In the early to mid 1990s, there should have been a piece of safety advice passed to UK bands: Being the support act on a Radiohead tour will ultimately cause your band to implode due to your leader/focal point damaging their physical or mental health.
In early 1995, on their warmup tour ahead of the release of The Bends, Radiohead’s support act was my beloved Marion. Within 2 years of the tour, Marion’s career began to unravel as their lyricist/singer, Jaime Harding started to become addicted to heroin. By early 1999, the band had split.
Winding back to the summer of 1993, and Radiohead were touring in support of a single called Pop is Dead, their first post-Pablo Honey material. The support band on this tour were Strangelove. Within three years, Strangelove’s lyricist/singer, Patrick Duff, was in rehab due to drug/alcoholism issues and by 1998, Strangelove had disbanded.
Radiohead spoke warmly of both bands - not always a given in the bitchy environment of the 1990s UK music scene - but Strangelove were the ones cited as an inspiration to them. I think I can see why. For while Strangelove’s inspirations appear all over Hysteria Unknown - they sound as though they had been listening to a lot of Bauhaus and Joy Division at the time they recorded it - they also seem to be pointing the way for bands/artists who weren’t going to embrace Britpop-infused ideas over the next few years. Not only that, but in the immediate term (early 1993), they suggested a means by which British bands could play the Americans at their own game. Hysteria Unknown touches on themes of self-disgust, morbidity, despair and alienation which were seen as the component parts of the grunge scene, but it replaces the buzzsaw sound of the US artists with something warmer, communal and sonically interesting. Their sound is big, both in terms of their ideas and their spirit, despite the pain they communicate.
Radiohead took this energy and produced records that were both artistically compelling and resonant with the public. Strangelove, on the evidence of this track, should have benefitted from it too, especially given that Suede and Manic Street Preachers were also fans. I suspect that I would have been too had I heard Hysteria Unknown when it came out, and if that didn’t put the mockers on them, then nothing would.
Video courtesy of sadmonkey62.
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