Artists who were naff and stayed naff

[Kane Jones]

The belief that Tom Jones is in any way 'cool' is, as the man himself would testify, the wisdom of a fool. That he has sung some of the finest songs ever recorded counts for nothing, the unwashed masses and the hoi polloi refuse to see beyond the perma tan, the shirt unbuttoned to the navel and the sweat soaked brow mopped with an old womans knickers in Vegas. But with those with eyes to see and ears that listen with no prejudice - Tom Jones is The Man. I've heard he was Elvis Presley's favourite singer. Along with all those other singers who were Elvis Presley's favourite singer. Nick Cave is a massive fan. He has sung, crooned and belted out Bond themes, murder ballads and modern pop songs like Kiss by the modern pop star Prince.

He's written off as a bellower, all power and no feeling. To those who would sit in judgement I say unto thee - Listen to Green, Green Grass of Home. Sensitivity, soulfulness, tenderness – its all there by the bucket load. But the song that I hold dearest is The Young New Mexican Puppeteer. I firmly believe – and if you believe nothing else I've ever written on these boards then believe this, I beseech you – that if this song were to be adopted not as a national but a Global Anthem then all racial, class and religious struggles would end and the world would be a better place. It wouldn't solve famine and pestilence, but that's a lot to ask from a short-arsed mutton fucker, whaddayagunnado?

Listen with me and raise a glass to world peace - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHip77SVmvM

I quite like Looking Out My Window, Doomy.  I hope this helps.

[Brundle-Fly]

Jesus, I'd forgotten about Embrace. There was Gomez too, with their growly man singer. Not to mention fucking Starsailor, who had the cheek to name themselves after that album. I used to work with a woman who hated The Verve but loved Starsailor, which confused me, as the latter seemed like essentially a Verve tribute act.

What about The Music?  At the time, I hated them by their name alone. I always imagined they were a Verve tribute tribute act? Did I imagine correctly?

[Serge]

I remember that they existed, but I don't think I ever heard a note of theirs. For some reason, I thought they were from Liverpool, but apparently they're Yorkshire lads. Talking of which - Kaiser Chiefs fit this thread to a tee, in fact have managed to get naffer as time goes on thanks to Ricky's X-Factor Move.

[chand]

What about The Music?  At the time, I hated them by their name alone. I always imagined they were a Verve tribute tribute act? Did I imagine correctly?

I'd say they were a sort of proto-Kasabian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeNssuIDViw Some pretty earnest riffs a bit like 'The Second Coming'-era Stone Roses, singer that sounded like a poor man's Robert Plant. Not sure if they ever wore Adidas trackies on stage but they sounded like they did. I had an early EP of theirs I'd bought off the back of some hype, never liked the main track but thought the second, slightly post-rocky instrumental was alright. Never liked anything else I heard by them.

[Jockice]

Fucking hell, yes.  Starsailor and Embrace are the epitome of offensively boring shit. I've heard more interesting farts.

Add The Kooks to that list please.

[zonko]

Some truly dreadful acts named in this thread so far but I think I'd take any of them over Scouting For Fucking Girls!

[Kane Jones]

Add The Kooks to that list please.

Done.

Some truly dreadful acts named in this thread so far but I think I'd take any of them over Scouting For Fucking Girls!

And these appalling cunts have been duly noted too.

[thraxx]

Done.

And these appalling cunts have been duly noted too.

The Kooks were fucking awful, but I had forgotten about Scouting For Girls.  They were staggeringly shit.

[purlieu]

I'd say they were a sort of proto-Kasabian.

Fantastic description. A band who think 'swagger' makes up for an innate lack of talent.

[great_badir]

I don't know if anyone here has heard of Bob Hall?  He's a legendary British boogie-woogie and blues pianist, who has played with just about every music legend of the last 100-odd years[NB]those that were still alive, obvs[/NB], and he's been the go-to session and live guy for any already established big-name putting together a new album and/or tour.  He's great.

Unfortunately, he also has a side solo career, which is entirely made up of fucking awful cheesy boogie woogie.  I saw him live, oooohhhh must be at least 15 years ago now.  It was him (in a gold lame jacket, with his name made out in christmas-type decorations stuck to the front of his little keyboard), his wife on 5-string Fender bass (comically wearing a ball gown, and I swear she only used two of the five strings throughout the whole gig), and some panto-twat on mandolin and plastic shaky eggs.  That was one of the worst gigs I've ever attended.

You know whenever people take the piss out of Jools Holland and demonstrate the type of music he plays, and it's always the same sounding boogie woogie piano?  Well, Bob's entire solo career is like that.

