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What do we reckon about Bis then?

Started by Rev+, October 17, 2021, 12:21:59 AM

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PaulTMA

#30
I think all the Bis-hate came from the fact that Kandy Pop was really annoying and soured people to everything else about them

imitationleather

Yeah Kandy Pop is probably their worst song.

Hobo With A Shit Pun

I knew them only for Kandy Pop, and so hated them at the time.
But I've since learned that a mate who occassionally says "Take your mask off, you highway robber" got the luine from them.

Lungpuddle

I like how in the Powerpuff Girls song it goes "trying to save the world" instead of "saving the world." Nice bit of ambiguity about how it all turns out for the little shitheads.

lazyhour

Quote from: OnlyRegisteredSoICanRead on October 17, 2021, 12:47:51 PM
Shouldn't the lyrics to that be 'If it's NOT a new beginning then I don't want to know'?

I always took that lyric to be in line with the rest of the song - ie, people don't want anything new, challenging, radical or thought-provoking, they just want endless repetitive, rehashed Europop.

The party's at it's end
A style is named and it's dead
There is no latest trend
I eat just what I'm fed...

If it's a new beginning, then I don't want to know
If it's not worth pretending, then I don't want to know
I'm just so sick of listening, why should I want to know
I lost my 15 minutes on eurodisco

The music's in my head
I thought music was dead
Give me the words I'll sing
But I can't feel a thing

Pauline Walnuts

"A style is named and it's dead"

I thought that's was a reference to new music (in the general Euro-disco/dance envelope) coming so fast as soon one type has got an agreed name it's already trés passé?

But the next line contradicts that.

I don't know.


Rev+

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on October 17, 2021, 09:00:09 AM
Also, does anyone remember a really nasty review or article in MM/ NME that focussed on the teenage Manda Rin's weight?

It wasn't one article, it was about a year of snipes in both MM and NME when Bis first appeared.  Both papers felt the need to call her a fat bitch in every review for some reason.  Despite her being 16 or 17 and just not thin as a stick.  Well done, music journalist twats of that time.

KennyMonster


Pop Will Eat Itself were dropped by RCA before Get The Girl Kill The Baddies charted and they appeared on TOTP in 1992 so the Bis thing was always bollocks from the start.

PWEI's wikipedia states that the poppies were "the highest charting act to appear on Top of the Pops without a record deal."

Which implies that they weren't even the first.


lazyhour

Perhaps Bis were the first act to appear who had, at that point, *never* had a record deal?

Kankurette

Quote from: Rev+ on October 19, 2021, 01:25:12 AM
It wasn't one article, it was about a year of snipes in both MM and NME when Bis first appeared.  Both papers felt the need to call her a fat bitch in every review for some reason.  Despite her being 16 or 17 and just not thin as a stick.  Well done, music journalist twats of that time.
She wasn't even fat! She was just a normal looking woman! We're not talking Tiny from Ultrasound! And even if she was...so what?

Gregory Torso

Quote from: Rev+ on October 19, 2021, 01:25:12 AM
It wasn't one article, it was about a year of snipes in both MM and NME when Bis first appeared.  Both papers felt the need to call her a fat bitch in every review for some reason.  Despite her being 16 or 17 and just not thin as a stick.  Well done, music journalist twats of that time.

That's horrible. One of the reasons I couldn't get on with the Chart Music Podcast that everyone on here raves about was it reminded me too much of what utter cunts MM/NME journalists were in the 90s.

non capisco

The level of rancor in the sixth form common room towards the 'Kandy Pop' TOTP performance was something else. Wasn't worth me mentioning that yeah it is a bit annoying but the riff is great. Went to my first festival that year and my school friends were spitting blood that I went to watch Bis over Reef or whatever bunch of earthy rawk honkers it was they wanted to see. They were fucking great too, the Marmite tweeness was less in evidence than on the early records, it was watching three kids my age having a brilliant time on stage with cheap guitars and a knackered looking old drum machine. That goofy DIY aesthetic plus the infectious energy was very seductive at that age, particularly at the time when chart guitar music had gone all Ocean Colour Scene and Kula Shaker, or 'Noelrock' as the inkies dubbed it. You don't want the bastion of your cultural landscape to be someone as conservative and ungenerous in his worldview as Noel Gallagher. Having said that, I never bought any of Bis' records. Saw them at Primavera about ten years ago, the two lads have put on some timber and Manda Rin looked amazing.

