans went on to worldwide acclaim and (to a degree) large-scale sales there was another bunch from the Manchester catchment area being tipped for similar greatness.
Hailing from areas such as Blackley and Moston from Manchester's north side, NORTHSIDE (geddit?) comprised Warren 'Dermo' Dermody (vocals), Cliff Ogier (bass), Michael 'Upo' Upton (guitar) and drummer Paul 'Wal' Walsh. They formed early in '89 - predictably as a result of the emergence of the 'E' culture and Acid House - though Upo was later replaced by Tim Walsh on guitar. Initially, their progress was swift: their first gig at Manchester's Boardwalk sold out by word of mouth in September 1989 and before long Tony Wilson (not Anthony H in those days) was courting them for his influential Factory label. By the summer of 1990 their first single "Shall We Take A Trip" (with its' attention grabbing "L...S...D" reference) made the Top 50. Pretty impressive, by anyone's standards.
However mercurial Northside's rise may have been, though, it would be short lived, for their entire career would end up consisting of only four singles (if you include the US-only "Tour De World") and the one album "Chicken Rhythms", released by Factory in June 1991. It goes without saying that thanks to LTM'S usual diligent benevolence virtually all of it is presented here in this hour-plus package.
Whether you'd really want to savour it all again, though, is a moot point. Personally, this reviewer was deeply suspicious of the heavily-hyped 'Side at the time and remembers being seriously underwhelmed by singles like "My Rising Star" and "Take 5". The latter opens this collection, and the expected ingredients - the requisite funky drummer beats, slippery bass lines, wah-wah guitars and Dermo's sense-of-wonder vocals ("It'll blow your mind, do it every time" he enthuses early on) - are, of course, present and correct. I'd expected to hate it, but the passing of time's a funny thing, and while "Take 5" and most of its' attendant tracks are firmly mired in the sound of the pre-Grunge cusp of the 1990s, some of them sound surprisingly breezy and pleasant these days.
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Indeed, without the crushing weight of expectation, tracks like "Weight Of Air" with its' rolling congas and gliding basslines and "Funky Munky" with its' skinny, chicken scratch guitars are strangely infectious. "Wishful Thinking", meanwhile, is blissed-out and luxuriously balmy and "Practice Makes Perfect" suggested they understood a few things about urgency and purpose after all.
Sadly, though, it all begins to sound rather formulaic after a while. Tracks like "Tour De World", "A Change Is On Its' Way" and the forced Cosmic bliss of songs like "Yeah Man" sound at best average and at worst compromised, while Dermo's puny stab at social commentary on "Who's To Blame?" ("The poor man gets the blame/ the rich man did the crime" - ooh, roll over Joe Strummer) is little better than pathetic. Indeed, Dermo's featherweight vocals were themselves something of an albatross because they simply sounded tame and tasteless as a rule. Hell, at least you remembered Ian Brown's tuneless rambling afterwards.
So you can labour the opinion that Northside were unlucky in terms of timing, as "Chicken Rhythms" was unleashed a mere three months before Baggy would be swept away for good by the all-consuming Grunge Tsunami that rode in on Nirvana's "Nevermind." Yet ultimately this reviewer maintains that Northside's days were numbered anyway, as they were limited in appeal when taken outside of the all-encompassing Madchester/ Baggy movement and may well not have survived regardless of Cobain and co.
Still, there's one interesting footnote to the story: "Take 5" got to No.1 in Canada and it took the inevitable "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to dislodge it. That's something to tell the grandchildren, eh, Dermo?
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