Neil Atkinson of the mighty Huddersfield Daily Examiner interviewed Young Armitage about it, and printed the lyrics - thanks, Neil:
13 Men in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Best of luck this afternoon, Giants.

This is something of a long shot, but Sue lost a ring in the the Latitude Performers' Campsite last weekend. If there's any chance you were there, or you found it or you know someone who was there, please can you let us know because it has great sentimental value for her and she'd love to have it back.

Thanks ever so much.

What constitutes this illustrious north country outfit? Armitage, again and again proven a colossus in the cultural life of these islands and beyond. Smith, the power behind, in front and on top of the throne. And the supporting Scaremongers, those vital moving parts in the band machine, sometime penumbral shapes who now and again step forward into the light. Time we got to know them all better . . .

The last year also saw the demise of Shoot, football magazine of choice in my youth. In a retro-fixated way, here we replicate the famed Shoot Focus on… interview format. First up, chief Clattermonger himself, Mr Craig Smith…

Name:
Craig Smith

Height:
An even 6 foot

Weight:
Fluctuates. 14 stone and a few pounds

Previous club:
Lloyd Almighty, The Dez Lawrence Soul Explosion, Route 56, Conscience, Phase

Famous relations:
My uncle's an Ewok!

Married:
Yes

Children:
None

Car:
Car-less

Favourite player:
Nick Watts, the keyboard player - I could listen to him for hours

Favourite other team:
Today it's Can. Any other day it might be Orange Juice, Jesus and Mary Chain, Black Keys, Smokey Robinson, Stereolab, St Etienne, Radiohead, Go Team, Lo Fidelity All Stars, Public Enemy, The Supremes, Beastie Boys, Velvet Underground, The Buzzcocks, Music For Grown Ups, The Walker Brothers, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, The Cookies, The Shangri Las or any of a million other bands

Most difficult opponent:
The guitar - it beats me every time!

Most memorable match:
Presteigne - the gig at The Gramaphone was great, but we were a chucked-together group of musicians at that point. Presteigne was the first gig where we coalesced a bit, where we got an inkling that we'd the makings of a proper band

Biggest thrill:
Born In A Barn - I've wanted to release an album for 35 years

Biggest disappointment:
Born In A Barn - sometimes I can only hear what's wrong with it

Best country visited:
As a 'monger, it has to be Wales - it's the only country we've visited as a band.

Favourite food:
Ready Brek

Miscellaneous likes:
A Telecaster through a Fender amp with a bit of overdrive, dogs, pigs, donkeys

Miscellaneous dislikes:
Moths - we have an infestation

Favourite TV show:
Futurama, League of Gentlemen, The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, Match of the Day

Favourite singers:
Dusty Springfield, Otis Redding, Sam Moore, Beth Gibbons

Biggest influence on career:
Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous - it's why I picked up a guitar

Best friends:
My little brother, Armitage, The whole Scaremongers Crew

Biggest drag in soccer:
Not having enough time to dedicate to it. Or money.

International honours:
We did the gig in Wales - does that count?

Personal and professional ambition:
To do another album. And one after that. And another one after that.

I can dream – but The Scaremongers really are the stuff that dreams are made on.

The long-awaited (twenty years in the making) debut album from Huddersfield based band The Scaremongers. Never ones to be rushed, non poet laureate vocalist/lyricist Simon Armitage and multi-tasking guitarist Craig Smith crafted the songs over the past two decades, letter by letter, quaver by quaver, and now feel that the galaxy is ready for their unique brand of “kitchen-sink snow-shaker pop-rock” as they casually refer to it.

Songs range from the swirling, up-for-it-indie-dancefloor-hum-it-in-the-bathroom-classic You Can Do Nothing Wrong (In My Eyes) to the soul hugging, shoe-gazing, hair-shirt wearing, seven-and-a-half minute From The Shorelines Of Venus, to the heartfelt and cryptic (even to the band themselves) Grouse Beaters Boys’ Club, to the stomping Derailleur, the only song ever dedicated to the sprocket-activated, variable-ratio transmission system frequently deployed on the modern bicycle.

    “Caesar came from Rome,
    picnicked here then pushed off home.

    The dashboard music soared
    from a Russian car,
    I could have sworn… in the chrome,
    your face, and next to it my own.”
                                      Derailleur

Full track listing:

    You Can Do Nothing Wrong (In My Eyes)
    Grouse Beaters Boys’ Club
    Tea Leaves
    Cardigan Girl
    Legendary
    Less Is More
    Nodding Dog
    Long Ride Home
    Derailleur
    From The Shorelines Of Venus
    Porch

Official Release Date: Friday 7th May 2009

Picture CD, including lyric booklet and artwork by Lyndon Hayes, £8.99 available from Vinyltap Records: http://www.vinyltap.co.uk/shop/item/951171950968.aspx

Downloads available from Cherry Red Records Download Shop.

