The Boo Radleys fall headlong into their 34th year with a new single, the title track from their forthcoming, long-awaited seventh album, Keep On With Falling. Introducing yet more harmony-rich, gently fuzzed-up alt-pop, as if the long story of the Boos had gone uninterrupted by their twenty-plus year hiatus, their latest big-chorus track holds a steady course en-route to the long-player’s release on Fri 11 March 2022.
Still feeling the warmth of the words and gestures of thousands of fans that returned to sing and dance through their six-date UK Tour in October 2021, the band with three top-twenty albums to their name, including 1995’s Number One hit, Wake Up! jumps, rejuvenated, into a hopeful New Year.
A choir of three that sounds like three hundred, the full extent of The Boo Radleys’ experience and experimentation with DIY recording techniques can be heard on the expansive Keep On With Falling as lead singer and songwriter, Simon ‘Sice’ Rowbottom’s voice is enveloped in an accompanying vocal cascade. A warm blanket of instrumentation woven of distorted six-strings, fleeting Chic-inspired scratch guitar, crystalline synth notes arcing from verse to chorus and percussive R’n’B piano means, in true Boo Radleys style, no one listen will ever be the same.
Sice says of the track: “Lyrically, it’s an entreaty to myself and everyone else to not be afraid to fail. Some of the most important learning in my life has been gained through massive mistakes and failures. Very little of true worth is learned through success. We learn to walk by falling over.”
Bassist, vocalist and fellow Boos songwriter, Tim Brown, adds: “Sice’s early demos had the feel of Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner’s Electronic, with some of those elements remaining all the way to the final version. Rob (Cieka) brought the drive to the drums and sped it up, Sice added a metric ton of backing vocals to give us a big chorus and there’s that touch of Nile Rogers-inspired funky axe.”
So far revealing four other hits of new music since announcing their return to recording in summer 2020, The Boo Radleys have held nothing back in committing the lows and highs of hard-won experience to virtual tape.
Their pre-Christmas gift in the form of melancholic sing-along You And Me tackled ill-health, perhaps an appropriate companion piece to A Full Syringe And Memories Of You which took aim at dignity, death and the pain exacerbated by archaic law. When religion found The Boo Radleys in combative mood on I’ve Had Enough I’m Out, any doubts lingering around the band’s confidence as they returned from their fallow, 22-year stretch apart were unequivocally blown away.
Made up of the three, original members, Sice, Brown and Cieka, the quarter of a century between Creation Records’ money-burning approaches to recording and marketing and the new age of independence puts The Boo Radleys in a new, perfect state of freedom. Democratic writing processes and the gift of home technology as powerful as any residential studio of the nineties has set the band on a new path, closer to the targets the trio had in mind all along.
Genre-indistinct and weary of attempts to be cast into any particular scene, The Boo Radleys unorthodox journey began with their first album, Ichabod and I, released by Lancashire’s Action Records in 1990. The response saw an ascendant Creation Records pick the band up and, capitalising on momentum, Everything’s Alright Forever was released to positive reviews in 1992 before Giant Steps cemented the band’s position in the eyes of listeners and critics alike the following year.
1995’s runaway hit, Wake Up Boo! lifted from their UK Album Chart Number One album, Wake Up! gave the band their moment in the spotlight, climbing towards the upper reaches of the UK Singles Chart at No.9 and sound tracking the optimistic springtime of that year. Their 1996 follow up, C’Mon Kids! and Kingsize completed the set for The Boo Radleys before their split in 1999.
Continuing to raise glasses and tip hats to old friend, original guitarist and songwriter with onstage dedications at each live appearance, The Boo Radleys forge their new and exciting path without Martin Carr in the current line-up.
