Music Arcades: Stump: A Fierce Pancake

I haven't thought about Stump for a long, long time; let alone listened to them. They emerged via John Peel, of course, in 1987-88, but then disappeared from the airwaves and everything else. There's a little bit of Tom Waits in their sound, a little Beefheart, and some playing on their Oirishness (fashionable at the time, thanks to The Pogues) — the album even begins with one of Yeats' most celebrated lines, "A terrible beauty is born". However, the only thing most people remember about Stump is the song with the line "Charlton Heston put his vest on". It's dangerously close to being an indie novelty hit, like Considering a Move to Memphis.

I saw them at the Leadmill during their brief day in the sun. Singer Mick Lynch cut a distinctive figure as a front man, hard to forget. The way I remember it, though, was that the headline bands on a Saturday evening always came on at 11.20pm. I guess that was linked to the pubs closing, but in my case it meant I could watch the first part of the Saturday art movie double bill on BBC2 (something like Wild Strawberries or The Wages of Fear, introduced by Derek Malcolm) and still make it down to arrive and buy my ticket just in time for the headliners. Can that be right? It was clearly before the Leadmill devoted itself exclusively to club culture, with its long queues of halfwits making it much harder to get in, if you ever wanted to. I saw fellow Peel faves Slab there around the same time — now there's a band that no one thinks about any more.

I say I haven't thought about Stump for ages, but apparently some still do — or they're finding a new audience 20 years on, thanks to the scope for digital media to drag forgotten culture out of the long tail. Wikipedia explains how their cult following earned them a release on iTunes Music Store, which was so successful that their entire recorded output was re-released in a boxed set earlier this year (see Amazon link below). No news of a reunion tour… yet.