The Boo Radleys, Classic or Dud?

And is Sice the least charismatic rock frontperson ever?

As I see it, the very earliest stuff (even _Ichabod and I_) is quite good, but _Everything's Alright Forever_ was a low point, sorta there and no more outside of a couple of songs. But after "Lazarus," strength to strength from there on in. And the singles were all just packed with some amazing B-sides and remixes; I went ahead and made a grand four CDR comp out of them all, plus a lot of the random rarities.

About the B-sides, I managed to get 2 extensive D90s of their excellent b-sides (which were often better than the rest of their material (seek: Blues for George Michael, Vegas, Sunfly II, Wallpaper, Almost Nearly There)... how in god's name did you get 4 CDs out of that? I thought i had almost all their rarities (then again i never included remixes or live edits - maybe i should)... I think the Boos were forgotten about because younger people (21 and under now) remember them as that band who did that Wake Up! song that used to play every morning before school and annoy them (actually, it was that song and Leaves & Sand that introduced me)... over 21s remember them as an excellent band who went pop and didn't do much after their Ride-era Everything's Alright Forever... Luckily, I never really gave up on them. I always thought the choice of A-Sides they brought out were abysmal though (Destroy: It's Lulu, Free Huey (ugh!), Barney & Me, What's In The Box) actually, I only bought the singles for the awesome b-sides where Martin Carr seemed to be able to do what the fuck he liked. I think they were a little scared of getting their experiments heard and so released their most straight-ahead tracks on single.

Kingsize is good and their most straight forward album although Carr was pretty apathetic about the recording compared to the others.

Just heard Ichabod and I recently and was surprised how excellent it sounded, possibly even better than Everythings Alright Forever.

Martin Carrs new stuff as Brave Captain is also excellent and also really prolific, a mini album, an album, a 10" single and a cd single so far and the stuff is great. Good live too if you can catch them.

One of the best of the 90s.

Shit - I even like Wake Up.

That said, their best track - Skywalker - was the free giveaway single on C'Mon Kids. Drum'n'bass scuzzed up rock. Made you kinda wish the rest of the album was that good. Oh yes, those were the days.

Search: Giant Steps, Everything's Alright Forver
Even the weakest disc (C'mon Kids, IMHO) is pretty damn OK. Destroy nothing but your preconceptions.

search: everything the boo's ever made except for the weird remixes
destroy: nothing but your silly head Mr Dud!

Have come to the sacrilicious conclusion that 1) Wake Up! is the best album, and 2) Wake Up Boo! is the best thing they ever did by a million silvery skyscraping miles. I like the Boo Radleys.

Albums:
Wake Up! > Giant Steps > Everything's Alright Forever > Kingsize > Ichabod & I > C'Mon Kids

Singles Choices (Era):
Giant Steps > Everything's Alright Forever > Wake Up! > C'Mon Kids > Kingsize

B-Sides (Era):
Wake Up! > Everything's Alright Forever > Giant Steps > C'mon Kids > Kingsize

They followed their best album with their worst album and lost all their momentum. Hell, they lost all their momentum right after "Wake Up Boo!" by releasing "Find The Answer Within" as the 2nd single. They should have gone with "Reaching Out From Here", and then "Wilder". And yes, "Free Huey" is their worst single -- if not song -- ever.

Their B-sides were always hit and miss. Hell, the ones from Giant Steps could be squalling noise for 2 minutes and then jolt into something beautiful. If I can remember correctly, 3 years ago, I made 3 CDR's just from their B-sides myself. One is good b-sides, one is remixes, and one is crap b-sides. I'll have to go digging through some boxes later today.

All that said, I don't especially miss them. Hence the cdr's buried in boxes.

One of the best bands ever - as well as the above there are loads of ace b-sides and other stuff.

Love 'em to bits and always will. BOO Forever people.

And your problem is?

1. Martin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clock
2. I Hang Suspended
3. What's In The Box (See Whatcha Got)
4. Take The Time Around
5. Almost Nearly There
6. Wake Up Boo!
7. There She Goes
8. Lazy Day
9. Zoom
10. Hold On Brother
11. Ride The Tiger
12. Skyscraper
13. Stuck On Amber
14. Does This Hurt?
15. Memory Babe
16. Wish I Was Skinny
17. Reaching Out From Here
18. Kingsize
19. Wilder

Feel free to rant or rave over my choices.

Forgot all about a few of these tracks, like "Hold On Brother" which is from the War Child comp, "There She Goes" from the So I Married An Axe Murderer OST, and "Almost Nearly There" which is a "From the Bench of Belvidere" B-side

I love the Boo Radleys again, now. Hurrah!

Cheers!

Search: Boo Faith and the early EPs compilation
Destroy: everything post Giant Steps

I enjoy the BC stuff even though it gets slagged pretty hard by the masses.

