IT’S baffling how some bands are brilliant when they start out, only to rapidly descend into garbage. Like these prime examples…
Kasabian
Kasabian’s debut album was packed with banging tunes like ‘Club Foot’. Follow-up Empire was littered with more good stuff, so how did they end up churning out dirges like ‘Velociraptor’ less than a decade later? Copious amounts of coke probably didn’t help, along with booting out your wife-beating frontman, but maybe songs about dinosaurs are just a bad idea. ‘He’s gonna eat ya!’ Er, probably not.
Elbow
Asleep in the Back was a masterpiece of dark, understated indie rock, but after a few years they morphed into commercial leviathans shitting out bland stadium-friendly anthems. ‘One Day Like This’ is their most famous song, but it’s so bland your mum sings along when it comes on the radio. Still, they were together for nearly 15 years before getting signed, so you can’t really blame them for cashing in. That’s a lot of depressing gigs attended by 11 people.
Stereophonics
Wales’ finest musical export – a dubious accolade – set the world alight as angry young lads from the Valleys on their 1997 debut Word Gets Around. Then just four years later they wrote the painfully pisspoor Just Enough Education to Perform. Nothing says ‘We’re rich and living in the States now’ more than songs with the word ‘nice’ in the title, eg. ‘Have a Nice Day’, and by Christmas there was that bloody awful ‘Handbags and Gladrags’ cover. Even the Welsh disown them these days.
Muse
Never before has such a pisstaking abundance of talent rotted to shit as dramatically as with these posh lads from rural Devon. Early releases Origin of Symmetry and Absolution were heavy rock genius, but by 2006 it had all gone tame and largely ignorable. Your girlfriend would still dump you to shag Matt Bellamy in a heartbeat though, which makes them even easier to despise.
Editors
Editors hail from Moseley in Birmingham, the same place as Ocean Colour Scene, so they were always likely to follow suit and turn to crap. Their debut album was fresh and exciting, but everything subsequently sounded exactly the same. Still releasing new material as recently as 2018 which nobody has ever heard. Look out for them playing a pub near you. Then don’t go.
Manic Street Preachers
The Manics flew out of the traps with Generation Terrorists and looked like they could rule the world, but by 1994 they were inflicting The Holy Bible on us and the only thing worse was reading the actual Holy Bible. Richey Edwards saw what was coming and did a bunk in 1995. ‘If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next’ was as much a warning about themselves as it was turgid rubbish in its own right.
