Blog: Giant Steps

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It's ten years since the Boo Radley's album "Giant Steps" came out, and there's a FANTASTIC retrospective of it at the Brave Captain website. It's got "sleeve notes" for all the songs by the band, pictures, press reviews, and, it appears, demo versions too! It's GRATE!

I've not listened to the demo versions yet (hey! demo versions and sleevenotes, that's a good idea isn't it? Someone should put that on their album as a CD-R extra some day!) because I am, for about the 1,000,000th time, listening to the album itself. "Giant Steps" is truly and honestly one of THE best albums EVER made by anyone, and is certainly EQUAL in my Top Three Records I Bought When They Came Out (with "Grand Prix" and "If You're Feeling Sinister", tho for really REALLY different reasons). The main thing for me about it is that it's the record I've been trying to make MYSELF ever since I heard it. I know you can't really tell, but honest, it is.

I bought it on tape in Ainley's in Leicester the day before Christmas Eve 1993 - I know this because I'd just had my leaving do for my first Proper Job, and had staggered into town from The Pub to spend my record tokens. I'd read about this album SO many times I thought I'd give it a go - I also bought, also on tape, the second PJ Harvey album. Me and my friend Chris had both been trying to be PJ Harvey since her first album came out, but from hereonin it was Martin Carr all the way for me baby!*

I listened to it loads and loads over the next year, and distinctly remember forcing my friend Simon to listen to it, saying "At last! Somebody UNDERSTANDS!" This is because I thought it sounded like the Voon OPUS "Modern & Vivid", where we had lots of GRATE and LOUD guitar noises, LOADS of songs, and were trying to make whatever sounds we thought were good, rather than the ones we thought we ought. So yes, in that was it was JUST like "Giant Steps" - perhaps the Boo Radleys might have even have BENEFITED from a few more songs about Surfing Monsters and Santa Claus?

Anyway, that's what I loved about it - the sense that a bunch of lads THE SAME AGE AS US had decided to do what the hell they liked, unleash their imaginations and make fantastic NOISES with IMMENSE tunes lashed onto them. It's hard to realise now, but back then the idea of ANY kind of tunes was hard to fathom, and the kind of inventiveness that was UNLEASHED by this record is still pretty much frowned upon - this record has dub, reggae, swooshy noises, samples, homemade samples, GRATE LOUD GUITARS, doo-whop vocals, an entire made up language (I've just discovered) and more untrammelled IMAGINATION than any other record that's been made in the last ten years, and it's all WALLOPED out with such enthusiasm that you can't help STILL getting as excited about what they were doing as the band themselves SURELY must have been at the time. It's utterly utterly brilliant.

Also lovely is the way, on the site, the band talk about each other and the recording with such love. Go and read some of the things they say about each other, it's deeply touching that they went through so much with each other and came out the other end still friends, and still full of RESPECT for each other, also for the actual record they made. SMASHING.

* examples of me trying to do this are LEGION throughout Voon, The Council (especially a song called "Mind The Death(Gigant Suspensions)") and early tapes, but the biggest examples in the old Proper Discog are songs like "Stop Look And Listen", "Born With The Century", "Carol And The Mandolin", "Symbol Of Our Nation", "Fat Was A Feminist Issue", "Make The World Go Blind", and especially "The Pebble And The Boulder", "Everything's Turning Out All Right" and ESPECIALLY especially 300% and more "One Last Party". Oh yeah!

posted 28/11/2003 by MJ Hibbett

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