who they?
four kholled-up dandy thugs from edinburgh. ac divide their career thus far into two categories - before hicks and after hicks. bill hicks that is, the late, indisputably great u.s. comedian whose scabrous, righteous rants against apathy, hypocrisy and bad music made him a bigger rock’n’roll icon than most actual musicians. it’s only natural that hicks should be reincarnated as a rock’n’roll band and - that band is annie christian.
why buy?
ac are a national grid-charged electric shock of radiohead’s wired bile, manic’s intelligence and suede’s opiate grandeur. space they are not. they don’t, however, belong to that pitiful "devotion by default" miserabilst sub-genre typified by dolts like strangelove (nothing shocking adds: that’s really not nice. constructive journalism at it’s saddest). this ain’t another shower of leather cased agoraphobics here - ac are positively brazen.
in about 30 years time people are going to look back on the nineties and fucking laugh," says singer larry lean. "guitar music’s not going to be remembered. no one’s going to laugh at dance culture but as far as guitar music’s concerned, it’s really treading water just now."
tell us more…
so, if there’s going to be no ‘rum old slappers’, aren’t you just taking this music lark a bit (gulp) seriously? "well, go and watch fucking ‘neighbours’ then. it’s not fucking ‘baa-baa-black sheep’ we’re singing here. if you make music you have to try and connect with people, you ca’t call that over-seriousness."
best enjoyed?
brother larry - "when you’re feeling totally lost and confused and at the point of despair - we will save you."
paul whitelaw
Love This Life
nme 21/03/98
(Equipe Ecosse)
"... Art-rock, chugga-chugga goth-gruel theatrics of the Mansun variation except this lot have seen fit to recreate, all the way through, the marvy electro doodle of Gary Numan's 'Are 'Friends' Electric' with their guitars. So they must be very amusing persons to take down the boozer which will do."
SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME AGAIN
nme 30/05/98
(V2)
Surprisingly upbeat Stout Noise from Scots newcomers fresh - if that's the correct word - off the Curve tour. True, the verses are better than the chorus, which is a pretty bloody fundamental mistake to make when you're writing songs, but as the Waltons once observed, all things are relative and this particular chorus does at least bellow along like Ballroom in a hurricane. Or perhaps a hurricane in a ballroom. Quite big and almost very clever.
SIMON WILLIAMS
The Other Way
nme 19/9/98
(V2)
Corporate indie guitars in full effect, but at least the Christians do it with a certain full-blooded swagger. This is old-skool indie rock on an epic scale, full of swelling crescendos, wordy verses and roaring choruses. With a touch less bluster and a dash more melody, they could become The Icicle Works. Which is a good thing, by the way. Long live the UK music scene.
Stephen Dalton
Okay, so first the good news. Edinburgh four-piece ANNIE CHRISTIAN, like their labelmates Steroephonics, put on as much brawn and bluster into their music as their youth will allow. A lot of their debut album, Twilight(V2) ***, is terrifically buoyant stuff - tracks like ‘Love This Life’, ‘Kiss The Day Goodbye’ and ‘The Other Way’, so consistently exuberant that by the time they played themselves out, the listener is sweating. The bad news - and it’s only mildly negative, at it’s worst - is that it occasionally falls back into a generic formula that makes them sound like the sort of band Kerrang! Writes about. But it’s still early days and Annie Christian - their name, incidentally, comes from an early Prince song - appear, on this evidence, to have plenty of what it takes to become an act well worth becoming excited about.
When full-bodied Scottish four-piece Annie Christian signed to Richard Branson’s V2 label their mission was clear: to see off the false prophets of stadium pub rock. Wiry singer/guitarist Larry Lean is passionate on this one. Oasis? ‘balnd, uninspiring, unimaginative, offensive banality,’ he spits. Stereophonics? ‘Bryan Adams crossed with Rod Stewart and AC/DC. One of their videos even has this girl in a bikini in it. get with it boys!’
It’s the kind of no-nonsense talk you want from a man who sings with bilious zeal and claims the late Bill Hicks, bullish hero of anti-establishment comedy, as his main muse. Lean, Chris Adams (guitars), David Hunter (bass) and Andrew Hastings (drums) ooze as much pop savvy as earthly conviction. Lean likens their music to ‘a harder, more blunt interpretation of Suede’, and he’s not wrong.
with its churning riff and battering-ram chorus, their first single ‘Love This Life’, boasted indie credentials. Their debut album, Twilight, reveals a flair for dynamics, split between the feral glide of ‘The Other Way’, the splenetic ‘Here Is The News’ and the Radiohead-friendly planning and chiming of ‘Secrets And Lies’. Ian McCulloch liked it so much he picked Annie Christian as the support for Echo And The Bunnymen’s tour. For Lean, this is several steps up from touring with the Stereophonics, where their spiky, messianic performance was wasted on a middlebrow audience. ‘We were thinking, "Why are we doing this?"’ he moans. ‘Bemusement was the response, but what do you expect from a Stereophonics crowd?’
If Annie Christian seemed like oddballs on the tour, it might because they ramraid the early Eighties, while others are plundering the Sixties and Seventies. Their name comes from an early Prince song. ‘Prince was the pop genius of the Eighties’, Lean gushes. ‘It sounds so glib when people say the Eighties were crap. The bands were there, such as The Smiths, New Order, Teardrop Explodes. Being a teenager then just made me want to buy cheap guitars and effects pedals.’ He fishes for a punchline and laughs raucously when he finds it: ‘And hate everyone!’
It's the contradictions within Annie Christian that make them so special. Four moody Edinburgh men swathed head-to-toe in black, they look like they should be churning out doomy, end-of-the-world-is-nigh industro-goth bollocks, but actually the opposite is true. Annie Christian, like, believe in something, man - namely the fact that rock'n'roll, done as it should be, with guts, soul and conviction, can still change the world.
It's there in the jagged guitar onslaught of 'Someday My Prince Will Come Again', in the pensively threatening 'Secrets And Lies', there in Chris Adams' frantic guitar attacks and Larry Lean's visceral howl, which is kind of Kelly Jones without the bullishness. They sound in turn like a literate Symposium, a less flighty Suede and The Dandy Warhols without the crystal meth overload.
All of which suggests that they should be vacuous glamourpusses with a penchant for swoony guitars and some shouting - except they're not. This is direct, honest rock music with just a touch of the 'Animal Nitrate' about it. Sometimes misleading, but really perfectly simple: what you see isn't necessarily what you get.
Emma Hogan
