Beloved in their UK homeland but virtually unknown in the US, The Wildhearts are one of rock’s greatest – and most combustible - bands. In 2018, singer/guitarist Ginger and former guitarist CJ looked back on their 1993 debut album Earth Vs The Wildhearts – a cult classic that could have been huge, were it not for a combination of drugs, bad luck and epic self-sabotage.
In the summer of 1993 the prevailing sound was of down-tuned guitars and recycled Black Sabbath riffs. Alienation and ennui were lyrical staples and plaid shirts and Doc Martens de rigueur as uniform. Two years after Nirvana released Nevermind, grunge was at its all-pervasive zenith and American alt.rock in the ascendancy. Already that year, Smashing Pumpkins and Tool had each brought out their second album, respectively Siamese Dream and Undertow. The biggest guns were looming, too. Nirvana’s In Utero was being readied for a September release, Pearl Jam’s Vs a month later. Three weeks ahead of In Utero, another now-classic album was released. And from an unlikely source.
The Wildhearts had evolved out of such inglorious other bands as the Quireboys, Dogs D’Amour, Tattooed Love Boys and hardly recalled NWOBHM-ers Tobruk. Forming as Wild Hearts, they at first comported themselves as faintly ridiculous Guns N’Roses clones with their teased hair and cowboy boots. Such was the chaotic nature of almost everything they did, it took them four years to get around to making their first album. Even then, Earth Vs The Wildhearts was spewed out on to tape that was so worn it was almost transparent, and with the four members of the band in a state guitarist CJ now describes succinctly as “fucked”.
Yet the result sounded not only entirely at odds with the musical mood of the time, but also almost stupidly exciting. All at once, Earth Vs The Wildhearts shot a restorative cocktail into the veins of a then-moribund British rock scene, made the idea of grafting bittersweet harmonies on to Metallica riffs seem entirely cogent, and marked the flowering of a rare and genuine maverick talent in the misbegotten form of singer/songwriter/guitarist Ginger. The Wildhearts were to prove incapable of sustaining any semblance of Earth Vs dead-ahead focus, but nonetheless the sheer potency of the record has been amplified over time.
“That was the first album I ever recorded, and for whatever reason it’s the one I’m still talking about to this day,” Ginger reflects now. “I guess there’s just a sense of honesty to Earth Vs that people like. We weren’t trying to be glamorous, and it must have worked for us.
“I haven’t listened to it for twenty years. People are very, very fond of it and for that I’m grateful, but I’ve no real connection with those songs now. As a whole it’s like a snapshot of your first shag. When the reviews came out and it was: ‘The sound of British rock finally waking up,’ we were like: ‘Are these fuckers talking about our album?’ It didn’t make sense then and it still doesn’t now.”
At the dawn of 1989, no success of any kind seemed within reach of the man born David Walls in South Shields, Tyneside. Ginger, as he would become known, had just then been thrown out of the Quireboys for being too heavy a guitar player and an even heavier drinker and general party animal. During the brief time he was in the Quireboys he had given no indication that he could write songs, much less that he was able to bring together such disparate styles as thrash metal, glam rock, punk rock and alt.country. Not that to begin with he even knew how to translate this gumbo of influences into real flesh-and-blood sound.
Wild Hearts started off by hitching on to the last knockings of the hair-metal bandwagon. A couple of early line-ups included one of two vocalists – former Tobruk frontman Stuart ‘Snake’ Neale and one Drunken F Mullet from another band of also-rans, Mournblade. The fledgling group recording a grand total of nine demo tapes with this pair, which combined did at least land them a development deal with EastWest Records, but no distinction. After Ginger was eventually persuaded to take on lead vocals, they settled on a line-up comprised of founders Ginger and guitarist CJ, late of the Tattooed Love Boys, plus former Dogs D’Amour drummer Bam, and on bass Danny McCormack.
It was Ginger becoming their lead singer, abetted by the discovery that CJ was naturally inclined towards vocal harmonies and, what’s more, that their two voices fitted like the proverbial hand in glove, that gave the now Wildhearts their wings.
