Friday, December 01, 2006

 

Made In France


In those dark days when I was living the a wonderfully wild life in sunny Montpellier, spinning records, promoting gigs, downing whatever was on the go and sleeping the bare minimum I got to promote a number of bands that were not necessarily my own personal favorites at the time, some of them as a result of their stage shows were soon promoted to another list. One of those bands was Welcome To Julian, a French indie band that had the patronage of Bernard Lenoir and les Inrockuptibles, signed to French indie label Rosebud that was to be distributed by Barclay, part of the Polygram empire, they certainly had a certain amount of marketing clout behind them by the time of their first concert for me in 1993. This was when they were touring their first real album 'Never So Close' released the same year. A listen to the album was all it needed to for you to understand that these boys were fervent followers of all that was Indie UK, paying homage to these influences was taken to it's logical conclusion and the album was recorded in London. Check out 'Is It A Crime' that makes me think of Ride and that can't be a bad thing!
Two years later the band came back in a big way. They had by now embraced a bigger sound, more American, more grunge, more roots. Almost as if to get closer to the obvious source of their inspiration this second album 'Surfing On A T Bone' was recorded in Hoboken, N.J. 'Satisfied' is a big lurching acoustic number that if the God's had been more favourable could have been a hit, 'Age, Class, And Race' is altogether a more noisy affair. The band passed by Montpellier at the end of 1995, and sadly the public were rather thin on the ground and so they missed on hell of a good gig. As all too often happens lack of interest leads to the band splitting and this is what happened to Welcome To Jullian. While listening to their last four demos, 'I Wish I Was A Stone', 'It's Too Late', 'Soul Down' and 'Leaving This Town' you can hear where their musical tastes might have taken them if only............

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