The last time Say It With Garage Flowers spoke to Sice Rowbottom, frontman of ’90s shoegazers-turned-indie-pop-experimentalists, The Boo Radleys, who reformed in 2021, he was promoting the band’s 2023 studio album, Eight, gearing up for a UK tour to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their 1993 masterpiece, Giant Steps, and looking forward to performing a series of solo shows, which included spoken word and songs, as well as reflections on mental health – he’s a chartered psychologist when he’s not making music.
This year, The Boos (Sice Rowbottom – guitar and vocals, Tim Brown – bass, keys, and Rob Cieka, drums and percussion) are back, and hitting the road again, but this time it’s for the C’mon Up! tour, during which they’ll be performing a mash up of songs from their 1995 number one album, Wake Up! and the follow-up, 1996’s C’mon Kids, as well as a few surprises.
In an exclusive interview, Rowbottom tells us why the music industry needs to catch up when it comes to tackling mental health issues, looks ahead to this year’s tour and shares some thoughts and memories on writing and recording Wake Up! and the oft-misunderstood C’mon Kids.
It’s time to throw out your arms for a new sound…
Hi Sice. How was 2024 for you?
Sice: It was very quiet I was mostly doing my day job. I had a busy 2023 – we had two albums out, one of which was a reissue, and I did my one-man show. I needed some reset time in 2024 and I did some planning for 2025, when we’re hoping to do quite a lot more.
How did the one-man shows go?
Sice: They were brilliant – I loved doing them, and the response was great, but the difficulty is marketing them: how do you tell people what it is? There’s psychology, a bit of singing, some comedy, talking…
Once the people were there, we had some great shows – we did a brilliant sold-out show in Liverpool, where I have a lot of contacts, but, in other places, it was more difficult. I took the show across the country to some great little venues, but I need something to hang it on – I need to write a book, if I get round to it – something that encapsulates all the elements of the shows. I’ll see…
In your one-man shows, you talk about mental health in the music industry, and we’ve discussed that topic in interviews before – particularly your work for the book, Touring and Mental Health: The Music Industry Manual.
Sadly, since we last spoke, we’ve had the high-profile case of Liam Payne, formerly of One Direction, who died in 2024.
It’s sad that it’s taken the death of a young man to put the issue of mental health in the music industry back in the spotlight.
Some of Liam’s fans have launched a petition asking for legislation that would “safeguard” artists’ mental health as they navigate the entertainment industry.
The Change.org petition proposes new legislation called “Liam’s Law” that would require artists to have access to mental health professionals, be given regular mental health checks and have adequate rest periods. Would you endorse that?
Sice: Completely – and I’ve spent quite a lot of 2024 doing stuff with the Music Industry Therapist Collective.
There’s lots to do in the music industry [around mental health] – there’s still a bit of a dinosaur attitude about it. A lot of people espouse that ‘if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’ thing…
It’s not just in the music industry – there’s a lot of it in other industries too. It’s those type A personalities who work 15 hours a day and expect everyone else to do the same because that’s what they do – not everybody can do that and not everybody wants to do it because they realise it’s not good for you. Unfortunately, until we recognise that, I don’t think it’s going to change.
Things will happen gradually – every time a tragic case happens, there’s a shift and people start taking it a bit more seriously. It happened with Kurt Cobain…
‘There’s lots to do in the music industry [around mental health] – there’s still a bit of a dinosaur attitude about it’
The thing about Liam Payne is what do young people like him do after they’ve had a huge level of fame and they’re on the other side of it?
There’s a great book called Moondust, which is about what the people who landed on the Moon did with their lives after they’d done it – what do you do when the apex of your life has happened? For a lot of the people who were in boybands, what do they do afterwards and how do they find meaning and purpose in their life?
The last time I saw The Boo Radleys play live was at The Garage in London, during summer 2023, as part of the Giant Steps 30th anniversary tour. How was it playing that album again, and airing some songs that hadn’t been performed live before?
