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The Wonder Stuff team up with PWEI and Jesus Jones for December 2012 UK tour

Posted: 11 years ago
The Stourbridge indie trailblazers are joined by the two grebo greats to complete a mouth-watering bill for a short UK tour, tickets on sale Friday 18th May
The Wonder Stuff

In the early nineties at a boarding school in the Home Counties there was, in a certain sixth former's dormitory, a fridge for keeping milk and the occasional bottle of 20/20.

Once white, the refrigerator ended its grubby days covered completely in the blue, black, red and green ink of marker pen; each word part of a lyric and every line of verse lifted from the indie rock demi-Gods of the day. A bit of Ned's Atomic Dustbin, some Cure, a little James or Stone Roses and lots of the Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself and Jesus Jones.

Back in the days before the internet changed everything, indie arrived mostly on tape and the news came from the weekly or monthly music press. And, before adoration was a click on a 'Like' button, everyone knew which bands you favoured because you wore their T-shirt and you wrote their lyrics on your history folder, on desks, on toilet walls. On your dorm fridge.

These were the days of exciting, cutting edge indie which saw guitar music abandoning the stoner-folk bent in favour of a more punky attitude. Cheeky chaps grew their hair, swore and sampled their way to the cover of Melody Maker. It was 'grebo' and its hotbed wasn't London or Manchester but the West Midlands, with Stourbridge its unlikely motherlode. Alongside Wiltshire's Jesus Jones, the West Midlands town offered up Ned's, the Wonder Stuff and the Poppies and two of those Stourbridge three will be joining Jesus Jones on an eye-catching December tour which will put the white goods of any indie kid of the eighties and nineties in imminent marker-based peril.

The all-star old-school indie tour kicks off at London's Shepherds Bush Empire on 19th December, followed, on consecutive nights, by academy gigs in Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham. We will have tickets available from 9am on Friday 18th May.

Stewart Darkin