Genius all too often goes unrecognized—when was the last time you saw someone wearing a Foghat t-shirt? Such is the case with Swansea, Wales’ the Pooh Sticks.
They may well have been the most fascinating rock band to emerge from Great Britain in the late eighties, but chances are good you’ve never heard their music. Musical magpies who gleefully dug through the dustbins of pop music culture the way the Manson Girls did supermarket dumpsters, the Pooh Sticks were wide-eyed daydream believers who began their “non-career” poking affectionate fun at Great Britain’s indie twee scene before alchemizing their love of American rock music into giddy-making soft rock and power pop tunes so jam-packed with stuff swiped from their extensive record collection they’re practically games of music trivia. The result? Music guaranteed to turn you into a human “Have a Nice Day” lapel pin.
The Pooh Sticks story is a unique one, and deserves to be told in full. But in brief, the band began as a lark. Friends and pop music obsessives Steve Gregory (radio DJ and owner of gadfly Fierce Recordings) and first-time singer Hue (Huw) Williams decided on a whim to record a single (“On Tape”) lovingly sending up the UK’s late-eighties indie explosion. That might easily have been the end of the story. Instead they soon found themselves with more songs, then the musicians they needed to play them live, before gradually evolving into playing a Welsh take on the American music they were so passionate about. This ultimately led to the creation of a sadly neglected masterpiece of an album in 1991’s The Great White Wonder, followed by a major label move that resulted in two more very good LPs (1993’s Million Seller and 1995’s Optimistic Fool) that failed commercially, leading to the Pooh Sticks’ dissolution.
Sadly, finding the Pooh Sticks’ music is no simple matter. You’ll find only Optimistic Fool on Spotify, and ironically it’s the Pooh Sticks record both Gregory and Williams like least. As for much of the rest of the Pooh Sticks’ body of work, good luck. Fortunately the saints and visionaries at Preston, England’s Optic Nerve Recordings have set themselves the task of bringing the Pooh Sticks’ music back into the public ear with the brand spanking new Straight Up: Noise Pollution C88-90, a compilation of twelve of the Welsh Wonders’ songs recorded between 1988 and 1990. It follows the label’s first foray into musical rehabilitation, 2019’s Pooh Sticks 7# Box Set, which complements Fierce’s 1988 box set of five one-sided singles with added B-sides.
Straight Up: Noise Pollution C88-90 includes “On Tape,” the song that began it all, as well as such Pooh Sticks marvels as “Indiepop Ain’t Noise Pollution,” “Teenage High,” and an appropriately sticky sweet cover of the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “1-2-3 Red Light.” You can purchase it on CD, but you’ll want to buy the LP, which comes on blue “Steve McQueen’s eyes” vinyl and includes a smashing reproduction poster of a legendary March 1989 London show with the Pastels and the Vaselines.
When I said the Pooh Sticks saga deserves to be told in full I meant it, and the here and now is as good a time as any. So buckle up and prepare for the ride of your life, because you’re in for a lot of zigging and zagging. I recently had the opportunity to give both Williams and Gregory the third degree, the former via that miracle of time-space transport known as Zoom and the latter by the old-fashioned method of exchanging text messages. We’d have used smoke signals, but the Netherlands (which Gregory calls home) have banned them as a form of air pollution. And they call themselves civilized.
Here’s Hue on how the whole thing came about: “I knew Steve because he was a DJ at the local radio station Swansea Sound and had this record label called Fierce Recordings. We became friends because we were both music freaks. And we decided to make a record on Fierce made artifacts, and ‘On Tape’ was definitely an artifact.” [Fierce did indeed make artifacts—among the label’s numerous releases you’ll find, alongside those of name bands like Spiritualized and Spaceman 3 and such excellent indie bands as the Sea Urchins and the Nightblooms, a 7-inch of Patti Smith’s spoken word “Brian Jones,” several Charles Manson oddities, and my personal fave, the 7-inch “Riot” by the Jesus and Mary Chain, which is basically a recording of the band’s fans going berserk after a 1985 show at North London Polytechnic. Best Jesus and Mary Chain record ever!]
”We were enjoying the C86 [shorthand for the burgeoning indie scene the New Musical Express documented on 1986’s legendary C86 cassette compilation] world. We enjoyed some of those groups and went to see some of them and it ‘On Tape’ came out of that. I came up with the name Pooh Sticks. Steve was always the main songwriter and between us we came up with ‘On Tape’ and I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee Quite Well’” and some other songs, and basically we recorded ‘On Tape.’ We weren’t thinking about forming a band or sending ‘On Tape’ out to record labels. We simply intended to release it on Fierce and be done with it.”
“On Tape,” “Alan McGee,” and “Indiepop Ain’t Noise Pollution” are lo-fi, quite funny, and very affectionate winks of the eye at the C86 crowd. Not everyone got the genuine love behind the songs—when Gregory and Williams approached Heavenly/Talulah Gosh vocalist Amelia Fletcher (who would go on to become a semi-fixture in the band) to ask her to lend her vocals to the Pooh Sticks’ first of two John Peel sessions, well, let’s give Williams the honor: “Those were the days when getting reviewed in NME and played on John Peel were the filters that immediately got you attention, and we gotten written about. Which led to our being asked to do a Peel session. We didn’t have a band and wanted a female voice and we’d seen Amelia play. So we got her number from a mutual friend and asked her to do it, and immediately she came back with, ‘Aren’t you the band that take the piss out of indie?’ We said ‘No we don’t,’ and we sent her the music and she liked it. I don’t think she understood that it was coming from a good place.”
Williams added, “It’s not sarcasm. We were having fun with it, not sneering. I suppose you could say ‘Indiepop Ain’t Noise Pollution’ is sneering but it’s not, it’s really one of our more heartfelt songs. I sang the line, ‘Those were the best days of my life’ when I was 20, and I was singing about the year before, and there’s something poignant about that. And the thing is they really were the best days of my life! Just joking.”