I’m not sure he ever “disavowed“ his stuff with bravecaptain but this is a good interview on how it all came to be and where his head and tastes were at the time: https://bigtakeover.com/interviews/an-interview-with-martin-carr-published-in-issue75

Giant Steps makes me so...

happy!

And thanks NTI, that is a more balanced view. I think what I was recalling was an interview for one of the albums Martin put out more recently, under his own name -- something depressing in there about how he didn't think he'd made any meaningful sonic progress since the Radleys... general downer vibes along the lines of "what have I been doing with myself" ... doesn't square with how good bravecaptain's music sounds to me.

You read any of his interviews and he's super self-deprecating and imposter-sydromey. It's a shame that people like him - who are clearly natural ideas-guys and all-round talents - only seem to get that one shot at making it during their twenties and then no one outside the original fanbase really wants to know.

I wonder if, in Carr's case that's just due to unfortunate marketing. I still get raised eyebrows when I tell people I really like this band, because to them they're a one-hit-wonder who recorded a mildly-irritating sunshine Britpop song and then faded away to obscurity. Imagine if R.E.M. were only really known for Shiny Happy People, it would be a bit like that.

He wouldn't be the first for this to happen to, of course, and there are loads of people who had their 15 minutes in the 90s who never recouped. At the same time there are others who did. Maybe time is kinder to US artists: People still buy albums by Stephen Malkmus, Thurston Moore (although they're bigger names - not sure anyone really cares that much about Damon Albarn solo projects do they?).

Not sure if Martin still releases albums. I took a chance on about ten years ago, The Breaks, and it wasn't bad; if a bit straightforward and kind of Britpoppy. There seems to be no real interest or marketing push behind these when they came out. It's always going to get propped-up and compared to the Boo Radleys, no matter what he does, and that's a shame.

Like, he could absolutley be re-marketed as a psych-pop elder statesman these days, a British Wayne Coyne or something; but instead it'll always be "the guy who did Wake Up Boo"

I think I say it upthread, but I kinda came around to the Boos kind of late, post-Kingsize. Uncut and the likes were pimping the Fingertip Sessions stuff, which intrigued me but also felt a bit undercooked once I eventually heard them (actually, the single disc comp released in the States).

By the time of Advertisements for Myself, you could def. hear Carr feeling a little liberated from the confines of a band, as he says in that Big Takeover piece. A lot of Boos fans were really underwhelmed by the BC stuff, and I get that, but to me, it was the sound of a guy who no longer felt the pressure of releasing music for the charts and could just indulge his interests. I appreciated that, even if I didn’t always love it.

I began to lose track of him after that … and the bits and bobs I’ve heard of his Martin Carr stuff proper feels a bit neoconservative by comparison, perhaps returning to the kind of proper pop songs he thought he was “expected” to deliver. Regardless, my impression was that he actually sounded more adrift on those releases than he ever was during BC. But I haven’t heard enough to be sure.

The White Noise Revisited; one of the all-time great album closers, isn't it

it's perfect isn't it? and for me it sets the stage for the Wake Up! album in that it's very tuneful and Beatlesy but also flits between the light and the dark so well

Aaaaaand now I want to hear Wake Up at once, right away

Speaking of all-time great closers... but no, I suppose I had better revive the bravecaptain thread

I don't like it, to be honest (white noise revisited).

Spent a couple months away from Giant Steps, but now I'm back in it, and loving it more than ever. I always listen to it as a single full-album file, and haven't felt any need to start delving into it track by track -- there is nothing on here that I might want to skip, and also nothing that I want to replay in isolation. The album as a whole has such a great flow to it. And (I guess I'm starting to get the White Album comparisons) it has the feel of a "feast" -- you sit down and enjoy the whole experience, course after course. This is not an album of morsels.

Even just the mixing on this thing is so good. The bursts of electric noise make themselves felt.

New single 'Solarcide' sounds promising to me

This is great and I had no idea this was coming out.

Going out on tour in 2026:

https://www.thebooradleys.com/

I find the fake Boo Radleys kind of depressing. Should've taken up a new name.

Posted this on the poll thread, but my Boo Sides megamix is now on Mixcloud:

https://www.mixcloud.com/charliestoic/and-tomorrow-the-world-boo-sides-rarities-of-the-boo-radleys/

The double-album known as "And Tomorrow the World" rules.

I'm not familiar with that comp, I do have the double CD Find The Way Out conp witch is fantastic.

This reminds me that I promised to update our ILM poll so it's easier to read, wil do that in a couple of days.

The double-album known as "And Tomorrow the World" rules.

the what?

Aw thanks TheNuNuNu.

