Book review: On track…STACKRIDGE by Alan Draper

Sonicbond Publishing [Publication date 26.08.22]

One of the really positive personal aspects of reviewing and interviewing for Get Ready to ROCK! over a twenty year period is the discovery of bands you missed earlier. Or maybe had given you the wrong impression.

I actually latched on to the Stackridge story from the late 1990s when creating a website for their long-term label Angel Air Records. Label boss Peter Purnell did much to raise their profile at this time.

Whilst the Angel Air years were chiefly concerned with band and band member reissues, by 2008 Stackridge felt confident enough to record and release a new studio album ‘A Victory For Common Sense’ following a series of well-received gigs.

Sadly it was to be their studio swansong when it could have been the springboard to wider recognition and success.

Alan Draper comments in his final section of the book “David Bowie may have adopted a different style for every album, but Stackridge pretty much did the same for every song.”

Draper likes this approach but the lack of consistency would confuse the less committed and certainly record labels looking for their next hit single. Consequently the band are probably more revered now than back in the day although their core fanbase – the so-called Rhubarb Thrashers – have been with them from earliest times.

And, indeed the Thrashers perhaps helped perpetuate the band’s wider perception with punters bringing rhubarb sticks to gigs and, er, thrashing them. (The sticks I assume, not the band).

Draper’s book is, though, one of the better titles in this series. It has had the buy-in from band members (at least Mutter Slater who provides a foreword, and James Warren) and it reflects 50 years of fandom. But Draper is also a musician and so provides some useful insights to song composition.

The book title is a bit of a misnomer, it deals equally with Stackridge spin-off The Korgis but you’d never know from the front cover.

Unusually, all works are taken chronologically so BBC radio sessions are included in the sequence they were recorded even though they subsequently came out later.

Although Draper gives a handful of secondary sources he hasn’t really combed the pages of the music press from the seventies onwards nor with any great reference to more contemporary online sources. I suppose this would have taken the book above the usual 200 or so pages in this series but at least it keeps the narrative song-centred. However some of the facts are vague, in particular the background to George Martin’s involvement with the band for 1974′s ‘The Man In The Bowler Hat’.

For the less well-informed this book does reveal the large number of semi-official recordings, the inevitable duplication with live releases and reissues and of course the large number of solo recordings. Draper evidently has a soft spot for his foreword writer and so you’ll find an appraisal that won’t often appear on review websites over the years. (We hang our heads, etc) ****1/2

Review by David Randall

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Album review (The Korgis, Kartoon World, 2021 and interview)
Album review (James Warren, Innocent Bystander, 2017 and interview)

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