(Feel free to bypass this brief digression, but the band’s two Peel sessions—which were released in 1991 by Overground Records but aren’t represented on the Optic Nerve compilation—are worth a mention. Both were produced by former Mott the Hoople drummer Dale Griffin, who proved to be a sort of Jekyll and Hyde character. Recalls Gregory, “He was grumpy for the first session—he was in a suit; maybe he’d been to a difficult meeting or something? After hearing Hue sing he phoned the Peel office to complain. With us right there in the room we heard him protest, ‘I’m aware of the parameters of perfection…’ Second session he was totally different. He was really into it and a lot of fun. He was really excited to see my Watkins Rapier [a species of guitar]. He said he hadn’t seen one for many years, and even called a couple of his guitar-loving mates from elsewhere in the building to come and see it.”)
A brief history of the 1998-90 recordings that are—and aren’t—represented on Straight Up: Noise Pollution C88-90. Gregory is a savvy promoter with a knack for the guerilla gimmick, and after releasing the aforementioned five one-sided (a nice touch) 7-inch singles Fierce issued what can only be described as a stroke of marketing genius—the untitled Spring 1988 limited edition (200 copies) cardboard box set of said five singles. A month or so later he pulled another great marketing stunt by releasing the box set on CD, exclusively for the Vinyl Experience collector shop in London. Said Gregory, “Their owner Mark Hayward [who, Gregory informed me, would later purchase John Lennon’s bathtub and even be photographed in it for a Japanese magazine] had enjoyed previous Fierce releases and we decided it would be funny to put the very, very lo-fi Pooh Sticks out on CD, which at that time was largely only used for “proper” nice-sounding records. Most copies were sold in just a transparent jewel case with no booklet or anything.” The band’s debut one-sided LP (1988’s eponymous The Pooh Sticks) followed shortly thereafter and was, noted Gregory, “the first Fierce release to actually have proper distribution.”
The Pooh Sticks followed The Pooh Sticks with 1988’s live Orgasm, which in Gregory’s words was recorded “in a basement with an audience of about 20 or so friends.” (In 1991 they would release the expanded Multiple Orgasm, which supplements the live tracks with ten studio recordings from the same period.) Come 1989 they released a series of singles (including their cover of the Vaselines’ “Dying for It,” which is on the comp) as well as another live album, Trademark of Quality, which (like The Peel Sessions) you won’t find represented on the Optic Nerve compilation. Gregory explains why: “The gig was performed with no monitors and under a barrage of bananas. It’s not a pleasurable listening experience. Katie [more about her later] was in a bad mood. She’d get grumpy sometimes. She was on hunger strike that day, for no discernible reason, but kept moaning about being hungry. She could’ve feasted on the bananas.” Finally, in 1990 they released the full-length Formula One Generation.
From the beginning, according to Gregory, he looked upon the Pooh Sticks as a “concept,” which at bottom he called “my valentine to rock’n’roll.” He told me, “I was never under any misconception that the Pooh Sticks had any raison d’etre at all other than in references to the records I loved.” This expressed itself early on in what he called a “meta-UK indie.” Come The Great White Wonder the concept evolved into what he described in a sort of shorthand as a playful take on “flares-and-smiley face-US-70s, sub-Eagles-West-Coast-Seals and Crofts.” (Not all of the band’s recordings live up to his conceptual ideals. In particular he self-panned Formula One Generation “as pretty much just a record. Pooh Sticks records were never supposed to be about themselves. I think they only have merit to the extent that they celebrate other ‘proper’ records.”)
But what, you may be wondering, was the precise nature of Gregory’s conceptual “valentine to rock ’n’ roll”? Well, what it came down to in practice was a systematic and blatant program of wholesale musical appropriation. In effect Pooh Sticks operated a musical chop shop that cannibalized the songs in their beloved record collections for spare parts. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but when it came to the songs they loved, the Pooh Sticks preferred robbery in broad daylight. They honored their heroes by robbing them blind.
They pilfered lyrics galore. They five-finger discounted the title of The Great White Wonder from the immortal Bob Dylan bootleg. Song titles (the Beach Boys’ “Heroes and Villains,” and the Eagles’ “Desperado” to name just two) were both fair game and practically a given—according to Gregory, “It’s very likely that at least 50% of Pooh Sticks songs have secondhand titles.” And they didn’t balk at grand larceny; they weren’t averse to filching whole songs, from which they’d use the parts (all quite identifiable) they liked.
A perfect case in point is the band’s “adaptation” of the Strangeloves’ 1965 hit “The Rhythm of Love” on The Great White Wonder. Noted Gregory, “The verses are the Strangeloves’. I made up the chorus and middle-eight.” But the Pooh Sticks didn’t stop there—that’s the guitar figure of “Tracks of My Tears” running through the song. Oh, and you’re not imagining things—those are the first eight notes of Neil Young’s guitar solo on “Powderfinger” at the start of the guitar solo in the song. Did Neil have any objections? The Pooh Sticks didn’t care. Like Lynyrd Skynyrd, a Swansea man don’t need him around anyhow.
We’ll get around to plenty more examples of the Pooh Sticks’ proclivity for theft a bit further down the road, but in the meantime let’s afford Gregory the opportunity to describe his role as band Svengali. While he’s careful to credit Williams, acknowledging “I wouldn’t have had the Pooh Sticks without Hue as a terrific partner to present the ideas,” Gregory added, “I wrote the songs and made the recordings; 1993’s Million Seller in particular was under my control. I largely made up very specific drum and bass parts, and arranged the songs for live performances—they were often very different.” He also micro-managed the band’s image: “I largely decided what the players should wear on stage. Converse sneakers, not any other sort; and the band in all white.” And he was blunt when it came to who called the shots: “My thinking was sometimes certainly not shared by others involved, but as Reg Presley says in The Troggs Tapes [the obscenity-laden and outrageously funny bootleg recording of a 1970 band argument] you need ‘just one fucking mind on it.’ Right or wrong, at least then you get something with an identity.”