Further information:
    http://www.thescaremongers.com/
    http://www.myspace.com/thescaremongers

Seeing (and Hearing) Is Believing: catch The Scaremongers on their Small But Perfectly Formed 2009 mini tour:
   Hebden Bridge Trades and Friendly - 27 June
   Latitude Festival - 16 July
   Nantwich Festival - 10 October.

Contact Details - OPM:
    Trevor Jenkins/David Carroll
    OPM LLP
    Aquarium Studios
    122 Wardour Street
    London
    W1F OTX
    t. 020 7 734 7224
    m. 07793 671813

As a kid growing up in the 1970s, Saturday evenings would mean waiting for the Football Post, the weekly sport supplement to the Nottingham Evening Post. Its unwavering hub of attention was, quite rightly, the fortunes of Forest, County, and maybe Mansfield Town and Lincoln City. But in the gutter margins would be the late kickoffs and scores wired in at the eleventh hour from the turbid realms of the non-league, a litany of lyrical names: high-born Shepshed Charterhouse, Ilkeston (sang out to the tune of Glen Campbell’s Galveston), remarkably unremarkable Alfreton Town, sodden-sounding Borrowash Victoria, folksy Brigg Town of the Midland League or the Northern Premier’s Hyde United, South Liverpool, Gainsborough Trinity. Waiting to hear of the Scaremongers’ adventures last Saturday night in the land of the poetic Thomases (Dylan, Edward, R.S., Mickey) conjured a similar childlike thrill. But maybe I should get out more.

Anyhow, Smith reports that the Presteigne audience was very appreciative, to the point of not rebuffing the band’s offer of playing two encores! Supported by silver anniversary-celebrating The Mood Index (author and friend of the Scaremongers Ian Marchant on vocals), the set list (surely itself now an object of veneration or an Ebay item) included the standards we know so well: Cardigan Girl, Less Is More, You Can Do Nowt Wrong In My Eyes; and rarer gems, airing in public for the first time: Cricketer’s Delight, Grouse Beater’s Boys Club, Derailleur (can you tell this band is the invention of wordsmiths?).

Next on the never ending tour: Ilkley with engineer/producer Steve Whitfield standing in for Glen on bass. News of that gig won’t be limited to the gutter margins.

And a few short weeks later, on Saturday 18 October, Armitage, Smith & Co. play their first (already sold out) Yorkshire gig at the Ilkley Literature Festival (http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/user/index.php), amidst such luminaries as Louis de Bernieres, Lionel Shriver, Graeme Garden, Barry Cryer and Kate Adie (oh, and also Cherie Blair and Chris Patten). Rendition of local folk song about headwear-eschewing fell-walkers is unlikely.

There is a point to this, so bear with me.

Contrary to popular belief, Messers Fairlight, Hardcastle and Horn were not the first samplers in pop music. The first samplers that I came across in my pop life were those Netto-cheap compilation LPs that record companies would put out as (no other word for it) bait to snare the curiously weak willed and their wallets.

Hairy-handed record exec? Got a few pallid debutants on your rostra? Then just bung a tune by each of them on a hastily packaged ‘Limited Edition!’ LP, add one song (too poor to be even a b-side) by your biggest star, put a sticker on saying BUY ME FOR BUTTONS! and watch all your young turks curdle up the charts on its coat tails.

I fell for this cheap stunt not once but three times.

In 1986 Mercury Records released Beat Runs Wild. It cost £1.99 and a nineteen-year-old student called, well, me, paid his money and took it home. It showcases such luminaries as Tom Verlaine, Pete Shelley, Topper Headon and, er, Wet Wet Wet, Swing Out Sister and Curiosity Killed The Cat.

I’m playing it now.

The sleeve was shocking, only partially redeemed by the strap line: ‘Also available on Cassette.’ As if anyone would buy it twice — memories of macaroni cheese and Henrik Ibsen notwithstanding, it hasn’t aged well. I do seem to remember playing it quite a lot. Or at least bits of it, as both Pete and Tom are on form and I’ll still defend to the death ‘Another Lost Weekend’ by Swing Out Sister, whose first two singles I bought after that (so crack open the Asti, Mr Hairy Hands, it worked!). But as for the others, all it did was pre-warn me, and I can safely say that I was the first person on the Humanities course to be able to say with total conviction that ‘Love And Money’ and ‘Zerra One’ were irredeemable rubbish. And then Ben’s beret and Marty’s smile ate the charts and I snorted my derision and hid my copy.

