(#555: 28 September 1996, 2 weeks)
Track listing: Hey Dude/Night On The Town/Temple Of Everlasting Light/Govinda/Smart Dogs/Magic Theatre/Into The Deep/Sleeping Jiva/Tattva/Grateful When You’re Dead-Jerry Was There/303/Start All Over/Hollow Man (Parts 1 & 2)
There to fill a gap in the market rather than create a new one, Kula Shaker were briefly in public favour in the mid-nineties. They evolved from a psych-Mod revival band called The Kays and frontman Crispian Mills was (is) the son of Hayley and the grandson of Sir John. They became popular with boys who don’t care to think too much and K – as Alan Bennett has noted, “the angriest of letters” – probably would have gone nowhere near number one, let alone spend a fortnight there, at any other moment.
K is mostly an enterprising but finally dull affair. On the back of a few catchy singles we find not very much, other than standard, gruel-heavy rock workouts which could have come from a below-par Charlatans album. Nor are the singles themselves, generally, of much merit. “Hey Dude” – incredibly, a number two hit – sounds like the boyfriends of The Last Dinner Party having a go at being Black Grape, though ends with the decidedly non-Ryderian protest that “But you treat me like a woman when I feel like a man!” Mills is neither Joe Elliott nor Shania Twain.
Similarly, the devotional mock-ragas of “Govinda” and “Tattva,” however heartfelt their content, plod unexcitingly with none of the natural fizz of Cornershop’s "6am Jullandar Shere" (from an album entitled, pointedly, Woman’s Gotta Have It). Alonza Bevan is, it has to be said, an excellent bass player, and there are times when the band do show a modest degree of adventure – the abandoned television theme instrumental “Magic Theatre,” and the later moments of “Into The Deep” where the band do make something of an effort – not nearly enough of an effort, but at least it’s something - to escape their Stone Roses backdrop. The way Mills just about manages to get through the line “Think I'll grow myself a big ol' hairy moustache” without corpsing in “303” demonstrates an admirable and humorous sense of self-awareness. On the other hand, the portentously-titled “Hollow Man (Parts 1 & 2)” constitutes tedious sub-Pink Floyd noodling; if they were thinking of recapturing the uncanny magic of Gilmour’s three-part “The Narrow Way” from Ummagumma, then they were some considerable distance away from doing so.
Where Kula Shaker unexpectedly thrive is when they drop the spiritual pretensions and bullet-point philosophy and simply concentrate on being a rock band. The problem for me, and for those of you expecting a full-on demolition of this band and record, is that “Grateful When You’re Dead” is beyond question a fantastic and dynamic pop single which would have worked at any time between 1966 and 2006. It does its business in about two minutes fifty and even its album segue into yet more tiresome ambient bollocks cannot mar its undeniable power. On it, Mills sounds as though he’s been suddenly snapped awake.
Perhaps the band’s best moment, which got grudgingly added to later editions of the album, was their 1997 number two smash hit single reading of “Hush,” the old Joe South/Deep Purple warhorse and a performance which to my ears is far more reminiscent of The Prisoners than The Charlatans; it strips out all the extraneous luggage (no solos), Mills assaults the song with genuine zest and, again, it takes just two minutes and 58 seconds to make its point. They treat the song as colourful Archies bubblegum, something Tommy James and the Shondells could have done (and there is nothing on K to approach “Crystal Blue Persuasion”).
But it didn’t last. Mills made some hazily naïve comments about reclaiming the swastika from the Nazis and returning the symbol to its Hindu origins – the term “swastika” in Sanskrit means “conductive to wellbeing” and first appeared in print in Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, serving as explanation of a grammatical point – and was summarily pilloried and rendered unmutual. It then transpired that Mills’ previous-but-one band, Objects Of Desire, deployed the slogan “England will rise again” – which might have worked on a European Cup level in 1996 but not at all in 1993 – and also performed at a Wembley conference of conspiracy theorists entitled “Global Deception”; one of the chief speakers at the latter, William Cooper – the term “illuminati” tells you all that you need to know about him (except that he was shot dead in a gun battle with the Arizona police in November 2001) – is thanked in the credits of K.
Kula Shaker did not really recover from any of this. The controversy – which Mills later publicly decried – torpedoed the prospects for their then-imminent second album, Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts, and the band split in September 1999. They reformed in 2004 and have subsequently continued to perform and record; this year’s Natural Magick album even restored them to the top thirty. But their moment was perhaps always fated to be brief.
