Menswear

The Arc of Menswear

The pivots — what forced Menswear to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Camden Hype Firestorm

   Formed in Camden pubs and booked on national TV before they had a full set of songs, Menswear were the defining hype-bubble act of 1995. They hit the studio with producer Neill King to scrape together Nuisance, a shameless love letter to mod-pop and Wire riffs that still managed to score UK top-ten chart numbers. Johnny Dean's bratty posturing and Chris Gentry's clipped guitars gave them a brief, brilliant window of genuine radio dominance. The whole thing sounded like a band running completely on borrowed time and pure cheek.

2. 02

   The Country-Rock Exile

   After booting Matt Everitt in favor of drum tech Tud and adding keyboardist Paul Fletcher, the group made a hard turn away from London indie-pop toward sun-drenched Americana. They hired Chris Allison along with production team Bird & Bush for sessions steeped in country rock and slide guitars. London Records heard the tapes, hated the radical shift, and promptly dropped the band from the roster. The resulting album, ¡Hay Tiempo!, was quietly dumped exclusively into the Japanese market via Polydor in 1998, leaving the band to dissolve under mounting drug strain and indifference.

3. 03

   Reissues and Vindication

   Johnny Dean tried mounting a short-lived club comeback with an entirely new backing band around 2013, but the real final chapter landed in 2020 via crate-digger labels. Edsel rolled out a comprehensive box set while Demon Records finally pressed ¡Hay Tiempo! onto domestic vinyl alongside a 25th-anniversary run of Nuisance. Heard decades removed from the toxic mid-nineties press cycle, the records read completely differently. The country-rock pivot sounds like an honest artistic rebellion, and the debut stands as a remarkably tight artifact of peak Britpop mania.

Influences

• Wire — Colin Newman's minimalist art-punk was the absolute foundation for Menswear's sound. You can lift the bouncy, angular guitar figure directly off 'Daydreamer' and find its direct ancestor across Pink Flag. They borrowed the choppy tempos and dry attack, then sprayed it with Camden swagger.
• The Jam — Paul Weller's sharply suited mod revivalism provided the exact visual and sonic template Dean and Black set out to replicate. It turns up all over 'Being Brave' in the punching bassline, the clean guitar chug, and the working-class London accent pushed front and center. Weller was the holy blueprint for any suburban kid looking to play smart-dressed guitar pop.
• Blur — Menswear formed explicitly out of the pub scene orbiting Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon during the height of Parklife. The vocal phrasing on 'Stardust' is an almost comical mirror of Albarn's theatrical cockney drawl over jaunty, bounce-heavy piano chords. They were an overt, opportunistic reaction to the commercial boom Blur dragged into Camden.
• The Byrds — When the band abandoned their mod posturing for ¡Hay Tiempo!, they openly modeled their new sound on Roger McGuinn's ringing Rickenbacker and Clarence White's country twang. You hear it immediately on tracks like 'Wait for the Sun' with its ringing jangle and acoustic strumming. It was a complete stylistic whiplash designed to prove they cared about real California songwriting.
• The Monkees — Johnny Dean frequently referenced them in interviews as the ultimate manufactured pop outfit with actual killer tunes. The brisk arrangements and bright, disposable hooks on Nuisance share the exact same television-ready bounce as mid-sixties garage pop. They never hid the fact that they wanted to be a pre-packaged pop sensation with catchy chorus hooks.