Jazz-Hands

Let’s Eat Grandma released their first single of the new year, called, appropriately enough, ‘Happy New Year’ – a taster from their new album ‘Two Ribbons’ due in April.

Like the other two taster singles for the new album, it failed to even make the Indie Chart. Six years since their debut, this is beyond an alarm bell ringing stage. This is an act on its way out unless they do something to turn their fortunes around in a fickle industry.

To no one’s surprise, news also came out that all had not been well in Camp LEG: to wit, an estrangement between the protagunists Jenny Hollingworth (the one that looks like Beckii Cruel in her younger days) and Rosa Walton (the one that used to look like the evil twin of Saoirse Ronan), the childhood friends going through their very own Ghostworld fraying of the ties between them.

The official line was boys, or rather a boy – now dead – but with the last two singles being first Jenny’s take on their fraying friendship and now Rosa’s, it’s pretty clear that the main problem is vast musical differences have emerged. That is more often than not the fatal blow in any musical combo, and bar a miracle, Let’s Eat Grandma will be lucky to survive until the summer, let alone the finish of 2022.

How did it come to this? Back in the summer of 2016, Let’s Eat Grandma had sneaked out the weirdest, most original album music had saw for a long, long time, from two teen weirdos in Norfolk who could have given the Carrow Twins from Harry Potter a run for their money in being unsettling despite behaving normally.

Their ‘psychedelic sludge-pop’ – a euphemism for chucking in all the sort of stuff they liked and who cared if it complimented each other, folk, electronica, punk, prog, goth, and the sort of kiddie music They Might Be Giants bankrolled their career survival on – wasn’t wholly original, but the way they went about their work most certainly was, throwing out the rule book on what made for a song not seen since the heyday of Cardiacs.

There was an unworldliness to the gruesome twosome which only Norfolk – the land of Black Shuck and Dorothy Walpole Townshend – could have produced. The critics’ favourite, ‘Deep Six Textbook’ – all fairy glockenspiel and organ chords of impending doom, broken only by a long, lonely sax call like a ship’s horn in the fog – sounded like the soundtrack for a BBC Ghost Story For Christmas. It served as both a welcome and a warning to those about to embark on first listening their debut album, ‘I, Gemini’ – listen and we hope you enjoy, but don’t blame us if you find yourself disturbed.

The nearest they had to a mainstream track was the exuberant bouncy ‘Eat Shittake Mushrooms’, and even it had a video featuring a lonely shopkeeper who looked like he expected the girls were there to ritually sacrifice him. Let’s Eat Grandma were the creepy kids from the quiet town everyone had warned you about, but that was the way we liked them – so long as a respectable distance was kept.

Unfortunately, others wanted them to be in an entirely different light, a more predictable one. That was where the band began to stoke itself up its problems for the future.

The history of music is littered with naive young bands manipulated into radically changing their style and sound by career management and record company ‘expertise’ (and anyone who thinks indie labels’ are less Machiavellian in practice than their major counterparts is soon disabused).

The logic is a cynical gamble that the reflex purchases of the old fans, added to the enthusiastic new fans be enough to catapult their artistes into mainstream prominence, thus product exposure, thus even more new fans over and above those the band has now royally pissed all over.

More often than not, it doesn’t work: but if you’re a busy record company or management group, the law of averages suggests you can pull it off the few times required to make the returns worthwhile – few non-criminal industries offer such massive returns on their investment if successful. After all, it’s not the record company or talent agency whose name becomes mud with the public if it all goes wrong, they can go out and simply find another artiste to replace the one the public’s now turned its back on decisively.

The band made No.29 in the UK mainstream music charts and got the Q Album of the year for the follow up album ‘I’m All Ears’. But it only charted for one week, and Q Magazine was by now reduced to handing out gongs to people it was confident would actually show up for their awards ceremony (it lasted only one year later before filing for bankruptcy).

Like all albums, it had sold largely on the back of auto-purchases from those delighted with the previous one – and this new over chart-friendly effort alienated irretrievably almost their entire pre-existing fanbase in one stroke.

Matters weren’t helped by the band making unsubstantiated claims about creepy old men at their gigs (ironic considering they’d no qualms about dressing skimpily for bizarre ‘fashion shoots’ in magazines who were supposed to be interviewing them about their music), insinuating there had been something lecherous about their initial fanbase. Ask the Jesus and Mary Chain about the fate of musicians – never mind bands – which disparage the very ones putting bread in their tin.

It was even more embarrassing, in fact downright hypocritical, considering the video for ‘It’s Not Just Me’, seeing them dressed in skimpy t-shirts and shorts attempting to dance in a manner which suggested the producer had been given a single remit – ‘maximise tits bouncing’. With its shots of vapour trailing jumbo jets and sunsets by the sea, it evoked all the worst ‘aspirational’ videos cliches when musicians are part of a ‘package’ sold to consumers eminating the lifestyle status the record buyer craves, whether the pretend romantic relationship of the boy bands to the mulish gangsta trappings of the rappers.

Let’s Eat Grandma had lost their way – and how!

A large part of the problem was, far from wishing to express themselves, in interviews they appeared all too ready to rhyme off parrot fashion dated pop culture platitudes aimed at pleasing whatever Transgressive Records and their management company deemed to be their target audience that week, largely from what was trending on Twitter.

