Personal Pick: The Sonics

Once upon a time, the process of forming a band meant writing songs in C major about buying your girl a steak dinner, meeting her parents and if you got lucky, brushing your hand against her thigh whilst everyone squeezed into the pew for Sunday mass. A succession of The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks quickly put pay to this scenario by getting thousands to sing along with lyrics about the down and dirty, even if the experience itself still meant a morning spent in the confession booth. One band however, saw this growing trend in rock & roll and took it a step further than the rest.

On their 1965 debut ‘Here Are The Sonics’, the Seattle based band covered such varied subject matter as cars, Satan, psychopaths, guitars, girls and drinking pesticide for kicks. As was not uncommon at the time, the majority of this LP is comprised of covers of popular songs from the era such as this pile-driving cover of Richard Berry’s ‘Have Love Will Travel’. However, all such interpretations were fed through The Sonics’ pioneering formula of howling feedback, chugging drums and bone chilling screams. The band carried this rich vein of form onto 1966 follow up album ‘Boom’ continuing the theme of subtle of subversion with opener ‘Cinderella’. Yet despite garnering a cult following, the band failed to crack the mainstream and subsequent attempts to water down their sound for commercial success met with widespread antipathy. As a result, The Sonics remain a band in the mould of The Velvet Underground, ignored in their own time but revered over subsequent decades.

Listening back on tracks such as ‘Psycho’ though, I’m filled with a sense of nostalgia for a period I’ll never get to experience. For the days when you could cut your own bit of magic in a recording studio the size of a tin can by playing three chords as hard and fast as you’re road weary guitar and tone deaf amp would allow. Better times maybe not, more simple ones almost certainly.

The Sonics can be found on MySpace here

‘Here Are The Sonics’ is available for £8.98 from amazon.co.uk