The Boo Radleys' 1996 album "C'mon Kids" is the sort of record for which the term "commercial suicide" was invented. Like Pulp's "This Is Hardcore" two years later, it was the sound of an indie band reacting in panic to mainstream success by turning darkly introspective and abandoning the idea of writing great pop songs just when they'd finally gotten good at it.

As with Pulp, it wasn't actually the band's last record – they both managed one more album, with Pulp's "We Love Life" meeting a similar bargain-bin fate to the Boos' final effort "Kingsize" – but it was unquestionably the one that destroyed their success and cast them back into indie obscurity and poverty.

All things, though, are put right in time.

The consensus of opinion has long been that "C'mon Kids" was a deliberate act of self-harm by the band, chilled by the experience of kids TV and daytime radio stardom that came with the success of the previous year's album "Wake Up!" and in particular its summer-smash near-title track "Wake Up Boo". All Music Guide's entry on "C'mon Kids", for example, asserts:

"[The band] recoiled from the spotlight and Martin Carr wrote C'mon Kids as a direct response to the group's celebrity status in the U.K. Simply put, C'mon Kids is an attempt to scare away any of the fellow travelers who welcomed the sunny-sounding pop of Wake Up!"

Whatever the intentions (see the entry below for "Annie And Marnie"), it's certainly a very hard album to love. It seems to have been compiled by gathering together fragments of about 40 songs, throwing them in the air and sticking the bits together in whatever order they fell, and both individual tracks and the album as a whole are swollen with wilfully difficult slabs of tuneless artwankery.

The sad thing is that if the band hadn't chickened out and sabotaged it into such a sprawling, impenetrable, borderline-unlistenable mess, "C'mon Kids" had all the necessary ingredients to make an album that was accessible and pop and fantastic without being a dozen dumbed-down happy-clappy clones of "Wake Up Boo".

In fact, with a bit of judicious pruning of some of the more overblown tracks, and swapping a couple of duffers for superior outtakes from the album sessions that were relegated to b-sides and the like, it's possible to fairly easily turn it into what it should have been – one of the defining records of the era, and a fresh, coherent, mature collection of songs that would have taken the Boos forward musically without sending tune-lovers running for the hills.

It might have run something like this.

(To hear most of the songs in these links, you'll need Spotify Free. It's completely legal and it's free, duh.)

1. C'mon Kids
2. Meltin's Worm

Everything's fine here. A couple of noisy, shouty attention-grabbers to kick things off, maybe a little bit light on melody but "Meltin's Worm" has a catchy chorus and a great lyrical story. (It would probably have made a much better first single than the title track, in fact.) Nothing much to see, move along.

3. What's In The Box? (See Whatcha Got)

The real album started to go wrong on track three with "Melodies For The Deaf (Colours For The Blind)", a meandering, disjointed mishmash of half-chewed scrag-ends that's about as snappy and memorable as its title and somehow manages to be both chaotic and boring.

It might as well have been written for the deaf, so let's bin it and keep the momentum by pulling second single "What's In The Box?" (originally track 7, and at 3m29s one of the shortest tracks on "C'mon Kids") forward for the classic album template of three fast, punchy songs before you stop for breath.

4. Annie And Marnie (download)

In an interview in 2005, Boos singer Sice denied the commonly-held notion that "C'mon Kids" was a deliberate attempt to frighten off mainstream fans in the aftermath of "Wake Up".

"We didn't want to scare away the hit-kids, we wanted to take them with us to somewhere that we'd not been before. All we wanted to do was make a different type of album than Wake Up… All we wanted to do was try something new – to keep ourselves fresh and interested. We were very surprised to find that it was seen as a deliberate attempt to scare away newly created fans."

If doing something interesting without losing all your fans was the goal, this b-side from the "What's In The Box?" single release would have done a much better job of achieving it. It's a quirky and playful little song, with warm, echoey harmonies and all manner of unusual instruments swooning away to pleasant effect behind a simple melody and completely incomprehensible words. The Boos were from Wallasey near Liverpool, and this track is a wry, textbook "Calm down" that would have sat perfectly behind the three over-excited openers.

5. Get On The Bus

Having spent a few minutes on the quiet step, C'mon Kids Redux can get back under way with the noisy but controlled "Get On The Bus", an interesting tune with an urgent middle section bookended by two slower, almost folky passages full of ominous foreboding.

6. Bullfrog Green

We're briefly back in step with the original tracklisting now, having thrown the hideously dull strangled plod of "Everything Is Sorrow" into a ditch somewhere along the way.

"Bullfrog Green", like many other songs on the album, comes in three distinct parts with very little obvious relation to each other – the first couple of minutes wander around aimlessly without getting anywhere and sound like the result of a mediocre programmer trying to get a computer to write something that sounds a bit like The Boo Radleys, then suddenly there's an extended grunge riff, which in turn leads into a rather lovely final third that wouldn't have sounded out of place on "Wake Up!", all honeyed backing vocals and "woah-oh-oh"s and "scooby dooby doo"s.

Originally this lazy-summer-afternoon-in-the-park blissout was followed by horribly out-of-place, jarringly brash "What's In The Box?", but we've got something much better lined up for the job.

7. From The Bench At Belvidere

"C'mon Kids" is an album whose narrative tone is that of a war – starting off with an explosive and optimistic call to arms but then steadily descending into regret and lament, with a pause in the middle for everyone to ponder how they ever got into such a state and write poetry. In that context, the nostalgic childhood-friendship story of "From The Bench At Belvidere"  is basically the Boos' version of "Two Little Boys".

