With ELASTICA now officially defunct and the dust having settled on both the 1990s Britpop years and singer Justine Frischmann's very public affair with BLUR'S Damon Albarn, now seems like a good time for an overview of one of the UK's most-loved mid-90s outfits.
Justine herself recently expressed her pride in ELASTICA's "Radio One Sessions" in an NME interview and certainly listening to tracks 1-14 here, recorded by the definitive ELASTICA mk.1 - Frischmann, plus guitarist Donna Matthews, bassist Annie Holland and drummer Justin Welch - she's entirely justified.
The first five songs (John Peel August '93) ooze with the special cocksure attitude ELASTICA brought to the party and include dynamite versions of early classics "Spastica" and "Line Up", plus the blink-and-you'll-miss-it exuberance of "Annie" and "Vaseline". A statement of intent and no mistake.
The band then get seroiusly into their stride during the 1994 recordings, with the two evergreen hit singles, the STRANGLERS-baiting "Waking Up" and the ace "Car Song" (here debuted as "Four Wheeling") falling just the right side of suggestive. I still fall for Justine every time she sings: "every shining bonnet makes me think of my back on it." Saucy!
There's also a little-heard Peel Session from December '94, when ELASTICA tinkered around with two Xmas hymns (you'll know 'em!) and came up with two great oddities - "All For Gloria" and "I Wanna Be A King Of Orient Aah!", pretty much the great festive single THE FALL never recorded.
Shortly after the March '95 Evening Session (featuring the classy,Donna Matthews-penned "2:1") things went awry in the ELASTICA camp and Annie Holland quit due to the usual pressure of touring problems. Hindsight clearly shows her growling, counterpoint basslines were just as pivotal as Peter Hook's role in JOY DIVISION.
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Following that, inertia crept onto the scene, along with heroin's black spectre, though the lone 1996 Evening Session with bassist Sheila Chipperfield and Dave Bush (keyboards and ex-FALL) drafted in for Holland - raises a major "what if?" Darker and paranoid in tone, it's massively powerful with the eerie "I Want You" and Matthews' spacy "Only Human" (before it completely rips off WIRE's "Lowdown") making you shake your head in sadness that this line-up couldn't get it together for any length of time.
Indeed, by the time of the 1999 sign-off session,ELASTICA were already a spent force, even allowing for the belated return of Annie Holland (when the scarred Matthews departed). The perky "Generator" aside, this is just toss, really and when Justine sings "I'm a third rate imitator" in "Generator" you suspect even she knows the game is up.
But let's sweep that sorry episode away, because for three-quarters of "The Radio One Sessions",ELASTICA remind us graphically why (bouts of plagiarism excepted) they were always one of Britpop's better ideas, full of feisty attitude, unimpeachable feminine logic and sparky tune torpedoes that regularly gave two-finger salutes to anything much over three minutes. All of which restores considerable dignity following the drug confessionals, tabloid fodder and the godawful mess called "The Manace" that masquerades as the second ELASTICA LP.
Mission accomplished then, surely?
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