18 Wheeler’s bogus journey

First published in Bigwig, October 1996

In a sound-proofed bunker, nestled between the antiques warehouses of London Bridge’s bourgeois Borough, a young Scot is plotting a revolution. Dressed in a trainspotter’s stripey anorak and initially wary of strangers, the porridge-faced propagandist raves animatedly about the slings and arrows, pitfalls and piss-takes that have led him and his clique of converts to this, their Year Zero. You might call him an idealist, this most un-star like (and for that matter un-‘pop’) of pop stars, but if you’d taken as many (critical) kicks in the teeth as Sean Jackson and his much-mocked band 18 Wheeler, labelling him a believer would be far more appropriate.

Sorry, 18 Wheeler? You could be forgiven for thinking that they had sputtered to a halt some while back, after the Formanka LP’s detour into the cul-de-sac marked ‘lo-fi’. Perhaps you too stifled a laugh when Jackson announced at the start of the year that his group were going techno, imagining the boys strutting their rather generous stuff at the next Rez.

Well, remember cynics, this is the very combo that Oasis press guru Johnny Hopkins trumpeted as “a long-term prospect that people will take a while to get into, like REM” way back in 1993 when they signed to Creation. Could it be that the hours and the times are finally moving in sync with the Wheeler? Stranger things have happened. The Gallagher boys supported them way back then.

So, how did 18 Wheeler, previously a sunny, if somewhat unreliable, West Coast pop vehicle (a Scotpop VW Beetle, if you will) come to call in for such a comprehensive third album service? Was it down to what happened (or didn’t happen) to that last record?

“Well it’s partly that,” affirms Jackson, “and partly down to the fact that we’ve been listening to a lot more dance music. We’ve been listening to dance music for a long time but with the last album, actually doing it was never an option. It was a case of: ‘Here’s a few grand, go into the studio for two weeks and make an album.’ So the last one was always going to sound like that — really garagey. This time we actually had the time to do it properly, to sit at the computer for, like, for ever, and do it in a different way.”

‘God, we went all the way over to Belgium and played to 20 people ’cos of Twix and their fucking lucky Twix!’

For a bunch of previously unreconstructed guitar manglers, this must have been quite a taxing process. How did they go about it? “Well, when we were still finding our feet, the album was in three parts between full-on techno songs, your traditional 18 Wheeler songs and a couple of instrumentals, explains Jackson. “And we were gonna link it all together with little bits of music like it was a radio show.

“So we took it to Creation and they said: ‘Well, the techno ones are all right, but play them to someone who knows anything about dance music and they just won’t stand up. And the other songs don’t really sit right with those songs, either. What you’ve got to do is go away and write some more songs, using those techno ones as the template for the whole album.’”

Indeed the story runs that Alan McGee himself was listening to their demos in the bath when suddenly, by way of a Glaswegian ‘Eureka!’, he spluttered: “Why the fuck are we always looking for new bands when we’ve got a band that I think are brilliant sitting there on the label? What we should do is put money into this lot and we might have a hit record on our hands.” In between bouts of sticking his big toe up the tap and that¹.

Back to the mixing desk then, 18 Wheeler, for more explorations in jangle pop with knobs (twiddled) on. “Fundamentally, the start of the process hasn’t changed, it’s still writing the song,” continues Jackson. “But then instead of rehearsing it and playing it until it sounds OK, we put it down on an eight-track with just guitar and start building a rhythm track around it and then adding all the stuff after that. It’s a completely different way of approaching it. It’s all put together in the studio and now we have to start trying to reproduce it live. We’re really working on making ourselves the best we’ve ever been live.”

Hence our surroundings, where Sean and comrades have been holed up for a fortnight in preparation for a showcase outing at the Raw Club, plus assorted radio sessions starting at tweedy London station GLR. All a far cry from the launch of Formanka, which saw them battling hard against a crotchety PA, a room of disinterested journalists and the kind of dancefloor activity that they’re hoping not to attract this time around courtesy of a Willie Thorne lookalike in white jeans. Sean shudders at the memory².

“All I remember about that is that we were playing to mainly journalists and record company folk and we were on stage and they were miles away. So people were just starting to come forward when this crazy bald guy with a huge moustache starts doing this ridiculous dancing at the front and I’m trying to keep a straight face as I’m singing all these songs thinking, ‘Oh Christ no …’ We just had to get completely drunk after that.”

I would say “you had to be there” but incidents like that happened all the time to Mk I Wheeler. Sean also cheerfully recalls playing to an audience of 20 or so in a marquee at a Belgian festival, with some 40,000 others milling around outside with bugger all else to do. The snag? The promoter had made a Willy Wonka-esque deal with sponsors Twix and your Belgian pop kids needed to accrue a lucky wrapper before gaining entry.

“The next band on kicked up a stink about it and people were allowed in without a lucky Twix — I think it was Menswear. We were just sitting there thinking, ‘God, we’ve come all the way over to Belgium and played to 20 people ’cos of Twix and their fucking lucky Twix!””

However, persistence, faith and an endearing self-deprecatory streak (“We are Scottish, after all”) have ensured that 18 Wheeler are still hanging on in there, writing poignant pop gems like The Hours and the Times and current single, Crabs. You have to wait until January for Year Zero, but like all good revolutions, this one starts in the head. Can you find it in yourself to take 18 Wheeler seriously at last?

“Well at least no one will be able to call us retro this time,” concludes Jackson. “They’ll have to criticise us on the songs. And we have got faith in ourselves as, like, good songwriters. Though we’ll never be one of those bands that says we’re the best band in the world … ”

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Footnotes

1. Even if you can’t imagine Tim Booth on the toilet, this is a mental image we can all get behind.
2. I was sorry to bring it up, really, but it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. Said gig was also the first time I heard Oasis’ Live Forever, played loud by the Creation DJ. I distinctly remember turning to my mate and mouthing words to the effect of: ‘These lot are going to be massive.’
3. As here we reach the end of the M8/Bigwig/writing for free years, it’s worth mentioning those pieces that I’ve not been able to track down. The one I’m most annoyed about losing is a Pulp interview from just before their Do You Remember the First Time? single and form video (not least because Jarvis cruelly but very amusingly turned the tables by trying out his Do You Remember the First Time? questions on me). Also out there somewhere, either on the dark web, the shelves of the British Library or lining the hamster’s cage, are seminal sitdowns with Ruthless Rap Assassins (Brig); Cornershop (Brig); Jellyfish (some Bristol magazine); Utah Saints (the same mystery mag); Tori Amos (M8 – tape recorder broke down; made most of it up); the Wildhearts (M8); another 18 Wheeler piece (M8); NoMeansNo (Speed fanzine, Manchester); Gene (Bigwig); Juliana Hatfield (Bigwig); Howe Gelb and Lisa Germano (Subway; a Bigwig successor that lasted one issue); The Boy Least Likely To (Time Out); and Jake Arnott (Time Out – a memorable one for both of us, that).