The Great White Wonder

The wry and wonderful partnership of songwriter/producer Steve Gregory and singer Hue Williams that made up the Pooh Sticks had already made their mark through the late 1980s indie scene but the shift from semi in-joke snark to full on retro kitsch celebration on 1991’s The Great White Wonder, issued and reissued in a welter of overlapping imprints that somehow eventually landed them in the BMG label universe, must have been a little surprising at the time. At once putting themselves in line with kindred sonic spirits like Redd Kross and partially anticipating Felt veteran Lawrence’s subsequent stylistic shift with Denim the following year, on The Great White Wonder everything is as groovy good times as the cartoon band on the front cover indicates. While there’s a theoretically straightforward cover of the Strangeloves’s “The Rhythm of Love” early on, if partially mixed with their own twists on it, otherwise it’s Gregory plundering riffs and hooks everywhere and Williams, along with guest vocalist Amelia Fletcher of Tallulah Gosh and Heavenly fame, going for broke with the exuberant feelings throughout – and even making a great, nearly quarter hour long epic rock anthem, “I’m In You,” along the way.

By the time of The Great White Wonder, Wales’s The Pooh Sticks had pretty much become the UK’s mirror-image Redd Kross, in their depth of understanding of the detritus of sixties and seventies pop. The Great White Wonder casts a wider net than their earlier, ironic indie-pop sides, aiming for grandiosity on the fifteen-minute “I’m In You” (named after a Peter Frampton song), including a love-on-the-road anthem (“Desperado”), and front-loaded with covers, or detournements, of garage pop and radio hits (e.g. The Four Seasons’ “Who Loves You”). The bubblegum ethos is writ large here, though it’s rendered with a clattery joy that transmutes it through the independent music ethos: you could hear the group trying to reach for a million seller. That cover art, too, is telling – they were the best cartoon band since The Archies.