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The best band you’ve never heard of

“What an unbelievable arse,” you are probably thinking, “’The best band you’ve never heard of’; where the fuck does this guy get off? And who the fucking cunt uses a semi-colon in typed speech? Probably incorrectly at that.” True, there is an unattractive and paraphilic thrill I feel knowing I am listening to a band that counts fewer than a hundred listeners on last.fm , for whom a YouTube search yields but a solitary, fuzzy and uncommented live performance, and whose album can only be downloaded from a blog with the hipster-fellating title, ‘Wilfully Obscure’. I am in many ways, as you say, an arse. I cannot use; punctuation. But calm your profanities. There are reasons for my writing this beyond showing off. And valuable as my indie credentials are to me, for example in picking up chicks, I hope to be able to (Shore)ditch my vintage-clad elitism in describing the mysterious pleasures of my very favourite band-you’ve-never-heard-of.

This summer, the London and Manchester radio station XFM has joined a number of magazines and blogs this year in celebration of the seminal releases of 1986: twenty-five years on, we have remembered, eclectic as we are in our tastes, The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead, Paul Simon’s Graceland, Slayer’s Reign in Blood, and dozens of other classics ranging from R.E.M to Run-D.M.C. While it is can be just lovely to sit around every now and then and agree that ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ was really very good, and that people who liked Prince still like Prince, there is also room for the suggestion that there is more to the history of popular music than the rotating roster of acts that gloss the covers of Uncut and Mojo each month. It is in this dual spirit of nostalgia and iconoclasm then, that I bring you The Odolites, who released their first single, Chimes, in that same year.

A quarter of a century on, as a certain stretch of Memory Lane lies desolate, windows smashed and heirlooms burglarised, it is not just unimaginative journalists that are to blame. In recent few years, bands such as The Drums, Los Campesinos! and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have been caught on street corners peddling old NME C86 tapes and Field Mice singles, or working from disused warehouses, where they package Sarah Records compilations in brand new CD boxes for distribution to record shops. The influence of ‘C86’ British indie bands, and the Americans such as Tullycraft and Beat Happening who took up the ‘twee-pop’ banner, has never been stronger. As a mission statement for the musical values with which the NME C86 compilation became synonymous with – a staunchly DIY and independent outlook; jangly guitars and nursery-rhyme melodies; reverence for British post-punk as symbolised by Orange Juice and The Smiths and homage to the nineteen-sixties golden age of American pop music – you could do worse than Chimes:

La la la la la la, let the Rickenbacker ring

La la la la la la, hear the Vox begin to sing

You can sing, you can sing

Put it right, put it right,

Pop song it’s time you came back home.

Set to the intertwining Rickenbacker guitars of Harvey Saward and Ted Lethborg, dancing dextrously around Gary Aspinal’s bouncing bass lines, Chimes is an explosion of wonderful, adorable, child-like enthusiasm, the sound of four kids in love with music, potently combined with the self-assurance of naivety. As Saward recalled to Cloudberry Records’ blog two years ago, “The lyrics kinda reflected the excitement I was feeling re the music we were discovering at the time and the feeling that we were really onto something special with our new band.” The sense of belonging, and of ownership, of being part of something special, even moral, is expressed with the sincerity of knowing no better , and the confidence that comes with having nothing to lose:

A sound for youth, a sound for truth,

The chime and ring from the bold young things.

The sense of manifesto, the awareness of a scene, is tangible. Yet while the indie ethos and common influences shine through, and their tunes in many ways echo the jangle of their British and American contemporaries, The Odolites were about as far removed as possible from any scene imaginable. An ocean away from the Paisley Underground of Los Angeles, and on literally the other side of the world to the Rough Trade Shop in Portobello Road, The Odolites were in Australia, languishing in a musical outback.

