An Englishman’s home is his castle, so why not write about it?
In the case of Hooton Tennis Club, this doesn’t mean stuff about the telly, or what secrets are kept under lock and key in the shed, but about saying what you see; drawing on the little peculiarities which make us in Britain so frequently a nation of stropkeepers.
Not that the four-piece ever sound bothered enough to get angry about anything much; hailing from Ellesmere Port on the Wirral – a region largely perceived as Liverpool’s toothsome cultural run off – their millennial sense of enervation leads to mundanities such as singer Tom Smith deadpanning about doing crosswords and how he, “Sat around my home/changed the wallpaper on my phone”, on the choppy, garage-wonk opener ‘Up In The Air‘.
Smith drawls in mid-Atlantic tones throughout while at times, during ‘Highest Point In Cliff Town‘ ( you’re correct, by the way, it is named after a place in the Playstation game Spyro The Dragon), the quartet content themselves musically with the Gen X fuzz rock of the US nineties college scene. Not that they aren’t crudely effective, with songs like ‘P.O.W.E.R.F.U.L Pierre‘ and ‘Not Going Roses Again‘ brimming with distortion, minor chords and ennui.
Not, perhaps, what you’d expect from a band discovered by Carl Hunter, ex-bassist of Merseyside stalwarts The Farm, or on a debut produced by The Coral guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones, but there are just as many clearly anglicised nuances to revel in. Of the most powerful, direct or otherwise, are nods to a rawer, less polemical early incarnation of The Stone Roses, a belief that coalesces around songs like ‘Jasper‘ and ‘Kathleen Sat On The Arm Of Her Favourite Chair‘ (the latter having an equal dose of vintage era Teenage Fanclub thrown in for good measure).
Lovers of spontaneity, the band themselves have admitted that part of their creative process is simply to plug in their instruments and see what comes out, and perhaps inevitably most of the time this is the stuff of young men hedonistically trying to pass their summer into eternity. Any dramas are strictly for the parochial kitchen sink, bummers and GOATs delivered with equal ambivalence, such as the stumbling paean to in between days ‘Barlow Terrace‘, or the punky rejection of relationships on ‘In Luv‘.
Mistaking the fact that much of ‘Highest Point In Cliff Town’ sounds carefree for the band not caring would be something however of a sin. Songwriters who can create the tumbling groove of ‘Always Coming Back To You‘ are a rare breed. Less common still are those who can unravel the sublime, ramshackle country of ‘And Then Camilla Drew Four Dots On Her Knee‘, the latter ugly-beautiful and a million miles away from any notion of pastiche. Wherever it is Hooton Tennis Club are coming from, be it the chip shop or the Prom, slouchy ambivalence is as much an ingredient of their chemistry as the gang mentality and close shouldered borrowing of urban folklore. What in the world can they get done?
Well, y’see boys, they wanna have fun. Boys just wanna have fun.