No talk of the Pooh Sticks’ complicated aesthetic would be complete without mentioning the band’s bubblegum music proclivities. They paid homage to the chewy, chewy, chewiest of all musical genres overtly by recording a small handful of early seventies pre-pube faves, including (in addition to “1-2-3 Red Light”) another 1910 Fruitgum Company classic “Gummy Gummy Gumdrops,” Tony Orlando & Dawn’s “Knock Three Times,” Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Do Something to Me,” and (a triumph!) the Banana Splits’ “It’s a Good Day for a Parade,” which Gregory noted, “wasn’t on any of their records, but was often used in the actual TV show.”
They pledged their allegiance to the Popping Pink Inevitable in other, cleverer ways as well. For example, they paid tribute to cartoon bands like the Archies by creating a fictitious band line-up they credited on all of their albums (Williams and Fletcher were the only musicians ever credited by real name). The line-up included the very bubblicious “Trudi Tangerine” on tambourine and piano, “Paul” on guitar, “Alison” on bass, and “Stephanie” on drums. And in the great bubblegum tradition “Paul,” for example, was not one person—a variety of Pauls paraded through recording studios and across live stages, and the same went for all but Trudi Tangerine, who was always the same person because by all accounts she’s such a spectacular human being there can only be one of her. That said, Gregory and Williams coyly declined to divulge her real name, and the same goes for members’ surnames as well.
What Pooh historians have been able to glean about the people behind the fantasy line-up follows. Pre-The Great White Wonder—at which point the Pooh Sticks took to using Dutch musicians—Gregory turned to friends and members of local Swansea bands. The “Pauls” included a real Paul, who was a member of the Spirals, Mike (“a schoolfriend I’d previously been in a band with,” wrote Gregory) and Stuart, also of the Spirals and later The Sweetest Ache. The “Alisons” on bass included Dave from Boats Not Ships, a Swansea band that never got beyond the demo stage, and the aforementioned Katie, who was Paul of Spirals’ fame’s girlfriend. But, and please try to follow along, Gregory insists upon arbitrarily putting Katie in the drummer “Stephanie” category. His reasoning: “I imagine I probably thought Katie looked more like a ‘Stephanie’ than an ‘Alison’.” He added, “She should really have been 16 in 1966. She had that entire thing down pat. She was beautiful, aloof, a muse, and Mary Quant’d to the nines.” And if we’re forced to place Katie in the “Stephanie” category she was the only flesh and blood one. The only other “Stephanie” was a drum machine.
The most endearing example of the Pooh Sticks’ love of bubblegum music is the cover of The Great White Wonder, on which the “band” appear as cartoon characters decked out in groovy seventies garb replete with classic period signifiers—Paul’s kitted out in an MC5 t-shirt and American flag elephant flares, drummer Alison sports an iconic Karen Carpenter “Lead Sister” t-shirt, and Hue’s duded out in blue denim elephant flares with a smiley face patch on his right knee. And I could go on. It would have made for a great circa-1971 metal lunch box, and had the Pooh Sticks been around when I was a third grader that lunch box and I would have been inseparable.
But let’s return to the Pooh Sticks’ proclivity for looting other peoples’ songs. Examples abound. A case in point: “Sweet Baby James” (title sound familiar?), also from The Great White Wonder, which Gregory noted, “is liberally sprinkled with the hook of the Four Seasons’ ‘Who Loves You’.” So liberally, in fact, that according to him the rights ended up “being 100% claimed by the Gaudio/Parker people.” [Four Seasons’ member/songwriter/producer Bob Gaudio and his wife producer Judy Parker, who together wrote and produced the song, and who made their courtship the subject of the great “December ’63 (Oh, What a Night).”] Gregory also pointed out that The Great White Wonder’s “Desperado” borrows from Hot Chocolate’s 1974 suicide ode “Emma,” although it’s hardly blatant.
Williams also gave me a few examples of the band’s fondness for musical brigandry, and they speak to the shockingly wide-ranging nature of the Pooh Sticks’ record collection. How wide-ranging? Well, the Four Seasons you’d expect. Ditto the Strangeloves. But G.G. Allin? Said Williams, “‘Teenage High 2′ [from Formula One Generation] is a cover of GG Allin’s ‘NYC Tonight’ with some lyrical differences.” With other songs, said Williams, “Steve simply wrote new melodies.” Such was the case, noted Williams, with a true obscurity, Bobby Bridgers’ (say who now?) ‘The World Is Turning On.’ “It’s a country pop song I bought over here in a thrift store before I was in the Pooh Sticks,” said Williams. “It’s one of those late sixties, early seventies songs where even the mainstream guys are getting into the counterculture. I rewrote the lyrics, but they’re still similar.” The song appears on Million Seller, and it’s a tribute to the Pooh Sticks’ uncanny ability to recognize the genius in the obscure that it came as close as anything they ever recorded to being a hit.
Williams also mentioned another obscurity, “That Was the Greatest Song,” a hard-to-find number by son of Doris Day Terry Melcher’s short-lived band Freeway. (Never heard of them? Me neither.) Said Williams, “On ‘That Was the Greatest Song’ [which also appears on Million Seller] we kept the chorus because we thought it was great, but we didn’t like the verses so Steve wrote new ones that we thought were better.” Added Gregory, “The verses and middle eight are mine, but the chorus is from the record. I’m supposedly credited with a quarter of the song (there were three guys in Freeway!) but I’ve not heard anything from the publisher since I was given a one-dollar advance in 1993.” I unfortunately failed to ask him how he spent the buck. On a side note, while Williams and Gregory never got the opportunity to sit down with the guy sometimes credited with driving Charles Manson to murder to hammer out who’d get what percentage of “That Was the Greatest Song,” Williams did become an acquaintance of another El Lay muz biz legend, Sleaze King Kim Fowley. Williams doesn’t have fond memories of his interactions with the combination Frankenstein/Rasputin: ““I met Kim in Manchester at a Big Leaves show (he wanted to produce them) and he’d ring me up and you couldn’t get him off the phone. For hours. He was talking crazy shit all the time, totally off the wall. And I was like, I don’t really need this in my life.”
