Song 36: Sweeping the Nation

Sweeping the Nation - Spearmint

I'm sorry about the version above, it's the only one i could find on youtube, it's a shaky live version with uncommon intimacy. But that's rather fitting really. Spearmint are a little band who played little shows, and this is a song about live music, about indie music, about all the bands who never quite made it and how it's the music that matters.

I'm delighted to be writing about this song, because it sowed the seed for the bulk of the 101 songs blog. I remember coming up with the idea in my bedroom in Balham, how this, like Wilco's 'The Late Greats', was a song about tiny, or even imaginary, bands who never got anywhere, but celebrating music for its own sake, and I connected that to my own imaginary band, the Turkletons, who I imagined being an unsuccessful but tuneful US power-pop band influenced by Big Star, Jonathan Richman, The Replacements, even Hall and Oates a little bit.

They're something splendid about band names you've never heard before, whether real or made up, and this song begins with a spoken dedication to various tiny bands who never made the grade. Real not imagined, I'm pretty certain. It sets the song up brilliantly, as the last of the bands mentioned is Laverne and Shirley, which my research tells me was the previous band of Spearmint's lead singer, Mr Shirley Lee (apparently the Mr was often added to make his gender clear, that's what wikipedia says anyhoo).

And Spearmint became one of those bands who never quite made it, though this song almost did. I believe it has that rare distinction of one week on the singles chart at Number 75 - an almost-hit which deserved to be a hit. So the song is almost some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's a euphoric song with a Northern soul sample 'Out on the Floor' by Dobie Gray, and though this is the closest Spearmint came to a hit, there are several tremendous songs in their back catalogue, 'Isn't it Great to Be Alive', 'Left Alone Among the Living' for example, and several from their 2001 concept album 'A Different Lifetime', including 'Julie Christie', 'The Flaming Lips' and the wonderful 'Scottish Pop', as charming a song as exists on God's earth. Like 'Sweeping the Nation' it's a song about love for music and happily throws in a list, so really, the likes of me are in heaven.

'A Different Lifetime' came out in 2001 which, for me, was a great year for music and probably, up to 2002, the time when I was splurging the most I ever have on album after album, and though I think in terms of The Strokes and Bob Dylan, the White Stripes and PJ Harvey, actually 'A Different Lifetime' is certainly one of my favourites from that time, and really, in a different world, an awful lot of people would love it.

Spearmint's one brush with Hollywood is in the tiny-bit-too-self-consciously-indie-mainstream-high-fidelity-ish-but-still-quite-enjoyable '(500) Days of Summer', where Joseph Gordon Levitt says "It pains me we live in a world where nobody's heard of Spearmint". One hopes that gave the band's back catalogue a nice enough little boost, bit I imagine we still live in a world where about .001% of people have heard of Spearmint, and that rather pains me too.

Spearmint were the real thing, a genuine indie band who made indie pop, who never made it and exist in a kind of enthusiastic netherworld of geeky cool I've only ever looked at from the outside. These are the indie kids who keep going  into their 40s, who really probably weren't much good at sport but are very good at pub quizzes, who love cool, good music and films and refuse to give into the idea that it's also ok to like the shit stuff. It's terribly wonderful and admirable, I kind of feel i could never have quite had the hair or been skinny enough for this scene, but if there's any "scene" I ever wish I'd been a part of, I think it would be this one.

I kind of wish I'd seen 100s and 100s of unsigned bands rather than a handful, I kind of wish I'd deejayed at a Northern Soul night which got a small but committed following, I wish a fey, light humane tuneful sound would come out when i started singing rather than a violent bellow, and I certainly wish I could have written a few songs like 'Sweeping the Nation'.