Well, maybe I shouldn't admit to knowing too much about them in case it gives away my age, but I always had a rather soft spot for The Chesterf!elds (yes that is the correct spelling). I know they originated from Yeovil in Somerset and they along with the Soup Dragons and Martin Whitehead's own band The Flatmates, were the mainstay of the excellent Subway Label. Their original line up is quoted as Brendan, Dom, Davey and Simon.

Their first single on Subway was 'A Guitar in Your Bath ep.' (Subway03) containing 4 tracks : Sweet Revenge / What's Your Perversion? / Love Mountain / Best Of Friends - 4 absolutely classic sub-three minute pop masterpieces, once you'd heard these you were hooked. Subway 07 was Completely and Utterly / Girl On A Boat and Subway 11 was Ask Johnny Dee / Pop Anarchy! two of the favourites from their Live gigs Pop Anarchy showing their ability to mix it up Punk Style with the best of them, just try dancing to it, your feet just can't keep up.

They contributed a couple of songs to the 'Take The Subway To Your Suburb' compilation, but their debut LP was 'Kettle' (Suborg 3) containing 12 great songs including a cover version of 'Holiday Hymn' played in typical Chesterfields style and much faster than the Vic Goddard version. The story goes that they chose this title for the LP after watching 'Coronation Street' and listening to the characters at frequent points during the show telling each other, in their best northern accents, to 'put kettle on luv'. They had it in mind that instead of making a cup of tea which would be the usual response to this request, they would start bopping around the set to The Chesterfields. I have no way of confirming whether this story is true but it certainly sounded good to me when I first heard it.

After that I rather lost touch for a while, I know that they had several releases on Vinyl Japan later on, including another LP 'Flood' which is good, but somehow it doesn't quite live up to the early stuff.

Later on it seems the band must have split up because some of the band members showed up in various outfits recording on the Hair! record label (again out of Yeovil I understand). Simon fronted a band called Gear while David formed Furnt, neither of which quite live up to the sound of The Chesterf!elds.

Anyway, that's about all I can tell you. I was fortunate enough to see them live a few times, including once when they were supporting The June Brides, and I have to say that no matter how good their records are, they were even better live.

Kevin Band (kevinband@cloisters.freeserve.co.uk) for the indie-pop-mailing-list in October 1998
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