Happy 30th Anniversary to Elastica’s eponymous debut album Elastica, originally released March 13, 1995.
One of the first things Brett Anderson ever uttered to Justine Frischmann was: “What’s wrong with your mouth?” Her languid, melodic way of speaking betrayed her posh upbringing, but Anderson, who had grown up poor, didn’t know that; he thought she had a speech impediment. They met in an architecture class at University College London, and he was immediately taken by her beauty, which she modestly downplayed with scruffy clothes and biker boots. As far as Frischmann was concerned, she didn’t know if Anderson was a boy or a girl. “I just saw this strange creature with two earrings and a ladies’ handbag, but he had some sort of magic around him,” she remembers. She concedes that she actually may have sounded like she had a speech impediment, mostly because she was nervous—she was just as taken with him.
They went on a class field trip and, seizing an opportunity to express her interest, she brought him sandwiches. The two became friends, and then a romantic item. He introduced her to his favorite music—The Smiths, The Fall, The Sex Pistols—expanding her palate beyond the Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell she was accustomed to.
Soon, Anderson, Frischmann, and their friend Mat Osman began making music as The Perfect—with Mat on bass, and Brett and Justine on guitar. Neither Brett nor Justine were skilled to the point that they could play lead, and so they placed an ad in the NME, which was answered by one Bernard Butler. The band changed its name to Suede, and they began playing out.
Just as Suede started becoming a tight unit, they opened for emerging band Blur (which, along with Oasis, would lend Britpop its laddish reputation—in marked contrast with Suede’s aloof androgyny). Blur frontman Damon Albarn was just as immediately taken with Justine as Brett had been, and he began pursuing her aggressively. “The breakup was nasty, horrible even, full of endless fraught phone calls and long tearful evenings that melted into lonely coal black mornings,” Anderson recalls. Awkwardly, Frischmann stayed in Suede for a while, while Anderson penned ever more tortured lyrics about their lost, years-long relationship. Realizing this arrangement wasn’t sustainable, Frischmann left the band.
In the aftermath of the breakup, Anderson was able to constructively use his hurt and anger to turn Suede into a powerhouse. It all coalesced in April 1993 with Anderson appearing leather-clad and defiant on the cover of Select in front of a Union Jack, the headline screaming, “Yanks go home!” And thus, Britpop was born.
Although Anderson would never fully subscribe to the idea that there ever really was such a thing as Britpop (certainly not as a genre, and a “movement” would have required his actually hanging out with the other so-called Britpop bands), Damon Albarn was all about it. In fact, Albarn’s feverish, ever-increasing desire to stoke the fires of Britpop was initially borne of his resentment of Nirvana, and how Kurt Cobain et al.’s outsized success in ’92 seemed to diminish American fans’ appreciation of Blur. (Over the course of the early-to-mid ’90s, Albarn would even make slightly embarrassing proclamations like, “I’m getting rid of grunge.”)
“I don’t remember any conversation about Britishness or Englishness with Suede,” says Frischmann. “What had happened was Blur had been sent on a disastrous American tour on their first record and came back and started talking about Britishness and Englishness. That’s the first time I remember that conversation coming up.”
Despite the lack of complete and total adoration in America, Blur had managed to achieve a respectable measure of success in Britain with their debut album Leisure (1992). Meanwhile, Frischmann began looking into starting her own band. In the autumn of 1992, a year after leaving Suede, she reconnected with her friend Justin Welch, who had briefly played drums in Suede, and they began searching in earnest for other musicians. For a while, Albarn played bass in the band, but it was understood he was simply serving as a placeholder (he also jumped around a lot in rehearsals, which Welch found excessive).
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Soon, Frischmann found Brighton-based Annie Holland by word of mouth. Holland played guitar, but the idea of playing in Elastica intrigued her enough that she decided she’d make the switch to bass. “Annie turned up and was just sort of sent from God really,” Frischmann said in a 1993 interview with The Beat, as Holland giggled. “It was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.”
Elastica then went through a slew of auditions with at least a dozen lead guitarists before finally settling on Donna Matthews. Matthews had found them through an ad in Melody Maker. It read: “Guitarist wanted. Influences: The Fall, The Stranglers, Wire.” Matthews had only heard of the middle band, but she didn’t let that stop her from trying out. She’d recently seen the American group the Lunachicks play the Reading Festival, and desperately wanted to be in a similar type of outfit. “I just thought, ‘That’s what I do. I play guitar like that, I don’t play it like Suzanne Vega,’” Matthews said. “It was, ‘There must be more girls who play like that.’ So I moved to London.”
