Cast your mind back a few years, to a simpler time. Here, let me set the scene…
It’s 2007, you’ve just got in from school, turned on your Playstation 3 and stuck Whistle For The Choir on your speaker. As you sit back, watching Call Of Duty Modern Warfare load up on your TV and listening to The Fratellis’ gentle melodies, you think to yourself, will life ever be this good again? And you know what? No. No it won’t.
Then a few years later, you’re walking home from a stressful day of cutting up pritt sticks to stick to the classroom ceiling and performing wrestling moves off desks, ‘Vince The Loveable Stoner’ comes on shuffle. That sweet wave of nostalgia hits you hard and fast. You contemplate grabbing a Monster on your way home and having a blast on COD, but your time is up and your mum wants you to do the washing.
The closest you’ll get to that feeling is at 1 am in the club, when you’re blind drunk in the middle of the dancefloor and the resident DJ treats you to a bit of ‘Chelsea Dagger’. Of course, you scream the lyrics at the top of your lungs, as you shuffle your feet through the questionable black sludge on the sticky floor, basking in that 3 minutes and 35 seconds of pure, euphoric nostalgia. Duh duh duh da da da duh nah nah nah.
The Fratellis are kinda like that person you used to be best friends with in primary school, you lost touch as you grew older, but every time you see them around you remember the good times and the chaos you used to cause together on the playground. Anyone for a round of bulldog?
Everybody knows that Costello Music is where it’s at. Absolutely solid, from front to back, dare you say otherwise. I’m talking ‘Henrietta’, ‘Flathead’ and ‘Creeping Up The Backstairs’. Seriously, pure bangers and we all have John Fratelli to thank for giving us an outstanding contribution to the soundtrack of our childhood.
Here We Stand we stand was never going to reach the same levels as their first outing, but their debut had set the bar out of any acid jazz singer’s reach, so what can you expect? I mean, Jonny boy nearly managed it with the release of We Need Medicine, managing to recapture some of the same magic ‘Henrietta’ gave us, on tracks such as ‘Halloween Blues’ and ‘She’s Not Gone Yet But She’s Leaving’. Unfortunately, the threesome couldn’t recapture the same consistency as their career definition introduction.
If you ever find yourself knocking about on a bleak day, grey skies above and no desks to Batista bomb your mates off, stick Costello Music on. If ‘Chelsea Dagger’ doesn’t pick you up, Henrietta certainly will and despite what Jonny says, she has got flowers for you.
Listen to The Fratellis on Spotify and Apple Music.