PaulTMA

I remember Dweeb's one big NME interview they said they loved Oasis and liked Ocean Colour Scene.

Quote from: Gregory Torso on October 19, 2021, 11:25:45 AM

That's horrible. One of the reasons I couldn't get on with the Chart Music Podcast that everyone on here raves about was it reminded me too much of what utter cunts MM/NME journalists were in the 90s.

Exactly

letsgobrian

As I remember it, it was very specifically Steven Wells on the NME side who had it in for them, to the point of working in insults towards them in articles that didn't involve them.

Never bought a Bis album but thanks to Peterborough Our Price's broad taste in stocking records, I did get a lot of the early singles at the time including that double 7" with The Golden Mile, The Delgados And Merzbow(!).

PaulTMA

Quote from: letsgobrian on October 19, 2021, 11:48:19 AM
As I remember it, it was very specifically Steven Wells on the NME side who had it in for them, to the point of working in insults towards them in articles that didn't involve them.

Bis were the "John Major-loving kings of shit" as he liked to describe them

I recall Manda Rin saying that she opened the NME one week and many of the letters sent in were calling her fat.  I think the chances of that being a week 'edited' by Swells (i.e. he wrote them all himself) aren't too far-fetched

Chriddof

Yeah, it was mainly Swells who had some sort of massive issue with them. The MM were quite sniffy about the band, but I can't recall much in the way of actually unpleasant insults from them (although that's not to say there weren't, this is just my recollection).

The "John Major" thing came from an entirely imagined and manufactured scandal that Wells thought up as a way to discredit them. Can't remember the details but he twisted some quotes from one of the guys in the band and printed it as a "gotcha" moment. The band may have written into the paper's letters page at that point to call him out (as we say these days) on that.

Swells in general was an absolute arse. He may have been capable of writing the odd funny thing (he contributed some material to On The Hour and The Day Today in partnership with David Quantick) but his views on music and life in general, which at the time I took as standard contrarianism, were apparently 4 Real and genuinely ridiculous. Apparently he once admitted he'd rather be writing about football than music, which I think he went on to do for a while after he got booted from the NME, before moving to America.

Quote from: Gregory Torso on October 19, 2021, 11:25:45 AM
That's horrible. One of the reasons I couldn't get on with the Chart Music Podcast that everyone on here raves about was it reminded me too much of what utter cunts MM/NME journalists were in the 90s.

The Chart Music crowd, Kulkarni, Stubbs, Price and Bee, weren't generally known for that kind of writing, though. I'm pretty certain they've spoken out against that sort of thing when they've retrospectively covered old issues of music mags from the time. There was a certain type of writer, your Beaumonts, Cigarettes, Wells, etc who made that kind-of hateful shit their stock in trade, which was what led to me dropping the NME in the late nineties, when it seemed to be full of similar cunts all imitating that style.

Gregory Torso

Quote from: Ron Maels Moustache on October 20, 2021, 11:14:02 AM
The Chart Music crowd, Kulkarni, Stubbs, Price and Bee, weren't generally known for that kind of writing, though. I'm pretty certain they've spoken out against that sort of thing when they've retrospectively covered old issues of music mags from the time.

Fair enough. To be honest I only listened to a couple of episodes but one of them started talking about going clubbing with Johnny from Menswear or something and that was enough for me.

PaulTMA

The presence of Stubbs is enough for me to avoid like the plague

Well, it's not like Raaaawk Expert David Stubbs is on every episode, pretty easy just to skip the ones with him in.

