QTheMusic.com

The Music played their last ever gigs at the weekend (5-6 August), bowing out at the O2 Academy in their hometown Leeds. Though often not a natural fit to much of what was going in music during the last decade, Brand Barstein says farewell and argues that the band deserve to remembered as individualists they truly were.

It's hard to imagine a band more out of touch with their peers than The Music in 2002. And thank heavens they were. At a time when matching outfits (White Stripes, The Hives), New York coolness (The Strokes) and two-minute garage-rock hits (The Vines) were rock n roll requisites, The Music became a refuge for an audience looking for more than dancefloor-friendly, three-chord guitar pop.

Here then, were no gimmicks nor concepts, merely four über-stoned, delightfully uncool teenagers from Kippax, Leeds, whose fondness for banging out seven-minute psychedelic rock opuses at the decibel level of a 747 was only exceeded by their youthful arrogance (sample quote: "Life is shite and so is every other band").

So while singer Robert Harvey may have looked and sounded like he'd emerged from the hair clippings of Richard Ashcroft and had decided to revive Robert Plant, it was the ballsy quips and the sheer other-worldliness of debut single Take The Long Road And Walk It that grabbed the audience's attention. As such, both Steve Lamacq and Factory Records legend Tony Wilson promptly hailed them down as "the most exciting band on the planet".

The iconic visual concept that adorned the band's debut album and single covers, tour posters and marketing campaign - surely a PR manager's wet dream - inadvertently had them down to a tee: Beautifully constructed; instantly recognisable, but ultimately a right mess.

For The Music's eponymous debut was, for lack of a better word, really fucking loud. The seemingly impenetrable opener The Dance, a five-minute drone-driven wall of noise that saw Harvey wailing throughout like a Led Zep lost in the desert, was in all its chaos an eloquent stab at 2002's FM-friendly post-Is This It-ism, where apparently little room was spared beyond the three-minute verse/verse/chorus/verse/chorus formula.

Take The Long Road And Walk It had been re-recorded and became their biggest hit, while The People, The Truth Is No Words and, perhaps their finest moment, Getaway, fused Second Coming, dance and, uhm, Hawkwind with grunge. Catchy, confident and ever so slightly bonkers, they were pillars on an album where hazy psychedelia intertwined with noise-ridden hooks and disco stomps from another dimension.

Two years later and the increasingly popular quartet excel in unfortunate timing, when the epic and over-produced grandeur of Welcome To The North is released at a time when Franz Ferdinand and Razorlight are paving the way for an emerging army of minimalist-obsessed indie acts. Guitars the size of Rome and sub-political messages, who do they think they are? Muse?! Or so it seemed the record-buying public were thinking. For although being far from a creative disaster (as disproved by Freedom Fighters, Bleed From Within, One Way In, No Way Out) the album was a commercial flop and the band subsequently dropped by label Virgin.

The four-year hiatus that ensued further confirmed a change in tact for the group.

Harvey opened up about battling alcohol dependence, depression and panic attacks following the lukewarm reception of their sophomore release, and little was heard from the band until their third and final album Strength In Numbers was released in 2008. Rife with clever hooks, a therapeutic vent for Harvey's demons and arguably their most commercial effort, it deserves to be remembered as more than an anecdote.

But now, following the singer's declaration that he was quitting the band because he "wasn't enjoying it", and after the weekend's farewell shows, The Music have, ahem, taken the long road and walked it.

Thanks for the trip guys, it's been a gas.

5:59 PM | 07/08/2011