Matthews was about as opposite as you could get from Frischmann. While Frischmann’s father was a wealthy architect with several high-profile London projects to his name, Matthews’ father had done a six-year prison sentence for marijuana trafficking. While her dad was in prison, Matthews had quit school at 14 and dodged truancy officers. “Donna was obsessed with ways around the dole: how to make your fiver stretch further,” remembers Frischmann. “She used to walk around with this bag of change. I always remember her counting out all these 2ps to pay for her food or her tea and coffee.”
Yet somehow, the two were able to forge a friendship. That’s because while Frischmann wanted to be more working class, Matthews had always wanted to have more money. As it had been with Justine and Brett Anderson prior, the two ended up meeting halfway.
With Elastica’s lineup complete and some promising material in the works, Frischmann began searching for a record label. By that point, Suede were British music-press darlings and their debut album had been one of the fastest-selling in British history, so Frischmann’s time in Suede—as well as her association with Blur—helped Elastica score a deal with British indie label Deceptive Records. An international contract with major label EMI soon followed.
Their first single was the cheeky and taboo-challenging “Stutter,” about a woman frustrated with her male companion’s impotence. Elastica would come to be known for their candid lyrics about female sexual desire, as well as for letting the listener in on the kinds of giggling, bawdy, boisterous conversations young women have amongst themselves. “Stutter” promptly went to #1 in the indie charts, thoroughly shocking Elastica since by that point they’d only played a couple of gigs. But the song was catchy as hell—and perhaps pushed the envelope in an early-’90s society that was still a little bit uptight.
“Line Up,” which became their second single, was a gloriously catty song about the seediness of the developing Britpop scene, particularly its groupies. It was about going to The Good Mixer pub in Camden (where lore says the Blur-Oasis rivalry began) and amusedly watching all the young women throw themselves at the boys in the bands.
Then, Elastica’s third single “Connection” came out in October 1994, and, as with “Stutter,” the band had no idea it would become the success it did. “For a start, it’s based on [Wire’s] ‘Three Girl Rhumba’—that did not sound like a hit. It just sounded like this funny, weird punk thing,” says Frischmann. However, the song’s production was phenomenal, so that when the Wire riff receded, the siren-like, Elastica-created arrangement that followed rushed in with a bang. “Like it literally sounded like a bomb had gone off,” Frischmann observes. “I remember all of us looking at each other. It was like, ‘Oh my god, this is so good, this is amazing.’”
Soon, Elastica were posing for German fashion photographer Juergen Teller for the cover of their debut album Elastica. The black-and-white photo somehow managed to capture what the band sounded like—gritty, angular, and androgynous in the coolest possible way. And the spikily scrawled “Elastica” in red was an obvious nod to ’70s punk. It came out the year I turned 18, and I’m fairly certain I bought the album based on the cover alone—Elastica looked like a tough gang of black-clad tomboyish girls (plus Justin Welch). Not long later, after I went to college, I’d chop off all my hair in the style of Donna Matthews.
Although I was already a pretty big fan of Suede, I don’t think I was aware of Frischmann’s connection to that band. And I mostly just thought of Blur as the group responsible for what I considered the very annoying 1994 party hit “Girls & Boys.” In fact, I don’t know if I even had really heard the term Britpop at that point in early 1995, although it would soon become ubiquitous in the American press as the Oasis-Blur rivalry heated up and Pulp’s “Common People” became a smash. However, in the UK, the term was already slightly well-worn.
“I suppose you could argue that Elastica were the first band that were formed in the framework of Britpop,” surmises rock critic John Robb in the documentary Britpop: The Music That Changed Britain. Journalist Lucy O’Brien agrees: “Elastica were very important in that emerging Britpop movement. They were one of the first out of the block really.”
As Britpop morphed into a global sensation deeper into the mid-’90s, a somewhat oafish lad culture would emerge in tandem with the macho, almost comically competitive rivalry between Blur and Oasis. With Loaded at the vanguard, a new crop of “lad magazines” would celebrate beer drinking, football, and scantily clad models alongside articles about the male Britpop bands. Football and Britpop even ended up fully converging, with the likes of Damon Albarn and Robbie Williams playing in celebrity matches. Which is perhaps why Elastica are now remembered for being refreshingly above it all.
“The thing is, they turned out to be the coolest band out of the lot,” asserts John Robb.
“It was so interesting and also hopeful that you had bands like Elastica and Sleeper—bands where women were powerful and in fact a lot cooler and a lot less try-hard than the boys,” observes journalist Katie Puckrick.
