Sometimes you have to travel through the darkest of places to find beauty in its truest form.
Shack, like Pale Fountains before them forged a career based on hope, anticipation, expectation, and undeniable outstanding talent. All this surrounded by a cloud of pain and heartache in the shape of a self inflicted drug and alcohol addiction.
The late 90s was a peculiar time in music. We had just come off the back of one of the biggest faux feuds ever created in the industry. Whilst Oasis & Blur were lowering their Britpop batons we found ourselves in somewhat an age when mainstream music was starting to pick up pace in churning out over-produced, over-sexualised, talent-lacking garbage, much of which of this type of framework the charts are still littered with today.
This is not to say there wasn’t anything decent being made at the time. Far from it.
It just seemed this was a telling point in history when the screw started to turn from major record labels lack of desire to push for exposure of working bands, and ultimately a resulting plummet in record sales.
So much so whereby real talent took a big back seat in place of an artist that looked far better on screen than they sounded on track. Yes the reality show era was starting to now take its stranglehold.
Shows like MTV’s The Real World, and videos of pop starsprancing around the school halls in uniform where now the order of the day in a complete shift of modern youth culture, having now tragically embedded its roots into the mainstay of todays music industry.
So why take us off on this tangent here? What brings us to talk about Britney Spears and the MTV era anyway.
Around this time, 21st June 1999 to be exact, Shack released HMS Fable.
For many who follow the mainstream juggernaut this will mean absolutely nothing at all.
For those who have picked up this album, and listened to it in full will feel a sense of warmth in this statement, a sense of belonging, a spine tingling excitement that only a very few handful of records will give.
So now seems about the best time we can drop the mainstream comparison here and concentrate on the music. A meekly 25th place in the album charts tells you a hell of lot more about the buying public at the time than the quality of this album.
HMS Fable was the third LP released from Shack following 1988’s Zilch, and 95’s Waterpistol. But this time it was different. As history will tell, there were no burnt down studios this time round, and no lost tapes turning up years later in New Mexico rental cars.
What Shack had delivered was a collection of majestic storytelling in guitar form, a body of work written by two extraordinarily talented brothers, Michael & John Head. Songsmiths who were truly blessed with creativity to gift poetry in their music so pure, so sincere it stopped you in your tracks and automatically embedded itself in your consciences jukebox.
So much so was the songwriting on HMS Fable the NME plastered a the now infamous headline onto its cover in October of that year ‘This Man is our Greatest Songwriter’. A wearily looking portrait of Mick Head staring straight down the camera lens to accompany this, the boldest of tag-lines, direct from the critics choice music publication at the time.
Read any reviews from the time of HMS Fable and critics will undoubtably have an outlook very differently to most other releases of the day.
Its no secret of the drug, and notably, the herion problems within the band around the time leading up to the making of this record. These are more than well documented, and can be read in almost every book or online page featuring Shack, The Pale Fountains or The Strands to date.
But let’s be clear on this, the drugs did neither provide an ailment in the making of this album. Nor did it have a profound opposite effect, where the haze filled mystique of dabbling in drugs heightening creativity in the work.
What the abuse and addiction gives this album is an outlet, an outlet to document, a hauntingly exposed narration that just wouldn’t have worked in any sense had it been written by anyone other than the Head brothers.
Streets of Kenny being the obvious choice to highlight, lyrics such as; “I’m searching for the caz again, Through the Streets of Kenny, I’m looking for our joys again, Can’t get shit get any” is about as painfully desperate as any line written in song, but what Shack did is create a beauty in the rawness, the sincerity, the misery of the lyrics.
Likewise in Lend’s Some Dough, lines such as “I’ve got a sore back and I’m itching” conjures visuals of the body’s natural rejection of the drug, to only be brought back to elated euphoria later in the song after scoring with “I just got up I’m still dreaming, Sleeping, drifting, dreaming, Of a big blue ocean”.
These are not romanticised lyrics. It’s documentary songwriting from the soul that paints a terrifyingly bleak painting, but that painting is a work of art, a masterpiece of sorts.
As with the elevated NME headlines, and a refound notoriety following release of this record you would have expected Shack to be catapulted into the upper echelons of the industry. The album was handed the number 2 slot in both NME and Uncut’s critics album of the year polls, only missing out to The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin in both polls. we have now is folklore, reminisce, understanding.
What Michael Head, John Head, Ian Templeton & Ren Parry gave us in HMS Fable was music that will last an eternity with unfathomable joy. An outlet not just for the band, but equally for anyone who has been acoustically blessed by these troubled chords, and equally absorbed the tormented lyrics.
With Mick already enjoying a renaissance in his career playing and releasing new music through his own label Viollette Records, and now John also recently playing his first gig in over six years that pleasure is still very much in rebirth and re-growth.
Will we see the band reform once again? Well that’s not up for discussion here. This is a time for reflection and celebration of an album that has brought a wealth of emotion in its delivery during these past two decades; tears, sorrow, heartache, beauty, power and fulfilment all in equal dose.
Kevin Barrett Photography 