[Dannyhood91]

Mumford & Sons

[studpuppet]

Not having that. Always loved them. Listen to their beautiful version of Nick Drake's River Man. Although this is third generation Swingles, I reckon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQkVtvwcLk

You'll be singing the merits of Mike Flowers Pops next. Any musical entity that relies solely on airplay on Radio 2 at post-6pm on Sundays (cf. King's Singers, Cliff Adams Singers) is naff.

The Mike Sammes Singers are on 'I Am The Walrus' and got a release on Trunk Records; The Swingle Singers worked with The Two Ronnies and the Style Council...

[Dr Rock]

Mike Flowers Pops played an important ok a smallish role in the nineties rehabilitation of Easy Listening. Maybe a little to much shit was allowed in but before this, great swathes of great music, not just your 'lounge'/Sound Gallery stuff but even Abba or All Country Music was filed under 'naff sad shit for losers.' The 90s was a lot about telling people 'no this is good and you were blinkered and wrong.' At the beginning of the 90s most people thought Johnny Cash was naff. That's how far we've come.

[DukeDeMondo]

Christina Aguilera

No way, José, not standin for this. You're not gettin away with lumpin Christina Aguilera in with Dido an Sash an' the fuckin' Baha Men for fuck sake. No, it ends here.

Christina Aguilera is brilliant. Stripped is fuckin phenomenal from start to end, and although there hasn't been anything as good as that since, there hasn't been anything that's anywhere near to bein shit, either. I saw her in Dublin when she was touring Back to Basics, a double album I'm not hugely fond of, and still she was fuckin astounding.

[George White]

Joe Longthorne

Longthorne intrigues me, and slightly terrifies me. It's as if once you turn eighty, you become a fan. I watched some videos and was reduced to helpless convulsions of slightly fearful laughter. It's a sort of anti-comedy, baffling you into cringing that you can only laugh at yourself. His gurning, struttting about, and the strange, almost recognisable voices that rise out of his mouth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjvwLZjp6FE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kQd46hH9yA When he was younger, he seems a decent cabaret performer, but nothing special.

On the subject of naff music, my family being Irish have obsessions with Irish country music. My gran and her sister love(d) Daniel O'Donnell, and my aunt cackled, "Sure, if he weren't married, you'd think he were queer." I told her that he and his wife Majella are "only friends". And she sidestepped me. "Joe Dolan was gay, and Cliff's gay, yeah, but not Daniel."
My mum on the other hand has become a fan of Nathan Carter, an allegedly Irish-descent Liverpudlian with a weird sort of Scouse-Ulster hybrid of an accent,
Every third night, the parents sit down and watch Ireland West or Keepin' It Country TV, filled with ads for "Boogie on the Brava" and country acts playing in Irish pubs in Rochdale or God knows where, and watched the Late Late Show country special on Friday, a mix of the old favourites like Big Tom, Philomena Begley, Foster and Allen, Allen's brother TR Dallas (no, really), Brendan Shine,  Daniel O'Donnell and his older sister Margo (whose autobiography is one of the funniest things I've ever read - it begins as a sorry tale of growing up in the 50s, then working in Troubles-era Ireland, with the brilliant description of being betrayed by her manager who sold her album rights to a mysterious Billy McBurney of Outlet Records, from the boot of a car in a Belfast bombsite, IIRC and devolves into fifty pages of thanking and namedropping every US country act she can think of, so she can boast of her "friendships"),  etc, as well as the "young talent", who mostly are a mix of talent show runnerups, 40something cabaret acts like Jimmy Buckley and the supposedly Louisiana-born Robert Mizzell (whose been in Ireland so long his accent sounds extremely Canadian-ish) and ex-failed boybanders like Derek Ryan, failed Irish rapper Lee Matthews and the likes of Ritchie Remo and Marty Mone who think country are sub-Wurzels songs about tractors sung in a sort of Garth Brooks-knockoff style.
Rappers turned country singers, not quite as bad as country singers turned rappers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnofM3VYQ-g

[DrGreggles]

Jess Conrad

I can't let that pass without a link to this:
https://youtu.be/_urjNkxaLz0

WARNING: May possibly be the worst thing at all ever

[Captain Poodle Basher]

On the subject of naff music, my family being Irish have obsessions with Irish country music. My gran and her sister love(d) Daniel O'Donnell, and my aunt cackled, "Sure, if he weren't married, you'd think he were queer." I told her that he and his wife Majella are "only friends". And she sidestepped me. "Joe Dolan was gay, and Cliff's gay, yeah, but not Daniel."
My mum on the other hand has become a fan of Nathan Carter, an allegedly Irish-descent Liverpudlian with a weird sort of Scouse-Ulster hybrid of an accent,

The Marquee venue in Cork isn't far from me so I pass it regularly when out for a walk. Usually, there's a smattering of fans of whoever is playing that evening, hanging about the entrance. Nathan Carter though, Sweet Jesus. Carload after carload of teenaged girls turned up with deckchairs, cooler boxes etc and camped out for the entire day. By contrast, I passed by when Country superstar Dolly Parton played and there was about half a dozen fans waiting outside.

