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Hooked
The Wildhearts try to catch a break
BY CARLY CARIOLI


The Wildhearts are the greatest British rock-and-roll band you’ve never heard of. And it isn’t your fault. It’s theirs. The band’s own soundman is fond of describing the Wildhearts’ story as a long tale of "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory." Over the past dozen years, the band’s immaculate discography has been overshadowed by a litany of unbridled excesses and wanton stupidities: revolving-door line-ups, drug problems, shanked tours, magazine offices trashed, band members fired and rehired, hotel rooms burned, record labels antagonized, fistfights, broken bones, more drug problems, break-ups, aborted reunions, suicide attempts. Such behavior made them notorious — legendary, even — in England but stunted any possibility of international growth. Before the garage-punk indie label Gearhead issued a compilation of recent singles and B-sides, Riff After Riff, last month, the Wildhearts hadn’t released an album in the US since their debut, 1993’s Earth Vs. the Wildhearts (East/West). And last month, as the band criss-crossed Europe opening for the Darkness (who a year ago were opening for the Wildhearts, the only band who’d give them a gig), frontman and resident genius/screw-up Ginger Wildheart was alternately grateful and tormented. His ego ached watching his pals in the Darkness achieve the stardom he’d always hoped the Wildhearts would achieve; the self-destructive urges that have derailed his band at every crucial juncture were rearing up anew; and yet a part of him remained determined to take hold of what is probably his last chance at rock-and-roll immortality.

"They’re a great band and fantastic people," says Darkness bassist Frankie Poullain. "Ginger’s a great songwriter, [but] they’ve never made the most of their potential. They’ve shot themselves in the foot a lot of the time just because they enjoy, uh, living the life, shall we say."

"Frankie’s being kind," laughs Ginger over the phone a few weeks later, on the eve of joining the Darkness’s US tour. "We’ve had a whole fucking armory to shoot at both feet, and that’s what we did. We’ve just had a lot of bad luck — 50 percent of it has been self-inflicted, and the other 50 percent you can’t really put down to anything. I can’t say that I regret anything that’s happened, because look what’s happening today. All I know is that after all this time, we’re still here and we’re stronger than ever."

Indeed, suddenly and quite surprisingly, the Wildhearts are everywhere. Riff After Riff is out, and next month, Sanctuary will release the band’s 2003 studio album, The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed. The Darkness have invited Ginger and company back as their opening band in the States on what has become one of the hottest concert tickets in America (the shows at Avalon this Saturday and Lupo’s in Providence on Sunday are officially sold out). And though the Wildhearts have no illusions about which band American audiences will be coming to see, Ginger retains his signature cocky optimism about their prospects. "We’ve got the luxury of playing to a Darkness audience who don’t know who the fuck we are."

In fact, this isn’t the band’s first trip to America. In 1996, the Wildhearts were in a similar make-or-break position — and they broke. They’d just released what at the time was their finest album, 1995’s P.H.U.Q., and appeared on Top of the Pops; while East/West was hemming and hawing about issuing the disc in the US, the band landed the opening spot on an even higher-profile American tour — with AC/DC. But the Wildhearts scuffled with their label, their tour support was withdrawn, and after a few shows, they ran out of money and flew home. "We ended up doing a really amateur job of it," Ginger admits. "We’ve tried to erase it from our memories."

It was just one of the gaffes that waylaid what had been one of rock’s most promising acts. Although the Wildhearts looked and acted as if they were following some mid-’90s continuation of the Mötley Crüe script, they absorbed the lessons of Nirvana and crafted the world’s first grunge-proof pop-metal anthems. They’ve been described as a cross between Metallica and Cheap Trick, but just as often their songs have sounded like some unholy combination of Jawbreaker and Def Leppard, or Hanoi Rocks and Social Distortion, or AC/DC and the Toy Dolls. Their acuity at delivering classic power-pop melodies with the vigor and commercial flair of glam rock was so admired and dissected that they eventually wrote a cheeky song about it called "29 Times the Pain": "Here, sitting in my room/With the Replacements and Hüsker Dü/We’re forever without a clue/And the Beatles and the Stones/Get to hang out with Ramones."

The song went on to name-check the Clash, the Damned, Kiss, Stiff Little Fingers, and Blue Öyster Cult before ending by rhyming the title with "I’m gonna miss Kurt Cobain." It became the Wildhearts’ call to arms, a testament to the idea that an unreconstructed metal band could have even more impeccable taste than the era’s Britpop stars. "There was this tradition of rock and roll with a heavy aggressive streak that’s always intrigued me," Ginger points out. "And we didn’t really do anything other than keep the thing alive when grunge was trying to kill it. I was influenced by bands like the New York Dolls and then Aerosmith and Hanoi Rocks, and then Guns N’ Roses came along. And hopefully bands like the Backyard Babies and the Hellacopters have taken the baton and kept it alive.

"The thing about rock-and-roll bands is they don’t take themselves as seriously as they take the music. Face it: at the end of the day, you’re only trying to make people dance and fuck, and then you’re supposed to go back to your loved ones and get on with your real life. Bands like us and the Darkness — all we’re doing is trying to bring a little fun back."

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Issue Date: April 2 - 8, 2004
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