Sombrero dynamic

Like vintage-minded garage denizens The Prisoners and The Chesterfield Kings, The Stairs championed mid-’60s raw sounds at decades’ remove. “Year zero was most definitely 1966,” says singer-bassist Edgar Jones, né Summertyme. “The Chocolate Watchband, Standells, Stones, Kinks. Those bands sounded so real to me. They were built on pure energy, excitement, so the plan was to recreate something similar.” Formed in 1990 in Liverpool, the group did just this, and over the next four years, four EPs and an album, they made fierce garage punk and R&B, built on immediate melodies, irrepressible riffs and Jones’s distinguishing snotty snarl. The foundations of the band were laid in 1987, while Jones was on a music YTS scheme at the city’s Attic Studio, where he started writing and demoing songs including Weed Bus, Mr Window Pane and Mary Joanna. In 1990, he recruited fellow YTS comrades Gerald ‘Ged’ Lynn on guitar and Paul Maguire on drums. As Jones was playing bass in Ian McCulloch’s touring band, the three got to work in Mac’s practice room, The Ministry. “We clicked immediately,” remembers Paul Maguire of early rehearsals. “We were the three little weirdos in Liverpool, always twatted on acid and weed, and at every house party, by the record player. In the studio we had one mind, we worked really hard and we couldn’t believe how fuckin’ great it sounded.” “We knew something was going to happen,” adds Ged Lynn. “The potential was in the tunes for everyone to hear, they just had to hear them.” They started building a following at their own fortnightly event the Garage Club, playing one set of Love, Seeds and Blues Magoos covers and another of their own songs. “My brother did the dry ice machine,” says Maguire. “One night he got bored and taped the button down with gaffer tape. It just kept billowing out – smoke alarms went off, fire engines came, we smoked ourselves out of our own night and had to wait two hours before we could get back in.” They struck a deal with Manchester indie Imaginary, but by the time their 1991 debut EP Weed Bus was issued, they’d signed to Go! Discs because, says Jones, “Chas Smith [aka Cathal Smyth of Madness, then A&R man] came to see us rehearse, and liked us.” Weed Bus was the group’s red-eyed statement of intent. Self produced in Liverpool’s Avid studios over four days in April ’91, it’s a raucous, maracas-shaking ode to skinning up, completely out of its time – the indie scene was dominated by shoegaze, the mainstream by rave – but it struck a chord with a generation who’d discovered ’60s punk via Nuggets and Pebbles comps. The group reconvened in Avid in January 1992, putting down their album in three weeks. The 14 tracks included the thrilling, also-THC-fixated rush of Mary Joanna, Out In The Country’s mesh of Chocolate Watchband and The Kinks, and the Cossacks-at-the- Crawdaddy tune Russian R’n’B (The World Shall Not Be Saved). And all in mono, natch. “In the ’90s you couldn’t go in and say, We want to do it live in one take, just turn all the knobs up, and go for it,” says Jones. “It was all overdubbing, drums first, then the bass, then guitar. It’s testament to Paul’s drum- ming that it sounds so raw.” On release, they hit

This month, found at low tide among the clay pipes, pointy shoes and wooden teeth on rock’s riverbank, the Superstars Of Smoking’s pre-decimal bluesy racket.