Song 30: Shorley Wall

Shorley Wall - Ooberman

This band were, I think, doomed from the start. Ooberman. What a horrid name. Perhaps if it was some thumping purveyor of Eurodance like Basshunter, success might await Ooberman, but they were a delicate, twee-pop proposition, and Ooberman was just about as far away from what they sounded like as it's possible to get. They should have been called something like The Daisies. Damn them.

This is a very pretty song. Firmly in the spirit of Belle and Sebastian, with the ovaltine male vocal and the poetic female spoken word bit, there were a lot of people around in 1998-9 who really thought this could be a hit. It received a lot of radio play for a long time and DJs would talk it up whenever they got the opportunity. It was re-released at least once, I'm pretty certain it was twice. The initial EP was The Times' single of the year for 1998 and got to the lower reaches of the charts. Surely the re-release would bring glory? But no, it stalled at Number 47.

And Ooberman had other songs, Million Suns, Blossoms Falling, Roll Me in Cotton, real tender little heartbreakers, and they got radio play and kind words from all kind of media, but nothing broke through.

When their album, The Magic Treehouse, was released, on a reasonably good, decent-sized label, to a bit of fanfare, you thought, surely now? But no. In fact, I remember hearing that it was the album that music stores had the most unbought copies of remaining on the shelves in the second half of 1999. In short, a disaster.

I was one of the few people that bought that album, and I subjected my two flatmates in our ridiculously dingy lodgings in Baker Lane (aah Baker Lane) to an awful lot of it. To be fair, Alexander was trying relentlessly to impose Macy Gray on us, so it wasn't a bad option. I don't really know how it makes me feel - cold, most of all. That was a cold, cold house with no central heating and my extraordinary insistence on having a window open ... so, it's definitely evocative, but perhaps not in the way Ooberman would have hoped.

And Ooberman never really came close to any success again. There was another EP and another album, and apparently some members are still working together, but no real acclaim or press since then.

So where did it all go wrong?Well, I think the answer's pretty obvious - the name. Who would buy an album by Ooberman? Who would even think about reading a review of a band called Ooberman. It's relentless, unmitigatedly awful. This poor band sabotaged themselves before they'd even started.

All the money put on them, all the faith, all the airplay, all the good vibes, but there was no getting past the Oober-awfulness.

Listen to this song - a gentle, sad, wistful dream of a song (hell, the girl even cries in her spoken word bit), it's got great verse, great chorus, great everything, and imagine they're called The Dandelions or something - forget Ooberman ever existed ...