“Up to that point we’d wanted a cross between Joe Strummer, Robin Zander, Steven Tyler and Paul Stanley,” a laughing CJ recalls of their vocalist search. “Of course, that person doesn’t exist. And now all of a sudden we had these really lovely Beatles, Beach Boys-style harmonies.”
“I hated singing,” adds Ginger. “I’m only comfortable now when I sing in a Geordie accent. Over the years, I’ve wished that I’d held out and found a proper singer, but I doubt we’d be having this conversation now if that’d happened.”
In the two years that followed after he stepped up to the mic, songs flowed out from Ginger and on to an EP, Mondo Akimbo A-Go-Go, and a mini-album, Don’t Be Happy… Just Worry. Bam jumped back into Dogs D’Amour, Andrew ‘Stidi’ Stidolph took over the drum stool, and from touring with everyone from Diamond Head to Alice in Chains and the Manics The Wildhearts’ sound hardened and crystallised.
“All along I was kind of cherry-picking the songs I liked best for the first album, because that’s what bands used to do when I was young,” says Ginger. “I wanted it to have the best chance possible of being accepted. But right up until it got released I figured there was a strong chance people would just turn around and go: ‘No, you can’t do that.’ That mixing heavy with pop wouldn’t work, because otherwise someone else would have already done it.
“It was going totally against the grain. Which for me was the more reason to do it. Plus I had the confidence of youth. I hated grunge, couldn’t understand why anyone would like it. The music I was listening to was played by the sort of people you would want to invite to a party. This was years before any of us had even tried heroin. We were all about speed, which was just as well because it was all we could afford. I always thought heroin was the least rock-and-roll drug in the world, because it put people to sleep.”
Charged with shepherding that first album into being was Dante Bonutto, recently added to the A&R department at EastWest. A former rock writer, Bonutto had seen Ginger out and about at gigs and they shared a passion for Kiss, but it wasn’t until the sessions for Don’t Be Happy that they were formally introduced. Or to be more accurate, this was occasioned as Bonutto watched Ginger drive a tractor into the recording studio’s swimming pool.
“I stood there thinking: ‘He’s not going into the pool, surely?’ And he did,” Bonutto remembers. “That sort of set the tone for our relationship from then on. There was always a drama going on.”
“How brattish and belligerent the band were put people off as much as it attracted them,” CJ qualifies. “It wasn’t an act. The Wildhearts was dysfunctional as a group and as individuals. We just weren’t very nice people.”
In early 1993, EastWest put the Wildhearts into Wessex studios in north London for an intended short, sharp demo session. Wessex was where the Sex Pistols had put down Never Mind The Bollocks and the Clash London Calling. There was no fanfare or import attending the Wildhearts’ date. Working with the in-house engineer, they had to use so-called ‘gash tape’, a cheap quarter-inch reel onto which countless other wannabes had previously recorded tracks. The budget was so restrictive that Bonutto practically had to beg his paymasters for a hand-out so that the band could finish up an additional song, Loveshit, that Ginger knocked out at the last minute.
His motivation for Loveshit was unconventional. One day, he reminisced with Bonutto about a TV advert of the 1980s for the body spray Limara. The ad was popular among teenage boys of the time for showing a pneumatic blonde bathing naked in a waterfall. Ginger’s specific point of interest was the ad’s theme song, Remember My Name, a strident rocker that Bonutto informed him was sung, in a full-throated roar, by Stevie Lange, then-wife of producer ‘Mutt’ Lange. And soon enough, Stevie was brought to Wessex to sing backing vocals on Ginger’s newest song.
“My puberty loved that advert and her voice,” Ginger says. “I can remember running away and writing that song just for Stevie to sing. I didn’t want her to have to sing any of the others that had all these swear words, but I called it Loveshit by accident. Not the smartest bolt in the box.”
Like the other 10 songs that would make up the Wildhearts’ debut album, Loveshit was recorded live in one or two takes. Most of the rest were drawn from more direct personal experience: Ginger wrote Miles Away Girl about his girlfriend of the time, a nurse, and Greetings From Shitsville about his flat in London’s Belsize Park. Although he wasn’t above indulging in a spot of self-mythology on the latter; as CJ recalls: “NW3 is one of the richest postcodes in the world and Ginger’s place was actually alright.”