He also divulged another aspect of their songwriting “method.” “In the early days we recorded quite a lot of covers. For fun, and practice—we were learning how to write songs. Some of them came out but a lot of them didn’t. This was when we were recording on a reel-to-reel 8-track ReVox tape machine and drum machine. On two or three of the covers—and I think it’s an interesting way to write—we would record the cover with me singing. Then we’d keep the backing track and Steve would write a new melody and lyrics.”
One of the interesting things about the Pooh Sticks’ magpie tendencies is that critics, caught up in the game of catch me if you can, tend to hear things that aren’t there. Listen to their songs with an ear towards other peoples’ songs and you begin to see, or rather hear, ghosts. When I mentioned this tendency towards mass critical musical hallucination to Gregory he replied, “There are so many ghosts legitimately in Pooh Sticks records I’m surprised anyone has brain space for inventing their own.” He added, “I’ve just looked at the Wikipedia page for The Great White Wonder. Don’t know where they got Kim Fowley, the Sweet, and Sham 69. And the reference to Chic is presumably because of ‘Good Times.’ No, it’s Sonny & Cher.” Williams expressed similar sentiments. There are so many ghosts on Pooh Sticks albums they could all stand a good exorcism.
But let’s return to the songs on Straight Up: Noise Pollution C88-90, which takes you from their lo-fi days smack into their transformation into a punk-edged power pop outfit that would ultimately go spectacularly Red, White and Blue on The Great White Wonder. They’d come a long way from “On Tape,” and Straight Up: Noise Pollution C88-90 serves as an excellent roadmap from indie twee to American rock and pop.
It opens, naturally enough, with “On Tape,” a humorous slice of twee fanboy braggadocio on which Hue goes to great lengths to inform you that his tape collection is positively epic: “I’ve got “Falling And Laughing”/The original Postcard version/I’ve got the Pastels’ “Songs for Children”/Sky Saxon’s solo albums.” He goes on in this vein until the chorus, on which he crows, “You want it, I got it/I’m talking about everything/I’ve got the Monkees’ Head soundtrack/On tape.” I particularly love the last stanza, where Williams makes clear that life as the world’s hippest record collector is fraught with tragedy: “I sent for the Soup Dragons single/Mail-order only/£1.30 to Martin Whitehead/But it never came.”
Like “On Tape,” the infectious and propulsive “I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee Quite Well” is a case of gentle self-mockery. (Gregory: “We actually did know someone who claimed to know Alan McGee quite well. His name was David Padfield, a student at Swansea University, who was trying to make a point to us that he could put in a good word for the band.”) This time it isn’t his tape collection Hue’s crowing about—it’s his three degrees of separation from the co-founder of Creation Records, the pioneering indie label that was home to many C86 artists. “There’s talk of a deal with Creation,” sings Williams, adding proudly, “With an expensive Lenny Kaye production.” And my favorite: “Paul Smith said to me that we couldn’t be on Blast First/Because we’re not noisy enough and we don’t hurt when you listen to us.” Ironically, notes Gregory, “We were actually managed by Paul Smith for, literally, two days. This was when we were negotiating with BMG [BMG Rights Management GmbH, which is both music publisher and record label]. BMG told us that if Paul Smith was going to be our manager the deal was off. Paul had an enfant terrible reputation at the time.” So that was that.
“Indiepop Ain’t Noise Pollution” is pure jingle-jangle tambourine-powered bliss and proceeds at a gallop, and is the perfect anthem for the young and tender-hearted. When Williams sings, “Well it’s come to this/Even now, can’t be happening/I thought that we’d go on through the years/And be happening/Your smiling face and you know why/These were the best days of my life” that past tense is downright heartbreaking. The best times always end too soon, and it’s always a crusher, and “Indiepop Ain’t Noise Pollution” captures the loss of that transient Eden as touchingly as any song I know.
On the two live cuts from Orgasm the Pooh Sticks go butch, and in a big way. “Foxy Boy” is methamphetamine fast and boasts razor guitar and some mighty drum thump, as well as a wah-wah guitar that adds garaged rock cred. And Williams sounds positively macho. “Sex Head” is hard-edged power pop with a simple but luscious melody, and has Williams pile-driving the title home by sheer repetition. Great guitar solo, and I love the post-song audience response. Someone shouts “Raunch and roll!” Another wag cries “Syphilis!” And a piercing whistle fails to call the crowd to order.
“Heroes and Villains” from the 1988 box set is streamlined but heavy-duty power pop that sets a gorgeous melody against a big, distorted guitar and a heavy bottom. Hue handles lead vocals but says (and this shows you how casual the band’s principals were when it came to who played what where) “I absolutely can’t remember the name” of the girl who joins in occasionally on vocals.” The best he can do is “She’s pictured on the cover of the box set/mini-album thing (she’s at the back, on the right, with a wedge haircut and a black jacket over a white shirt).” Hue also handles lead vocals on “1-2-3 Red Light” (also from the box set) and he has the perfect upper register bubblegum voice for it. They up the tempo of the original and add just the slightest bit of guitar muscle and some nice organ, and the results do the 1910 Fruitgum Company (and every single 9-year-old who bought the original 45) proud.
“Just Another Minute” (a studio track from Multiple Orgasm) is a punk-tough power pop rave-up and boasts some very mean guitar—even the very civil Hue sounds like he’s ready to throw punches. Other studio tracks from Multiple Orgasm include “Do It Again (A Little Bit Slower),” a Speedy Gonzalez of a number that goes heavy on the tambourine and on which Hue sings about needing a pacifier (why I’m not sure) and “When the Night Falls,” a power pop blast of pure happy. Then there’s the one-sided 1989 seven-inch cover of the Vaselines’ “Dying for It,” which Williams opens a Capella before the song goes warp speed and a buzzsaw guitar comes in. You also get nice female backing vocals and, to take things out, some truly out-of-control guitar jousting. Better than the original!