Sice: It was amazing, and playing the songs that we’d never played live was exciting – I was very surprised at how well they worked. I don’t know why that was… maybe it’s down to maturity or whether we’re better musicians or there’s better tech these days… A lot of those songs we probably would’ve tried to play back in the day but maybe they didn’t work… As a set, it worked well – a lot of people have a huge fondness for that album and that hasn’t faded.
Back in the day, we probably only played half a dozen songs from it, and a lot of people didn’t see us doing it.
So, this year The Boos are on tour again and you’re doing a mash up of the Wake Up! album from 1995, and the follow up – 1996’s C’mon Kids. You’re calling it the C’mon Up! tour. I see what you did there… Did you ever think about calling it Wake Up, Kids?
Sice: (laughs). Well, that was the other option… We’re going to do the whole of the Wake Up! album for the show at Rough Trade in Liverpool, but for the rest of the shows it will be a mash up of the two. Looking at the setlist that we’re going to do, mashing up the two makes a brilliant album – you can see the similarities between the songs because they were actually quite close in terms of their writing period.
How will it be singing a noisy song like C’mon Kids? Will it wreck your throat?
Sice: I’m worried about that – I don’t know how it’s going to be. I always used to wreck my throat doing it, so I don’t know what it will be like singing it as an older man…
You’re not the world’s biggest fan of the Wake Up! album, are you? You’ve told me before that you think it doesn’t work as a complete record…
Sice: Martin’s [Carr – Boo Radleys guitarist and songwriter, who isn’t in the reformed band] intention was to write a 12-song pop album, and I think it would’ve been brilliant if we’d done that, but I don’t think we did. Martin’s way of working was that whatever was produced was kind of it…
To be blunt about it, I think there’s a lot of filler on the album, which I don’t think there is on any of the other albums – but there are seven shit-hot songs and five that I’m not sure about…
Wilder is a brilliant song…
Sice: It’s great – really lovely.
With the piano, it’s like The Boos doing Elton John, and then there are those wonderful, Beach Boys-like backing vocals…
Sice: Totally. We always loved the harmonies. We’ll definitely do that song – back in the day, I don’t think we had a piano player who was good enough to do it live.
Have you got a favourite song off Wake Up!?
Sice: I love Twinside.
Find The Answer Within is a good tune too…
Sice: We’ve always done that… If we’d done a pop album, those would’ve been the songs that would’ve been good for it: Find The Answer Within, Twinside, It’s Lulu... If the rest of the album had followed suit, it would’ve been what we intended it to be.
Giant Steps is seen as The Boo Radleys’ masterpiece, but you prefer C’mon Kids, don’t you?
Sice: I do.
Is it your favourite Boos album?
Sice: I think it is – definitely. It sounds the most like us. We wanted to make it more like us, because Wake Up! had a lot of extra brass and other stuff. We wanted C’mon Kids to be just us in the studio. I like the eclecticism of it and that it’s slightly off the wall – it was a real shame that the album [wasn’t better received] … It was just timing… Had we released C’mon Kids straight after Giant Steps it would’ve been lauded.
It feels more like the natural successor to Giant Steps than Wake Up! was…
Sice: It does. Wake Up! was almost a reaction… because we’d done Giant Steps, which was sprawling and had everything and the kitchen sink, we didn’t want to do the same thing – we wanted to do a 12-song pop album… C’mon Kids was more naturally us, but the success of Wake Up Boo! kind of derailed us.
‘Had we released C’mon Kids straight after Giant Steps it would’ve been lauded’
At the time, a lot of critics thought that C’mon Kids was a deliberate attempt by you to sabotage your career, but it wasn’t, was it? You were just doing something different to Wake Up!…
Sice: It surprised me that people said that. Music journalists are pretty savvy people, and they know how it works… Did they really think that we had enough control to be able to decide that? Absolutely not. We saw it as an opportunity to give all those people who loved the band something brilliant to listen to. Had we released C’mon Kids after Giant Steps, I think we would’ve retained our indie cred, which we lost with Wake Up! We gained a lot of publicity and promotional ability, but we lost our indie cred.
