For many of my generation, 'Year Zero' was 1989. On the cusp of a new decade and having just reached our teens, we wanted to embrace something that was ours. Punk wasn't really ours. New Wave wasn't ours. The eighties, to be honest, were never really ours. Yet, an epiphany occurred in many bedrooms around Britain and Ireland in 1989. On dodgy cassettes we heard Stone Roses frontman, Ian Brown proclaim, "the past was yours but the future's mine, you're outta time!"
And so it came to pass that "on the sixth day, God created Manchester," which would soon be renamed 'Madchester', and with it, our sound and our time had arrived! Finally, music meant something again. We supported bands like people supported football teams, championing our boys and girls as they made a mockery of the, at that point, terminally ill Top of The Pops formula and social mediocrities we were forced to subscribe to. For the first time since the demise of The Smiths, we had 'indie bands' in the truest sense of the word, with no external influence over image, sound, tours or direction welcomed. Music was, once again, made by the people for the people. And It worked because the pre-internet youth of the time got up off their asses and demanded that it did.
Three bands led the charge with a magical mixed cauldron of psychedelia, guitars, dance-beats and baggy fashion: The Stone Roses; The Happy Mondays and The Inspiral Carpets. Strabane was awash with baggy jeans, hooded tops and t-shirts that donned either a John Squire collage or a cow proclaiming 'mooo!' or 'Cool as F**k'. These were halcyon days never to be forgotten, and to have one of the chief players of the scene, Tom Hingley, vocalist with The Inspiral Carpets, coming to Strabane's Dicey Riley's on August 10 has got many of us wondering if we can maybe slide a leg into those 28 waist flares again.
Over a period of five years The Inspiral Carpets enjoyed huge success in the UK and Irish charts, and on the road. Driven by the intense character in Tom Hingley's voice and the trademark Farfisa organ of Clint Boon, The Inspirals were a perfect representation of that glorious period.
"It was the biggest youth movement since Punk," Tom proudly announces, speaking to the Chronicle last week. "Between the guitar bands and dance scene, it all gelled together at that time. The ripples it started are still being felt now. It's not just confined to Manchester anymore, although I do like The Courteneers. But bands like The Arctic Monkeys from Sheffield, who are probably the biggest guitar band in Britain, owe a great deal to what happened in Manchester in the eighties and early nineties."
Tom was able to see the origins of the scene first hand in the eighties, working as a glass collector in the legendary Hacienda club in Manchester, which was owned by New Order and their record company, Factory Records.
"Tony (Wilson), Rob (Gretton) and the rest of the gang at Factory were really nice as people and Factory was a great label. But as business men they were terrible," laughs Tom.
Indeed, the business sense of a record label that lost five pence on every twelve inch vinyl issue of New Order's classic 'Blue Monday' track must surely be put into question, especially when the track became the biggest selling twelve inch of all time. Tom has yet another example of the comically bad business sense that engulfed the label.
"Mike Pickering, who went on to form M People, used to DJ at the Hacienda. At one point he had the only copy in Britain of this dance track called 'Ride On Time' by an act called Black Box. He tried to persuade Tony and Rob to release it through Factory. Tony said 'we don't do dance' and declined. That song went on to shift about ten million copies!"
Ironically, within time the Hacienda did do dance and it was soon to become the main counter-culture club in all of Britain, as the fusion of dance and rock took hold. As joyous and exciting as the scene in Manchester was becoming, Tom felt it was important for The Inspirals to stand on their own away from the pack.
"We tried as hard as possible to create a separate identity away from the hump of the movement," he stresses. "We went out of our way not to become the Happy Mondays' pet support band. In 1989 the Mondays booked the G-Mex in Manchester for this huge gig. Word spread that we were on the bill as support. The press contacted me and asked about the gig and I said we weren't doing it. When they asked why, I said because we'll be doing the G-Mex ourselves for our own headliner gig soon. No such gig had been planned but three months later we sold the place out!
"We always kept a careful distance from the Manchester pack for various reasons. When Morrissey publicly stated that he liked us, I slagged him off in an interview with The Face Magazine. It was nothing personal but historically any band Mozza champions tends to go by the wayside very quickly. We didn't want to become another Darling Buds, Bradford or Primatives, all of whom benefitted initially from his praise but all of them went quickly out of fashion."