About twenty years ago, I used to pass a rundown shithole of a pub which put on nothing but Country & Irish acts. The band's posters could have featured as a warning about marrying your first cousin. 8-12 identical weirdos all called "The McCarthys" or "The Delaney Family" or what have you armed with accordions, fiddles and the like gurning at you from a glossy poster.

[Sydward Lartle]

Joe fucking Longthorne for fuck's sake, Christ. You've really touched a raw nerve there. Whenever some anus like Garry Bushell does his usual pitiful moaning along the entirely predictable lines of 'why don't the smug smart-arsed trendies who run television nowadays[nb]Presumably the same thoroughly loathesome people who gave this bearded Neanderthal his own late-night ITV series in the nineties?[/nb] start going around the country to see who's packing them in at the working men's clubs and holiday camps and sign a few of those proper talents up for their own series?', I just want to take him by the scruff of the neck and dump him in front of the biggest, glossiest poster of a be-wigged and beaming Joe Longthorne it's possible to find and make him stare at it, Clockwork Orange-style, while he thinks about what he's done and admits he's in the wrong.

I'm sure Joe's a lovely bloke, has bags of time for his fans[nb]The ones who aren't yet entirely senile and incontinent, anyway...[/nb], feeds stray old ladies, helps cats across the road, saved the fucking whale and everything else, but he just reminds me of the kind of entertainers my extremely blinkered and narrow-minded mother enjoyed - the kind of dead-behind-the-eyes, washed-up-before-they-even-started chicken in a basket cabaret uber-cunts who seemed to turn up again and again on light entertainment extravaganzas in the seventies and eighties. Entertainers for people who like to have jokes and comedy routines explained in minute detail, told when to laugh and applaud and never put in the slightest danger of being surprised or genuinely taken aback.

I remember seeing one of his shows from about 1984, and he was still impersonating Steptoe and Son and Leonard Rossiter as Rigsby, along with all the expected whack-'em-out-of-the-ballpark crowd pleasers like Tom Jones, Cleo Laine and Gilbert O'Sullivan(?!) before doing the old 'and this is me' bit where he sang some horribly schmaltzy song that was 'specially written for me by a very good friend of mine'. It seemed anachronistic even then, and no doubt it'd seem like a terrible, dusty, fly-blown museum piece by today's standards, but my mum sat there glowing with joy, asking "Why hasn't he got his own series?" Bloody hell...

Come to that, there was also a certain breed of entertainer who seemed to choose stage names that sounded almost deliberately cheap and tacky, the clubland equivalent of those 'luxury Christmas cards' you see selling at twenty for a quid. You know the types - Bobby Davro, Richard Digance, Freddie Starr and so on. Awful.

[George White]

The Marquee venue in Cork isn't far from me so I pass it regularly when out for a walk. Usually, there's a smattering of fans of whoever is playing that evening, hanging about the entrance. Nathan Carter though, Sweet Jesus. Carload after carload of teenaged girls turned up with deckchairs, cooler boxes etc and camped out for the entire day. By contrast, I passed by when Country superstar Dolly Parton played and there was about half a dozen fans waiting outside.

About twenty years ago, I used to pass a rundown shithole of a pub which put on nothing but Country & Irish acts. The band's posters could have featured as a warning about marrying your first cousin. 8-12 identical weirdos all called "The McCarthys" or "The Delaney Family" or what have you armed with accordions, fiddles and the like gurning at you from a glossy poster.

Or in my case, the Mulkerrins at Feericks' Hotel, a regular in the advert breaks on Keep It Country TV.
Yes, my cousin-in-law, she obsesses over NC, and even my mum thinks, "he's a good entertainer, he's not as good as Ray Lynam or Joe Dolan". My great-aunt, 83 dislikes him, thinks he's "queer", and prefers the ever-more-excruciating Mike Denver (a sort of country Joe Longthorne, frosted blond hair, stetson, etc who bears an uncanny resemblance to a lad in my school named "Farmer") and Derek Ryan, who was previously in a C-list boyband called DSide (which I've only just realised is a pun).

[the science eel]

Good call. Along with U2 and ACDC I don't hate them, I just don't get them. At all.

Fine, but what has this got to do with the thread?

[Sherman Krank]

CaB Pro Tip
When responding to a post it's always worth checking the date of said post as newbs will sometimes bump old dead threads without any warning.

