NEWS: All hail the return of BOYS WONDER

“The greatest band that never was is now the future” – Vic Reeves

1987 was not a great year for British pop music by anyone’s standards.

U2 were deep into their chest-beating period, the Beach Boys were collabbing with the Fat Boys, and radio stations pumped out ‘Living in A Box’, ‘Star Trekkin’ and alarmingly frequent new releases from Shakin’ Stevens, Samantha Fox and Five Star. No wonder The Smiths decided to call it a day.

With hindsight, we were holding our breath for Madchester and Britpop.

But imagine this gap being filled with a band who chose to ignore the prevailing consensus and combine perfect pop choruses with a high-fashion boot-boy image and barbed, laugh-out-loud lyrics: Queen meets the Sex Pistols. Had Boys Wonder appeared in 1995 on the cusp of Britpop, their career might have been different. Listen to them now and you’ll immediately be reminded of Blur, Supergrass, the Sladeier side of Oasis and the arched eyebrow of Pulp.

But this being 1987, Boys Wonder were ignored or openly dismissed by pop gatekeepers like Radio 1, NME and Melody Maker.

Now, finally, in 2024 on October 11th comes the release of “Question Everything”. Released digitally, on vinyl and 22 track CD “Question Everything” is a diverse collection of material from the various stages of the band’s career – more than half of which are demos, as the band only ever released three singles.
It is, for all intent and purposes, their first album.

Boys Wonder’s first 2 singles on Sire Records, ‘Now What Earthman’ and ‘Shine On Me’ proved unsuccessful. Rough Trade took the reins for the 3rd single “Goodbye Jimmy Dean”. The first 2 releases had just about captured the band’s histrionic prowess but ‘Goodbye Jimmy Dean’ nailed it: blessed with a towering chorus, backing vocals to die for, and words dripping with attitude and humour, it gives nods and winks to The Who and The Beatles, and boasts a middle eight, a key change and a searing Graham Jones’ (previously of Haircut 100) guitar solo. Oh, and handclaps too. Sadly it too refused to make a dent in the charts.

Mike Smith and Ben Wardle of the Scared Hitless label witnessed Boys Wonder live back in 1988 – memories of the set Boys Wonder played that night is still fresh in their heads: Both carried fragments of the songs internally for over 30 years – the way you used to have to before the Internet made that part of your brain redundant. Imagine their joy when they began the excavation of the band’s recordings for this album release and finally got to hear the songs they were beginning to think they’d imagined: ‘Elvis 75’, ‘Platform Boots’, ‘Lady Hangover.’ … The fact that the songs didn’t shrivel up and die in the daylight of reality is testament to their quality.

But there were more riches than just the Steve Jones-meets-Brian May formula. Brought up in South East London, twins Ben and Scott Addison had been exposed by culturally rich parents to an eclectic mix of soundtracks, musicals and classic pop and all of this fed into their material including Tin Pan Alley-inspired tracks like ‘Song Of Sixpence’, ‘Mayfair’, ‘Soho Sunday Morning’ and ‘I’m Alright Jack’. As with the rock tunes, some of the joy of listening to these songs is to spot the influences and references – listen out for traces of Bowie’s ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ lurking in ‘I’m Alright Jack’, enjoy the twins channelling Anthony Newley’s showtune professionalism in ‘Song Of Sixpence’ and note that the verses of Who-inspired ‘Platform Boots’ also take their time signature from ‘On Broadway’.

As the 90s got going, this meta-approach to pop music, appropriating and mashing up styles, became the norm. It was partly helped by the ease of sampling technology and the increasing access to niche music on CD but also because acts such as Primal Scream, Massive Attack and later Oasis made it acceptable and cool. In 1988, it was not cool; it simply didn’t demonstrate the required levels of rock authenticity and earnestness.

That decade saw Boys Wonder taking another characteristically sharp turn left and following the prevailing winds of dance culture and the time Britpop arrived in 1994, the twins had abandoned Boys Wonder and redirected their musical chops into the Jimmy Smith-inspired spy theme grooves of Corduroy. Now they were finally able to grip momentarily onto the Zeitgeist.

So, try for a moment, to imagine a parallel universe, where nestling comfortably alongside the great UK pop visionaries who emerged in the late 80s and 90s: Damon, Noel and Jarvis but also Neil Hannon, PJ Harvey, Brett Anderson, Louise Wener, Gaz Coombes, Thom Yorke, Robbie Williams, Chris Martin and Stuart Murdoch … alongside them, perhaps even at the top of the table, sit Ben and Scott Addison.

Not so hard, once you’ve listened to this album.

Available on vinyl, CD and digitally, track-listings go like this:

VINYL
Side 1
Goodbye Jimmy Dean
Submarine
Song Of Sixpence
Platform Boots
Hot Rod
Soho Sunday Morning
Side 2
Shine On Me
Elvis 75
I’m Alright jack
Come On Love
Now What Earthman
I’ve Never Been To Mayfair

CD:
Goodbye Jimmy Dean
Submarine
Song Of Sixpence
Platform Boots
Hot Rod
Soho Sunday Morning
Shine On Me
Elvis 75
I’m Alright jack
Come On Love
Now What Earthman
I’ve Never Been To Mayfair
Lady Hangover
Ten Million Ton Headache
We All Hate Honesty
Tomorrow
Stop it
Hey Mister
Hello Angels
Baby It’s No Joke
Never Steal Anything Small
Viva Boys Wonder

Boys Wonder line-ups featured:
Ben Addison – vocals
Scott Addison – guitar
Graham Jones – guitar
Pascal Consoli – drums
Les Nemes – bass
Chris Tate – bass
Tony Barber – bass

(and if you’ve read this far…there could be a live show or 2… watch this space)

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