Kenickie - At the Club (Album)

So it’s early 1997. Oasis are a matter of months away from strapping Britpop to their motorbike and heaving it’s tired carcass over the metaphorical shark. Blur have already evolved their way out of the scene by indulging their Pavement fantasies on their eponymous classic. And Kenickie, with characteristically disastrous timing are about to unleash their debut album At the Club.

But we’ll disregard the inopportune timing of Lauren Laverne’s merry gang for now and concentrate on one of the best guitar pop records of the ‘90s.

Like 1977, which was released a year previously, At the Club is an album that could only have been made by teenagers. From start to finish, it’s a blast of pure youthful energy. It kicks off with ‘In Your Car’, an explosive precursor of things to come. What follows is a mix of shouty harmonies, playful pop fun, and smart-arsed soundbites.

The album calls to mind a lot of the best bands of the ‘90s. For example, the squelchy synths on Robot Song are reminiscent of the first Mansun record. What‘s kept At the Club fresh in the 12 years since it’s release is the fact that Kenickie weren‘t just magpies; they took the classics and put their unique Northern punk stamp on them.

I mean, look at ‘PVC’. It’s Nirvana’s ‘Lithium’ in pigtails (which kind of explains why Courtney Love had a soft spot for Kenickie).

And then there’s Lauren Laverne’s lyrics, which aren’t a million miles away from Suede’s romanticising of trash life: ‘We dress cheap, we dress tacky’, ‘We’re on our backs looking up at the stars’.

All this, and we haven’t even mentioned ‘Punka’, Kenickie’s undoubted high point. In fact, screw it, it’s most bands’ high point. A joyous, glitzy three minutes of complete ecstasy on the subject of punk puritanism, it satirises and glamorises all at once.

The album finishes off on a downbeat note. The stripped down ‘Acetone’ dispenses with the power chords and attitude for a surprisingly gorgeous tale of trying to ‘dodge the sick stains on the street’.

Well, I say the album finishes there, but it doesn’t quite. Where Ash chose to end their debut album with a revolting recording of them throwing up, Kenickie show they are clearly a far more demure bunch. They finish matters with the comic japery of ‘Montrose Gimps it up for Charity’. The song is basically just a load of kids larking about in the studio having a right old laugh at each other, and is about the most appropriate conclusion to the album really.

With At the Club, Kenickie gave us one of indie’s great under-rated albums. Predictably, they ended up burning out within 18 months of it’s release. They managed just one more record, Get In, which was a far more laid-back affair which sold far fewer copies than it deserved. In reality though, there probably wasn't anything they could do to save them from an unsympathetic record-buying public which, lest we forget, was just about to embrace the horrors of nu-metal.

This was the way Kenickie was always going to end, and was a far more fitting way to finish that limping to an insipid third, fourth and fifth record like a lot of their contemporaries did.