“Dare, True, Kiss, Promise” from Formula One Generation is more friendly fuel-injected power punk with switchblade guitar. It’s lyrics are pure bubblegum children’s game remembered in tranquility—”Many years have passed/We seem to have grown up fast/Games that we played then/Are now better than ten.” Also from Formula One Generation is the great “Teenage High,” an absolutely gorgeous slice of twee pop (sung by Katie) that stands as one of the band’s greatest contributions to Western Civilization. The third cut from Formula One Generation is “Time to Time,” a jangly number with a bouncy bass line on which Hue engages in some call and response with the backing vocalists, who call out the numbers of the things he both loves and hates about a girl he can’t decide whether he loves or hates (backing vocalists: “Five!” Hue: “The smoke she blows out from her fat cigar.”).
Also on the compilation is the secret track “Apollo Message,” which originally appeared on The Pooh Sticks under the title “How to Get to Hue Pooh Stick.” It features American singer/songwriter, voice actress, and “Live Action Anime Girl” Apollo Smile–who the band met in New York while there to play a show in March 1988 at the Limelight club—chatting breezily about her master plan to win Williams over. “I spent all my money on this knock-out wardrobe, a lot of good you did me fellows,” she says, before hitting upon a less expensive way to his heart. “I just put on my Orange Juice t-shirt and my anorak,” she says, but can’t get beyond that “anorak,” which (she’s a Yank after all) she finds hilarious. She repeats the word over and over before dissolving into laughter and saying, “Can I just say sweatshirt?”
So that’s the compilation, but the Pooh Sticks story was in a sense just beginning after the records up to and including Formula One Generation. They turned their attention to making The Great White Wonder, but first they needed players, and Gregory, instead of again fishing the Swansea musicians’ pool, looked to Holland. Gregory had moved to the Netherlands to work with Fierce Recordings’ mainstays the Nightblooms, and never looked back: “I immediately liked Holland, and pretty much right away knew I’d like to be here full-time. I especially liked living in The Nightblooms’ house: they all shared a house. It was like living with Fleetwood Mac pretending to be the Monkees.” And after discussing the band’s manic antics he added, “It was like living in a cartoon.”
It was there he lassoed the musicians who would be the Pooh Sticks’ future: “In 1989, a guy in Holland named Michel van der Woude sent Fierce a tape of his group Beatle Hans & the Paisley Perverts live at De Melkweg in Amsterdam. I loved it. Come the summer of 1990 I thought it might be a good idea to have the Paisley Perverts be the musicians for the next Pooh Sticks record, as their tape (which I released as an LP [It’s/Beatle Hans] in August 1990) sounded just right for what I had in mind. So I went to Utrecht for a few days to try out the Perverts on a couple of Pooh Sticks demos and it sounded right.” Dutch guitarist Edu Hackenitz (Hedda Gabler/The Secret Combination) also played a pivotal role on the album, as did the trusty Amelia Fletcher.
Gregory didn’t look upon The Great White Wonder as a grab for the brass ring—anything but. Instead he saw it as the opportunity to achieve the ultimate goal of the Pooh Sticks Konzept—deliberate commercial hari-kari. “I’d pretty much intended it to be the last, deliberately last, Pooh Sticks record. I figured that real drums instead of a drum machine and, especially ‘I’m In You’ [more about which in a moment] would be swan dive suicide. It was meant to be good, sure, but only on those terms. It had been that way from the very beginning. Even ‘On Tape’ was supposed to be so very daft that people would hate it. The box set was supposed to be too ludicrous to possibly be accepted. A live album called Orgasm? That’s just ridiculous. The 10-minute meandering of ‘Tonight’ on Formula One Generation? No one would allow that, surely? Not that these records were meant to be bad. They were meant to be right, but commercial suicide ‘career-ending’ right. Same with The Great White Wonder. That it was ‘popular’ was an unintended and unexpected bonus. And problem: ‘Now what?’”
That the album ended up being “popular” (a relative term—Gregory “guesses” the LP sold “maybe 10-12,000 copies on Cheree/Sympathy” and has “No idea how many of the Zoo copies might’ve been sold”) was a matter of semi-divine intervention. And even then there were glitches. “The Great White Wonder,” noted Gregory, was originally recorded as a Fierce release, and would’ve had the same level of professional promotion as all the label’s other releases—zero. I got as far as test pressings but then an indie label in London, Cheree Records, said they wanted to release it and the Fierce release was cancelled. Only the proposed US release on Sympathy for The Record Industry went ahead. Cheree was actually well organized, as far as bedroom-type indie operations went. They actually had some proper funding (from a bloke who owned Red Bus Studios in London: he’d had $$$$$ hits and drove a Rolls-Royce) and they employed an actual press agent. They also worked closely with a live booking agency. This was great for The Great White Wonder project, of course, but we still didn’t have a band, and we had no intention of playing live. But OK, we put one together made up of the Paisley Perverts guys and Mike on extra guitar and did some shows, including Reading Festival.”
“Then BMG entered the picture. An A&R chap in Chicago for BMG’s Zoo Entertainment label wanted to sign The Pooh Sticks. Part of that deal was that they bought out Sympathy Records for the right to release it in the States. But by the time they released the record it was several months old, and wasn’t dealt with as a new release, so promotion was limited, although compared to what even Cheree had done it was reasonably extensive. The Great White Wonder did as well as it could’ve, really. Remember: no management, and no band. And we lived in Swansea. I was very happy with its level of ‘success’.”
The Great White Wonder may not have catapulted the Pooh Sticks to the toppermost of the poppermost, but it’s a timeless and brilliant record—if this is the sound of a band attempting musical self-immolation, more bands should try it. It’s the Pooh Sticks’ definitive “valentine to rock and roll,” and includes such great cuts as the rousing “Young People,” on which Williams swipe lines from Stephen Stills and Ray Charles, and closes with a cry filched from Jonathan Richman’s “The Morning of Our Lives” (“Now’s the time to show what we can do!”). It also includes the delirious guitar anthem “Desperado,” on which Hue calls himself a rock ’n’ roll “desperado,” which is kinda cute. “Desperado” also comes with a gorgeous piano interlude, a brilliant guitar take-out and Fletcher’s fetching vocals.
