Pop music is full of sob stories from bands whose timing was horrendous. Few managed to be quite as late to the party as Liverpool’s garage rockers the Stairs.
Never have a band evoked the spirit of a period quite so well as this wonderfully anachronistic three-piece. Sadly for a group born slap-bang in the middle of the early-90s acid-house boom, that period was California in 1966, and the drug of choice was marijuana, not MDMA.
Frontman and bassist Edgar “Summertyme” Jones put together the Stairs after a stint in Ian McCulloch’s backing band following the breakup of Echo and the Bunnymen. Jones had been a fan of the wave of 80s Merseyside bands influenced by the 60s, such as the Lotus Eaters and Wild Swans, and he was forming a worldview so overwhelmingly singular and psychedelic that it made Liverpool contemporaries the La’s seem forward-thinking.
“I was blinkered, young and hot-headed,” Jones told me in 2012. “I found the 80s pretty disgusting morally, socially and musically. It was a time for new toys and forgetting about your fellow man, and when I started to listening and buying things like the Nuggets and Pebbles compilations, I couldn’t help but be drawn into that look.”
Jones, whose raw, growling vocals became the band’s calling card, was by no means the first musician to be influenced by Lenny Kaye’s groundbreaking 1972 Nuggets compilation, but few set about recreating their look, sound and spirit quite so slavishly as Jones and fellow Stairs, guitarist Ged Lynn and drummer Paul Maguire.
“Everything was based around the year 1966, rather than that psychedelic Woodstock thing which came later,” he said. “It was like no other music existed apart from songs made in that year, but it was much harder work to be into something then. There was a network of cool people, and you either got to know them or you didn’t, and you’d try and gather as much information and knowledge as you could from things like record sleeves, but it was those cool people who acted like a quality control, which is something the internet can’t do.”
After briefly signing to indie label Imaginary, the Stairs moved to Go! Discs, then home of the La’s and Paul Weller (Jones reputedly spent his advance on having his rotten teeth fixed). Their first release for Go! Discs was the single Weed Bus, a story of scoring weed and smoking on the bus – “It’s the one-four-seven and you know you’re in heaven” – set to a Pretty Things-style riff. It chimed with the city’s scallies, while the band’s reputation for incendiary gigs soon saw their audience grow enough for there to be a genuine buzz around the release of their debut album, Mexican R’n’B. Issued in glorious mono in summer 1992, the album’s raw-edged psych stood out at a time when shoegazing and rave were fighting it out at the top of the UK’s indie charts. Even the sympathetic Go! Discs struggled to promote a band so out of step with the times.
“Those were the days when you used to hear people banging on about the snare sound on the new the The album,” said Jones. “We didn’t like big commercial studios at the time because they were geared up to deal with an industry that we didn’t believe ourselves to be part of.”
Inevitably, there was trouble ahead. The sessions for a second album didn’t work out, and the band left Go! Discs and moved in a more blues rock direction before splitting in 1994 in what Jones described as “chaos”.
“Ged kept leaving the group and then rejoining,” he said. “On the first day of our album sessions, our manager walked out and went on holiday to Europe after I’d shared out the publishing money. That’s what the Stairs were like – it was volatile and has psychologically affected the way I have been in bands ever since, because I have this fear people will go just when I need them.”
As if life wasn’t challenging enough, Jones found himself joining the La’s – “like national service” for Liverpudlian musicians, according to Jones – at a time when their eccentric leader Lee Mavers was singlehandedly doing his best not to capitalise on the band’s burgeoning status as Britpop legends. That was followed by a spell as a stylish gun for hire with the likes of Saint Etienne, Paul Weller and Johnny Marr, before he returned to Liverpool to form the Big Kids in 2001.
With a lineup including Sean Payne and Russ Pritchard of the Zutons and Howie Payne of the Stands, Jones’s reputation as the godfather of Liverpool’s soon-to-be-massive “cosmic scouse” scene was sealed. But while his bandmates quickly became part of the city’s next wave of chart stars, Jones was left without a group at a time when the music press were lionising anyone with a guitar from Merseyside. His response was to form the Joneses, a band of jazz and R&B-loving musos, who recorded the critics’ favourite Soothing Music for Stray Cats in 2005 and won the instant approval of such disparate fans as Noel Gallagher and Daniel Radcliffe.
Despite the album’s success, Jones returned to the three-piece rock sound of his new band Free Peace, but despite an Oasis support slot they, too, split in 2011. A fourth solo album, Sense of Harmony, was released in 2012 following a succession of health and financial problems, but it was this year’s news that Jones was reforming the Stairs for a one-off gig in Liverpool this November that has had garage-rock enthusiasts scurrying to the internet in the vain hope of securing a ticket.
The reformation was the idea of current Merseyside psych band the Wicked Whispers, who have persuaded the Stairs to play their first gig in more than 20 years. “I think the time feels right for them to want to do this,” said frontman Mike Murphy. “Maybe they feel a torch has been passed, so connecting both generations at our show is creating something that interests them in terms of a reunion.”
For Jones, the opportunity to resurrect a band who are such a crucial part of his home city’s musical DNA is just another step on a career that defines “cult”. “When I was young I was stupid and easily led,” he told me. “If I had the success that maybe some people thought I deserved, I don’t think I’d be sitting here.”
- The Stairs play The Butterfly’s Ball & The Grasshopper’s Feast night at the Kazimier, Liverpool on 26 November.
