GOLDMINE vol 27 no 18, issue #551
7 Sep 2001
$3.95

Footnote Archives
SLEEPER'S (BRIEF) HOLD ON BRIT-POP
by Dave Thompson
transcribed by Vu

It barely seems possible, but it's almost exactly 10 years since the words "Brit" and "pop" first started moving together to describe the exciting new musical force lurking in the backwoods of the British underground. It was late 1991 when Blur, fresh home from a quite disastrous American tour, commenced the body swerve in the direction that would lead to the prototypical Modern Life Is Rubbish album, which in turn begat the quintessential Parklife; and, while the true peak of the movement would not be reached for a little while longer (1995-96 is generally seen as the apogee of the Brit-pop movement), still one cannot help but wonder where so many hopes and dreams lie now.

A few of them are, apparently, still bubbling. Last summer, the news came through that Louise Wener, formerly the figurehead of Sleeper, was finally preparing her solo rebirth; in February of this year, it was reported that she's set to publish her first novel next year. The silence has lain unbroken since then, but still it's hard to repress a fission of excitement at the thought. For, across three years and two albums smack in the middle of the 1990s, Sleeper posited a future for Brit-pop that none of the movement's better remembered heroes ever envisioned -- and that despite being utterly opposed to the pigeonhole.

"For me, Brit-pop's just another media term," Wener shrugged. "There's a lot of different scenes gone on over the course of the two years we've been together, and we've had them all. We were New Wave Of New Wave a couple of years ago. What British bands have done is rediscover the concept of a tune, the art of songwriting If Brit-pop's anything, it's that. I think it was Brian Epstein who said that the next big thing is a good song." Wener just happened to have a lot of them.

Singer/guitarist Wener was born July 30, 1968, in Gants Hill, east London. It wasn't an environment she necessarily cherished. "It's not only on the outskirts of London," she said, "it's on the edge of everything. There's something about growing up in the dregs, the badlands, away from it all... you're not even a suburb. It's no-man's land. It has its very own set of images.

She got out as quickly as she could, enrolling in college to study English and politics in the northern city of Manchester. It was there that she met guitarist John Stewart in 1992, and the pair formed their first band together soon after. They'd both been in groups before, but Wener reflected, "for a long while, all the bands that 1 was in, everyone else did the songwriting and I barely played guitar at all. Then I thought, 'Shit, I'm gonna have to learn because I'm sure I can do this better,' and I sort of took over the whole thing and it really began to flourish from that.

The pair moved back to London the following year, recruiting Somalia-born bassist Diid Osman and drummer Andy McClure, a man whose resume included The Crawl and the l0-piece ska orchestra The Mable String Quarter. The quarter began gigging that summer under the name Surrender Dorothy but changed it, Stewart explained, after discovering "there are about a dozen Surrender Dorothys in America." By late 1993, already signed to the independent Indolent label on the strength of a demo of the song "Stay," the band debuted as Sleeper with the single "Alice In Vain."

February 1994 bought the follow-up, "Swallow"; while May delivered "Delicious," the cue for Wener to unleash her own brand of sexual philosophy onto a nation lulled into soporific mateyness by the singing electricians elsewhere around the Brit-pop firmament. Tours opening for Manic Street Preachers and, even more impressive, Blur, confirmed Sleeper's ascendancy -- for audiences gathered reverently to hear about girls doing boys like they're girls. It was one thing for Damon Albarn to tell them to cut down on their pork life ("Get a bit of exercise."); it was quite another for Wener to chastise them, "you're so dirty.., make it dirtier." Sleeper need not have made another record; Wener was making headlines on her own -- and the band's first album was still to arrive.

When Smart finally arrived, it was an utter revelation. The most eagerly awaited album of the year became the first to actually eclipse the hype, hope and hubris that attended it - even if the tabloid press did spend most of its time searching for details of Wener's mid-sessions split with boyfriend Stewart. Of such things, of course, Big (Fleetwood) Mac rumors could be wrought, but regret and bitterness were confined to just one song, the birds 'n' blokes-flavored "Inbetweener," an epic of suburban angst camouflaged as a tough-talking tale of modern birds 'n' blokes.

"Lady Love Your Countryside," a dig at SMASH's less ecologically minded song of a similar name, "Delicious" and "Alice In Vain" were the primary points of entry; former singles one and all, they allowed one to chart Sleeper's growth at the same time as marveling at their speed; by the time you hit "Inbetweener," the band's first U.K. Top 20 hit, Smart was enshrined as much an induction as an introduction.

Defying media predictions that Sleeper, (like so many other emergent bands of the era) were unlikely ever to repeat the Smart experience, Wener lost no time debuting new material at the same time as playing down the personal pre-eminence that had hit the headlines before. She even retired the "Another Female Fronted Indie Guitar Band" type T-shirt she used to wear with such belligerent pride.

"The press leaped on one line 'we should both go to bed til We make each other raw' from one song ['Delicious, Sleeper's third single] and tried to make that define me for a whole year. I thought the whole thing was quite bizarre, and 'Lie Detector' [a new song scheduled for the next album] is a bit of a response to that, and the way women in particular are caricatured, like you're not really allowed to be funny and clever and write good tunes.