While in the late seventies and early eighties a modest New Wave swept over the land down under, with the Go-Betweens and The Birthday Party surfing to reasonable international acclaim, to Harvey Saward at least, the mid-eighties music scene was something of a vacuum: ‘I think we fell into a bit of gap between what happened in Australia in the early 80’s with bands like the Go-Betweens and the Triffids (who we adored) and then a much more vibrant independent sector that started in the late 80’s.’ Besides, the Odolites started out at an even further degree of removal to their compatriots, imprisoned on the ex-penal colony island of Tasmania. Living in the small north-western port city of Burnie, they recorded their first demo on a farm, somewhere called Mole Creek, and gigged around the small number of pubs – ‘most of them were just oversized barns’ – that would put them on alongside the usual dipsomaniac-pleasing cover bands. After being picked up by the mainland label Rampant Records in late 1985, The Odolites moved to the bright(ish) lights of the relatively thriving Melbourne scene, but their music would always retain the mountainous, untamed, island quality of their home, an intensification of ‘the feeling of isolation and fatalistic sense of despair of the Australian countryside’, that music historian Ian McFarlane finds in The Triffids.

A lot of what you need to know about The Odolites is contained in the name itself. Taking apart ‘theodolites’, to conjure one of those gloriously complete-sounding names that sits alongside those of the legendary girl-groups, the quasi-suffix evoking the crystal pop of the Marvelettes or the Shirelles and testifying to a sixties influence that also encompasses the garage rock of the Sonics, the ‘Baroque-pop’ of the Left Banke and the shimmering 12-strings of the Byrds. Syllabically, it is nearly exactly ‘The Odd Delights’, perfectly descriptive of their charming, yet idiosyncratic, sound. Like diving for eccentrically shaped pearls. Taking apart theodolites is precisely the business of The Odolites, presenting the listener with an unsurveyed landscape, destroying our instruments of navigation and launching us into uncharted space beyond our solar system of familiarity. There is a cinematic quality to the music, evoking, like the cover of their debut Persistence of Memory E.P., expansive roadway vistas bathed in golden light, sleek sonic highways cutting through Australian desert.

The name of their album too is a perfect evocation of the band’s ethos. Released in late 1987, Face Down in the Violets plunges you headfirst into a sweet-smelling, psychedelic garden, chiming in the same key as Primal Scream’s Sonic Flower Groove, released the same year, and drawing on the same jangly sixties influences. Yet this album is more than sunshine and pansies: the sinister reverb on the drums, the arresting stabs of overdriven rhythm guitar that crash searingly across the intricate lines of Lethborg’s lead, and the eerie disembodied vocals of the breathless Saward, leave you wondering whether the subject of the title, face down, is indeed taking in the sweet scent of the viola odorata, or like Rimbaud’s soldier in the valley, ‘his feet among the flowers he sleeps… at peace’, with two red holes in his side.

Two years ago, the Tasmanian Government launched a new tourism brand for mainland Australia: A World Apart, Not A World Away, and this seems an elegant way to place The Odolites in relation to the music of their contemporaries and the bands that inspired them. Listening to the first E.P, the two singles and the one album they made in the space of the three years for which they existed, it is as if the scaffolding supporting nineteen-eighties indiepop has been comprehensively taken apart and then reassembled without instructions; a new and elaborate canvas, erratically stretched over the same points of reference. I know, after such florid and irrelevant hyperbole, it will hard for you to shake the notion that I am an unassailably giant twat (“He quoted Rimbaud for fuck’s sake!”), but just listen and try not to be delighted. Although 12” test pressings were made of Chimes for UK release, a deal between Rampant Records and Rough Trade, that might have seen them find their way into the pages of NME or the turntables of John Peel, fell through in 1986, and the Odolites never released a record in Britain. Twenty-five years on, with Peel dead and the NME irrevocably shit, maybe we can take the opportunity to welcome them to our shores. With a little luck, the memory of The Odolites can persist for another 25 years.

Download:

Persistence of Memory E.P. (1985) & Chimes 7” (1986): http://tinyurl.com/6an7rqu

Face Down in the Violets (1987): http://tinyurl.com/5spqdww

(With thanks to Wilfully Obscure for uploading the music, and Cloudberry Records for permission to reprint part of the interview with Harvey Saward)

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