FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Gomez – Bring It On (Twentieth Anniversary Edition)
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AN album that is very well known…
IN THIS PHOTO: Gomez in 2006
but people might not have on vinyl, I wanted to highlight Gomez’s brilliant and adored 1998 debut, Bring It On. Rather than the standard release, I am recommending people spend a little more to get the twentieth anniversary from 2018. Originally released on 13th April, 1998, Gomez entered a very eclectic and fascinating British music scene. Consider the fact it won the 1998 Mercury Music Prize, beating favourites such as Massive Attack's Mezzanine and The Verve's Urban Hymns! Prior to coming to a bit of praise and documentation for Bring It On, Rough Trade have the twentieth anniversary release in stock:
“To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Gomez’s Mercury Music Prize winning debut album, Bring It On is re-mastered and reissued. Bring It On is Gomez's half a million selling debut album (UK) that was recently voted the all-time best Mercury Music Prize winner by BBC 6 Music listeners. Twenty years on, the debut album by Gomez sounds not of its time, but ahead of its time. You can hear its echoes in so much of the music that followed it: not just in Elbow, but in any artist who heard Bring it On and realised the possibilities of combining indie and roots music with lo-fidelity electronics: a modern experimental sensibility with a love of the past. Bring It On was an album that synthesised styles in a way that seemed remarkable then, and now sounds utterly unforced and contemporary. Where so many of its contemporaries sound completely of their time, Bring It On sounds as if it could have come out to equal acclaim at any point over the past 20 years”.
Just before arriving at some reviews for one of the defining debuts of the 1990s, NME spoke with guitarist and keyboard player Tom Gray during the band’s tour that celebrated twenty years of Bring It On:
“What are your memories of making ‘Bring It On’?
“We were just kids mucking around with tape machines. We were just a group of mates who played music for fun. That’s what we did. We were nerds who liked making music and mucking around with song form and having a laugh really. My memories of it are being in a big social group of friends in which we would just nip off, go and record some music, come back and carry on the party really.”
What were the songs about?
“They were songs about running away, having nights out, going to Mexico. It was pure escapism. It was about 20-year-old kids desperately trying to get out of their small town mentality.”
A lot of my friends have told me over the years that an old school mate of mine inspired the single ‘Whippin’ Piccadilly’. Is it possible we know the same person?
“Ha no way. The story goes, we all went to see Beck at Manchester Academy in 1995 on the ‘Odelay’ tour. Beck was ruling the world at that point in time, he was just incredible and his band were the best band I’d ever seen. The person that was ‘dressed in a suit looking like a lunatic’ in that song was Beck and the other person was our mate who took the string out of the bottom of his coat and he was literally whipping the floor of Piccadilly station that night. He was completely on one that night.”
You won the Mercury Prize for ‘Bring It On’ in 1998 ahead of Massive Attack’s ‘Mezzanine’ and The Verve’s ‘Urban Hymns’. Was that ultimately responsible for the record reaching Number 11 in the UK album chart and selling nearly half a million copies?
“To a degree yeah, but the first big thing that happened to us was when we first appeared on Later…With Jools Holland. That was when we were like ‘Oh Lord!’. People leaped on to it very quickly. And then we had two sets at Glastonbury that year. We played in a tent and the gig went so well that we were asked to fill a set on the Main Stage (after Beth Orton pulled out) as well. So on a whim we did a second set on the Main Stage at Glastonbury in the pouring rain and managed to cheer a whole lot of people up. That set off a bit of a fire really and then in September when we won the Mercury Prize it was like a perfect storm. The word of mouth was out there and ready and everyone was excited about it but then when it got this big stamp of approval, it was like boom. Then the record was just flying out. It was crazy”.