“The Rhythm of Love” goes from easy listening to guitar blare hard, while “Good Times” is an acoustic guitar slice of walking on sunshine pop perfection, and “The Wild One, Forever” is a small wonder of an instrumental throwaway. But the LP’s highlight is the breathtakingly audacious “I’m in You,” a fourteen-and-one-half-minute guitar epic that can only be described as the Welsh-Dutch retort to “Free Bird.” It begins as your standard luscious power pop love song, takes a slight left turn during which Hue sings “Never learn not to love”—which he pickpocketed from the Beach Boys who (kinda) stole it from Charles Manson—and then goes full tilt gonzo when Edu Hackenitz (an eccentric of sorts according to Gregory, who noted, “He refuses to play unless (a) it’s at max volume, and (b) he has his little half-moon-shaped lamp aglow on top of his amp”) launches into a fiery eight-and-one-half-minute guitar solo that includes sonic booms and afterburner blasts guaranteed to leave your synapses sizzling like bug zappers. Fun fact: the closest I’ve ever come to touching the face of God was the time I heard it while receiving ketamine-assisted therapy. Try it at home, kids!
It was after The Great White Wonder—and the Pooh Sticks took the Mao-like Great Step Forward of officially cementing their new relationship with Zoo Entertainment, essentially taking them into the major leagues—that the band commenced to auto-destruct, but hardly in a way that fit into Gregory’s Kamikaze aesthetic. Things with Zoo Entertainment went amiss from the start. Williams said the band’s rationale for signing with a major label was they wanted to spend more time in the studio in order to capture the songs the way they wanted to hear them, and that required money. But, he added, “We knew what would come with that, and we were trying to make a commercial record. We weren’t trying to be clever and pretend we weren’t on a major label. We thought that if we could get away with being commercially successful compared to where we started it would make a really great ending to the story. But commercially it didn’t really do anything.”
Gregory told me his game plan differed from that of Zoo’s. “I never intended Million Seller to be ‘the hit album’. We weren’t ready, and I knew it—our recording process was sub-optimal, and we had no management. It was meant to be merely the next logical step—I intended the next record to be ‘the hit.’ I even held back some of the more obvious ‘hit songs’ for that next record. But the label wasn’t looking to the future, and wanted the album to mirror the success they were having with Matthew Sweet’s [1991 LP] Girlfriend. At the label’s insistence, I had to agree to much of the record being given a new—and mostly inappropriate—‘smoother’ mix. Tracks which were meant to be stepping stones—somewhere between our existing rough ‘n’ ready indie identity and an eventual straight ‘chart’ kinda thing—ended up sounding simply like unsuccessful attempts at the latter. Although the record was very successful with college radio, where DJs and programmers seemed able to bring to the table their own understanding of what we were doing, it was no surprise to me that it failed to connect with a wider audience. It was too ‘professional’ for an indie audience and too ‘unprofessional’ for anything more mainstream. Things might’ve worked out differently had the label president, who didn’t like The Pooh Sticks—his favorite on the label was Green Jello—not at the last minute cancelled support for our US coast-to-coast tour, which was to have included a Letterman appearance. But that’s what happened, and that was essentially the end of that.”
I don’t agree with Gregory’s assessment of Million Seller, and music critics and fans of the LP have tended to agree with me. It boasts a host of excellent songs, including the rocker “Let the Good Times Roll” (which Hue opens with Alice Cooper’s “Hello, hooray, let the show begin!”) and includes the line “your sister sings good but the AM’s better,” which is R&R gold if you ask me. (Go ahead and ask me!) Then there’s the Uber-bubblegum classic “The World Is Turning On”—the only Pooh Sticks song to be made into a video. Williams told me, “It wasn’t really a hit. It did get played on the radio between Madonna and Whitney Houston, but it didn’t sell the way we’d hoped.” “Susan Sleepwalking” (a version of which appeared earlier on Formula One Generation) is about as good as power pop gets, with its bright sound and mad catchy chorus. The tender electric piano ballad “When the Girl Wants to Be Free” kicks Eric Carmen’s desperate-for-a-big-hit-single ass, while “Rainbow Rider” is cosmic feel good with a cool piano figure running through it and fantastic backing vocals. “Goodbye Don’t Mean I’m Gone” features the lush harmony vocals of Williams and Fletcher and would’ve—I’m sure of it—topped the American Top 40 in 1973. “That Was the Greatest Song” is more harmonized easy listening joy and “a beautiful rhapsody,” to quote the lyrics. In short, Million Seller makes for a fantastic listen.
And if Million Seller was a commercial disappointment that left a bitter taste in the mouths of its makers, 1995’s Optimistic Fool was the final nail in the old dead man’s condo. Zoo/BMG severed relations with the band. “No $$$$$-sales for Million Seller to show,” noted Gregory, adding, “And there was no other pro-budget major label deal on offer. For me, a new album which didn’t improve on Million Seller—musically and commercially—made no sense. I wanted a co-producer (with Zoo we were in communication with Todd Rundgren to do the next record with me), and the band was without management.”
Management was always a problem. Towards the end of the Million Seller period the Pooh Sticks actually found one in Tom Maher, but it didn’t end well. Gregory: “He worked for BFD Management and his only other client was Slash from Guns N’ Roses. We’d enjoy hearing his retelling of whatever latest scrap he’d had to get Slash out of. Unfortunately, the timing wasn’t right and we weren’t able to formalize anything with him, and he too was out of the picture by the time we did the deal for Optimistic Fool.” The Pooh Sticks finally made a deal with Seed/Atlantic Records, but, noted Gregory, “The budget was barely enough to pay for a rudimentary recording. I again held back the ‘hit’ songs. My heart wasn’t in it. As the guy producing the record as well as the guy answering the phone and fax machine, I just wasn’t feeling it.”
He added, “[Hue and I] knew it was kinda ‘done.’ I think we were okay making the ‘quiet’ tracks on the record (‘Prayer For My Demo,’ ‘Optimistic Fool,’ ‘First Of A Million Love Songs’…), probably because they had something of a morning-after-the-night-before vibe, which was how we were feeling after the BMG experience, and they came out OK. But we had less (i.e., zero) interest in the ‘loud’ songs (‘Cool In A Crisis,’ ‘Miss Me’…). I think you can hear this quite clearly. Although ‘Song Cycle’ is maybe my favourite of all Pooh Sticks songs. Not the best recording—that’s ‘I’m In You’ because of the solo, of course—but my favourite actual song. Maybe.”