Summer 1995 saw Sleeper make their first trip to the U.S., debuting on American TV with a six-song showcase on the late-night Beat Zone. "I spent six months in the States when I was at college, lived in and around Boston, went down the whole East Coast," Wener recalled. "But it was strange to turn up in places like L.A. and San Francisco, which seemed such a long way away and have people queuing up to get into our gigs and knowing all the words to our songs."

It was the same story in Japan, Sleeper's next port of call. "Japan was brilliant. I think I've never been anywhere so similar and yet so foreign at the same time. It was a very weird contradiction. Incredibly polite people, but there's a very repressive feel about it. It's very strange."

Another British tour followed; another single, "Vegas, kept the band in the U.K. Top 20. But it was a fall 1995 Radio One session that truly proved Sleeper's follow-up potential. Four new songs included "What Do I Do Now!" possibly the most painfully perceptive mid-break-;p narrative ever to be disguised as a pop single. By the time Sleeper brought former Smiths/Morrissey producer Stephen Street in to supervise their next album (a hit re-recording of "What Do I Do Now!" among them), the doubters had long since buttoned their lips. Wener laughed, "I remember people were saying, 'Ah, you'll never do anything,' and then saying, '"Inbetweeners" will be the last thing she ever does,' and then, 'Oh no, now she's done "Vegas,"' and then, 'Oh no, now she's done "What Do I Do Now!"' 'Oh no....' There was a lot of skepticism about us, I think.''

Marveling in the mundanities of life but without the exaggerated eccentricities of Blur and Pulp, with musical bases slipping from classic Blondie to mid-period Beatles but avoiding the twin traps of affectation and retro posturing, The It Girl positioned Sleeper firmly on the brink of a major breakthrough.

"It is a lot more confident," Wener reflected at the time. "I think we really found our feet with this one. It almost felt like the first album paved the way for it. This is also the first time we've had a long period to sit down. I locked myself away and just wrote and had the best time writing it. And now, I can sit and listen to it and really enjoy it, as if I'm not connected with it, which is really weird because I've never done that with anything I've written before. I just like to put it on because I love the songs."

The singles "Sale Of The Century," "Nice Guy Eddie" and "Statuesque" all breached the U.S. Top 20, while an American tour with Elvis Costello in 1996 not only earned the group the maestro's applause, but also a B-side on his own latest single. Sleeper's cover of Costello's "Other Side Of The Tele- scope" backed the "Useless Beauty" 45, while a dramatic reworking of Blondie's "Atomic" was a key addition to the cult movie Trainspotting soundtrack.

It all came tumbling down with Sleeper's third album. While the U.K. media jokingly savaged Wener's newfound public pre-eminence, relegating the remainder of the band to the status of mere "Sleeper blokes," the group fell apart during sessions for an album that Wener insisted was to be called Cunt London but that eventually emerged as Pleased To Meet You.

Osman was sacked in June 1997 to be replaced in the studio by Madder Rose bassist Chris Giammalvo, and with the album sessions' dragging on, Sleeper canceled a scheduled appearance at the Reading Festival. Pleased To Meet You finally emerged that fall, but unfortunately, few people were. Wener's face alone appeared on the album cover, and despite entering the U.K. chart at a high of #7, it was swiftly: apparent that sales of the record were never going to approach the peaks of it's predecessors.

The problems were apparent from the outset -- alas, poor Louise, we loved her too much. Gone was the abrasive sexual scratchiness that was the band's original calling card; gone was the raw bollock-blasting that was the sound of Sleeper in heat. In their place came the belief that "real songs" are "smooth songs," that ballads were somehow more lasting than rockers, that sensitivity was Superior to gut emotion. Growing old before the band had even grown up, Pleased to Meet You was the kind of record bands make after they've sold out to Middle America, and it really didn't matter how highly Costello rated Wener's songwriting talents. His latest work wasn't exactly anything to write home about either.

With Dan Kauffman now on bass, a distinctly out-of-sorts Sleeper toured Britain through the fall of 1997, but three successive singles fared increasingly poorly -- "She's A Good Girl" scraped to #28, "Romeo Me" to #39, and "Motor Man" [sic; Motorway Man] bottomed out altogether. 1998 then opened with Wener angrily denying split rumors -- only for Kauffman to quit in February. Giammalvo came back for a poorly attended second British tour, but news that Sleeper's U.S. label, Arista, had canceled the Stateside release of Pleased To Meet You hit the band's future plans hard. So did the closure of the Indolent label in July, and five months later, on Dec. 30, 1998, Wener announced Sleeper's demise. Stewart relocated to L.A. and joined a new band, UFO Bro; Wener and McClure announced plans to form a new band.

The story ended there, and for a long time it seemed that the book was finished as well. Now it seems that there will be further chapters, and no matter how disappointing that final Sleeper album may have been, track back to the two that preceded it, and Wener's return isn't simply something to look forward to. It's worth much, much more than that.