Expat Jon Chapple's bass and vocal parts are being performed by Damien Sayell of The St. These days they have an asterisk at the end of their name to denote a change in personnel. After a handful of sporadic comeback shows, the band have been touring again. "Only, it's fed through the filter of self-respect," he has specified.Īnd now Mclusky have returned, at least partially. Yet Falkous insists it has always been his intention to make some form of pop music, with melodies and choruses and similarly palatable ingredients. His music has often been mislabelled noise rock on account of its, well, noisiness as well its frequent shouty bits and often darkly humorous lyrics. Mclusky's spirit has lived on through Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone's next band Future Of The Left, as well as Falkous' sort-of-solo-project Christian Fitness. Or had a tune featured on a Nissan advert.ĭeath also means rebirth, however, according to Tarot card enthusiasts and the chipper outlook of David Lynch.
Or made a plonker out of himself on the reality TV show Celebrity Stanford Prison Experiment. If only Mclusky had put the same effort into their footwear and hairstyles as they'd put into their three fabulous albums of fiercely idiosyncratic indie-punk, he could have been a judge on The Voice by now. Mclusky appeared on the Reading & Leeds bills too, on a smaller stage than those trodden by The Hives, Steven "I'm not a racist, but." Morrissey, and The Ordinary Boys. It is entirely possible that Mclusky's cause wasn't helped by an interview with The Telegraph newspaper that began with the sentence "Andy Falkous says he was betrayed by the music magazine NME before he was ever in a band." And he wore scruffy trainers like a normal person.
Singer and guitarist Andrew Falkous had a shaved head for Christ's sake. And in December, Mclusky played their final gig.Ĭardiff-based and graced with a networking nous comparable to that of Norman Bates, Mclusky never had the right hair or shoes. In October of that year, John Peel died (literally). McNicholas had instigated a policy of reserving the pages of his magazine for the exclusive appearance of musicians who had "good hair and good shoes".
He was NME editor at the time and the arch fabricator of a scene christened - try not to be sick in your mouth as you read this - "The New Rock Revolution". Much of their success was down to the support of one Conor McNicholas. Elsewhere on that line-up were The Libertines, Razorlight, Franz Ferdinand, and The Von Bondies.
Meanwhile over at Reading & Leeds, the bill was topped by another joke that had got way out of hand: The Darkness, who at that time had released only one album of throwback hair-rock cack. At the final night of Glastonbury, Muse headlined for the first but by no means final time. All photographs courtesy of Jonathan PirroĢ004 was the year the music died.