If you still need a bit of prodding to go and get a truly brilliant album on vinyl, then perhaps a couple of positive reviews might tip the scales. This is what AllMusic had to say in their review for the mighty and simply perfect Bring It On:
“On their debut album, Bring It On, England's Gomez introduce their original take on bluesy roots rock. Unlike Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, this isn't amphetamine-fueled freak-out music but similar at times to Beck's acoustic-based work (One Foot in the Grave), with more going on vocally. The band has a total of three strong vocalists, who can switch from pretty harmonies to gutsy blues outpourings in the blink of an eye. The band manages to cover a lot of ground convincingly on Bring It On, which is unusual, since it commonly takes bands the course of a few releases to hone their sound. The three British singles released from the album are definite highlights -- "Get Myself Arrested," "Whippin' Piccadilly," and "78 Stone Wobble," the latter containing a beautifully haunting acoustic guitar riff similar to Nirvana's unplugged version of the Meat Puppets' "Plateau." All the praise that Gomez's debut received is definitely not hype. The album is consistently great, as proven by such tracks as "Tijuana Lady," "Love Is Better Than a Warm Trombone," and "Get Myself Arrested”.
I am going to wrap it up with an in-depth investigation and love letter from Drowned in Sound. In 2018, they revisited Bring It On as the anniversary edition of the album came out. It makes for pretty interesting reading. I found a new appreciation for Gomez’s debut following my reading of the Drowned in Sound feature/review:
“It was an album that didn’t fit the zeitgeist, but that was part of what made it so appealing. It emerged at the fag-end of Britpop, with This is Hardcore atop the albums chart, another fine record that seems, in retrospect, to have been an antidote to the dominant indie music of the time, rather than a product of it. For one curious 15-year old in small-town Ireland at least, Bring It On represented something completely new. Over the years, conversations amidst the dying embers of many house parties revealed that others also saw Bring It On (along with the likes of the Beta Band’s Three EPs, Radiohead’s OK Computer, which came out the previous year, and the Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin (released a year later) as a gateway album of sorts – one that suggested there was more to indie music than the tired, formulaic pastiche that Britpop had become.
Bring It On is endlessly inventive. It fuses delta blues with mariachi guitar, rollicking drinking anthems with paeans to small-time weed dealers. It’s loose in its structure (having three vocalists seemed revelatory at the time) and loaded with ideas, a jam album that arrived fully formed. The crux of the record was seven tracks recorded on an old four-track recorder, in one of the band’s father’s garage. A tape of the tracks had been circulated among the band’s group of friends, finding its way into the hands of numerous A&R men.
As the tape circulated (these were essentially pre-internet days), a minor buzz ensued and Gomez signed to Hut. Because the equipment they’d used to record the songs broke down, the label had to use the garage recordings, with “a little bit of mixing and embellishment”. Had the songs been rerecorded, perhaps this effortless and casual sound would have been lost.
Yet despite this breeziness, Bring It On it is also accomplished beyond its makers’ years. From the hammer-on intro to ‘Here Comes The Breeze’, to the finger-picked outro to ‘Free To Run’, there are moments of real musical beauty. Add to that the dashes of imaginative production (the lo-fi crackles of ‘Tijuana Lady’, the grinding synth that ushers the record in with ‘Get Miles’) and you’ve got a heady brew of sounds.
That it was written and recorded by a bunch of skinny teenagers from Southport was considered phenomenal. The contemporary reviews were glowing, but there was also a general air of bemusement: how could these youngsters come up with something so heterogeneous and “real”? (At the time, much of the media coverage focused on Ben Ottewell’s gravelly drawl.
Bring It On was not a product of its time, rather the crate-digging, audiophilia of its creators. Perhaps for that reason, it has aged remarkably well – better than many of its contemporaries. These songs could have been recorded at any point in the past 30-odd years, but they still sound fresh today. A 20th-anniversary reissue is a chance to toast a record that – if not maligned – doesn’t get the attention it deserves. For those who found this record a formative part of their musical upbringing, take the time to rekindle some old memories, it sounds just as good as you remember. For others, enjoy it for what it is: a melting pot of escapism, stoner jams, and melodies so on point, you could hang your sombrero on them”.
Even if you are new to Gomez or not a superfan, Bring It On is an album that you will find truly engaging and nuanced. You will come back to it with fresh appreciation of various songs. Next year marks twenty-five years of a phenomenal album from Southport’s Gomez. It made a big impression in 1998, especially in the U.K. I am shocked that there are doubting and slightly muted reviews for an album many consider a classic! I wonder whether opinions have changed since then. Regardless, go out and own the twentieth anniversary release of Bring It On…
AND cherish its brilliance.