[Sydward Lartle]

I can't let that pass without a link to this:
https://youtu.be/_urjNkxaLz0

WARNING: May possibly be the worst thing at all ever

Mention of Jess Conrad always reminds me of the Kenny Everett-curated K-Tel compilation the World's Worst Record Show, which my parents bought for me (on green vinyl, yet) when I was eight and semi-obsessed with cuddly Ken. Apparently, listeners of his Capital Radio show voted for their all time least favourite records, and twenty of the buggers found their way onto the overcrowded grooves of this album. It's a bizarre, often testing collection, and a whopping three of the tracks are Jess Conrad's - This Pullover, Why Am I Living? and Cherry Pie. Perhaps the biggest surprise to anyone who stumbles across a copy of the album in a charity shop nowadays would be the inclusion of Surfin' Bird by the Trashmen, which is a classic bit of proto-garage rock, shurely?

[MattD]

Touched upon, but Kasabian. Kasabian all day long. For indie bands, Embrace and The Kooks are like The Beatles and Beach Boys rolled into one in comparison.

They're a pair of knobheads who look like their mums got them a 'my very own rockstar' fancy dress kit for Christmas. Then they start lumbering around on stage like the loutish pricks they are with equally embarrassing 'banter' with shite songs that merely sound like Chas n Dave on ecstacy. In an alternative world, they're probably members of the EDL.

[Dr Rock]

Mention of Jess Conrad always reminds me of the Kenny Everett-curated K-Tel compilation the World's Worst Record Show, which my parents bought for me (on green vinyl, yet) when I was eight and semi-obsessed with cuddly Ken. Apparently, listeners of his Capital Radio show voted for their all time least favourite records, and twenty of the buggers found their way onto the overcrowded grooves of this album. It's a bizarre, often testing collection, and a whopping three of the tracks are Jess Conrad's - This Pullover, Why Am I Living? and Cherry Pie. Perhaps the biggest surprise to anyone who stumbles across a copy of the album in a charity shop nowadays would be the inclusion of Surfin' Bird by the Trashmen, which is a classic bit of proto-garage rock, shurely?

Half the tracks
(A1   –Jimmy Cross   I Want My Baby Back
A2   –Zarah Leander   Wunderbar
A3   –The Legendary Stardust Cowboy   Paralysed
A4   –Pat Campbell   The Deal
A5   –Nervous Norvus   Transfusion
A6   –Jess Conrad   This Pullover
A7   –Mel & Dave   Spinning Wheel
A8   –Dickie Lee   Laurie
A9   –Mrs Miller   A Lover's Concerto
A10   –Ferlin Husky   The Drunken Driver
B1   –Jess Conrad   Why Am I Living?
B2   –The Trashmen   Surfin' Bird
B3   –Steve Bent   I'm Going To Spain
B4   –Duncan Johnson   The Big Architect
B5   –Jess Conrad   Cherry Pie
B6   –Eamonn Andrews   The Shifting Whispering Sands
B7   –Tub Thumper   Kick Out The Jams
B8   –Adolph Babel   My Feet Start Tapping
B9   –Skip Jackson   The Greatest Star Of All
B10   –Raphael    Going Out Of My Head
)

are stone-cold classics in my book. Lovely record.

[Sydward Lartle]

Kasabian all day long.

Seconded.

[Sherman Krank]

Surfin' Bird by the Trashmen, which is a classic bit of proto-garage rock, shurely?

More like a classic bit of blatant plagiarism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edYQiZxyw0I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQrQjNNZCAo

[holyzombiejesus]

I love them, but Belle and Sebastian.

[Nice Relaxing Poo]

I love them, but Belle and Sebastian.

Nah they were never naff.

[George White]

[/b]A4   –Pat Campbell   The Deal

Campbell was an Irish country DJ and apparently, according to Ireland's Own magazine was a mentor to the aforementioned Ray Lynam. Its a jawdropper - only recently rivalled by Cliona Hagen's feelgood singalong tune "We're All Gonna Die Someday, Oh We're All Gonna Die Someday, Mom's on the pills, Dad's over the Hill, oh We're All Gonna Die Someday!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyNNGTn9KwM No 30 in the UK charts, No 20 in Ireland (though you could sell 20,000 records and get to No 1 here - although until 1992, the chart was judged by shipments not sale).

Duncan Johnson was a Canadian Radio London DJ, a sort of-Proto Kid Jensen with a similar schtick to Campbell - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWsetLh-AXI


Joe Longthorne did get his own series, in 87-ish. Lisa Maxwell IIRC was the sidekick. It was in Lewisohn's guide.
He's also the subject of two memorable anecdotes from the Krankies.

[holyzombiejesus]

Some christian who invites members of the audience to dance on stage with the band and has songs called things like 'Fox in the Snow'? That's pretty naff. As I said, I love them, but they don't half make me cringe sometimes.