Huw Williams once called the late, great John Peel a bastard and presided over one of the most overlooked indie bands ever, so is he really coming back for more?
Common consensus is that The Pooh Sticks were well ahead of their time with their raucous, cutesy-pop form of indie that subtly poked fun at the more established acts of time.
The Welsh “band”, formed by Swansea born Huw Williams in late 1987 and really just a duo, were immortalised in The Rough Guide to Rock who expected them to be “reassessed as [an] overlooked gem sometime in the [21st] century”.
Now, Williams has a chance to test out that theory when he plays at this year’s Indietracks festival joining New York headliners The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. It seems, however, that the man who was quoted as calling the late, great John Peel a bastard, does not sees this as a second chance.
“We just weren’t good enough,” says Williams matter-of-factly. “If I meet people now and they’re interested in hearing [our] stuff, there a few tracks I can play [but] there’s some terrible recordings of us,” says Williams. “I can’t believe we were around for seven years … and went to the States and played in Japan. I think we were overrated really.”
Williams even plays down the Peel incident. “I can’t remember whether I said it,” he says. “It was quoted in a very obscure fanzine as, ‘John Peel is a bastard, he deserves the slagging he’s about to get,’ or something like that [but] it’s written as a dream sequence.”
Dream sequence or not, Peel read the quote out on air and The Pooh Sticks appeared to fall out of favour with the DJ who had once been a champion of theirs.
Studio to stage
The Pooh Sticks were formed by Williams and Steve Gregory intending only to be a studio band. In fact, Gregory never played live with the band and will not be present at the Indietracks festival. “Because of the momentum we got and [the] demand for us to play live … we did some shows initially that were really shoddy,” says Williams. “We played with a drum machine, a 17-year-old guitar player and an 18-year-old woman playing bass who had been playing for three months. It was chaotic, but beautiful, but rubbish.”
The Pooh Sticks put off signing to a major label when they first started out because in those days, as Williams puts it, “You would lose a certain amount of credibility.” Eventually though, Williams’s curiosity got the better of him. “I knew that when we signed with a major label that it was all going to go pear-shaped but I just thought it would be interesting to see,” he says.
Their last performance came in the long, hot, Britpop dominated summer of 1995 when they performed a live acoustic session for Mark Radcliffe on Radio 1.
Moving into management
Fortunately for Williams, who now lives near Cardiff with his wife and two boys, the band merely bookends what has been an eclectic and successful career in the music industry. By the time he played that last performance, he was already heavily involved with the management side of the industry.
“I could give you a list of all the groups that supported us like Pulp, the Cranberries … David Gray,” he explains. “It was almost like, go and support The Pooh Sticks and in two years you’re going to be massive. [I was picking the groups] and it occurred to me that I had an ear for that kind of thing.”
During the last few years, Williams has also been involved in a number of projects which include helping to launch the ill-fated XFM radio station in South Wales and now acting as a consultant on the Swansea Creative Hub – an initiative to regenerate the Swansea High Street.
Williams says that all this has meant he sees the band as his hobby once more and this has precipitated the Indietracks performance. “I feel I can just pull it off,” says the 45-year-old. “In 10 years, I’ll be too old and decrepit to do it,” says Williams. “We’re headlining one of the stage[s] and I thought … rather than playing in a pub somewhere, [Indietracks] could be a reasonable place to come back. He adds: “It’s the only one that we’ve announced [though] I am intending to do more.”
Despite this, it is hard to detect any sentimentality from Williams about the band’s comeback, it seems he was just glad to be involved their success the first time around. “There’s good and bad about all of it. Usually, I don’t stick around for the lows, I can see it coming and I’ll move on to the next thing.”
Indietracks will be held in the grounds of Butterley Station between Friday 23 to Sunday 25 July. Weekend tickets: £55 for earlybird available before Friday 7 May, £60 thereafter. Day tickets: £32.50
Image: the perfumegarden.blogspot.com
