Always the bridesmaid

In a 2006 article for the U.K. Guardian, author Dave Eggers recalled riding his bike 22 miles outside the Chicago suburb where he grew up to the only record store he knew of that would carry a record by English indie-pop group the June Brides. He purchased There Are Eight Million Stories, their lone LP, and fell in love. For him, the band was what its singer and chief songwriter Phil Wilson has called a “small joy,” a group of less-than-prolific output that is nonetheless treasured by the tiny minority who even know they exist.

In the United Kingdom, however, the June Brides were not necessarily a small joy — more like a medium-sized joy that, in its brisk three-year run in the mid-’80s, teetered constantly on the edge of becoming a big joy but never managed to tip over into full-fledged stardom. They toured with the Smiths, landed on the cover of NME, released a few singles and EPs in addition to their one album, and ended up influencing an entire scene that based its sound around their exuberantly ragged, highly literate brand of post-punk. Then they split up. Wilson, disillusioned with the music industry, contentedly faded into a life as a civil servant, where he learned how to organize an efficient filing system and “look busy when you’re actually not doing anything at all.”  

“[N]o band meant more to me for a long while,” Eggers wrote, “and so forever I waited for a full-length album, and a tour, but none were forthcoming and, pretty soon, that was that.”

Last year, though, something odd happened: After close to two decades in semi-retirement, Wilson felt the urge to get back to recording. And now, he’s doing by himself what his old band never had the chance to do: touring the United States, with an appearance at the Summershine Pop Festival at the Art Barn in Ventura on July 5.

“I kinda figured that I was now allowed to do it again,” Wilson writes in an e-mail. “Nobody could begin to believe that I was trying to become famous again, or to be the next big thing — I’m too old. So it seemed to me that I could maybe do it again with my dignity intact. I would be horrified if anybody thought this was a ridiculous attempt at a comeback.”

Wilson started the June Brides essentially as a lark in 1983, part of the second wave of independent English bands inspired less by punk’s snarl and bite and more by its musical simplicity and raw, emotional honesty, but after winning a talent competition — much to their amazement — the sextet was unexpectedly forced to begin taking itself seriously. Sparked by a unique combination of trumpet and viola, the band were staples at the Living Room, the London club owned by famed U.K. tastemaker Alan McGee. However, when McGee formed Creation Records — the label that launched the careers of Oasis, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and dozens of others — he refused to sign the June Brides, allegedly because it would have been “too obvious.” Regardless, the group continued to expand its following in the ensuing years, supporting the Smiths in Scotland and, in 1985, becoming one of the first legitimately indie acts to grace the cover of influential tome New Musical Express. But without a solid label deal, the band had trouble holding onto its fanbase, and decided to fold up shop in 1986 — the year NME released its C86 cassette, a compilation of artists clearly indebted to the Brides’ brainy minimalism.

In the immediate aftermath of the breakup, Wilson put out a pair of singles — on Creation, ironically — but, when neither was met with much enthusiasm, he opted to become a government employee instead, and spent the ’90s as an office drone, barely even picking up a guitar in that time. In recent years, though, Wilson has slowly made his return into the musical arena, beginning with a few one-off June Brides reunions in 2003 and 2006. In 2007, he quit his day job and began easing back into songwriting with home-recorded covers, reinterpreting tracks by the likes of Kraftwerk, Faust and Throbbing Gristle — bands known for almost robotic coldness, seemingly the antithesis to the big-hearted ramshackle pop that so endeared Wilson to people like Dave Eggers.    

“I’d always loved [those] bands, and flirted myself with creating experimental, industrial music before I formed the June Brides,” he writes. “I really liked the idea of revisiting my youth and playing the songs on acoustic guitars, banjo and mandolin to try to get some warmth and soul into the songs.”

Wilson has a covers EP scheduled for release on the Slumberland imprint in the coming weeks, which he will support with a handful of rare West Coast appearances. But he acknowledges he is re-entering a music world that has changed considerably, one in which no kid even has to leave his house to hear the bands they want, let alone ride a bike 20 miles to nearest cool record store, and one where technology has made it a lot easier for artists to maintain a spirit of independence.

“Looking around at the corporate scene today, it seems to me that that period [in the 1980s] did have a worth and honesty to it compared to a lot of what is foisted onto the public by major labels today,” he writes. “And it was a very exciting time. Bands did help one another ‘round the country by way of organizing gigs and releasing fanzines and [flexi discs]. It felt [like] we were a real community of likeminded, idealistic people on the way to bigger things — which didn’t happen.”

Still, Wilson has little regret. He admits things may have turned out differently had the Brides made a record for Creation at the height of their popularity, but ultimately, he is content with his small-joy status — especially when he considers the alternative. “Had I become successful at 22, I might have had to be friends with Bono, marry Patsy Kensit, do drugs and all the other hideous things that being a rock star entails,” he writes. “That would have been terrible.”    

Summershine Pop Festival
featuring
Phil Wilson, Maria and more
July 5, 1 p.m. at the Art Barn 856 E. Thompson Blvd., Ventura
www.myspace.com/summershinefest08