Elastica opens with “Line Up,” where Frischmann serves as a bit of an oracle for Britpop’s bloke culture. The song starts out as not the most feminist of anthems; it unflatteringly refers to a groupie as “Drivel Head”—“Drivel Head knows all the stars/ Loves to suck their shining guitars/ They've all been right up her stairs/ Do you care?” But Frischmann ends up referring to these women as “victims” and ultimately, as if admonishing herself, includes the line “You could have been kinder.” The song’s exaggerated, ape-like grunts by Justin Welch offer plenty of humor and levity; it’s the loutish boys, after all, who are really being made fun of.
Despite it being only one minute and thirteen seconds, Elastica’s second track “Annie” is one of my favorites on the album. The economy of Elastica’s songs is one of the band’s biggest selling points. Being able to do a lot in a short time is significantly underrated, and “Annie” pays tribute to Elastica’s “God-sent” bass player in a beautifully danceable, hyperactive burst.
Although Frischmann freely admits that the next song, “Connection,” was built around ’70s art-punk band Wire’s “Three Girl Rhumba,” it didn’t stop Wire from suing (the Stranglers would later follow suit for parts of other songs). However, before we dismiss Elastica as grubby little plagiarizers, a bit of context is necessary.
Although Britpop can’t exactly be called a “genre” since most of the bands didn’t share a unifying sound, what did unite the bands was their “magpie tendencies,” or their very blatant revival of sounds from Britain’s past to say something new about its present (even if it was just to protest where rock was heading in America with grunge). To the point that the definitive history Britpop!: Cool Britannia and The Spectacular Demise of English Rock includes a lengthy appendix cataloging all of the artists from decades past that served as inspiration—everyone from the Beatles (Oasis) to David Bowie (Suede) to T-Rex and The Kinks (Blur) to Roxy Music (Pulp) to, yes, Wire and The Stranglers (Elastica). Later on, we would see a very similar type of movement in the United States with bands like The Strokes, The White Stripes, and Interpol paying tribute to their favorite garage and post-punk artists of eras past in the aftermath of 9/11.
As Pitchfork’s Judy Berman rightly points out, “Now that sampling has spread from hip-hop and dance to just about every genre of popular music, and we acknowledge that entire albums constructed out of other people’s recordings can be masterpieces, Elastica’s obvious appropriation of two male bands’ riffs looks like citation more than theft.” (Particularly when you consider that Elastica’s most obvious lift was “Three Girl Rhumba” and there were exactly three girls in that band.) In short, Elastica were in conversation with the source material rather than disrespectfully thieving it.
But let’s get back to Elastica, shall we? While “Car Song” cooingly chronicles the simple joys of sex in a Ford Fiesta, the chugging and pogoing “Smile” is dirty, gritty, lo-fi punk over the questioning of a lover: “Where have you been? / Did you know I've been waiting all night? / Whose bed were you in? / Whose head were you turning?” (As Britpop got pushed into the mainstream, Frischmann and Albarn eventually became an obsession for the British tabloids. Among the many gossip items written about the couple was a lengthy article in the Sunday Mirror about their open relationship. The unwelcome attention would lead to both of them having nervous breakdowns.)
“Hold Me Now” is a song that manages to infuse the title’s request with a droll boredom, and the track captures the push-pull of wanting someone one moment and feeling utterly repelled the next. “S.O.F.T.,” with its sexy, unhurried strut, is another one of my favorites, and Matthews has claimed that it stands for “Same Old Fucking Things.”
Meanwhile, “Indian Song” is ’60s psychedelia in the middle of a punk record, and because of that it reminds me of the om-chanting oddity “We Will Fall” on the Stooges’ debut album. Next, “Blue” features fuzzy guitar and pretty harmonies before it evolves into a head-bopping rollercoaster ride. “All-Nighter” captures the fun, frenetic energy of staying up all night with chemical assistance. Conversely, “Waking Up” paints a picture of the laziness that would soon become a daily battle as all the members of Elastica sadly slid into heroin addiction.
Although the album ends with the upbeat, humorous “Vaseline” about a relationship that’s become a little too close for comfort (“When you’re stuck like glue—Vaseline!”), the second-to-last track “Never Here” is a more introspective, regret-filled examination of Frischmann’s relationship with Brett Anderson. “And you lent me your records / And I lent you an ear / Funny how it seems to me now / That you were never here / Never really here.”
In the summer of 1997, when Frischmann was on the verge of a breakup with Damon Albarn and was attempting to put her life back together in the wake of heroin addiction and the dissolution of Elastica, she reached out to Anderson, who’d been through his own ordeals with drugs and difficult band dynamics. Frischmann joined Suede on stage for a couple of summer gigs, and she and Anderson were able to repair a lot of the past hurt and finally reconnect as friends.
“It was almost like two different people meeting,” he recalls. “Because when we first met, we were two sort of scruffy students and no one knew who we were. And then we’d gone off and done things independently and then kind of met as completely different people.”
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