In the sixties, the US Supreme Court floundered to find a substantive definition of porn. “I know it when I see it”, offered one judge. A mess of acne scars, spunk and forty years of youth culture swirling between their ears, the second you plug into Worthing’s swaggering Ordinary Boys, you’ll either immediately know they’ve got that intangible ‘it’ or trash them as copyists.
Never mind that almost every band that has charged the blood through your veins have suffered a painful initiation of being branded thieves. From Franz Ferdinand (Orange Juice) and Interpol (Joy Division) back through Oasis (The Beatles) and Blur (The Kinks), as the title of one of the songs here goes, “The List Goes On”. Even The Jam were derided as Who knock-offs as first, and it’s comparisons with the former, despite their Moz-tipping name and Preston’s similarly tremulous vocals, that’s going to be the bane of the Ordinary Boys.
Imagine if you’d blinded yourself to the glories of the bands above because of a resemblance to their forebears? All art tips its hat to the past while recontextualising itself within the present and the Ordinary Boys have the bruised-heart, throat-parched passion to rise above hackneyed derivation. Instead, "Over The Counter Culture" is a series of three-minute mod manifestos for the post-"No Logo", directionless new millennium.
Over William J Brown’s hair-spiking hooks in the title track or the us-against-the-world anthem "Week In Week Out", Preston’s lilting baritone laments the market’s co-option of what was once ‘alternative’ and how we salve our personal emptiness with trinkets and customized crap. This is the (post) modern world: of panic attacks in the shopping queue and the fake ‘authenticity’ of street teams and £100 jeans with dirt marks.
If the corridors out of the mainstream are blocked, the old skool Manics fuzz of "Maybe Someday" or defiant closer "Robots and Monkeys" rue the lot of office drones who may have the contrivances once only awarded to the boss (a suit and a screen), but whose work is just as demeaning as the factory line.
It’s no surprise then, that catharsis is still found in the oblivion of the bottle (bass-driven stomp "Weekend Revolution") and results in relationship dysfunction (the snaky post-punk of "Settle Down" and "In Awe Of The Earful"'s’ Gene-like swoon). Counterpointing Preston’s disparaging acid tongue with maudlin synths, the former is pure tragic-comedy.
There’s the ridiculous “loutish lads” who act out "Friday Night, Saturday Morning" by The Specials every week (and whose schoolboy taunt "Little Bitch" is covered here) and the quiet, pathetic death of one who hangs himself “with his Christmas tie”, an image as disturbingly banal as the young mother in the film "This Sporting Life" who tops herself after totting up the week’s groceries.
Both it’s attraction and its curse, "Over The Counter Culture" depicts the Britain of "Billy Liar", "Quadrophenia" and Ray Davies, and as such, seems a little outmoded: aren’t we all happily middle-class nowadays? Nevertheless the Ordinary Boys are romantic idealists and bookish hooligans with ‘it’ in spades.