Williams also saw Optimistic Fool as the end of the line, but for different reasons. He understood that the Pooh Sticks were the right band at the wrong time. Their American sound was utterly out of synch with the Anglo-centric Britpop movement that was conquering the UK, and as he bluntly noted, “We weren’t part of that.” More importantly, he’d never wanted to become a musical professional on a major label to start with, and had actually wanted out before Optimistic Fool was recorded.
“The whole thing of signing to a major label is very difficult. Before that I was a sports coach. I enjoyed that, and it meant the band was an amateur thing. And that arrangement was working out quite well until we signed a major deal. It then became a full-time thing and there was a lot of pressure on us to play live—we didn’t play a lot in the States but we did play there, as well in Japan and across the UK. It became a job. When we played Japan in ‘93—although it was great—I said I didn’t want to do it anymore and left the group. But then we signed a small contract with Atlantic Records and I told Steve I didn’t want to play shows—looking back I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old and it hadn’t really worked out.”
Williams was also busy pursuing a new career on the business end of the music industry as a sort of multi-purpose “Our man in Wales.” “I was working with other groups and that took off quite quickly. When Optimistic Fool came out in ‘95 I was acting as publisher and A&R guy for Catatonia. They were really big over here, sold like two and a half million copies of their second record, which is a lot of records in the UK. I was also managing 60 Ft. Dolls, who were signed to Geffen in the States. And I had my own publishing company with Sony and signed a few bands like Murry the Hump, Big Leaves, and Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi. So I was getting paid and that was part of it.”
Williams shares Gregory’s opinion of the album’s weaknesses and their causes. “I think Optimistic Fool sounds like a record by a band who’d been on a major label and all that. Some of the songs are quite good but some of it doesn’t really work, and it doesn’t really work because it was recorded very quickly, and some of the songs needed more time. Basically Steve had moved to Holland, which is where we used to record, and he never really came back. Meanwhile I was back in Wales and doing a lot of traveling for my job.” But despite it all Williams harbored ambiguous feelings about the band’s future. “I think we might have made another record, and BMG would have made another record, but we were always like ‘Do you want to do it?’, and it just didn’t happen.”
My personal opinion is that Optimistic Fool—the title is quite appropriate, given the LP’s dismal fate—is quite underrated. The title track has a laid-back vibe and luscious vocal harmonies—perfect seventies fare. “Working on a Beautiful Thing” is perky, light-weight power pop with hand claps, great backing vocals and some hard-nosed guitar thrown in. “The First of a Million Love Songs” is another relaxed number, with Beach Boys vocal harmonies and a yacht rock smooth mid-section, while the guitar rocker “Cool in a Crisis” is power pop that really pops. And the guitar solo will knock you out of your keks. (Like “The World Is Turning On,” “Cool in a Crisis” found its way onto Radio One but didn’t exactly tear up the charts.) “Miss Me” is another hard rocker with an infectious chorus, while “Prayer for My Demo” is a slinky number with a cool twist—the demo in question isn’t for a record label but a girl Hue wants to win over. ”I’m saying a prayer for my demo/And hopin’ that when it’s played/If the bridge don’t get her/She’ll fall for the chorus I made up.” And then there’s the great “Song Cycle,” which is lovely and lush and totally seventies and evolves from a comely hush into a Neil Young kinda thing with moody guitar and bass. It’s a true lost classic, one you really should listen to if you want to think of yourself as a well-rounded human being.
Optimistic Fool seemed the very last chapter in the history of the Pooh Sticks. But come 2010 several things happened that proved the band wasn’t quite finished making people happy. First the Pooh Sticks reunited to play live shows, albeit without new material or Gregory’s participation. In fact, Gregory was quite direct about his unhappiness with Williams’ decision to put a band together and take it on the road, saying, “Hue did some shows as ‘The Pooh Sticks’ ten years ago. He asked if I wanted to be involved, but this was a very definite absolutely not. It went ahead anyway, but was very much entirely nothing to do with me.” When I asked him why he so opposed the idea Gregory was brutally blunt: “The Pooh Sticks were about other bands. The ‘Pooh Sticks’ reunion shows were about the Pooh Sticks. That’s a fucking fail.”
Williams has a much more upbeat assessment of the reunion. “The band I put together for those shows was really good. I think apart from the Dutch boys it was the best Pooh Sticks’ live line-up ever and it really worked. They were a lot younger than me—we didn’t have a bunch of old blokes on stage. It was me and Amelia and we had youth as well. Anyway, we reformed in 2010 to do this big festival in England called Indietracks. It was held at a steam train museum in Darbyshire—which sounds very English and very twee. The Pain of Being Pure at Heart and Teenage Fanclub [amongst numerous others] were playing and we did that as a kind of one-off and it was great. There were loads of people there and everyone enjoyed it, and I had seen Amelia but we hadn’t played together in a long time. After that we did a sold-out show in London and a few other shows in the UK as well as a show in Berlin. And we played in New York actually, at the New York Pop Festival, as well as the Green Man Festival in Wales. We did a bunch of shows between 2010 and 2015 and then it kind of ran its course. Those shows certainly didn’t hurt the Pooh Sticks legacy. We seemed to be worth about 300 kids wherever we played, which given the fact that 20 or 25 years had passed I think is pretty good.”
I asked if he’d considered releasing an album with the new band, and Hue responded by saying a Pooh Sticks record without Gregory’s participation wouldn’t really be a Pooh Sticks record. “Steve wasn’t involved in those shows. I did tell him we were going to do them but he didn’t really seem to want us to do it—I didn’t really understand why. I think it was one thing doing shows without Steve, but—over the years other writers have sent me songs saying ‘This sounds like the Pooh Sticks and would you like to do something?’ But I would listen to the song and it didn’t really. It’s not as if I couldn’t do something without Steve, I could use the Pooh Sticks name, but I suppose Steve would have to be involved.”
