Gene........... Now heres a band that was misunderstood !!!
And i don't know why because from what i am listening to right now they always shined with PoP goodness, swirly hammonds and guitar hooks that can kill. Gene knew how to write a fantastic pop song "Be my light, be my guide, haunted by you, For the dead, Fighting fit"...the list could go on and on...
So The good old NME (Sic) always touted them as Smiths wannabes .But i always found myself listening to Gene more than The smiths. Don't get me wrong, the Smiths are fantastic, but for me Gene had something else to bring to the table. I was a bit late to get in to Gene, well i say late my first encounter with them was when they released "Sleep well tonight" which was only their 3rd single. Then they released "Haunted by you" which is still in my top 10 Britpop singles of all time. They had everything that a band should, a lead singer that all the girls could swoon over, Guitar riff's aplenty for all the blokes and Songs that would switch from Ballads to rock.
Spanning 5 Studio albums and 14 singles, Gene had a great career with a fantastic fan base and some critical success. But in 2004 they split after deciding that that had done all that they could. I always thought it was a shame that they never got the recognition that they deserved, don't get me wrong there was a few years that Gene were on the covers of all the regular music magazines and on TV but nothing as big as i thought they deserved!.
Just go and listen to their Debut album "Olympian", every song is a bonafied classic.
Like i have said in previous posts about albums taking me back to a certain place in time, Olympian also does this. When i have a listen nowadays I'm taken back to that hot summer in 1995, i had just arrived home from the Glastonbury festival and i couldn't sleep for the fact that i had just spent 4 days sleeping on the grass in a tent. For those few nights afterwards the only way i could sleep was to put my pillow on the floor and drift away to Olympian on my headphones.
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