Wake Up - Boo Radleys (The)

Wake Up represented a daring new challenge for the Boo Radleys: after the psychedelic masterpeice 'Giant Steps', what now? David Cavanagh's excellent book, 'The Creation Records Story' recalls The Boo Radleys' guitarist/songwriter Martin Carr having a conversation about opportunities to become famous with publisher Mike Smith. Smith warns that such a goal would mean, "playing to the very people that tormented you at school – the bullies, the ...
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1995 was the height of Britpop, and the perfect time for the Boo Radleys to attempt a commercial move into the mainstream. The first single, 'Wake Up, Boo!' was specifically designed to be just that: a deviously clever indie-anthem that could appeal to all ages, it can still be heard on commercial radio station across the UK. It's not that hard to see its instant appeal: blaring, catchy brass nestles with clipped, funky guitar and ... more

Wake Up represented a daring new challenge for the Boo Radleys: after the psychedelic masterpeice 'Giant Steps', what now? David Cavanagh's excellent book, 'The Creation Records Story' recalls The Boo Radleys' guitarist/songwriter Martin Carr having a conversation about opportunities to become famous with publisher Mike Smith. Smith warns that such a goal would mean, "playing to the very people that tormented you at school – the bullies, the football kids, the wankers". Carr's response? "Bring on the wankers".

1995 was the height of Britpop, and the perfect time for the Boo Radleys to attempt a commercial move into the mainstream. The first single, 'Wake Up, Boo!' was specifically designed to be just that: a deviously clever indie-anthem that could appeal to all ages, it can still be heard on commercial radio station across the UK. It's not that hard to see its instant appeal: blaring, catchy brass nestles with clipped, funky guitar and joyous harmonies for an easily digestible treat. Its sweetness may irritate some, but Carr still has enough nous to keep the interest up, adding a middle-eight that moves quickly and encompasses more ideas in its structure than most pop songs do in their entire length. 'Wake Up Boo!' also opens the album, with an a cappella intro added to further push the charming pop quota of the record.

It's followed by 'Fairfax Scene', a simple, short reverie to loss which perhaps wafts past a little too easily. 'It's Lulu' comes next, brought in on a wave of noise and harmonies that soon reveal the song proper. The one real failure here, it's a needless attempt to push the 'Wake Up Boo!' formula to its absurd conclusion: the horns are too in-your-face, the words too vacant, the tune too insanely happy. In the end, it just doesn't work.

However, the next track, 'Joel', is where the album really starts to belie it commercial aspirations and plunge into darker and more stimulating territory. The first 'proper' Boo Radleys song here, it's also the best so far, an acoustic lament slowly unravelled by backwards effects and Beatles-esque strings that break into a funk-inspired mantra, before finally collapsing into a eerily appropriate ending of swelling guitars and endlessly swishing noise. The journey is thrilling, evoking a variety of emotions that few bands could hope to mimic, let alone understand.

It's followed by two more commercial songs. 'Find the Answer Within' was the follow-up to the 'Wake Up Boo!' albatross, which failed to shine beneath the latter songs shadow. In fact, it's a glorious pop confection (its main descending chord sequence sharing a lot in common with Oasis's 'Whatever'), as is the following song, 'Reaching Out From Here'. Both could (and, quite frankly, should) have been big hits: even if 'Reaching Out From Here' was never actually released as a single!

The second half of the album is the point where all pretence to pleasing the mainstream is dropped; the songs becoming longer and more complex and fractured. It's all the better for this move, and offers the listener a more exciting challenge and experience in comparison to what has come before. Each song is carefully arranged, relying especially on beautiful minor key chord changes to reinforce an array of wonderfully melancholic melodies. The lyrics very occasionally don't come up to scratch (such as on 'Martin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clock'), but the music more than makes up for this shortfall: The Boo Radleys are no ordinary Britpop band. 'Stuck on Amber' is a case in point: an uncomfortable, dissonant opening leads into a complex verse that surges into a vivacious, memorable chorus. It seems unlikely and ridiculous, but the skill of the band makes it work, and the lengthy end groove becomes a magnificent peak of the record. 'Charles Bukowski Is Dead' and '4am Conversation' both emphasise the more extreme edge to the band. The former starts as a catchy, xylophone-led narrative, but halfway through announces a gear-shift into an enormous a cappella round, phased and panned in such a woozy way as to leave you happily disorientated. '4am Conversation' is possibly stranger: a tiny sound that slowly builds into a massive beast, which ends as quickly as it began. Not an easy song to grasp in its subtleties, it only really begins to reveal itself after a few listens.

After the noisy blast of 'Twinside' we reach the final track 'Wilder' – an MOR piano ballad, of all things. It combines the two contrasting elements running throughout this entire album perfectly. You could see George Michael covering most of the song, but who knows what he'd make of the lengthy ending, where the piano vanishes and the drums come in, and superficially nothing appears to happen quite slowly. It's these kinds of touches that finally turn the mainstream off: but they were also what made The Boo Radleys such a unique, brilliant band. 

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