The Great White Wonder

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.