In doing so, they compromised the very essence of what had made them so good in the first place – not being like every other artist making the same old computerised santitised music to the same old formulae and spouting the same pretentious sixth former soundbites about current affairs in the hope of trending on Twitter for fifteen minutes. If you truly wish to irritate today’s average music fan, preach about Black Lives Matter, Climate Change and all those other worthy causes (to middle class middle aged journalists who last bought a record when Michael Jackson was still alive) to people who are merely looking for three minutes of escapism from the anxiety and misery of their own existences, and were hoping instead to hear about your next record.

The Guardian newspaper – with no hint of shame – moralised last 12th November  ‘Some critics couldn’t believe that two Norwich college girls had made this fantastically inventive music without a bloke pulling the strings’ – a rumour The Guardian was almost wholly responsible for propagating in the first place by continually running up this charge in every interview with the girls. No one who had witnessed the band’s antics live was in any doubt who was responsible for their music, and on each occasion The Guardian has been challenged to name names as to these ‘critics’ responsible, there’s been a silence as ominous as the fade of the gentle accordion intro before the farting saxaphone of ‘Sax In The City’.

What made it even more ironic was this new material appeared to be little more than Let’s Eat Grandma being used as a template to showcase the ‘talent’ of other Transgressive Records artistes they thought had better earnings potential by making them their producers and mixers – which went a long way in explaining why ‘I’m All Ears’ was a musical clusterfuck of gargantuan proportions.

For all the good it did anyone:  one, so-called ‘hyperpop pioneer’ Sophie Xeon killed itself last year falling off a balcony in Greece whilst on a Covid regulations busting holiday and being out of their face on whatever at the ripe old age of thirty four. It may have made for a headline on the BBC online, the vast majority of people outside of the deceased’s family and friends were completely nonplussed as to who this ‘highly influential’ person was. It was certainly never reflected in any record sales attributed to them at any rate.

With friends like that, who needs enemies, and the girls have been appalling in their choices over the last few years little helping their corner. Quite aside from The Guardian, they nailed their colours to the Jeremy Corbyn mast a mere few weeks before his ‘problem with Jews’ and creepy obsession with surrounding himself with more nubile young girls than a Delphy wet dream for public events (a favourite of totalitarian regimes where leaders are frequently shown surrounded with attractive young women as a means of cementing their ‘alpha male’ credentials and thus fitness to rule the proletariat), which only made their claims about part of their old audience all the sillier.

It even got to the stage the band hired a drummer for a tour who played about two to three songs per gig if he was lucky, the rest of the time it was back to the drum machine. That the drummer was black was less than a coincidence – the worst kind of Uncle Tom tokenism c/o some Penelope from public school in her first job in public relations’ diktat, deciding the band was ‘too white’ and therefore by what passes for logic today in danger of being labelled ‘nazis’ if they didn’t put on some sort of black solidarity showpiece. (‘Well they are from Norfolk after all, and everyone knows everyone there are all fox-hunting Tories out there, don’t they?’) Everyone in the London metropolitan bubble that regards everywhere outside of it as barbarian lands punctured by the occasional ‘exotic’, that is.

Then Jenny Hollingworth’s boyfriend of all of two years died of cancer. She told The Guardian “Billy was not only my boyfriend but also my best friend who inspired everything that I do, and I feel completely devastated to have lost him.”

Just a bit of a kick in the teeth to Rosa Walton, her actual best friend. Or was. Which may explain why the latter made music for the Cyberpunk 2027 video game on her own.

Walton also came out as bisexual, which would automatically have introduced a tension into their previously close friendship from the unspoken but obvious implication that Walton may have for some time wanted to be more than friends. That some of the terseness from her towards Hollingworth may have been sourness to the latter being more than friends with any number of relative male strangers but not her closest confidante of nineteen years. You could hardly blame her.

Then came the COVID lockdown, and whilst other artistes were finding ways to keep the momentum going to their careers, all LEG were managing were once a blue moon updates on Twitter, at the very moment in history people had more time to kill and were open to suggestions of ways to fill it. Whilst Walton and Hollingworth indulged in private grieving or sulking, the world moved on without them – even the wallies of ageing punks Kunt And The Gang managed to get two two ten singles in the UK Charts.

Last September, ‘Hall Of Mirrors’ was the band’s first new material – let alone single – in three years. Despite a BBC special and predictable sycophany from The Guardian and other ‘woke’ media reflex white knighting young women they’d like to fuck, the single stiffed, just as the next two for the album were doomed to be, and the disastrous choices of those meant to be looking after their careers as much as themselves appears to have left Let’s Eat Grandma finished before they’d even reached the ages of 23.

Jenny’s new songs appear to have more in common with Belle and Sebastian than the blip-blop 90s computer game tunes of Rosa’s being done already by hundreds of other artistes in an oversaturated market where all sound the same. Once a not so long ago, they could have put the two styles together and made something clever and new. Not any more. Something has died between them, and it doesn’t appear judging by these first three tracks they’re really all that interested in resurrecting it.

Yet their only way out of their rut is rediscovering the music they made together in the way they made it together, on their own terms, not to anyone else’s template. But it appears it’s too late for that to happen. Events are going to take its course, and Norfolk’s best musical hope for decades is doomed – no one wants to release music from those whose music no longer sells.

Oh well, at least there will always be ‘I, Gemini’ and the memories.