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mr-ig · 9 months

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On the Bardots

As it happens, I recently turned up a small pile of diaries from the nineties, stuffed into a holdall with my old ZX Spectrum, some scart leads and a couple of pink plastic kazoos. By that time, I was, mercifully, beyond documenting my romantic woes in gruesome detail, but I hadn't yet got out of the habit of writing hysterical notes about gigs I'd been to and earnestly noting down a weekly playlist.

As I adjusted to my twenties, that weekly diet was somewhat lacking in fresh ingredients. Random example from 1991: Ministry, God, Terminal Cheesecake, Godflesh, Codeine, Swans, Wedding Present. Gives me a touch of indigestion just thinking about it. It was about to change. Random example from 1993: Insides, Shara Nelson, Metalheads, Seefeel, Orbital. A lightening of the mood, a broadening of the palette, and a great many guitar bands would not survive the cull. One guitar band in particular, however, would still be appearing in my diary's weekly hit parade even in 1997, the last year that I kept.

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For a brief moment, the Bardots were the music press darlings of cliché. Entirely unafraid of pomposity and pretentiousness, they were tailor-made for the Melody Maker of the time, and for an indie scene swooning to Suede and hungry for some post-Madchester glamour. They were rewarded with Single of the Week a couple of times, first for the chiming cascade of Pretty O and then for the barbed dream-pop of Shallow. A knack for flowing melody and extravagant melodrama was noted and would persist. They received a full-page interview, a high-profile live review.

My memory suggests that the live review sounded a somewhat disappointed note, complaining of the band's reluctance to engage with its audience, suggesting that success would require a greater generosity of spirit towards paying punters. Honestly, you couldn't have found a way to make them sound like a more perfect fit: for several years, I'd steadfastly (and yes, absurdly) refused to applaud bands, on the grounds that they ought to know whether they were any good or not without my assistance. I didn't want to be engaged with, thank you kindly, and would be delighted to accept the invitation to stand there with my arms folded looking unimpressed in return.

Which I duly did, at the Concorde on Brighton seafront on Wednesday 16th September 1992. "Pristine pop, for once, for always" says my uncharacteristically pithy diary entry. My recollection is that the audience comprised me and another bloke; we had a friendly chat, it would've seemed rude not to. The Bardots delivered their set shrouded in projections of red roses and razor blades, and they did indeed seem largely indifferent to our presence. Not hard to ignore an audience of two, it's true.

To my mind, falling in love with a new band requires that they tick precisely the right number of boxes. Too few and it's all awkward silences, nothing in common; too many and there's no nervous tension to play with. I fell in love. Tried not to show it too much, obviously.

The belief that everyone else would come to love them too has not weathered well. I've tried, God knows. I'm still trying, evidently. A comprehensive history of the band, having detailed its roots at the University of East Anglia and the lightly fey stylings of early material and that initial music press interest, would inevitably hang much upon the fact that Cheree Records went bust at the point of releasing debut album Eye Baby, and that the album therefore received almost none of the promotional fanfare that it deserved. Disastrous timing, cruel fate. We'll never know what might've happened in different circumstances, but I feel that the argument in favour of thwarted superstardom would be on more solid ground if a single bastard one of the countless people upon whom I've foisted the Bardots over the years had shown even the merest interest.

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No matter. Perhaps I wouldn't hold them so dear if I'd had to share them. In truth, I'm not wholly convinced about selling Eye Baby to you as some kind of lost masterpiece: it's got a rather one-size-fits-all production, cavernous and cloudy, which doesn't necessarily do favours for its best songs. Those best songs fill up most of the second half and they're remarkable, to my ears: Gloriole, for example, is a hot mess of a thing, constantly stumbling and stalling and then launching itself off again and only just making it over the two minute mark. Caterina begins in a similar vein before slowing down to admire its own elaborate swirls of guitar. The tortured waltz of Obscenity Thing has always been the one for me, descending as it does into an oddly dubby, lightly flagellating middle section before reviving its chorus for one last turn around the dancefloor. It's absurd, and complicated, and ambitious, and sublime. It's everything I wanted indie pop to want to be. Still do.