Next up was Sampled (yes, I nicked their gag) released by ZTT. This was a different kettle of fish entirely, for me at least, as I already had most of what was on it, because I had fallen, hook, line and multi-format release for the whole ZTT shebang. I’m not proud, but nor I am repentant of the fact that I was a bit of a (whisper it) ZTT completist, so the fact that this LP cost less than any of that label’s ten cassette singles (or Zanglettes, since you ask) I had already shelled out for was a mere bonus.

I’m playing it now.

Sampled has a sleeve that is beyond parody, tracks by all the ZTT acts you’ve ever heard of and quite a few by those you haven’t. Instinct, for instance, never managed to release anything else other than ‘Swamp Out’, their contribution here. Did they get bored waiting for the in-house producers to get round to them? Or were they the only act here that actually bothered to read the small print on their contracts (which would shame even a Vietnamese sweat-shop owner) and thus quite rightly and in the nick of time give it all up for landscape gardening and accountancy? Perhaps we’ll never know, though I did get to see them live and can report that they were pretty good actually. There, I told you I was a completist.

Oh, and if anyone out there is laughing at my ZTT fixation, you should check out Frankie’s live take on ‘Born To Run’ that’s included. I never thought I’d say this about anyone ever, but they, ahem, rocked.

Finally, about a year later, Doing It For The Kids was released by Creation Records: ‘An LP for the price of a 7” single’. I think I played it once at the time.

I’m playing it now . . .

. . . and I was really expecting to hate it. I was going to re-name it ‘Creation: The Doldrums Years Pt 1’. Of course Pt2 would recall the post-Oasis crash when, flush with Gallagher groats and cocaine supernovas, for every Super Furry Animals, Arnold and Primal Scream there was a Three Colours Red, 18 Wheeler and Hurricane #1. Back in ’88 there were similar villains but lots of heroes too. Felt, The Jazz Butcher and Razorcuts are all bringing unexpected smiles to my jaded chops. The sleeve’s good too, if a little familiar. And that reminds me . . .

The daddy of all these sampler LPs, or at least the dotty old aunt, was Pillows and Prayers, released by Cherry Red Records in, oooh, 1982 was it?

I’m not playing it now, because I never bought it.

My sister bought it for the princely sum of £1.99. I say ‘princely sum’ because she bought the picture disc, which was a whole pound more costly than the frankly much better packaged regular release (so the whole ZTT thing was her fault!).

Apologies if my guess of the date of release is wrong, likewise if any of the following is wrong too, but I’ve decided to eschew boring old Google and rely on memory, just to prove how much this wonderful record has stayed with me over the years.

The first time I ever opened an NME and saw that Pillows and Prayers wasn’t No. 1 in the Indie Chart I thought it was a typing error! It seemed to be the only island of sanity in a sea of Crass and Dead Kennedys. So, let me see: Monochrome Set, The Passage, The Marine Girls, Tracey Thorne, Ben Watt, Everything But The Girl, Joe Crow, Attila The Stockbroker, Quentin Crisp, Kevin Coyne. Hmmm. Frankly, I’m annoyed, as I thought I’d have done better than that. Oh, hang on, wasn’t Thomas Leer on there? (I won’t bore you with his ZTT connection.)

So, I can remember 11 acts out of about 18. Not bad considering I haven’t heard or seen this LP for, I dunno, nearly twenty-five years now. And I can still reel off most of ‘A Bang And A Wimpy’. And my impression of Quentin Crisp still ends dinner parties with embarrassed silences. And Joe Crow’s ‘Compulsion’ would still be in my Top 10 of Lost Classics—so much so that when I heard that the little bloke with the leather skirts from Depeche Mode had covered it I AVOIDED IT LIKE THE PLAGUE! The sleeve was great to, obviously influencing Mr McGee’s efforts (see above).

So, when I was told that our beloved Scaremongers had signed to Cherry Red, my first thought was ‘blimey, are they still going?’ Then my second thought was Pillows and Prayers. And I’ve been thinking it ever since.

By the way, in writing this piece, I found out that spellcheck doesn’t recognise ‘Google’, but it does recognise ‘googly’. A cause for celebration, methinks. Now, excuse me while I Googly the life out of Pillows and Prayers.

David Reakes