Musically, the tracks were like fun-fair rides, a roller-coaster cascade of ideas and reference points, veering off at wild tangents and as if none could be made epic enough to contain all the ideas rampaging around in Ginger’s head. Everlone, for example, ran to six and a half minutes, accommodated at least four different, mighty riffs, and still gave the impression it could go for many minutes more.
“I just wanted to make a kind of music that I wasn’t hearing at the time,” says Ginger. “And I had nothing to write about other than what was going on in my life. That’s been my practice ever since. It means that whenever I go on stage, no matter how I’m feeling, at least I’m not a fraud.”
“I still think today that Ginger is hugely underrated,” offers Bonutto. “I would put him up alongside Elvis Costello and Paul Weller as one of our great British songwriters, and he’s probably been more consistent than either of them. I’ve never heard a bad song he’s written.”
A kind of reckless abandon was another of Ginger’s signature traits. It was this that surely led him to title three of Earth Vs’ most accessible songs: Greetings From Shitsville, Loveshit and My Baby Is A Headfuck. Bonutto had the often onerous task of explaining away this self-destructive bent to his bosses at EastWest. Today he considers The Wildhearts the very last band that should have been signed to a major record company.
“That whole corporate set-up was anathema to Ginger as an artist and he didn’t want to toe the line,” he says. “If I said something was black, he would automatically go white because he felt it was the right thing to do artistically. I actually had great empathy with his point of view, because I love that rebellious rock’n’roll spirit and people who live the lifestyle and mean it.
“I played Greetings From Shitsville to the head of A&R at the company and he said: ‘That’s an amazing song. Why on earth would they call it Shitsville?’ Well, welcome to The Wildhearts.”
“Thing is, we never had any aspirations towards commercial success,” reasons Ginger. “We didn’t have those smarts about sustaining a career. Swear words are fantastic, too, if you’re trying to be loud and snotty. That was our logic.”
Right from the outset, the band had wanted to have Mick Ronson produce their debut album. They had been impressed by the venerable former Spiders From Mars guitarist’s work with Morrissey on the latter’s 1992 album Your Arsenal. But Ronson’s health was ailing and he was unable to commit to such a labour. However, he did drive himself down to the studio to add a characteristic solo to My Baby Is A Headfuck, an event that CJ recalls “kind of freaked us out”. It would be the last time Ronson was recorded, cancer claiming him on April 29, 1993.
After that, they turned to producer Mark Dodson re-recording with him a brace of the demo tracks. One, Suckerpunch, made it onto the finished album. The other, …Headfuck, didn’t because the band had needed to match exactly the tempo of the original in order for Ronson’s contribution to be preserved, and the result was stilted.
Neither Ginger nor Bonutto can quite agree on whose actual idea it was, but both men finally determined that the demos should be released as the finished album, with the exception of Suckerpunch. Bonutto’s one concession to radio-friendliness was to have the basic tracks remixed by Pet Shop Boys/Human League producer Mike ‘Spike’ Drake. By Bonutto’s own admission, the band immediately took against Drake, but he succeeded in accentuating the sugar pill of Ginger’s melodies without dampening the Wildhearts’ raw fire.
Earth Vs The Wildhearts was released on August 30, 1993, by which time Stidi had been replaced on drums by Rich Battersby. The album’s front cover adequately reflected the distinctive, uncompromising nature of the music: a portrait of Ginger, his face submerged in oil and bound with barbed wire, a cockroach crawling from his mouth. This, Bonutto points out, was in the days before Photoshop technology, “so for real he had to lie in a bath of oil with a cockroach on his face. Altogether it was a magnificent statement.”
Another Wildhearts sleeve from that period was to gain a notoriety of its own. EastWest pressed ahead with Shitsville as the launch single. Ginger had a very particular idea for the artwork that should accompany it. Which is to say he imagined a photograph of someone shitting into a pitta bread that the four members of the band would hold open. At the time, they were laying down their first batch of tracks with Battersby, and Simon Efemey producing. Ginger happened to mention the pitta bread idea to the voluble Efemey, who instantly volunteered his services.
