From Cubist Castle 03.20.09: Puppy Love

Posted by Jon Kinsey on 03.20.2009

After spending the whole of last week encouraging the elitist jerks of this world to share their love, I follow my own advice and turn my column into a sermon about my favorite unsigned band - The Hot Puppies

Last week, I made a point of bashing the sort of music fans who insist on keeping the bands they love secret bastions of their own and I made the point that we, as educated music fans, have a duty to share what we know about the bands we love with the world, in order that others might discover them. Never one to shirk my responsibilities, I have dedicated this column to my favorite local band, an outfit who, I believe, are on the verge of greatness. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Hot Puppies

I have a confession. Writing this column is making me feel old, because I've literally been championing this band for the best part of a decade. In last week's column, I touched upon the phenomenon of college towns acting as a microcosm in which bands that have triggered no interest whatsoever in the outside world live as demigods within their own community. The Hot Puppies could quite easily have been one of those bands.

Formed in Aberystwyth on the Welsh West Coast, The Puppies began playing small gigs around the town's pubs and music venues in the early part of 2000. They connected instantly with a student population starved of more recognized bands (in my three years at UWA, the only touring band to play the town were Wheatus. I didn't go.), but still keen to see good music being played by good musicians. Despite playing a residency at the Castle Hotel, which was literally at the top of my street, I managed to avoid all contact with the band and was blissfully ignorant to their existence.

All that changed in February 2002 at the first University sponsored Battle of The Bands. I hadn't heard of any of the acts on the bill and subscribed, at the time, to the "all university bands are irretrievably broken" school of music critique. Frankly I wasn't expecting much, but it was a night out and the beer was cheap, so I thought, "Sod it" and went. When the first band took to the stage, I was still in Negative Nelly mode. There was a definite air of shambolism about them. The lead guitarist looked like he had just escaped from Harrow and was about to commence a poetry recital. The keyboard stand housed a Theremin, something that I always wanted to shatter over the head of its operator – "it isn't even a proper instrument", I remember thinking at the time. The drummer was bare chested, a massive no no in my book. By the time the demur looking female vocalist picked up the microphone, I was already baited, ready to hate them.

Then they played their first song. It was called "Shoot'em In The Head" and it went a little something like this.




I don't think I've ever fallen so quickly for a band before or since. My immediate reaction, which they certainly justified in their early days, is that they are what the Ramones would have been, had Johnny been brought up with keyboards instead of guitars. They were loud, fast and in your face. There was something distinctly raw and animalistic about the music they were making – the running keyboards, overlaid with a chainsaw bassline and machine gun drumming. But they were also clever and catchy and ever so sexy. The Harrow escapee turned out to be a startlingly good guitar player and the Theremin actually worked in the context of their songs. I still couldn't justify the drummer's lack of shirt, but it turns out that it was his birthday or something, so I suppose I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Without a doubt, the star turn that night and every night since was front woman Becky Newman who mesmerized the audience and is still the best female lead I've ever seen live. I'm pretty certain that I can speak confidently when I say that there wasn't a straight man in the house who didn't fall a little bit in love with her that night. Her stage presence drew you in, like a Lorelei to a sailor. There is something innocent and yet also obviously sexual about her performance. Her appearance belied the tone and timbre of her voice. Once you start observing her, it is impossible to avert your eyes.

Every song that they played made me more convinced that I was seeing something very special indeed. In those days, they turned the bass right up in the mix, so that it coated everything. The vocals sat on top and the keys shuffled in behind, but it was the pulse of Ben Fairclough's base that drove the first few songs on. His performance that night was especially noteworthy– he had only joined the band three days prior and had rehearsed with the full ensemble just once. Four songs in, however, he was rendered almost irrelevant. The sheer weight of the bassline blew his amp and he was virtually silent for the remainder of the set. This experience, which cost them the competition, might well have prompted some of the stylistic changes that were to come. Even with that in mind, I left the Union that night with that rare and wonderful feeling of having seen something special and needing to tell the world about it.

In the seven years since that gig, The Puppies have continually slogged around the independent circuit, impressing critics everywhere they tread and yet, uncannily, still not "signed" in any conventional sense. They put out their records through micro-indies and singles clubs, bouncing around between distributors and surviving mainly on word of mouth. Their gigs always sell and their fanbase is rabid. Importantly, though, the people who truck around the country, following the band from gig to gig, are only too happy to tell the world at large about the Puppies. Slowly but surely, they ahve earned a reputation as the biggest small band on the scene.

As they have grown in stature, so it seems to have developed in terms of their musical scope. Guitarist Luke Taylor, who started in my eyes as Mr Public School, has proven time and time again that he is a top-notch lyricist, having the uncanny talent of not only putting words into a woman's mouth, but also being able to write convincingly and believably from a female perspective. In this regard, he is right up there with Stuart Murdoch and Stephin Merritt. From the early days of sloganeering and catchy lyrical riffs, he has begun to craft truly thought provoking tracks. One of the band's latest singles "King of England", for example, deals with the illegal war in the Middle East. This sort of subject would, and oftentimes in the last few years, has, turned to cliché for most lyricists, but Taylor's intellect and word play shines through. I absolutely love the refrain in the chorus

I am the King of England
So bring me the head of the man
Who took my people to war



If this clip is compared to the one above, the other thing that becomes obvious is the change in musical direction that the band has taken since its early days. The more punky, harder elements have been toned down and the band has moved, increasingly with each release, towards something resembling an art-rock output, with the instrumentation coming to the fore and some of the more raucous elements ironed out.

It is this modified sound that dominates the band's first full-length release, Under The Crooked Moon. The album, with the exception of "Theda Bara", which was played in the Battle of the Bands set, consists solely of new school material. As a collection of songs, it stands up remarkably well from start to finish housing some of the band's best numbers – "Terry", a hymn of love to a bad boy boyfriend, "How Come You Don't Hold Me No More", which featured recently in my Top 5 breakup songs and my favorite middle era Puppies track, "The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful", a song fraught with obsession and usurpation of identity, subjects which Taylor's lyrics are increasingly embracing.



Under The Crooked Moon was followed by a rarities and B-sides collection called Over My Dead Body which finally collects my all time favorite Hot Puppies track "Closed To Sin", a b-side from the band's second single. "Closed to Sin" is told from the perspective of a girl who has fallen in love with her friend's man. She knows that her thoughts are impure and wrong, but she wants him so badly that she really doesn't care. The more oblivious he becomes to her presence, the further into depression she falls, eventually resorting to alcohol and medication. This was the first slow Puppies song I had ever heard and probably the first to feature the more grown up, cogent lyricism that has come to the fore of late. That being said, listening to this album in it's entirety gives you more of an idea of what the band would have sounded like in their early days, though I must be honest and say that those blistering early performances don't really translate when set down and recorded. So much of the energy came from being in the same room, feeding off the vibe of the crowd and being almost goaded into enjoying yourself and there is no way that this could ever really be distilled onto cd.

With the release of their third album, Blue Hands, the band now seem as if they are on the verge of making the jump from small town college outfit to national recognition. They have brought themselves closer to the Welsh music hub, re-locating from Aberystwyth to Cardiff and their singles are being backed by high quality videos. Their song "Love Or Trial" played during the climax of the first season of the BBC's hit comedy Gavin and Stacey, which has been watched by more people than God in this country in the last few years. With more certainty than ever, I can say that the time will come when The Hot Puppies will truly make it and, when I tell people that I was there at the beginning, it will not be with the sense of exclusion, of cliquism, of blind prejudice that the Elitist Jerk followers of other bands would revel in. It will be with a sense of pride and wonder.