The Inspirals were their "own light" throughout the early nineties. While the supposed leaders of the 'Madchester' movement imploded in a series of legal tussles with record companies and their own egos and addictions, The Inspirals looked after themselves well and maintained a discipline for five years. Classic albums such as 'Life', which reached number two in the UK album charts, and anthemic singles such as 'This Is How It Feels', 'She Comes In The Fall', 'Saturn 5' and 'Dragging Me Down' proved that The Inspiral Carpets had a consistency that was missing in The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays.
"They were great bands but there were so many bad decisions made within," reflects Tom. "Every decision of The Stone Roses' career was wrong: the legal wrangles that stopped them recording for five years, right up to the album that they finally returned with. It was 1995 and people were getting excited about the big comeback, but I'd say to them, it's too late, they've blown it because Oasis had capitalised in their absence!"
For the little that both The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses did in a chart and album sense in comparison to the Inspirals, I've often believed that lazy rock journalism has elevated the two bands at the expense of The Carpets. Does Tom feel the same way?
"Well there does tend to be a lot of revisionism about the early nineties period now," he states. 'The NME did a 'Manchester Special' once and they had about ten pages on The Roses, ten on The Mondays, five for a few others and one page on us with a crap photo and a short article that slagged us off. I thought, well if you're just gonna give us one page don't bother putting us in at all. They looked on us like we were riding on the coat-tails of the other bands. They knew nothing about us or where we came from. They didn't even realise the Clint, our keyboard player, was mates with the guys in the Roses before any of them ever formed a band, and that he was eventually in a band with The Roses' bassist 'Mani' long before The Inspirals or the Roses ever happened. We were our own band and owe everything we achieved to ourselves. And you know something - no Inspirals, no Oasis," he states with a laugh.
Tom may be laughing but he certainly isn't joking. Throughout the early nineties, one member of The Inspirals' road crew was a guy in his early twenties from Burnage, Manchester called Noel Gallagher. He actually auditioned to be the singer of the band, but Tom beat him to it.
"Noel was and still is a canny fella, but I'm a better singer than him," he laughs. "He learned a lot of tricks in his years hanging with us. We used to go shopping during the European tour and Noel would sit in for us on the interviews and pretend to be a member of the band. I'm sure he's glad he never got the job as The Inspirals' singer in retrospect, but the band seriously would not have been as good with Noel fronting. He was wrong for The Inspirals but right for Oasis and I'm delighted for him personally that he went on to achieve what he did. But yeah, you could say that the Inspiral Carpets were responsible for Oasis - praise us or damn us!"
Tom has visited Ireland many times as a performer, both in solo in full band capacities. He even played at the, now legendary, 'Trip To Tipp' festival.
"The Inspirals played Feile '91 in Tipperary," he recalls. "Our flight into Shannon was a big dodgy I remember, but it was an amazing day. We met and played with some great people that day too, like the lads from Therapy?. I remember another Irish tour we did where we drove up from Dublin to Belfast. We stopped off in Dundalk after spotting an ice-cream van. It was beside a school and about 300 kids started shouting at us. They knew who we were. We couldn't believe it. It resulted in what was the probably the biggest game of football ever played. The story has apparently become the stuff of legend now for the kids who played because who was in the Inspiral Carpets team that day in Dundalk? Noel Gallagher, of course! The Irish audiences have always been great and I like to come back and try places I've never been before, so this'll be my first time in Strabane and I can't wait. I believe Dicey Rileys is a real hub of great music, it must be as it has Inspiral Carpets on the jukebox, " he laughs.
Aside from his solo acoustic gigs, Tom has a band called The Lovers, who he has recorded two albums with. He also plans to release a solo album and get back with The Inspirals for a tour in 2010. On top of all this, he is also a lecturer of Music Business at Salford University, so he leads quite the busy lifestyle. His acoustic gig in Diceys on August 10 should be a celebration of that golden era of the early nineties. I doubt any of us still fit into our baggy fashions of that era, so modern attire will be more appropriate as the gig will not just be about nostalgia, but where Tom Hingley is at in 2008. Speaking to the man last week, wherever it is sounds like a pretty good place.
The Inspiral Carpets - 'This Is How It Feels'
