"GIANT STEPS" By Martin Carr (The Boos)

“Giant Steps” captures a moment at the dawn of Britpop, when shared influences didn’t always mean shared ideas. Drawing from Martin Carr’s surreal encounter with the Gallagher brothers in 1994, the song reflects the clash between obsessive musical idealism and raw, instinctive rock ’n’ roll—two paths shaped by the same love for the Beatles, yet heading in completely different directions.(Rock)

Martin Carr stayed up all night with the Gallagher brothers. He just did not get what they were talking about. This was April 1994. It was the start of the Britpop thing. The band Oasis was just starting out. They were the opening act for Martin Carrs band, the Boo Radleys at a festival, in Glasgow. Martin Carr was really confused by the Gallagher brothers. The Oasis band was new. They were playing with the Boo Radleys. Carr really liked the music from Oasis. His band was a lot like Oasis. They were all young. Wanted to make music. They all loved the Beatles. They were all signed to Creation, which is a big deal because it is a famous music label in Britain that is run by Alan McGee.. When Carr met Liam and Noel in Glasgow he did not know what to make of Oasis. He found Oasis to be really confusing. Carr thought Oasis was going to be similar, to his band. They were not.

Carr is a 25 year musician with really curly hair. He plays the guitar for the Boos. Writes most of their songs. Carr loves talking about music and searching for Beatles videos that are not official.

He said to David Cavanagh that the Gallaghers just liked to drink and be in a band.. Carr and his friends did things differently. They would stay up all night talking about music. They never agreed on anything. Especially when it came to the Beatles they had opinions, about the Beatles. I really liked the Beatles because they were a band that was always trying things Carr said, but when I talked to people about them they would just say things, like: No the Beatles are great. They loved the Beatles much. That was all they would say about the Beatles.

The battle for the soul of 90s British rock was really about what it meant to be like the Beatles. In his book The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize Cavanagh says that one big reason people liked Britpop was that it made the young people of the 90s feel like they were living in the 1960s. They got to see what it was like when the Beatles and the Stones were competing with each other to make the music. This was an exciting time for music and Britpop brought that back, to life for the 90s kids. The Beatles were a part of this and people wanted to feel like they were a part of it too. Oasis made this connection very clear they became the popular group in Britain since the Beatles by openly showing how much they loved the Beatles. They even got the same kind of haircuts they played "I Am the Walrus" all the time they took a Beatles melody and used it in their song "Shes Electric" and they also used the beginning of "Imagine" in their song "Don't Look Back in Anger". Oasis really liked the Beatles and they were not afraid to show it Oasis took some ideas from the Beatles. Used them in their own music like Oasis did with "Shes Electric" and "Don't Look Back, in Anger".

The Boo Radleys were a great band that came out during the Britpop time. They were a lot like the Beatles because the Boo Radleys could change their sound a lot and they liked to try things. Sometimes the Boo Radleys would make music that was popular with a lot of people. Sometimes they would make music that was really different and not what people expected. The press had a time understanding the Boo Radleys and they tried to put them into categories that did not really fit the band. The Boo Radleys were not, like bands and the press did not know how to deal with that. The song "Wake Up Boo!" is a happy tune that people like to sing along, to. It was the big hit the Boo Radleys had and it is always connected to the Britpop music of 1995.. Even back then the person who made the song, Carr said it was not a very sincere thing to do. He said it was a way to make a hit song and he did not really care about the Britpop movement.

The Boo Radleys did not like the idea of Britain being perfect. Carr said "I liked the band Blur a lot" but he did not like it when they started talking about how great Britain was. He said "I must have missed the meeting where everyone decided to be patriotic" which means he did not understand why they were being so nationalistic.

The Boos made a great album, Giant Steps back in 1993. This music is like a mix of different styles all combined into one thing. You have shoegaze, Britpop and psychedelia together. The Boos Giant Steps is, like a dream of what the 1990s could have been. The Boos music is a fantasy version of the 1990s a time that never really happened like that. The music has 17 songs that go in a lot of directions. You will hear things like reggae in "Upon 9th and Fairchild". Then there is indie-pop in "Wish I Was Skinny". The music also gets really loud with a free-jazz sound in "Leaves and Sand". The band plays with psych in "Spun Around" and fuzzy noise pop in "Take the Time Around". They even do a Human League-inspired song called "Rodney King" that's about being against racism and it is meant to get people dancing. All of these songs are connected by the bands interest, in trying new things and their ability to create catchy melodies. The music of the band is held together by the bands curiosity and the warm sound of the melodies of the band.