Pauline Walnuts

Quote from: Ron Maels Moustache on October 20, 2021, 11:14:02 AM
The Chart Music crowd, Kulkarni, Stubbs, Price and Bee, weren't generally known for that kind of writing, though. I'm pretty certain they've spoken out against that sort of thing when they've retrospectively covered old issues of music mags from the time. There was a certain type of writer, your Beaumonts, Cigarettes, Wells, etc who made that kind-of hateful shit their stock in trade, which was what led to me dropping the NME in the late nineties, when it seemed to be full of similar cunts all imitating that style.

On the Chart Music Podcast Taylor Parkes is the archetypal school bully, admittedly the kind who's quite witty and funny, when it's not you he's picking on.

Quote from: OnlyRegisteredSoICanRead on October 20, 2021, 01:15:29 PM
On the Chart Music Podcast Taylor Parkes is the archetypal school bully, admittedly the kind who's quite witty and funny, when it's not you he's picking on.

Pfft, nah. Parkes is too low status to be a bully. At worst he's a grumpy old sod with some naff opinions, but there's no sense of him actually being able to overrule the others, or even trying to. There's no Gervais/Merchant/Pilkington dynamic going on where one dominant personality constantly tries to assert their power over the others, Parkes is just too low key in his misanthropy for that to ever be the case.

Pauline Walnuts

Oh, no it's not an Alpha Nelson Muntz, he's more a weedy one who goes through a list of names of the classmates to see if he can find something in their names to see if he can create any partially nasty nicknames for them.

ajsmith2

#53
It's a shame the supposedly self proclaimedly fearsomely right-on Swells died back in 2009 (the least notable celeb death on a day when Wacko Jacko, Farrah Fawcett and Sky Saxon all also bid adieu) before he could be properly roasted over hot coals* by cancel culture for his treatment of Bis and esp Manda back in the day. Remember a particularly nasty cartoon in a Swells-written comic in the Christmas 1998 edition on the NME where she was depicted in an incredibly unflattering caricature saying 'you only hate me cos I'm fat' with people replying 'no it's cos you're ugly'. And this was more than 2 years after Bis's brief ubiquity in the UK weeklies, long after they were omnipresent enough for such an attack to be (slightly) mitigated by the 'oh well they're so annoying' line. The man quite clearly had a deranged and hugely odious negative obsession with them that was entirely comparable to that of a spurned lover turned psychotic bunny boiling stalker.

*which I hear Bis claimed to eat on an early B side

imitationleather

I was too young to read the NME and that at this time. Seems a tad deranged to be so angry about a band like Bis.

What name did he used to post on here under, then?

gilbertharding

I have to say, I never liked them. I knew from the instant it was spoken the 'unsigned' hype was utterly meaningless (weren't S*M*A*S*H unsigned when they went on TotP? Did New Order ever actually sign to Factory?). The music could have appealed to me, except I was a few years too old to really be excited by it. And I didn't fancy the singer.

Luckily for everyone, I realised these things were very much *my* series of very boring problems - so I kept my mouth shut.

Famous Mortimer

I have all their presumably less-valuable-than-when-they-were-a-thing 7" singles in a box somewhere, was a fan, every now and again I'll play something from outside that first period of success and not really care for it.

phantom_power

Quote from: imitationleather on October 21, 2021, 01:23:44 PM
I was too young to read the NME and that at this time. Seems a tad deranged to be so angry about a band like Bis.



Music journalists often dish out the worst abuse to acts that get famous or successful outside of their patronage

Kankurette

I remember he said Bis were 'arrogant and thick'. And Miki Berenyi pushed him down a flight of stairs.

I liked Swells - his interview with Space was hilarious, Jamie clearly didn't like him and Franny came across as a massive cunt (which he is) - but that stuff about Manda was just nasty. Although unsurprising, sadly.

Kankurette

I wondered why Steven Wells had a hateboner for Bis and did a bit of googling, and ended up with this.

Basically, he thought Bis were a bunch of spoiled childish middle-class twats and found their whole outlook/aesthetic rather twee, and got mad at them for not wanting to talk about politics or class. IIRC he didn't try to do that with Space, but then Space are working-class (and male, and older). It still doesn't excuse the fat-bashing though. You can't claim to be all right-on and then constantly go on about how fat and ugly a perfectly normal-looking woman is.