The Wildhearts

Earth Vs The Wildhearts

The greatest British debut album of the past 30 years gets a vinyl reissue.

All these years on, it’s hard to imagine the impact The Wildhearts had on music when they emerged at the start of the 1990s, which was precisely zilch. Back then nobody knew quite what to make of this amalgam of rejects, troublemakers and malcontents from such long forgotten cannon fodder as the Tattooed Love Boys and Energetic Krusher. Fair enough, mainman Ginger had once been fourth banana in the Quireboys, but that’s hardly the stuff that legends are made of.

The Wildhearts were part of a Doomed Generation of brilliant, unpigeonholable British bands who promised much but ultimately failed to deliver: The Atom Seed, New England, Loud – too smart, clever and sexy and just not American enough to succeed in those unenlightened post-hair metal, pre-grunge times. All had had moments of greatness, but none had so much brilliance to burn as The Wildhearts.

There had been early warning shots – the Mondo Akimbo A-Go-Go and Don’t Be Happy… Just Worry EPs were a glorious boom-crash opening salvo in 1992. But it would be a year later, with the release of Earth Vs The Wildhearts, that the flag of genius was fully unfurled.

More than a quarter of a century on, it

still sounds like nothing else. Or rather it sounds like everything else, jammed together in the Magimix blender that was Ginger’s mind: Metallica, Cheap Trick, The Replacements, The Beatles, The Cardiacs. It’s an album that wears its own musical schizophrenia like a crown, from the thrash-pop paranoia of Greetings From Shitsville to the heads-down Beach Boys/Sex Pistols mash-up of My Baby Is A Head Fuck. At the centre of the madness is Ginger himself, not so much deranged ringmaster as barely-in-control lion-tamer, trying to get the sounds in his head to do what he wanted them to do while armed with nothing more than a whip and a wooden chair, and sometimes even succeeding.

The chattering classes would have it that Oasis’ Definitely Maybe is the best British debut album of the last 30 years. They’d be wrong: this is. Whether you need this vanilla vinyl reissue – no extra tracks, certainly nothing you’ve not heard before – is between you, your conscience and your wallet. But as a work of deranged genius that the rest of the universe has never come close to catching up with, Earth Vs The Wildhearts is untouchable. ■■■■■■■■■■