Review Summary: he wear a Stetson, he got a moustache, he go to night club..
A continuously revolving door of players that included at one point or another future members of underground strongholds like Male Nurse, The Country Teasers and even revivalists extraordinaires Franz Ferdinand; Glaswegian art punkers Yummy Fur mashed the stubborn repetition of The Fall with the barbed foolishness of more tongue-in-cheek outfits like Thinking Fellers and Half Man Half Biscuit into an angular brew, music for people who were as prone to pontificating on existentialism as they were to throwing rocks through windows.
Named after Chester Brown’s cult fringe comic (home to the gory, scatological heathen Ed the Happy Clown), the band plied a simple enough trade – penning sharp, skinny guitar lines and then bashing away at them, as the lyrics turnt biting, pertinent and/or absurd (John Peel was a big fan). Cowboys prostrating at discos, the hyper-lucid boredom of clean living, sex and submission, scantily-clad feminists, evangelists and tight-fisted bookies all get strung out over a giddy stomp and swing. Patently Scottish indie of its time, there isn’t even a glint of an attempt to pretty up all these earworm riffs with anything remotely more elaborate than a euphoric, rhythmic march. So take a sweating pint, a hungover cig, sit in the sun, listen and never wonder again where Parquet Courts got their every single idea from.
