This is the second in an intermittent series of posts about bands I loved in the 1990s who have little or no internet presence.

I was listening to an old Mark & Lard Graveyard Shift show last week and it reminded me how much of my musical tastes started there (or thereabouts – Peel & The Evening Session should get a mention too). In June of 1995, surely their peak year, one of the songs they championed was a fierce panda release from a band called ‘Pullover’. The song was called ‘Holiday’, and besides being a witty parody of British holiday cliches it managed to combine the girlier side of Britpop with the jagged high-tempo sections of The Wedding Present – a mixture that is, as far as I can tell, still unique.
Pullover released three singles on fierce panda, and I’ve still got two of them somewhere. Their other songs are nothing like ‘Holiday’ – instead they sound like a before-the-event Life Without Buildings. I’d recommend ‘Oddball’ if you can find it, it has to be one of the best songs about not being attractive enough to be a popstar but getting on with it anyway ever recorded.
Holiday kept getting radio play, their other songs didn’t, so when they took advantage of the buzz and signed for Big Life in ’96 their first move was to re-record their signature song – and for once its charm survived the bigger, more expensive production. Here’s the video.

Unfortunately it was at this point that the label went broke, and Pullover appeared to go down with them. Nothing was heard until a few years back when they suddenly had a myspace page with promises of a tour and a new album. Nothing seems to have come of it yet, but I can hope, can’t I?