Go Team U.S.S.A.

It would be wrong to go through yet another Friday without putting anything up, even if Casa Gringcorp has been overrun with lodgers. That, and the usual round of eating and drinking.

In lieu of anything in the papers enraging us (it hasn't) or the telly amusing us (we have been three whole days without the telly's merciful caress. Help us!), we'll drivel on about power-pop bands. These chaps are known as the Interpreters - and we shall tell you our story. We'll give you the Amazon link because we're too lazy to refine our google search.

They were three young scamps that f***in' loved the Kinks and playing punky songs, and they wanted to be so famous that they then committed a bunch of elementary rock mistakes. the sort of ones that Steve Albini warned about repeatedly. Signed to a major label after passing an album around a squad of indies, and persuading Ron A Schaffer to produce them an album in London, they suddenly, massively, went to seed.

We first chanced upon them in the Mercury Lounge, or possibly Brownies, fronted by Herschel Gaer, this completely and utterly ice-man rock aristocrat. We didn't know until later that this version of the Interpreters only contained Herschel from the previous line-up. After a while Herschel re-emerged as Tourist, and we even started nodding our head at him in sundry LES dives. But we have no idea what happened to him afterwards.

And we had no idea what caused the demise of the Interpreters, apart from an obviously messy album birth. Well it turned out that the band, being originally from Philly, had been offered a slot playing the Republican National Convention in 2000, and agreed. We dare say Herschel's gone back to making films, and we hope he's happy. Or if, as this chap claims, he's been playing with Fischerspooner, he's suitably chastened.

The Interpreters - "Where Do We Go When"
Buy "Back In The U.S.S.A." here reeeellly cheap