Earl Brutus were, by some distance, the most improbable beneficiaries of the Britpop goldrush. Indeed, their brief sojourn on a major label may be the high-water mark of the insanity that gripped the music industry in the wake of Oasis and Blur’s success: it’s not just that their music was wildly uncommerical – a frenzied splurge of bovver-booted glam, noisy electronics and bellowed vocals – but that Earl Brutus appeared to oppose everything that made Britpop popular. In an era defined by the optimism of Oasis’s Live Forever, one of Earl Brutus’ musical calling cards was titled Life’s Too Long. Instead of flag-waving patriotism and rosy, we-won-the-World-Cup-once nostalgia, their mordantly funny songs picked at the scabs of modern Britain, alternately repelled by and revelling in the grotesque absurdities of everyday life: the sleeve of their debut album Your Majesty … We Are Here featured a block of text explaining that Chat magazine had refused permission to use a photo of a distressed young girl and her alcoholic mother from a feature headlined “Mum wanted me dead”, which the band “felt was an appropriate image for the cover”.
At a time when putatively alternative bands were smartening up their act and evincing a greater polish and professionalism in the hope of mainstream success, Earl Brutus’s live shows were chaotic, drunken and often violent, while their promotional photos were resolutely unglamorous, highlighting the fact that the band’s members were old enough to have served not just in proto-Britpop pioneers World of Twist, but industrial pioneers Clock DVA and early-80s pop hopefuls JoBoxers. In the most celebrated shot of their late frontman, Nick Sanderson, he’s wearing a bra and glitter eyeshadow, leaning against a parking meter with a bottle of lager; another had him striking a rock-star pose while using an asthma inhaler.
Needless to say, any commercial ambitions Earl Brutus’s label may have had for them went unfulfilled. But 11 years after their last gig, their music seems weirdly prescient. There’s something of Earl Brutus about the grimy, refusenik din of Fat White Family; you could draw a direct line between the witty, splenetic list of modern-day ills found on their 1996 single The SAS and the Glam that Goes With It (“TV chef … nouveau Irish pub … Tudorbethan mansion … hair design by Nicky Clarke”) and the oeuvre of Sleaford Mods. And, understandably, you can hear their echoes in the Pre New, the band formed by various ex-members of Earl Brutus a couple of years after Sanderson’s death in 2008 – not least in their blackly comic sense of humour.
Their second album arrives bearing songs called things like Middle Class Heavy Metal on Antidepressants and The Mars Bar Within You. Earl Brutus were always obsessed with the seedier aspects of 70s rock: The Male Eunuch opens with Speed Queen, a helium-voiced parody of glam-rock acts’ troubling penchant for writing queasy songs about young girls. Midway through the album is an interlude that features a recording of Jerusalem drowned out by electronic honks and buzzes: it’s both funny and slightly unsettling, particularly when you learn the honks and buzzes are the sound of an MRI scanner in action.
For all the reminders of their past, the most striking thing about The Male Eunuch might be the way it shifts the Pre New out of their former band’s shadow. You’d hesitate to use the word “subtle” about an album that contains a tumultuous din like Speed Queen, but it certainly sounds more expansive than their previous outfit, the chaos fractured by quietly brooding electronic interludes, the churning racket of Middle Class Heavy Metal On Antidepressants crashing against Europa Superstar #2’s thumping techno. Photographed, meanwhile, somehow manages to transform the kind of worldess, woo-hoo-hooing diva vocal you get on pop-house records into something weirdly creepy and unsettling.
The words aim a few kicks in the direction of Farrow & Ball’s tasteful range of paints and the government’s decision to regulate what can be shown in British pornography, while the title track works itself up into such a cold rage at the proliferation of “twats … overpaid fucks … tasteless losers” that it ends up asking itself “why breathe?”
But perhaps reasoning that Sleaford Mods have got the splenetic, state-of-the-nation addresses pretty well covered, the lyrics are mainly preoccupied with aging. This isn’t a topic that rock music regularly addresses – a little oddly considering how many craggy, middle-aged faces you get staring out of the NME cover these days – and certainly not as unflinchingly as The Male Eunuch does. The characters here are middle-aged, thwarted, confused and unfulfilled, riven with what Janet vs John describes as “all the emptiness the guy from Elbow never sings”. The songs describe them with an oddly affecting combination of sympathy and withering sarcasm. The protagonist of Flaccid Astronaut was a space-race-obsessed child filled with moon-landing-inspired visions of a glittering future. “Then nothing happened, and I just hung around,” he complains, his misery underscored by the album’s prettiest melody. 100% Beef’s leading man is washed up by the recession: “Your wife is beautiful, you always had perfect taste/ With 30 years of overdraft and you’re back at your dad’s place.”
The Male Eunuch is variously angry, moving, disturbing and extremely funny. It’s tempting say that if you only buy one noisy glam-rock/electronic album preoccupied with the misery of middle age this year, it should be this one: that covers what you might politely call its niche appeal and the fact that there isn’t really anything else around like it. Perhaps the biggest compliment you can pay them is that the Pre New sound as singular and strange in 2015 as Earl Brutus did 20 years ago.
