The Wildhearts
Given a career in which they've constantly hit the self-destruct button, it’s surprising that The Wildhearts are still here. Not only that, they've also released the best album of the year.
It’s been quite a year for Ginger and co.
Renaissance men indeed.
As the first decade of the current millennium ended, so did The Wildhearts. This shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who had followed the band for the first 20 years of their career. A group for whom volatility was as natural as breathing, they had split up many times before, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years.
But this was different. It was final. Their most recent album at the time, the anaemic Chutzpah!, had come and gone with a whimper – a far cry from the fuck-the-world roar of their audacious, brilliant 1993 debut Earth Vs The Wildhearts and its follow-up PHUQ. Their latest tour had ended three days before Christmas 2009 with an undersold gig at London’s 800-capacity Islington Academy. They had reached the end of the road, broke, demoralised and ultimately kaput. “The Wildhearts was over,” frontman Ginger says now. “So I got on with loads of other things.”
Guitarist CJ, who co-founded the band with Ginger in 1989, went even further. He didn’t just quit The Wildhearts, he also quit music. He ended up “running a couple of cleaning crews”, clearing the houses of hoarders and taking care of the aftermath of suicides. “I earned more doing that than I did in The Wildhearts,” he says wryly.
Ginger and CJ might have been done with The Wildhearts, but The Wildhearts wasn’t done with Ginger and CJ. Two years later they were back together.
Now, a full decade on and several more corkscrew turns along the roller-coaster that is their career, they have reclaimed their crown as the greatest British rock’n’roll band of the modern era. Their new studio album, this year’s Renaissance Men, is the first to feature the classic Wildhearts line-up of Ginger, CJ, drummer Ritch Battersby and long-absent bassist Danny McCormack since 1995. More importantly, it’s the most exhilarating and brilliant album of 2019, and one that could go toeto-toe with their own early-90s peaks and come out triumphant.
“Yeah, I’m surprised about all this, cos we never thought we’d still be alive,” says Ginger. “But put it this way: I’m fucking delighted we are.”
The resurrection of The Wildhearts is only unexpected if you haven’t paid any attention to the previous 29 years of their career. Still, it’s a cause for celebration, even though the wider world will do what it has always done and ignore them completely. But rock’n’roll needs bands like them: crazy, passionate, mercurial, always a Rizla’s breath away from flying off the rails, punching each other out, or serving up the greatest anthem you’ll ever hear.
“There’s always a few people always waiting for the car crash,“Ginger says today. “But then there’s a lot of people who haven’t been let down by the band. A lot of people consider it’s a career worth following. Like, The Damned, Mötorhead, Ramones, I never gave up on those bands.”
It’s half-one in the afternoon and the singer is still in bed, drinking an Irish coffee. His daughter, the singer Jazmin Bean, has just put out a new single, Saccharine. “It’s got over 400,000 views on YouTube,” he says with a father’s pride. “That’s more than any single I’ve ever made. I’m glad I was useful for something, even if it’s just my sperm.”
I talk to CJ a few days earlier. The guitarist is in the basement of his flat in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. The sump pump broke just before The Wildhearts embarked on their most recent tour, and the flat was flooded, causing a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of damage. “I was up all night bailing out water,” he says, sounding more chipper than a man who had to chuck out a load of ruined carpets should.
Irish coffee and soggy carpets is the story of The Wildhearts right there. Their whole career has been a patchwork of glorious hedonism and inglorious pathos. The Hollywood pitch would be 24 Hour Party People-meets-Carry On Camping. But the second half of this decade has brought some unlikely stability, something that has intensified with Renaissance Men. Their first studio album since the ill-fated Chutzpah! a decade ago, it's not just the artistic high-water mark of this umpteenth act of their career, but the commercial one too. When it was released early this summer it reached No.11 in the UK chart, their highest position since PHUQ. According to Ginger, it would have gone higher, except the label didn’t press enough physical copies.
“We ran out of CDs,” he says. “We were doing signings all over the country in HMVs and there were no copies of the record. It would have gone a lot higher had anyone cared. I didn’t.”
Ginger and CJ agree that they could never have made this album earlier in the decade. They know this because they tried, sometime around 2017.
“We got around to booking studio time, we had a producer, but we never turned up,” says CJ. “Me and Ginger had a big falling out in Japan and we didn’t talk to each other for four months.” This happens a lot in The Wildhearts, obviously. “Oh yeah, we routinely fall out. It’s nothing new. There’s always going to be drama with us.”
The spark that lit the touchpaper that fired Renaissance Men into life was the return of Danny McCormack in 2018. The bassist last played in The Wildhearts in 2005; the interim years had seen him battle heroin addiction and endure the amputation of his leg following a brain aneurysm.
McCormack’s first show back with the band was at a 2018 benefit show for one his own replacements, American bassist Scott Sorry, who was undergoing treatment for a brain tumour. In rehearsal, Danny told CJ and drummer Ritch Battersby he needed a quiet word.
CJ recalled: “He said: ‘I’ve been shitting
“Our ability to hold a grudge was f**king Olympic. But we
got together again and said, ‘Why the f**k did we fall out?’”
Ginger
this for weeks, so nervous. You guys are quite intimidating, and I haven’t been in this room for fifteen years.’ I just went: ‘Man, don’t worry about it.’ And it was brilliant.”