“A week later, the five of us were in a photo studio and me with my kecks off,” Efemey recalls. “A Japanese girl took the picture, and it was all set up with deadly seriousness. The night before, I’d even drunk a load of Guinness to help ease my movement. But as soon as I heard the camera shutter going I started to piss myself laughing. She got the shot of it appearing to drop into the pitta, but I was shaking so much that I actually shat all over Danny’s hand.”
This was a transgression too far for EastWest, who released the single in a plain brown sleeve instead.
The Wildhearts had got real momentum by then anyway. Earth Vs The Wildhearts received rave reviews, Radio 1 daytime playlisted another of the album’s standout tracks, TV Tan, and the band undertook a crowning UK tour with The Almighty. By the next summer, the Caffeine Bomb single had got The Wildhearts on Top Of The Pops and they headlined the second stage at the Donington Monsters Of Rock festival on a bill that also included Therapy? and Terrorvision, heirs apparent to lead a Brit-rock renaissance. Ginger certainly had grand ambitions for The Wildhearts’ next move, plotting a defining double album.
It wasn’t to be. EastWest baulked at that concept too, and when the band’s second album, P.H.U.Q. subsequently came out in May 1995 it was as a single disc. In Ginger’s opinion it was a substandard one at that, the more ranging and esoteric tracks having been put out on the Fishing For Luckies EP instead.
P.H.U.Q. entered the UK chart at No.6 but, fatally, Ginger had ousted CJ from the band before it was even finished, robbing both himself and the Wildhearts of their essential foil. His timing couldn’t have been more ruinous, and after that it was all downhill.
Intent on waging war with EastWest, Ginger next delivered them a third album of splenetic industrial metal, Endless, Nameless, that, depending on one’s point of view, was either a bold artistic statement or unlistenable. EastWest duly passed on it. It was eventually released by indie label Mushroom Records in 1997, but by then Ginger had split the band, citing musical differences and drug problems.
“Two things derailed the band completely,” Ginger offers. “The first was cocaine. That was how CJ and I fell out. Soon as cocaine came into the picture, the egos started to get affected and we were having these huge arguments about what I can’t even remember. And when EastWest refused to go with the double album, the band was over for me at that point. If we were going to succeed at this I had wanted to make a statement.”
The Wildhearts’ story ever since has been typically chequered. Starting in 2001 there have been serial reunions, just as many bust-ups and the odd album. Last month, Ginger and CJ, the latter now living in the Yorkshire Dales, together played a handful of acoustic dates around the UK. The upshot of which, reasons CJ, was as likely to have been that they “wound up killing each other as to have come back feeling like brothers again”.
Rich Battersby got to be so disillusioned with the whole messy business that at one point he stopped playing altogether, but he’s now back in the fold. So too is Danny McCormack. Years of heroin addiction led in 2015 to him having to have his right leg amputated below the knee. “For a one-legged bloke that should be dead, he’s doing really well,” says Ginger. “I’ve no idea what makes that bloke tick, but tick he does.”
Ginger too has not been without his demons. He was hospitalised last year in an apparent suicidal state. Today he claims to be fit, well and happier for being busy. Despite stating in the recent past that he would never again record with The Wildhearts, the band’s eighth studio album is now on the cards, and they will join Reef and Terrorvision for the Britrock Must Be Destroyed tour in May.
Earth Vs The Wildhearts stands now as a monument to its time, to the pig-headed brilliance of the man who conceived it, and to The Wildhearts themselves, who, as spectacularly and wilfully as any band, snatched defeat from the jaws of certain victory.
“I really wouldn’t want to go back and change anything,” Ginger concludes. “Back then we were having the time of our lives. I would suggest to any band going in to make their first album that they live exactly as they want to and get smart later on. If you’re going to be stupid, then for fuck’s sake do it when you’re young. And we were stupider than most.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 247, March 2018
