The Complete Singles

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While it’s fair to say they didn’t burn as brightly or have the same cultural impact as the Stone Roses, or fuse as many different artistic ideas (nor make as many headlines) as the Happy Mondays, this appraisal of their legacy (their first singles compilation in 20 years) seems long overdue. The rest of this collection consists of some superb remixes for the clubber in us all. We get a couple of bangers including The Go! Team remix of This Is How It Feels, a bit of dub on Dubville and an excellent Changes remix from Martyn Walsh and Simon Lyon. A funky end to a sprawling collection of hits that tell you the tale of a band who hit the heights and are still loved today. A great start for any newcomers to Inspiral Carpets. By the time fourth album Devil Hopping was released in 1994, Britpop was asserting its dominance on guitar bands, but the sheer Modish joy of Saturn 5 still can’t be denied, while even Mark E Smith is less sardonic and more motivated on the highly charged I Want You. As with any northern band worth their salt, weaved in amongst the life-affirming music are lyrics mined from a deep vein of social conscience and a sense of specific geography. Joe calls to mind the reality of poverty: “All that I possess is my existence, vagrant more or less/Children on the pave, mither bad, but help me through my day/BECAUSE I’M JOE, THE STREET LAMP IS MY HOME/FROM PLACE TO PLACE I LIKE TO ROAM.” My new musical education involved inhaling anything and everything that looked northwards. I stared enraptured at Top of the Pops whenever it featured lanky men dressed in psychedelic shirts, bearing down on keyboards as their long hair flopped over their faces. In solidarity with the newly-labelled ‘Madchester’ and ‘Baggy’ scenes, I wore dungarees and floral shirts, yearned to be bought an acid house T-shirt, and read avidly of the Hacienda in Smash Hits magazine. I wanted in.

Elsewhere, Two Worlds Collide attempts to be as grandiose as the title suggests, all mature piano, while Bitches Brew is a piece of melancholy pop the band aren’t given credit for. Sadly, despite straddling both Madchester and Britpop with some success, Inspiral Carpets were dropped by their label in 1995, although they have since released some strong singles, not least Let You Down from 2015, featuring a guest appearance from a typically insolent John Cooper Clarke.

A much needed lookback on the Inspiral Carpets’ career.

Somewhat unjustly, Inspiral Carpets are largely perceived as third in the ‘triumvirate’ of the Madchester scene. The 24 th of April 1991 will be a day I’ll never forget. It was my first-ever gig. The band? Inspiral Carpets. I was chuffed to little bits that they were playing in my home town. After hearing the single ‘Joe’ on The Chart Show (remember that?), I was intrigued. Their first album, Life, had been released one year and one day before that fateful night. By the time the gig came around, I was a devotee, though I don’t think I have ever been Cool as F**k! Always so full of life and zest, this collection ably reminds why Inspiral Carpets were so much more than the band Noel Gallagher used to roadie for. The group has been bold, exploring a range of dance genres that reflect their wider influences or interests, such as dub.

The big 1990 breakout hit, This is How it Feels, still stands up strong after 33 years. Aside from the soaring chorus and cinematic, plaintive lyrics, there are brilliant complexities in the composition, including the tambourine standing in for the high-hat cymbal, allowing the drums to pound an almost funereal beat. The combination of Lambert, Boon, Walsh, Gill and Hingley was solid until 1995, when they were dropped by their label after Devil Hopping failed to match the success of the previous album release. But they returned sporadically without officially splitting, doing well in their respective side projects. Reflecting the era, or perhaps more their youthful restlessness, by 1991 Inspiral Carpets were developing at a rate of knots; Caravan was more proficient and ambitious with widescreen intentions while on Please Be Cruel, Tom Hingley’s vocals were more considered and, for want of a better word, professional. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge.Caravan’, from their second album The Beast Inside, was not a huge hit (position 30 in the UK singles chart), but it will certainly get you up and dancing. Get your baggy jeans out and do some quality shoegazing! The song has a Happy Mondays feel to it – somewhere between ‘Kinky Afro’ and ‘Hallelujah’. I’m wary when making comparisons to either the Mondays or The Stone Roses. All three bands were thrust into the public’s consciousness from the Madchester scene in the late 1980s, sometimes referred to as the Holy Triumvirate. The Inspiral Carpets were sometimes considered the lesser of the three bands, something I always felt was completely unjustified and wholly unfair. They were simply different. But it is Hingley whose vocal enabled the band to hit the heights on anthemic choruses from This is How it Feels onwards, with the torch song quality of Saturn 5 possibly being the most memorable. Hingley’s vocal prowess over that of Mark E Smith is more than evident when the pair duetted on I Want You in 1994. However, on stage Holt makes brilliant delivery of Hingley’s best work. Trying to capture who Hingley most sounds like, I hear fleeting touches of Julian Cope and Marc Almond. In Stephen Holt I note the influence of Ian Curtis and Morrissey. However, it was Hingley who enjoyed the glory of the Inspirals’ most commercially fertile period from debut album Life in 1990 to 1994’s Devil Hopping. Inspiral Carpets The Singles Is a compilation of singles by English band Inspiral Carpets, released 18 September 1995 on Mute Records. By the time of Dragging Me Down, the Inspiral Carpets had been in existence in one form or another for close to 10 years, having issued a demo, Cow, in 1987 and demo album, Dung 4, in 1989. Three songs from Dung 4, Keep the Circle Around, Joe and Butterfly, have made it onto this compilation (though Joe was re-recorded in 1995).