Ref: a mix of B-sides I posted upthread. Spent a good while thinking about it and putting it together

https://www.mixcloud.com/charliestoic/and-tomorrow-the-world-boo-sides-rarities-of-the-boo-radleys/

(Not upthread, a different thread)

(If anyone wants a download version of this, PM me)

Getting into this dog latin curation after a half-year of ever-growing Giant Steps love makes me think -- these cats really *were* the track that western popular music should have gone down in the 1990s. They *ought* to have dominated sales etc the way the Beatles did in the '60s! What good things could have followed!

This is what I keep trying to tell everyone

My favorite band from the 90s and that is mainly because of those B-sides. Martin Carr is such a genius and hardly anyone knows. Pavement would be number two and Super Furry Animals being third from this decade..

But I will say this again even if it makes no sense. It is because of Kingsize that they cemented their legacy for me. Take out "Free Huey" and you have another bona fide classic.

"Put Your Arms Around Me and Tell Me Everything Is Going to Be OK "

And "Kingsize " is my favorite song by them.

I was listening to a nice podcast interview with Sice, who was as you can imagine very sweet, funny and self-deprecating. He was saying that Kingsize was largely Tim's album, and that both he (Sice) and Martin had all-but checked out by that stage.

Martin had grown tired of indie rock and was mostly listening to stuff like Aphex Twin and other things. While Sice says he barely spent any time in the studio for it. But Tim was very involved with it, and was spending hours tinkering away.

It didn't help that it only got a "soft" release by the label. Barely any marketing by Creation, a rubbish lead single that sucked so badly, and a cancelled second single.

I can't pretend it ranks anywhere near the top of my faves but I still like to put on a self-edited version of it which omits Free Huey and inserts some of the (really quite fabulous) contemporaneous B-sides.

Overall it sounds very much like a studio project. Any sort of residual live band "grit" that might have carried over from C'mon Kids has gone.

And it has a very late-90s "in-the-box" feel where, I guess, people were ready to embrace being able to make music from just a laptop and sequence everything in a DAW. Aphex Twin, aforementioned, was doing his digital RDJ Album drill'n'bass stuff, which has a similar flat-plan feel.

There are some lovely orchestral arrangements on it. Some beautiful sweeping strings. I love the Lalo Schifrin horns on "The Old Newsstand At Hamilton Square", the cinematic feel of "Eurostar".

And it's fair to say Sice has never sounded so good when he sings.

It could have been shorter though. There are too many songs that slot roughly into the same style as each other, where one of each would have been enough. I could also have done with a bit more of the off-kilter experimentation and psychedelia of C'Mon Kids mixed in.

Where it sits in the pantheon, I'd say take out Free Huey and it's very close to C'Mon Kids for me. Both are very good albums which are betrayed by sounding a little too of-their-time. CK has a definite post-Oasis guitar sound that sticks it firmly in 1996, whereas Kingsize has that aforementioned clean and slightly-syntheticky feeling that makes it sound straight outta 98. I don't feel this way about Wake Up!, strangely, which to me is their most timeless-sounding record despite coming out at the peak of Britpop mania

I got a set of early promos (one a full set of tracks, one a five tracker, both look identical), and I loved the whole thing!

Took it to work, some there were like "oh, I loved Giant Steps" but nobody was bothered enough to even hear it. Tough sell, I guess, but McGee clearly put this on low priority.

The second single was cancelled (live, on the creation website) by McGee, and I made daily trips to R&TE, notting hill in case the promo turned up which it did, so got the b-sides, including "Superintendent" which I don't think ever got issued.

Reading around in another Radleys thread, found this -- beautiful and sad:

JC: I'm currently reading John Peel's autobiography and have come to the conclusion that although life goes on, the music industry in Britain will never see the likes of him again, and as a consequence of this, will never be as good. What are your views on this? Oh, and make me jealous by regaling me tales of your encounters with the great man.

MC: Yep, I just read that. There is no chance we'll ever see his like again. I was very sad when he died, it was so unexpected. John Peel was there at the beginning and at the literal end. When we had finished our first record in 1990 we sent loads of letters to Peel, pretending to be fans of the band and asking if he would play the new record (which we didn't even have copies of yet). This went on for some weeks until finally we had a copy which we sent him and he announced on the radio that he'd been getting these letters which he suspected were all written by the band (ha ha ha ha) and that he'd played the record and it was 'actually rather good' and then he played 'Catweazle'. We were living in separate flats in this big old Georgian house on Huskisson Street in Liverpool 8, I was listening to Peel with Tim in his room. While 'Catweazle' was being played at full blast I was jumping up and down on the bed, the girl from across the hall knocked loudly on the door and shouted that there was a phone call for me on the payphone in the hallway. I picked it up and said hello and there was Peel telling me that he was playing our record and would we like to come in for a session? We went out and got good and drunk that night.
Years later I read an article by Peel somewhere and he mentioned that he used to buy his NME at this newsstand in Hamilton Square. I used to work in Hamilton Square in the late eighties and had bought my NME from the very same stand. I thought it was a good idea for a song and 'The Old Newsstand at Hamilton Square' appeared on our next album 'Kingsize'.
Some time after that Sice and I made an awful journey up to Liverpool to tell Tim and Bob that the band was to break up. Shitty, bleak day, really sad. As Sice drove us back into London we switched Peel on to cheer us up. When we reached Junction Road in Archway near where I lived he told the story about him buying his NME at this little place in Birkenhead and started to play 'The Old Newsstand At Hamilton Square'. We parked the car in a side street and listened without a word.