C’mon Kids was a noisy album at times…
Sice: It’s very noisy – it was our most ‘rock’ album. What’s In The Box? was pure Who power.
The title track is a call to arms: ‘C’mon kids, don’t do yourself down, throw out your arms for a new sound…’
Sice: That was the bizarre thing about the idea that we were somehow trying to get rid of people with that album, because the first song says: ‘C’mon kids, throw out your arms for a new sound…’ We were saying, ‘Here you go – have some of this…’
That song feels like a mantra for the album and what you were doing. You also sing: ‘Work all day, it don’t mean a thing. With the sun always outside your window. Fuck the ones who tell you that life is merely a time before dying…’
It’s an anthem to getting out there, following your dreams and living in the moment…
Sice: Totally. It was a very energetic album. The weird thing is that because of Wake Up Boo! there’s this thing that Wake Up! is a big poppy album, but it’s actually really depressing. 4am Conversation and Reaching Out From Here are pretty miserable… Martin was at a time in his life when he was living in Preston and was quite miserable.
Wake Up Boo! has a melancholy undercurrent to it…
Sice: Yeah – absolutely. I think C’mon Kids is a really uplifting record – New Brighton Promenade is celebratory – and it’s a far more positive album.
It still has some melancholy too, though…
Sice: Yes, but that’s us…
Meltin’s Worm is bonkers. It’s the stuff of childhood nightmares – a song about a worm who eats a child and takes his place at school…
Sice: I love it! I can remember when Martin sent me the demo of it. It was one of the first songs for the album and I thought it was brilliant. No one else was writing songs like that, and it was very Beatlesesque – whimsical, weird and very English.
Both the Wake Up! and C’mon Kids albums were recorded at Rockfield. How was that?
Sice: The reason we went to Rockfield was because we were known as a party band. The problem was, if we were in London, people would’ve been dropping in all the time – it would’ve been a distraction. Everything prior to that had been made in London.
‘The weird thing is that because of Wake Up Boo! there’s this thing that Wake Up is a big poppy album, but it’s actually really depressing’
Rockfield was a solution to that, as it’s in the middle of nowhere, but I think we had too much time on our hands there. Our work rated slowed down and we got a bit bored and stir crazy. Everyone ended up disappearing at weekends, so, even though it’s a residential studio, our work rate wasn’t that great.
In London studios, you’d work for 12 hours solid and then clear off. At Rockfield, we nearly killed our engineer, Andy Wilkinson, because we’d all fall into different work patterns. Tim would want to get up in the morning and work, but Martin would practically want to be nocturnal and do something in the middle of the night. Poor old Andy had to be there the whole time… but it was a good thing to do.
You self-produced Wake Up! and C’mon Kids…
Sice: Yeah – and I wonder about the wisdom of that, but we didn’t like being hemmed in and being told we couldn’t do this or that. We enjoyed the process of experimenting and messing around, but it probably wouldn’t have done any harm to have an extra set of ears. If we’d got the right person, it might’ve been good.
So, finally, a question that’s in two parts… Firstly, what’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
Sice: I press the button on my one-cup water boiler because I’ve prepared my coffee the night before, so I can have it first thing in the morning.
And, secondly, have you ever played C’mon Kids to your kids, and, if so, what did they think of it?
Sice: It’s funny because they never used to be arsed at all, but when we went back out, they did the merch, and they suddenly realised how much we meant to people. They were like, ‘Oh my God…’
They didn’t think we were cool until they read about us and they realised we knew Oasis and Radiohead. My son said: ‘You have to understand, these people are like gods to us….’
I was like, ‘fair enough…’
The Boo Radleys C’mon Up! tour is in February: more details here.
On March 30, there will be a special event at Rough Trade Liverpool, with the band playing the Wake Up! album in full.
The Boo Radleys will also be playing the 10th Anniversary Shiiine On Weekender festival, at Butlins, Skegness (Friday March 28 – Sunday 30).
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