1.Hello World (3:01) 2.Perfect (3:16) 3.Not My Scene (3:21)
Sometimes, bands slip by unnoticed and Seafruit were one of them. To this day, I don't know a lot about them - I can't even name all the members. I don't even know the correct orthography of their name: is it Seafruit, Sea Fruit or Sea-Fruit? I've seen all three. I first encountered them supporting Gene in 1999, and was actually impressed; indeed, I felt they outshone the other support act, Grand Drive, whom I already admired on record. I made a point of buying Seafruit's debut single, 'Looking for Sparks' when it emerged a couple of weeks later, and went on to grab this follow-up release.
I hadn't actually heard Hello World until I played the CD, but I had been impressed enough by the previous release to take this on trust. Unfortunately this lacked the epic drama of its predecessor, replacing it with a more self-consciously commercial approach. Geoff Barradale's voice could be described as spirited but doesn't quite seem to fit this material. The chorus "I came alive/When I heard my favourite song" is moderately catchy though. What's curious is that Seafuit had a far stronger upbeat song in the shape of 'Rocket Fuel', which was never issued as a single.
The first B-side, Perfect, is less memorable but in some ways more convincing. Headphone listening reveals a satisfyingly chunky guitar riff. It's let down a little by the rather perfunctory lyirc however: "In a perfect world, you could be my girl" and so on.
Maybe best of all is Not My Scene, a more acoustic-flavoured number which lends itself rather better to Barradale's vocal style. You can probably guess what the words are about from the title, but they seem a little better worked out than on the other two tracks. The string parts sound synthetic, but the use of maracas is surprisingly effective. Sadly much of the subtlety of these two track - both produced by guitarist Alan Smyth, a long-established Sheffield scenester who'd done the same job on Pulp's Separations LP - is lost in Chris Nagle's mix.
Despite my moderate reservations, this single brought Seafruit their only taste of chart success, entering at 59 (possibly because there were two formats available) and getting them into the reference books. Then they seemed to vanish, before I discovered that they had been dropped by Wildstar and signed to the even smaller Global Warming label. A mail-order only single snuck out, followed by an eponymous album in the year 2000, which included both 'Hello World' and 'Not My Scene'. Another version of the album was subsequently issued in Germany under the title I Feel a Bit Normal Today, a phrase on the cover of this CD single. Alas both incarnations are deleted now. If only I'd known they were coming out.
ONLINE:
The official site seems not to be online at time of writing, but there is a
Yahoo! group.
Some live photos of the band in their fetching lab coats can be seen here and here.
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