Oh gosh

So -- the original, single version of Lazarus...? The track length tells me it's longer than the one on Giant Steps but I swear it's two minutes, maximum. Textbook case of "perfect song structure", I guess.

Decided to try Free Huey since so much hate is heaped upon it in this thread -- "can the Boo Radleys be *bad* ?". It's brash, sure, but the bridge is incredible!

I don't think "Free Huey" is a bad song oer say but it has no business being on that beautiful album. It would be fine as a stand alone single, tho still probably my least favorite. Our poll thread on it was pretty good too:
The Boo Radleys - Kingsize poll

Free Huey is bad

But I also dislike the songs C'mon Kids, What's In The Box, It's Lulu and to some extents Barney & Me. I find them all a bit "not what I come to this band for"

thanks again for this wonderful comp, dl. just kinda listening on low-ish volume at work and letting it start to sink in (and loving most if not all of it)

Query: what is that makes Giant Steps so *moving* ? I'm not at the stage yet where I know the lyrics well, so I can't put this up to the lyrics alone, though the segments that I do hear are sweet and sad and profound... there's amazing music that I can listen to with excitement and awe, which Giant Steps generates too, but then there's amazing music that makes me feel both those things *and* makes me feel touched -- the late Beatles, almost anything Hosono... now this too! It's a rare reaction.

"So you listen to the Beatles, and relax and close your eyes..."

God I love the Radleys!

That whole line and the delivery behind it

Got this in my email today:

From influential shoegaze pioneers to conquering the charts during Britpop and enjoying a triumphant reunion era, The Boo Radleys have enjoyed an unconventional journey in which restless sonic experimentation has always been a hallmark. Now the trio - original members Simon ‘Sice’ Rowbottom (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Tim Brown (bass, guitar, keyboards, vocals) and Rob Cieka (drums, vocals) - prove that decades-long inspiration is as strong as ever as they announce that their new album ‘In Spite of Everything’ will be released on May 1st.

‘In Spite of Everything’ is a record that was crafted following the tragic loss of Tim’s eldest son. The album’s new single, ‘Living Is Easy’, hones in on that all-encompassing grief and the sense of helplessness that comes with it. And yet even in the depths of grief there often remain fleeting reminders that life and its myriad wonders is still worthwhile. This dichotomy is particularly familiar to Sice in his professional capacity as a psychologist: the pain and suffering experienced by his clients needs to be addressed, but so too does the hope of a brighter future.

Available on Limited Edition 2CD, Black Vinyl or CD. Bundle orders include an exclusive artcard (while stocks last, 1 per order).

In Spite Of Everything

1. Affected / Rejected
2. Solarcide
3. Do Better, Know Better
4. Hey, I Know
5. Living Is Easy
6. King Budgie
7. Through the Crack in the Window
8. Bring Them Back Again
9. This is the Place
10. Song for Natalie
11. Wasn't I Enough?

Out May 1, 2026

BTW, this was recently updated:

Just a simple song but God I love it Embedded in me, so bittersweet I’m addicted, I’m a melancholic Sing it again, I’ll be your Poll forever: THE BOO RADLEYS - ILM artist poll #60 or new numbering #65

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keuGsnqu3Xk

I like how they use both the #shoegaze and #britpop hashtags when they post to social media

Semi-looking forward to the new album. It feels like they're experimenting and trying to come into their own post-Martin sound at this point rather than mostly retreading the Wake Up vibes. And it's been great to hear Sice on podcasts speaking very openly about life in the Boos and the other work he's been doing as a psychologist. He seems like an extremely kind-hearted and down-to-earth guy

Cheers for the heads up. I've just spent an hour listening to one of those podcasts on youtube.

Now we have something new from Martin Carr:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9omYq0dazo

Martin Carr, the former guitarist and songwriter in ’90s shoegaze/Britpop greats The Boo Radleys, has announced a new album, What Future, which will be out later this year via his own Sonny Boy Records.

Full details of the album haven’t been revealed yet, but Carr has shared a song from it, “Connie Converse is Playing at My House,” which pays tribute to the ’50s singer-songwriter cult hero while tipping a hat to LCD Soundsystem.

Man, this all sounds okay. I assume they have their reasons but at this stage I'd love it if they just reunited and had a crack at something together though