Britpops forgotten band, Elastica. Where did it all go wrong?
By Andrew Hudson, 15/07/2005.
In the mid 1990’s “Brit-pop” reached its commercial peak. Oasis, Blur, The Manics, the list is almost endless. Add to that list Elastica, a band now forgotten, and at the time underrated for all the wrong reasons.
The biggest problem for Elastica was that lead singer Justine Frischmann was dating Blur’s Damon Albarn. The press immediately accused the band of cashing in on their association with one the biggest British bands of the time. The Sun dubbed Justine “Blur indoors”, and for the tabloids this band were going nowhere fast. However the music press, unusually didn’t take the easy option of writing the band of, and after a series of singles, and live shows Elastica were achieving success and credibility on their own backs.
In 1995 the band released their self-titled debut album. Comprising of 15 songs, crammed into less than forty minutes, Elastica continued to delight the music press, and draw derision from the tabloids. More importantly they were building a strong and loyal fan base, the music fans it seemed were in agreement with the NME and Melody Maker that Elastica’s album was a modern classic. With everything starting to go their way, Elastica should have been planning their second album to maintain their momentum. Instead drugs, and in particular Heroin were ravishing all four founder members, and relationships within the band started to deteriorate.
Bass player Annie Holland became disillusioned with where the band was going, and the constant touring. Rumoured to have hated touring as she wasn’t guaranteed good heroin Annie left the band in August 1995. Justine was herself becoming more dependent on drugs and was writing no new material so the band was becoming stale. Their live sets had sounded the same for far too long, and fans and the music press were not amused. Add to the cocktail guitarist Donna Matthews and drummer Justin Welch’s personal relationship breaking up and continuing to work together, and the strain on the band members was reaching breaking point. Justin and Donna ended up in a drunken fight with each other in an incident known as “the Scottish hotel bust up”. The police were called and the pair separated, but both claimed it cleared the air between them. Elastica were going downhill, and their fans wondered if the tabloids had been right, that Justine wasn’t interested in a music career, just a smash and grab on the back of her boyfriends success.
Elastica finally released a second album in 1999. “The Menace” received luke warm reviews by the music press, and the tabloids paid it little or no attention. Although Annie rejoined the band, the spirit of Elastica had gone. Drugs and bitter in-house fighting had left the band confused and disjointed. Despite playing at Reading/Leeds festival in 1999, the band soon parted and the rumour mill was working overtime. Reporting that Justine wrote “Stutter”, a song about a man disinterested in sex about Damon, Donna had a pump fitted in her stomach to help her give up Heroin, and then promptly undone her own stitches and removed it the same day. And so it went on, so much so the band ended up becoming the butt of music jokes, and their brilliant debut album quickly forgotten.
When Justine and Damon split, he wrote the number one hit “Beetlebum” about Justine, who by this time was totally dependent on heroin. Drugs had claimed four more victims in the music industry. Although they lived to tell the tale, or what they remember of it, you can’t help but feel a sense of loss for Elastica. Had they not have allowed drugs to dictate their own careers, they could have achieved so much more. Their second album was in the main lazy and lethargic, and for such a great live band not to be touring, the only publicity they got was negative.
Elastica were perhaps the last main stream band to sink on the drugs ship. Hopefully the industry keeps a more watchful eye over its assets, or it could just be dumb luck. Either way the likes of Elastica and The La’s never reached their full potential. They became sidetracked by drugs so much so that they did nothing else but feed their habit and allowed potential and real talent to slip away. The decline of Elastica is a sad one, and we can only hope that we do not lose more artists to the cliché of drugs.