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That first clutch of records gives the impression of a band with songs to burn, yet without a really clear idea of how those songs ought to sound. That never encumbered them live, but the studio can be a treacherous place: even their sole Peel session leaves the sense that the very best versions of these songs stayed in their writers' imaginations. There's no absence of execution: Neil and Steve Cox were a lithe, fluent rhythm section; guitarists Andy Murphy and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, brother of Adorable's Pete Fij, never let pyrotechnics obscure the tunes; smartly-dressed frontman Simon Dunford had a gift for delivering his lyrics as if they were far simpler, and far more innocent, than closer inspection revealed. I saw them twice more, in venues of diminishing size, and they huddled together like an insular little gang before they took the stage. Wagons circled, like they were talking about us, judging us. I couldn't have loved them more.

Bar interim single We Are Fiasco - a delightfully celebratory take on their predicament - they disappeared from sight for the best part of three years. The album which eventually resulted, V-Neck, is one that I cherish deeply…and perhaps all the more for the fact that it's always existed in a total vacuum. The Bardots were, apparently, no more by that point, just a line in their label's newsletter to announce that they'd packed it in. Then and now, I'm not sure that I've ever heard any opinion of that record other than my own. No press releases, no interviews, no reviews, nothing. It's a funny place for one of your favourite albums to sit. Over the years, I've weighed every nuance of those songs, rejoiced in every revelation, dissected every flaw, and it's almost as if it belongs only to the six of us, them and me.

With one line-up change - Yves Altana replacing Andy Murphy on guitar - and some evident stock-taking, the Bardots finally had a sound worthy of their songs. Or mostly, at any rate: there are a couple of moments when the budget evidently doesn't stretch to an actual string section, something that's easy to forgive. But where Eye Baby was all very thoroughly coloured-in, sometimes outside the lines as well as in, V-Neck leaves plenty of room for the listener to do some of their own shading. It's a more minimal, skeletal record, and yet a more vibrant one too, and its use of subtle texture and sly detail and well-judged restraint seems to owe just the right amount to the likes of Magazine and Wire. It sounds like they've taken their self-absorption to its logical end: where once it was rather performative, now it just seems that they've spent months writing and perfecting songs simply to satisfy themselves. Almost nobody else would ever hear them, which is almost everybody else's loss.

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When it does want to prowl and pout and preen, to be the Bardots of old, it does so with new-found assurance. It's a record which understands the power of a moment left to linger for a second or two. The Colony Room, for example, saunters lazily down the corridor, leans in the doorway with an eyebrow arched, holds the pose for a line before bursting into the room. Sole single Carrion does the same, screaming guitars held in check for just long enough. Elsewhere, English Lovers bides its sweet time for four minutes before a climax which tastes of summer rain, each element allowed to breathe pure fresh air with arms outstretched. Violent Love is all poison and pirouettes, and it chooses to close its eyes and turn faster and faster until everything becomes a soothing blur. Skin Diving is simply ravishing, and "We'll steal ourselves a car/And take us to the world" has always seemed the most romantic of lines.

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It's a record of oblique angles and sudden openings and great tunes, and every song is a slim novella, and every chorus has a counter-chorus, and every line has a little bit of mischief hidden in it. Dunford constantly ties his words into grammatical knots and bows and I've never had much of an idea what he's on about half the time, apart from an inkling that it's probably quite rude. He never had such fun as he does here, his lyrics spinning their way around whatever spiraling guitar lines Fijalkowski and Altana have conjured up. Or maybe they're spinning around him. There's a lot of spiraling and spinning, anyway. They conclude, forever, with Feeling Juvenile - "Stop stop press/Life's complex" - and it fades into silence with one final gorgeous intertwining of all five band members, each flying their own streamer, trailing it into the distance. Not a happy ending, perhaps, but a fitting one.

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Krzysztof Fijalkowski would form Polak with his brother, Simon Dunford joined their ranks for a bit; their tilt at stardom didn't quite make it into orbit either. The Bardots reformed for a one-off gig in Norwich back in 2009; I found out about it a month after it'd happened. There's been almost nothing but silence since, until a sudden flurry of social media activity recently leading to both albums being made available on Bandcamp and the usual streaming services. The records finally being out there again may or - oh, if you insist - may not secure their rightful place in history. It does at least give me something tangible to refer you to, something to prove they existed.

Because - and I do appreciate that there are far greater injustices - I find myself slightly alienated by a world in which Suede have ascended to become alternative national treasures and nobody gives a flying toss about Dunford and co. It feels a bit personal, somehow. It requires me to accept that I'm wrong, to swallow my pride, and I still can't quite do it. World domination is too much to ask, clearly, but I'd love it if one person, just one, could find it in their heart to cherish this band half as much as I do.

Perhaps it could be you.

#bardots #eye baby #v-neck #your new favourite band #Youtube

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