Of his new band Swansea Sound—more about which later—Williams told me, “We could have called ourselves the Pooh Sticks, but it didn’t really feel like the Pooh Sticks, which is why I thought we’d come up with another name. Could Swansea Sound be the Pooh Sticks? I suppose they could. I think the new Swansea Sound record [their second, which is slated for release in early September 2023] is a lot shinier, and I think it is a lot like the Pooh Sticks.”
Gregory also brought the Pooh Sticks back into the public eye with the 2014 LP, Think Bubble, which he released on Fierce Recordings under the Pooh Sticks’ name. The recordings date back to the Optimistic Fool period and, noted Gregory, “I sing and play everything on the Think Bubble recordings, which were just home demos. This is how I always did it. It made it easier to teach the songs to the eventual players.”
Gregory then placed them in fuller context: “After Optimistic Fool I decided that if there was to be another Pooh Sticks album it would have to be a hit—in the charts, gold record, etc. There was no point in making another also ran like Optimistic Fool. Basically, I was only interested in making the kinda record I’d intended to be the second album for Zoo. I wanted a co-producer, a different recording set-up entirely, management, videos, etc. But this would’ve required a [large financial] commitment from a major label. And it would surely have been difficult to put something like that together. To help me focus on whether I wanted to even try, I recorded home demos of maybe 40 songs over a period of several weeks. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to make another Pooh Sticks record.” As for why Gregory waited decades to release Think Bubble, he provided an interesting rationale: “I just picked ten songs to release, pretty much at random, because I had a nice picture for a sleeve.” Think Bubble was an album waiting for a cover. And when I asked if he’d had any qualms about releasing Think Bubble under the Pooh Sticks name he replied, “If there’s ever call for expanded editions of The Great White Wonder, Million Seller, or Optimistic Fool they’ll probably have some home demos on them. The recordings were made while the band still existed, and were a legit part of the process.”
All of which brings us to the sad present, where we’re forced to lead lives of quiet desperation in a world without the Pooh Sticks in it. What are Gregory and Williams up to now? Of International Language and its aftermath Gregory had this to say: “International Language wasn’t a ‘next thing’ or anything like that. Michel van der Woude [of Beatle Hans renown] and I were helping a studio owner remodel his house, and in return we got studio time. 1995 was also the year of the final Fierce Recordings release, a Spacemen 3 CD. So when I decided not to pursue the idea of making another Pooh Sticks album, after having made the Think Bubble home demos, that was kinda the end of ‘the biz’ for me.”
He added, “Sometime towards the end of the ‘90s I started selling rare punk records—almost exclusively from the UK—on my online site Low Down Kids. It was one of the central places for that for a few years. I still sell records online, but with a significantly lower profile: I don’t have the Low Down Kids site anymore. From 1999 to 2006 I was also very involved in Mario Panciera’s book 45 Revolutions, which details UK punk/new wave singles from 1976 to1979. [It was released by Italy’s Hurdy Gurdy Books in 2007 and is fiendishly hard to find.] I probably worked on that for at least 20 hours a week, every week.”
Gregory currently works with the Dutch band Safe Home, a project of former Nightblooms’ members Ester Sprikkelman (vocals) and Harry Otten (guitar). Noted Gregory, “Esther and Harry formed Safe Home around 2000. All recorded at home. I basically push the buttons (such as they are; we have no ‘gear’ to speak of). Safe Home has made three albums [2002’s You Can’t Undo What’s Already Undid, 2006’s The Wide Wide World and All We Know and 2022’s Een Jaar Met Dertien Maanden]. The first two are in English; the latest one is in Dutch.”
As for Williams, as mentioned he’s returned to making music with Swansea Sound, having reunited with Amelia Fletcher and fleshed out the group with guitarist/bassist/songwriter Rob Pursey and drummer Ian Button. The band released their debut LP, the excellent Live at the Rum Puncheon, in 2021, as well as 2022’s “Music Lover” EP and a series of singles. Swansea Sound’s songs mark a return to the sly indie commentaries of the early Pooh Sticks, as evidenced by titles like “Indies of the World Unite,” “Corporate Indie Band,” and “I Sold My Soul on eBay.” And they’ve even released a tongue-in-cheek homage to their old band entitled simply “The Pooh Sticks,” which includes the great chorus “I went to festival/They were the best of all/Indie bands/Indie bands.” And they end the song with a reprise of “I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee Quite Well,” replacing McGee’s name with “Hue Pooh Stick.” And as mentioned they’ve wrapped up production for their sophomore LP, Twentieth Century, the wait for which has fans (including yours truly) very agitated.
When I asked Gregory if he had any final words on the Pooh Sticks legacy, he said simply, “The Pooh Sticks gave me an opportunity to ‘comment’ on the records I loved. That’s what I liked most.” For his part Williams focused on the need to do more to bring the band’s body of work back to the public eye. “What I will say, and I think it’s important, is that these days bands tend to their catalogs and Steve and I don’t do anything with our catalog.” He mentioned a few steps they’ve taken, but in general noted, “We’re really bad at that kind of stuff. Optimistic Fool is on Spotify so the only thing you’re going to get to hear is possibly our worst record.” He then added, “I bumped into Steve recently. I hadn’t seen him in 20 years, so maybe we’ll do some more things.” Let us hope.
The Pooh Sticks stand amongst the ranks of the great coulda shouldas—they were enormous fun and celebrated the power and the glory of rock ’n’ roll with unabashedly exuberant songs that still smell fresh from the oven decades later. I can’t think of another band so eager to share their record collection with you, and the Pooh Sticks had a monumental record collection. Love, cheek, and theft—it’s an impossibly heady combination. And speaking of cheek, I can think of no better way to end this piece on all things Pooh than with a mention of their appearance on the 1997 compilation Revolution No. 9: A Tribute To The Beatles. Paul Weller contributed “Don’t Let Me Down.” Billy Bragg contributed “Revolution.” The Pooh Sticks contributed “True Life Hero.” By Klaatu.