The reunion with their wayward bassist soon shifted from temporary to permanent. Without him, Renaissance Men would not have happened.
“It just didn’t feel right until Danny came back,” says CJ. “It’s the sound he makes. No disrespect to anyone else who’s been in this band, but he has a tone that nobody else does. It’s his fingers. They’re like sausages. A bit filthier, though. I wouldn’t eat them, cos I know where they’ve been.”
“We were worried about him,” says Ginger. “The shape he was in… he had no leg, barely any teeth. But he fucking shone. He did the charity gig sitting down. But now he plays standing up, with a prosthetic leg. He’s often in agony. I can tell it in his face, but the crowd can’t. I’m proud of him, how far he’s come. So proud.”
For Ginger there was extra poignancy to McCormack’s return. The relationship between the two was nonexistent for all the time the bassist was absent. “Our ability to hold a grudge was fucking Olympic,” says Ginger. “But we got together again and said: ‘Why the fuck did we fall out?’ All I could remember was how much history I’ve got with the guy, the ridiculous things we’ve been through.”
CJ suggests that the rekindled friendship is indicative of a deeper shift. “I think Ginger realises after all these years that he’s got some good relationships within this band.”
The Wildhearts’ resurgence was perfectly timed. Renaissance Men came out on the 30th anniversary of the band’s formation. Back then, Ginger was newly fired from rock’n’roll barflies the Quireboys, while CJ was going nowhere fast in London sleaze-metal makeweights the Tattooed Love Boys. Together the pair cooked up a plan to form a band that existed in the middle of an unlikely Venn diagram where Metallica, The Beatles, Cheap Trick and The Clash all intersected.
They lived up to that promise, at least initially. The Wildhearts sounded like everything and nothing that had come before them at the same time, a gigantic detonation of noise and attitude. Even now, Earth Vs The Wildhearts (reissued this year on vinyl for the very first time) still sounds like a work of mad genius.
The Wildhearts were sonic warriors and chemical dustbins, spiral-eyed devils stomping where angels feared to tread. They would drink, snort and inject everything that was put in front of them, while praising the gods of rock’n’roll; a living, breathing, brawling myth in action. Sometimes the pendulum swung too far in the wrong direction. Or maybe it was the right direction, depending on what you want from rock’n’roll.
“There was a time when the partying and the drinking and the drugs took over,” says CJ, who was fired during the sessions for PHUQ after one bust-up too many. “But most bands have the same story.”
They do, but few have The Wildhearts’ capacity for hitting the self-destruct button. That selfsabotage reached a pinnacle with 1997’s barely listenable Endless Nameless, an album which was essentially the sound of a band on every single drug ever invented, shouting: “Fuck the world!” over the noise made by a sheet-metal factory as it gets sucked into a black hole. It was the first of many tipping points for The Wildhearts. Everything they’d built suddenly vanished, and on the back of it they fell apart for the first, if not final, time. Naturally, Endless Nameless is Ginger’s favourite album.
“Fuck it,” he says in response to the question of whether he would have done anything different at any point to make life easier and maybe stack the decks in The Wildhearts’ favour. “We are the way we are. Getting us to change anything, you might as well go and look at a fucking brick wall and wish it wasn’t there.”
“If we’d have taken a different path we’d have sounded like most other bands in their fifties sound: dull, quiet, safe, tame,” says CJ. “Renaissance Men would probably have been a blues album. We’re still an aggressive band. And me and Ginge can jump higher on stage than most of the kids out there.”
N o one would have ever put money on The Wildhearts entering their fourth decade in the disconcertingly healthy state they’re in, especially not The Wildhearts themselves. But here we are, on the verge of the 2020s, and this bunch of middle-aged malcontents, fuck-ups, and ex-junkies aren’t just back in the ring, they’ve swung from rock’n’roll casualties to folk heroes.
There’s talk of a book at some point in the future, recounting the litany of triumphs and transgressions. Ginger is excited by the prospect. “I’d read it,” he says. “Mainly cos I can’t remember most of what happened.”
Then there’s the follow-up to Renaissance Men. Ginger has already written three songs for it. “Heavy as fuck and pissed off,” is how he describes them. This time around, he’s instructed the others to bring five songs each of their own to the table. “That’s never happened before, because they’re historically lazy bastards,” he says. “But I want everyone singing on the next album, so there’s going to be different lead vocals.”
Only time will tell if this transpires. Past history suggests it could all go wrong in the most spectacular fashion. But right now the members of The Wildhearts are enjoying being The Wildhearts more than they have in a long time.
“After thirty years, we’re still making albums that some people really fucking give a shit about,” says CJ. “That’s the cherry on the top for me.”
“If it all goes this well and we behave well to each other, we’ll be doing this until we die,” says Ginger. “Lemmy was playing bass up until he went, Willie Nelson’s still out there doing it. I love the idea of being an old fuck on stage making a massive racket. And I love the idea of being an old fuck on stage with these three guys. No one in this band is going anywhere. Otherwise there’s no point in doing it.”
It’s tempting to say long may this continue. But this is The Wildhearts we’re talking about. Only a fool would take a guess at what the future holds for them. But whatever it does, it’ll be way crazier than every other band’s future.
“We’re still an aggressive band.
And me and Ginge can jump higher on stage than most of the kids out there.”