The Dentists - Heads and How to Read Them (1990)

The Dentists were the local big deal when I first moved to Kent, or at least they were the local big deal which didn't involve Billy Childish. Once they began to enjoy success further afield, local goth types of my acquaintance took to a degree of sneering, therefore requiring that I venture a little way outside my limited social comfort zone in order to hear the music of the Dentists and decide for myself, and once I did, I quickly realised that they were popular for a reason; the reason being that they were fucking great.

Later they apparently became associated with something called C86, which was something to do with an NME compilation tape and has been retroactively declared a movement, specifically a movement of mostly jangly sixties-inspired bands. I still don't quite see this, being as most of the C86 bands were - excepting Josef K and maybe two or three others - fucking atrocious. Never mind.

Anyway, I vaguely knew the Dentists, seeing as how they were local lads. I once spent a boozy afternoon around Mick Murphy's house; Mark Matthews put out the first ever fanzine to feature something I had drawn; and I knew Alun, their second drummer, fairly well. Indeed, I vaguely recall the grumbling amongst members of Apricot Brigade when Alun jumped ship to tap the skins for what was frankly a much better band - following Ian, the Dentists' original drummer, having been temporarily inconvenienced. Grousing accompanied the release of Down and Out in Paris and Chatham, the first record to feature Alun but I went out and bought it anyway, and actually it was a magnificent record.

Since then I've tended to regard the difference between those first two incarnations of the Dentists as a sort of Beatles-Stones thing, with softer, poppier songs giving away to something more raw, as characterised by You Took Me By Surprise - which I've only just noticed almost borrows from The Word by the Beatles; and listening to Heads and How to Read Them, I notice my Beatles then Stones equation doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Heads is a different beast to Some People, but is great for similar reasons, and is by no means a lesser record. For the uninitiated, the Dentists did that pure pop thing like a distant cousin to the Smiths but without the burden of Morrissey, having some of that breezy quality of the Monkees without it being some cheesy fresh-faced sales pitch - just consistently great songs with hidden depths and of such quality that the usual labels seem a bit pointless. This second album is notable for the peculiar key change - or whatever the technical term may be - during the chorus of House the Size of Mars, and the infectious waltz of Crocodile Tears, amongst other things.

There were a couple of later records, and whilst there's nothing specifically lacking in what I've heard of them, there seems to be a faint major label sheen, something suggesting some A&R twat may have been drooling over the possibility of selling the boys to all those Ravey Daveys who thought the first Stone Roses album was the greatest record of all time; when actually it was the wrong way round, and the Dentists were always the superior group, which goes for those Smiths comparisons too.