Meanwhile, the fans continue to make their appreciation felt: in 2014, OCS came fourth in a poll of Birmingham’s best ever bands. “Someone thought it would be nice for us to play the kinds of venue we were playing when Moseley Shoals came out,” Fowler said. It’s hardly Knebworth, where 125,000 once shouted back the choruses, but for a group who called their greatest hits collection Songs for the Front Row, it fits. The dad-rockers are quite literally dads, and the cords are finally age-appropriate. In July this year, the band’s now middle-aged members will head out at Birmingham’s Moseley Park to play the album for a crowd of 2,000. Ocean Colour Scene frontman Simon Fowler performing in 1996. This is still, I realise, an album I’d sooner put on than many of the others I loved in that era, including Different Class, Expecting to Fly, All Change, and even possibly Definitely Maybe maybe. Fowler’s aching, tuneful croon is light years ahead of anything his contemporaries offered: less laddy than Liam, less hammy than Damon, more genuine than Jarvis. There’s depth, too: beyond encore favourite The Day We Caught the Train there’s the sorrowing One for the Road, the sweetly complex It’s My Shadow and the drifting, dreamlike The Downstream. The Circle is a flat-out masterpiece, all the way from its feedback fade-in to its lovely, shredding outro, and nothing anyone says will convince me otherwise. The Riverboat Song’s scalding riff – “It came from me being really pissed off one day,” says Cradock – still makes me lip-bite embarrassingly and reach for my air Gibson. Musically, the album still prompts an all-out assault on nearby drummable surfaces. When the lines do make sense, they tend to reach for the regulation Britpop imagery of suns, shadows, shoes and roads. “Like a king who stalks the wings and shoots a dove and frees an eagle instead,” he sings on Riverboat. Then there are the lyrics, which – thanks to frontman Simon Fowler’s writing method of improvising into a cassette player – can be cryptic, to say the least. Some tracks, such as bangy piano rocker 40 Past Midnight, feel like filler, and I’ve never liked the droney You’ve Got It Bad. Nostalgia aside, though, how does Moseley Shoals stand up in 2016? Playing it again, I found the answer was: actually surprisingly well. The boutiques wouldn’t exist if there weren’t. It’s OK – there are more of us than you think. Chances are you find yourself, from time to time, drifting into certain boutiques, hesitating over the leather satchel with the Ministry of Defence target on, leafing through the Ben Shermans on the rack. Chances are, if you were an OCS fan, you’ve got a train-driver hat stashed at the bottom of a cupboard somewhere and you once really wanted a Lambretta. My mates and I could replicate every line, every drum fill, every guitar lick. Moseley Shoals was one of the albums I knew best, back in the days when you really got to know albums. “Ten albums in and they’ve never stopped living in the past,” it croaked in 2013.Īs a teenager in the 90s, listening to the band on repeat, I couldn’t have cared less. The NME, after initial enthusiasm, went on the attack, branding them “out-of-time 60s freaks” and disparaging release after release. There was a nickname: Ocean Duller Scene. They have been called “painfully mundane”, “workmanlike” and laddish, accused of playing dad-rock at gigs “more akin to a beery football match than a rave”. The real reason for its success, though, was simpler: it was an absolute gem of a record, by a brilliant group of musicians.Īdmiration for OCS is not so common in contemporary media in fact, it’s hard to think of a serious band who have inspired more contempt over the years. “We spent a lot of time working on it.” Championed by Radio 1’s Chris Evans – who loved The Riverboat Song so much he made it the theme tune to TFI Friday – it screamed into the charts at No 2 and stayed in the top 10 all summer, buoyed by support from Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher. “We knew it was good,” said guitarist Steve Cradock. It was the band’s second stab at success: their self-titled 1992 debut had sunk without trace and they’d been honing the follow-up for four penniless years. ![]() Today marks 20 years since Ocean Colour Scene’s Moseley Shoals entered the British charts. And a band from the Birmingham suburb of Moseley reached the top 10 with an album that combined cord-clad 60s nostalgia and northern soul influences with robust, melodic Britpop songcraft. England got to the semi-finals of the European Championships, still their best performance in half a century. The Spice Girls released Wannabe, leading to global debate about who wanted to be Baby Spice. Dolly the Sheep was born, leading to global debate about the ethics of cloning. ![]() A few important things happened in Britain in the summer of 1996.
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