Take 5 showed that Northside could punch harder than many of their contemporaries.
Winners. Losers. Mondays? Former. Roses? Yeah, at least for a bit. James? Escaped it largely unscathed but had been around for years and just got swept up. The La’s? Never, really. The Charlatans? Obviously.
And those that got broke: The Paris Angels, World Of Twist, Intastella, the list goes on. Pick up a guitar and a pair of congos in Manchester and hang around at Affleck’s Palace for long enough and some cockney A&R man would wander over and offer you a ten-album deal.
Briefly, it seemed that the streets around the Boardwalk and the International were paved with gold. Ah, Madchester.
And then there was Northside.
What was surprising perhaps was that the city’s most famous musical entrepreneur (and by extension label) seemed relatively detached from the phenomenon it had played such a part in creating.
Factory supremo (as if you didn’t know who we meant) Tony Wilson was bemused rather than messianic about the whole thing, telling the now also sadly deceased Tom Hibbert at the time: ‘I’m not a great creative manipulator. I never told the Happy Mondays to go to Ibiza on holiday and bring back this strange American leisure drug…I watch it and find it all fabulously exciting.’
Factory had though signed the Mondays, whose album Bummed had first pried open the door, then after failing to sign the Roses, who’d wanted to avoid the Manc-baggage, they then signed Northside.
Northside’s members had familiarly laddish nicknames like Dermo, Woz, Weg and…Cliff, and came from Blackley and Moston. Their rough-edged demo was, according to the predictably enthusiastic John Robb, the hottest tape in circulation around the city in 1989 and duly created an avalanche of word of mouth.
Then the city’s other mouth got wind – supposedly at the band’s third rehearsal – and the quartet were duly snaffled into the sort of organised chaos they quickly made their own.
Despite their head honcho’s affectation (he had become known in the meantime as ‘The Mayor of Madchester’), Factory as everyone knew were never shy of a little basic publicity, and when Northside released their debut single Shall We Take A Trip – opening line simply ‘L, S, D’ – to his delight it earned them the money-can’t-buy publicity of a BBC ban.
Manufactured controversy to one side, part of Chicken Rhythms’ problem was that by the time it was eventually released in mid-1991 the scene it was part of was waning quickly, as too was the label they’d signed to.
It was not that producer Ian Broudie didn’t play to the band’s strengths, and the material itself used familiar elements – 60’s pop, 70’s punk, danceable beats – whilst single Take 5 also showed that Northside could punch harder than many of their contemporaries.
Over two years on though from She Bangs The Drum etcetera, there was a sense that the like of Practise Makes Perfect, Weight Of Air and Funky Munky were a little to cookie-cutter to distinguish the quartet enough in what was by then a very crowded market.
Returning to it now, that conclusion still doesn’t seem particularly harsh, but the thudding wah wah of Yeah Man and My Rising Star’s playground optimism have aged well enough – and, let’s face it, nobody’s expecting Spiderland.
Made available on vinyl again as part of Record Store Day for the first time since its original release, Chicken Rhythms is Northside’s only album – Factory’s collapse meant they were never afforded the chance of a second.
As a reminder of someone’s blinder, there’s plenty enough to bring the past back into the present for just long enough as necessary.
