The Presidents go back to school...

I know what you’re thinking straight off, the instance you saw the title, the words began forming like an ignoble effluence storm in your head. But please, before the synaptic pulses start firing the phrase towards your mouth, and the tongue begins to contort around the first syllable of ‘they’re the band who sung Peaches, yeah?’ just stop, stay silent for a moment and listen.

Many bands and artists in the past have been passed off as one song wonders, and for a plethora of reasons, most often it is that they were mediocre talents who for one magnificent moment rose above the pedestrian indifference that blights their everyday lives and produced something truly brilliant, like Jet with that song ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl?’, Babylon with ‘Spaceman’ or a-Ha with ‘Take on Me.’

By many, PUSA (as they are known to their friends) fall into this category due to the ubiquity of their signature track ‘Peaches’ way back in the UK summer of 1996 and limited commercial success of their subsequent material. Indeed their only resurfacing into the public conscience at large was a cover of one-hit-wonders The Buggles ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ for Adam Sandler’s The Wedding Singer film. (Technically this means they’ve had more top 40 hits than Jimi Hendrix, but then again so does Timmy Mallet, statistics do lie)

However, those adventurous enough to purchase the bands eponymously titled first album, were indoctrinated into a perfect blend of three minute pop-punk and ingenuously irreverent lyrics that touched on glacial motion, amphibian necrophilia, marsh creatures sexual curiosities and little blue dune buggy’s being ragged around the sand dunes by spiders with ‘fuzzy little toe-oe-oe-oes.’ A bit like Monty Python and Paul Merton improv-ing on the tales of Louis Carroll, PUSA plumbed an addictive and listenable line that was blurred between insanity and frivolous brilliance.

They released a follow up album entitled ‘II’ the subsequent year and another, ‘Pure Frosting’, in 1998 to little mainstream attention and then went on an indefinite hiatus, leaving their work to fester like a fungal infection in the minds of those it touched. In 2004 they reformed for what was initially dubbed a farewell tour, originally set to include a single UK date.

(L-R) Barack, George, Dwight and Abraham

This was when the internet message boards relit the PUSA flame, disparate admirers of the bands work seemed toemerge from isolation, buoyed by their new found e-companionship and soon £20 tickets at face value began touching on the £100 mark on e-bay. One show, became eight and each show became an event. The gigs had a cultish element, the same initiated formed the core of every gig and travelled the country to attend every set possible. Those initiated sung every random and peculiarly imaginative line to every obscure b-side in a fervent unison, it was like a Star Trek convention at times, only instead of Klingon the crowded traded on glib lyrical twists about drug addled frogs, depressive kleptomanic postmen and vengeful tiki gods.

The band rose to the occasions and knocked out a different set each night and interspersed cover tracks of acts from The Clash and Stevie Wonder through to the Spice Girls in their sets to rapturous enthusiasm out front. Perhaps encouraged by this success they have stayed together to the present day and toured regularly and released new material, all of which have remained below the popular radar.

Most notable on nights of this tour, from the obsessives at the front the smallest cheer of the night always went to ‘Peaches’ a weary scar of the impudence their obsession has endured, telling of how their idles have been labelled by those who only glanced at the cover, and a lesson that even a quick leaf through the pages can reveal something remarkable, hidden between the covers.

David Ellis