By the time I started to follow “contemporary” music in around 1994/95, Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets were about to call it a day, at least on their initial run as a band - they would reform in 2003. By the time they split in 1995, their former roadie had eclipsed the decent level of success that the band had enjoyed up to that point, almost overnight. During the first two years that he spent on the end of seemingly every journalist’s microphone, Noel Gallagher had plenty of opportunities to cook up the myth of Oasis rise to superstardom. When discussing his time working for Inspiral Carpets, he would talk of the frustrations he felt working for a band whose material wasn’t, in his opinion, as strong as the growing number of songs he was writing which just needed an outlet for the world to discover them.
By the time Inspiral Carpets released their third album, Revenge of the Goldfish, in October 1992, they’d laid Gallagher off from his role with them, leaving him to concentrate on working with his band and readying the ground for a debut album, Definitely Maybe, which was streets ahead of anything that his former employers had put out on their third album. The servant had learned his masters’ tricks and comprehensively usurped them...except in one degree. Namely, quality of longevity. Because by the time Oasis came to record their third album, Be Here Now in 1997, they could have desperately done with a track as good as Fire (or Dragging Me Down...or Here Comes the Flood or...) to cut through the coke’n’treble tedium.
There are a few lyrical themes on Fire which would be staples of plenty of Oasis songs, not least the search for God in a Godless environment. It’s clear that, as far as the Inspirals were concerned here, the absence of God has given the Devil the chance to bring us Hell in our own homes. It’s actually a very bleak lyric despite the frenetically, upbeat performance. Unavoidably, the “Get ready to burn” refrains find singer Tom Hingley channelling The Crazy World of Arthur Brown though I think the Inspirals track is much more worth revisiting than Brown’s iconic Number 1 hit of the same name.
Revenge of the Goldfish was released the day after this show went out and Peel had nothing but good wishes for the band’s prospects with it, not least because he declared himself “a fan of them as human beings.” One of them had invited him to their wedding, but work commitments had prevented him from going. In the event, the album peaked at Number 17 in the UK Album Chart, the only one of their four albums from their initial run as a band not to make the Top 10.
Video courtesy of Inspiral Carpets
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