Rock CD

Johnny Boy, Johnny Boy

(Johnny Boy)
4 out of 5 4
Johnny Boy, Johnny Boy

If critical acclaim automatically equalled commercial success, then Johnny Boy's second single, the catchily titled You Were the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve, would now be as ubiquitous as James Blunt's You're Beautiful. On its release in 2004, the single attracted hysterical praise everywhere from broadsheets to blogs. Nor did it want for celebrity endorsement: the duo were feted by Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield and Mick Jones, who may well have heard an echo of his post-Clash band Big Audio Dynamite amid the track's audacious melange of styles. Johnny Marr said it was "the best thing out all year", while film-maker and DJ Don Letts went further: he announced that the track had given him an erection. In the States, USA Today proclaimed it single of the year, undaunted by the fact that the single wasn't actually released in the States.

A lot of the praise carried with it a tang of pleasant surprise. We live in an era when a lot of rock and pop artists behave as if they're working in customer services: their aim is to give the listener what they think the listener wants. Here was a single that represented the exact opposite of that approach. Before coming across You Were the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve, it seems unlikely that anyone thought the one thing they really needed to hear was a vitriolic, anti-consumerist polemic set to a glorious spiralling melody, drums pinched from the Ronettes' Be My Baby, psychedelic backwards guitar, brass that recalled the theme tune to Rocky, massed vocal harmonies and firework sound effects. After hearing it, you wondered how you ever managed without it.

But on release, You Were the Generation That Bought More Shoes ... didn't so much flop as evaporate. It disappeared so conclusively that you expected to see posters bearing a blurred picture of its sleeve in railway stations and a police-organised press conference at which tearful pleas were made for anyone who knew its whereabouts to come forward. There were dark tales of singles not reaching shops, and of bitter artistic disputes and litigation with their then-label, Vertigo, which gave one the chance to appreciate the bleak irony in a single attacking the malign influence of multinational corporations effectively being buried by a wing of a multi- national corporation.

Given the vast fanfare afforded You Were the Generation That Bought More Shoes ..., there should be something faintly pitiable about Johnny Boy's eponymous debut album quietly emerging nearly three years later on their own label: the unmistakable sense of making-do in reduced circumstances ought to cast a vaguely tragic pall over its contents. But sympathy isn't among the emotions its contents elicit. For the most part, the album is as striking, daring and unlikely as its first song. That single and its predecessor, Johnny Boy Theme, suggested a band in thrall to the sound of 60s girl groups - the latter, also present here, is a particularly heady whirl of cut-up harmonies and tumbling drum samples - but the album never settles on a particular style. Wall Street switches unexpectedly from a soft- focused cocktail jazz shuffle into the wind-tunnel dynamics of My Bloody Valentine. Formaldehyde is frantic punk rock, War On Want a curious fusion of twanging, Duane-Eddy-ish guitar, graceful arcs of white noise and a beat you might have described as trip-hop a decade ago.

The disparate styles are held together by the duo's apparently limitless supply of euphoric melodies, and the lyrical tone. The album keeps up the anti-consumerist rhetoric throughout, mercifully tending towards smart Manic Street Preachers-style opacity rather than hectoring didacticism. In the age of complaint rock, where the prevalent emotional modes are either wistful or slightly grumpy, there's something hugely invigorating about hearing an album that sounds genuinely angry, particularly when the anger comes wrapped in such gleeful pop music.

Occasionally, the duo's ambition slightly outstrips their ability. Someone perhaps should have dissuaded vocalist Hayes from rapping on Bonny Parker's 115th Dream, though any discomfort at her doing so is cancelled out by the song's sudden eruption into an immense, elated chorus with a Bo Diddley beat. Meanwhile, there's presumably meant to be something knowingly naff about Livin' in the City, from its rotten title through its stadium rock guitar histrionics, to its drum sample that winkingly recalls the over-used break from Lynn Collins' Think (it's the one that features James Brown going "Wooh! Yeah!"). Whatever the intention behind the track, it surely can't have been to reawaken unwelcome memories of bullish-but-hopeless 90s techno-rock combo Republica, which is what it ends up doing.

But that's a rare lapse. More often, Johnny Boy's debut album warrants precisely the same kind of acclaim as their hit-single-that-never-was. The one thing it doesn't deserve is the same fate.

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