Song, by Toad

This album is one I bought years ago.  It was from a time when the Beta Band were making quiet waves in Scotland – although I wasn’t quite cool and hip enough to know anything more about them than that they existed.  Arnold don’t have much in common with The Beta Band, apart from the fact that, looking back, it feels like at this point we were starting to see the breakup of the Britpop juggernaut.  It had, as a movement, peaked.  And now, by 1998, it was well and truly petering out.

Bands like Arnold and The Beta Band seem, in retrospect, like the first inklings of what indie was going to become after Britpop: introspective, slightly more atmospheric than pop, and generally quite a bit less brash.  They weren’t entirely indie though, given that this album was released on Creation Records.  Well, let’s rephrase that, Creation were still indie at that point, but they were surfing the Oasis wave and were within a year of selling out to Sony BMG, so they were pretty influential and well-established for an independent record label.

Personally, I have to confess that there is really only one reason I bought this: that cover.  I love the proportions, that shade of blue, and the drawing style.  The album itself I only found myself half liking, but there are some great songs on it.  It reminds me of a time when I still actually went into HMV from time to time, although I was largely shopping at Fopp (before they were HMV), Echo and Lost in Music at this point.  I wasn’t reading zines, but I had started to take note of which record labels and which producers were involved with bands.  I bought loads of CD singles – an unfairly maligned format.  I found music by browsing in record shops, not from the big magazines, not from the telly and not from either radio or the web, which barely existed at this point.

Looking back, the era of the CD single seems like a sort of lost time, in between the indie era of home-packaged vinyl releases and fanzines, and the internet era and subsequent territorial battle between the industry and its consumers.  Britpop was waning, and there was yet to to emerge an obvious successor to dominate our landscape, so it was like a little lull in the world of music.  Not that the music was all crap by any means, just that there seemed to be no coherent ‘movement’ to define the time.  A bit like the 90s as a whole, really.

Arnold – Goodbye Grey
Arnold – Windsor Park
Arnold – Fleas Don’t Fly

You can still buy their stuff on Amazon incidentally – look at the second hand prices though.