Having just completed a Festive Fifty for 1992, I can content myself that it’ll be a long while before I have to do one for 1993. That’s probably a good thing because while I have currently listened to Peel shows up to April 1993 and I have a lengthy list of selections for the year so far, only two tracks have really stood out as earworms for me up to now. Sweet Revenge by Colour Noise is one of them.
I think what stands out for me, with the benefit of hindsight, is how out of place it sounds as a piece of female-fronted rock in 1992/93. Not ethereal enough to be shoegaze, not savage enough to be grunge, not political enough to be considered British Riot grrl and as a portent to the future, you’d be hard pressed listening to it to imagine the world of Elasticas, Sleepers and Echobellys who would be dominating the spotlight in the coming years. If you squint, there’s a touch of Polly Jean Harvey at her most mannered and melodramatic about Sweet Revenge, but it seems to belong less to contemporary 90s rock music and instead feels like a bitter, tortured drinking blues/jazz song of the sort that Billie Holliday or Judy Garland might have performed to anxious cabaret audiences in their last, desperate years.
In its verses, one can picture singer, Gena Dry, snarling her contempt at the target of the song while drawling her way through her sixth glass of whisky. The alcohol and the spite drive her towards the transcendent chorus - but it’s the breakdown that Gena suffers and drives her way, almost incoherently and virtually unaccompanied, through from 2:50 to 3:40 that makes the song. The litany of promises about what she will and won’t do, the determination to be revenged on those who’ve wronged her, while at the same time still betraying feelings of love/desire for the target, until finally - like Billie and Judy - Gena strikes up the band and stops singing her intentions into her glass or her shattered self esteem, but instead projects them right to the back of the hall so that everyone can hear her and be left in no doubt that she’s back on her feet and fighting on.
Despite the rockist trappings and Eastern tinged riffs, this is a showstopper of a tune and if it had a proper ending as opposed to a fadeout, it would bring audiences to their feet demanding a dozen encores. It’s rock music as Broadway/West End theatre and that’s what would have made it stand out from the crowd in 1992/93.
I don’t think anyone knew quite what to do with Colour Noise back then. The positive music paper reviews for the Sweet Revenge EP, as mentioned by Peel at the end of the video, did nothing for the band’s immediate prospects and it would take until 1996 for them to release any follow-up material. The following year, tracks from the 1996 EPs together with the material recorded for Sweet Revenge were put out by Lowspeak Records on an album called Exposed. This also featured 4 previously unreleased tracks recorded live, almost on my doorstep, at Truro City Hall of all places. The promotional notes attached to the record talk the band up with a handful of positive quotes from reviewers and magazines. Forget Echobelly E.P Magazine demanded, which is a bit of an irony considering that by 1997, Echobelly seemed to be going all out to try and sound like Colour Noise. But they appear to have remained below the radar, only being referenced subsequently during news stories of Gena Dry’s suicide in 2010.
Video courtesy of Webbie who has very kindly also uploaded my other big ear worm from 1993 so far. More on that in the coming weeks.
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