It is a marvel that an album full of ideas never sounds messy or immature. The Boos make references to musicians including taking an album title from John Coltrane. You would think this would make people laugh at them for being full of themselves.

Carr said to Select that he had a vision to make an album that sounded big. He wanted it to sound like open spaces, something, like Bitches Brew. The Boos and their album Giant Steps really impressed Select they even named Giant Steps the album of the year. The White Album and Daydream Nation are albums that you can really get lost in. You just put them on. The White Album and Daydream Nation take over. You forget about everything when you are listening to the White Album or Daydream Nation.

The Boo Radleys took some ideas from rock bands but they did it in a quieter way than Oasis. Not many people noticed that the song "I Hang Suspended" got its name from something Bob Dylan said. This song is really good. Has a lot of noise in it. The Boo Radleys also wanted the loud noise in "Upon 9th and Fairchild" to sound like what Jimi Hendrix did, with "The Star-Spangled Banner". The Boo Radleys liked the way Jimi Hendrix played his guitar. They tried to do something similar. The Beatles love is really obvious in "The White Noise Revisited". This song is about how music can make you feel better when things seem really bad. It is like a fun song to sing around a campfire with friends. It reminds me of "Hey Jude" because it is happy and everyone can join in. When Simon "Sice" Rowbottom sings about listening to the Beatles after a day at work he suddenly says "Yeah yeah yeah yeah!". It feels like you are really there, with him. The Beatles music is what makes him feel better. You can tell that the Beatles love is what makes this song special.

The Boos have a connection to the Beatles. This is because the band members, Carr and Sice grew up in Wallasey, a town in England. Wallasey is across the river from Liverpool. When Carr and Sice were kids in the 1980s they liked to pretend they were famous musicians. They would wave to people who were not really there and pretend to play music with tennis rackets. The Boos also met a man named Tim Brown. Tim Brown taught Carr how to play the guitar. The Boos and their music are connected to the Beatles because of where they grew up near Liverpool and because of their experiences, with music. Carr was an adult when he worked for the Land Registry. He did not work there for long. During this time Carr drank gin every day. He could not stop thinking about the things he wanted to do when he was a kid. Then Carr got together with Sice and Brown. They started the Boo Radleys in 1988. The Boo Radleys were a band that Carr was really excited, about.

They really loved the dreamy music that people in the UK called shoegazing. This type of music was very popular. They made a debut album called Ichabod and I in 1990. It was released on a label from a local record shop. Not many people heard it. The guitars on the album were very loud. Sounded nice but they were not very original. They were trying to sound like My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Sice talked about this in an interview in 2022. He said the problem was that they were too good, at copying bands. Sice said that he thinks they were a band when they did not do everything perfectly. When we tried to be a bit like My Bloody Valentine I think we got it close. It was not really us. It was not really until we did Giant Steps that our own style came through. My Bloody Valentine was an influence but with Giant Steps people could see what we were really about. We were finally being ourselves, with Giant Steps. My Bloody Valentine is a band but we did not want to sound just like My Bloody Valentine. We wanted to sound like us.. That is what happened with Giant Steps.

The Boos improved quickly and they signed with Creation, which is the record label that MBV is on. Their second album, which is called Everythings Alright Forever and it came out in 1992 still had that sound that people like but they added some unusual things to make it stand out like a trumpet playing a happy tune or a really loud guitar solo. This made the Boos different from all the bands that were trying to be, like My Bloody Valentine.. The song that really showed what the Boos were capable of was "Lazarus" a single that they released later in 1992 and it was really something special. Six minutes long, self-produced, and furnished with a kaleidoscopic intro that burbles and groans like a dub DJ going apeshit in the apartment below yours, it doesn’t release its tension until three minutes in, with a colossal fanfare of horns that feels less like a drop, in the contemporary parlance, than a euphoric lift-off.

Mason Morgan