It's a beautiful, understated song that actually predates the album – "C'mon Kids" is one of those oddities where all the singles were released after the LP – and doesn't appear on any Boos long-player (excepting compilations), but it ought to have been on this one. So now it is.

8. Four Saints (That'll Do, Pig edit) (download)

Four different tunes in one track is plenty already. Six is too many. The remainder of "C'mon Kids" can't be fixed without surgery, so we've had to get the scalpel out and trim some of the indulgence off. Almost a minute shorter in our incarnation than the released version, "Four Saints" holds together much better as a  coherent song when freed from the senseless Stealer's Wheel drivel originally tacked onto the end of it, and as a bonus there's even time to extend the smashing riff a bit as it fades out.

9. Spion Kop (I Don't Want To Boer You edit) (download)

You couldn't find a better example of the Boos' malaise in 1996 than "Spion Kop". At just 2m02s this b-side from the "C'mon Kids" single (named after the scene of a famous battle in the Boer War that in an odd quirk of culture gave its name to several sections of terracing in sports grounds) ought to be a snappy little track, but it turns out to actually be about 90 seconds' worth of song that the band haven't been able to resist dragging out with pointless ugly twiddling until it's 33% too long and has had all the life sucked out of it.

C'mon Kids Redux trims 36 seconds of useless dead weight off it, setting free the pretty, wistful tune underneath – well suited to replacing the godawful multipart Simon & Garfunkel pastiche of "New Brighton Promenade" from the original album as a low-key, reflective breather between two noisier numbers.

10. Fortunate Sons

The mere act of dumping "New Brighton Promenade" also refreshes the next track and leaves it free to act as a bridge to the album's big finish, carrying on the pace of "Spion Kop" while setting the sonic scene for "Ride The Tiger".

"Fortunate Sons" is growly and prowly and fits the Boos' criteria of moving on and doing stuff that didn't sound like their earlier work, but is vaguely listenable at the same time, perhaps because it's more or less the same tune all the way through.

So it gets to stay while the pointless filler "Shelter" – which doesn't fit with any other song on "C'mon Kids", never mind "Ride The Tiger" – gets the elbow.

11. Ride The Tiger (Stu's Compact Mix) (download)

The gigantic arse the Boos made of this essentially brilliant song is probably the worst crime on the whole of "C'mon Kids". What ought to be the majestic, epic centrepiece of the album is bloated by two interminable minutes of tedious noodling at the end that completely wrecks the song's patient build-up to the glorious, soaring T-Rex-meets-Oasis payoff that starts at around 2m40s and reaches an all-too-brief climax at 3m23s.

Instead of taking that moment and throwing the kitchen sink at it to draw it out – as Oasis would do with the best parts of "Be Here Now" a few months later – the Boos cut the peak off in its prime and instead let it dribble limply away into some tuneless jungle noises and free-jazz organ parping and mumbling that goes on and on and on and on until the poor listener wishes death by sadistic boa constrictor on all concerned, before sputtering into a short acoustic refrain and then putting the song out of its misery.

"Ride The Tiger" was the last single released from the album, and Creation slammed the stable door shut several weeks too late with an abysmal re-cut that crudely hacked out a full three minutes from the album version, including the whole jazz-jungle section but also, insanely, the minute immediately preceding it that's the entire pinnacle of the song. (They were rewarded with a dismal No.38 chart placing.)

C'mon Kids Redux deftly segues the zenith straight into the coda (oh yeah), leaving the song at a lean 4m34s – over two minutes shorter than the original – but without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

12. One Last Hurrah

Strictly in terms of musical merit you could easily end the album there, but while it's not much of a song in its own right, "One Last Hurrah" does have quite an end-credits sort of atmosphere about it, whereas ending on the short refrain of  "Ride The Tiger" would feel a little abrupt.

Leaving it in gives us a classic 45-minute length for the whole album – 45m24s to be precise – compared to the wearisome 52m45s (but feeling even longer due to being made up of so many little bits) of the real thing, and it does provide a suitable Last Post and give C'mon Kids Redux a pleasingly rounded whole.

 

I don't think I've ever listened to "C'mon Kids" since the month it came out. (Certainly, there wasn't anything from it in my 2300-song iTunes library.) As a whole it's a spoilt, wallowing shambles, and none of the individual songs are enjoyable because they've all been ruined in some way, whether by having gratuitous bits of other tunes glued randomly into the middle, or being inextricably merged with the preceding or following track, or just being rubbish in the first place.

But I love C'mon Kids Redux. It sounds like the Boo Radleys without sounding anything like "Wake Up!", yet it's still an accessible and tuneful album. If the band had released this version in 1996 they might have kept themselves commercially and creatively alive (a couple of bits of "Kingsize" show they hadn't lost the ability to write a great song, but it was clear that their heart wasn't in it any more).

We might, in that world, have had more brilliant records from the Boos instead of the almost entirely forgettable work of their numerous splinters. But there you go. C'mon Kids Redux doesn't prove any great point, I just wanted to save it from the indignity of obscurity that its component parts don't deserve, and turn it with the least possible degree of alteration into something that was enjoyable to listen to instead of a gruelling, unco-operative challenge. You can judge the success of that project for yourself.

 

 

 

xx. Secret hidden track (download)

No album of the Britpop years would have been complete, of course, without a "hidden" bonus track, and this – actually Tune #6 from "Four Saints", released from the ugly baggage of Tune #5 – fits the bill rather nicely, and is quite sweet in its own right when not nailed carelessly onto the end of five completely dissimilar mini-tracks. Never let it be said that WoSblog would throw away an edible part of the animal.

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