The Boo Radleys: Wake Up! ---Ink Blot Magazine

The Boo Radleys: Wake Up!

Listen To Real Audio
The Boo Radleys,
"Stuck On Amber"

at a glance...

Hometown: Liverpool, UK
Formed: 1988

Members:
Martin Carr -songwriting, guitar, vocals, harmonica, glockenspiel, keyboards, percussion
Sice -lead vocals
Timothy Brown -bass, keyboards
Rob Ceika -drums, percussion, keyboards, bell

Bands in the family :
Eggman, Brave Captain, Gallon Drunk, Sharkboy, Moose, Andy Wilkinson, The High Llamas, Stereolab, Justin Warfield

Notes:
Martin Carr, the force behind the Boo Radleys, formed his band with Sice, Tim Brown, and original drummer Steve Hewitt in Liverpool and entered the fray in 1989 with the independent Ichabod and I. Shoehorned into the "noise-pop/dream-pop/shoegazer" scene that briefly ruled the U.K. but never really caught on in the US, the Boos gratified their cult with several EPs and 1992's Everything's Alright Forever on Rough Trade. They escaped from the shoegazer ghetto and into Britpop with the epochal Giant Steps in 1993, one of the greatest albums most Americans have never heard. They pretty much remained critic's darlings until Carr came up with 1995's poppy yet introspective Wake Up!, which spawned a Top Ten hit in "Wake Up Boo!" and brought the Boos all the success it turned out they didn't want. Carr's typically perverse next step was the daunting C'mon Kids in 1997, which made the mistake of not being Wake Up! Volume II. The Boos re-surfaced in 1998 with Kingsize, which is either brilliant or a huge disappointment, depending on who you are. Whoever you are, the band packed it in in early 1999, causing heartache among many Internet music geeks and critics.

The Boo Radleys
Wake Up!
Creation/Columbia, Released 1995

This album can't really be separated from its history: head Boo Martin Carr, having just kicked the ass of anyone who cared to listen with the masterpiece Giant Steps, still found himself lonely up in northern England without his bandmates and wanting to make a huge pop breakthrough. So he grabbed his guitar and wrote 12 songs, rang the boys, and knocked out one of the most surprisingly successful albums in recent U.K. history.

Wake Up! is unrelentingly on-point, and sonically perfect. It's got something for everyone: insanely catchy pop songs like the huge breakthrough single "Wake Up Boo!" and "It's Lulu"; orchestral timber like the album closer "Wilder" and the perfect "Stuck on Amber," and we're-still-an-experimental-group-honest-we-are stuff like "Charles Bukowski Is Dead" and "4AM Conversation." Sice still sings like the sexiest castrato alive, the rhythm section bangs away nicely, and all in all it's a hell of a record that goes down smooth.

So why does this album leave a weird taste in your mouth? Boo-heads and critics all talk shit about how it's not Giant Steps or "the early stuff," but it's not meant to be. No, the truth is this is an album about ambiguity. I don't know if that was the plan; I suspect not. But Wake Up! contains more mixed feelings, mixed music, and mixed-up confusion than any Blur album, not to mention the entire Oasis catalog. For every urgent "Wake Up Boo!" there's a despondent "Martin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clock." This is not a happy guy, and this is not a happy album. But it sounds happy most of the time, and so people loved it, and so the Boos found themselves playing "Wake Up Boo!" on children's shows with dancing strawberries. God bless pop music.

If you like The Boo Radleys, check out:
The Boo Radleys Giant Steps
Supergrass Supergrass
The Beatles The Beatles
The Flaming Lips Clouds Taste Metallic
Stereolab Emperor Tomato Ketchup
The Beach Boys Pet Sounds

-- Matt Cibula

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