Samiam - You Are Freaking Me Out

John Saunders. There is the name of a man I have never met. However, it is through him that I discovered one of my favourite bands of all time. John Saunders was an older guy (I've no idea how old - 40?) whom my brother worked with. One day my brother came home from work with a pile of CDs by this band. There was something about the that I liked but there was something not quite clicking with me. I was in my mid teens and I was just getting in to music in a haphazard sort of a way.

I had gotten in to Oasis recently and had begun my Noel Gallagher obsession that lasted a while. I'd also gotten interested in a few other bands, like Pavement and The Flaming Lips - maybe Lowgold was around this time too, I cannot recall. However, I also liked Westlife and Jamiroquai. I knew the words to the vast majority of songs on rotaion on all the music channels on satalite televisions. I'm talking songs by Shaggy, Geri Halliwell, Nas, etc. Just about anything. I was a little bit opinionated (a lot of my opinions I'd simply adopted from my brother and there were some bands that I deemed too trendy and dismissed - post-Pablo Honey Radiohead).

...so, these Samiam CDs just sounded odd to me. The lyrics were almost exclusively not rhymning, the production seemed a bit too amateurish (I wont say 'rough' because I was already liking things with a rough edge to it but this just seemed off to me). Whatever it was, they are no longer opinions I hold, but at the time something just wasn't clicking. Then, one day when the house was empty I put on You Are Freaking Me Out - at the time their most recent release at the time. It was an easily their most mainstream record. At the time that I was listening to it Blink 182 were big, Jimmy Eat World were big, Hot Water Music were as big as they were going to ever be, and this album sat nicely among these bands. Except they were better - and a lot less 'immature' than Blink. This was also around the time that I was falling asleep a lot. I remember falling asleep on the kitchen table whilst listening to Samiam.

For many years I'd considered this album to be my favourite album (with the possible exception of The Masterplan by Oasis, if compilations were being included). I'm not sure I'd currently rate it that highly but it is a great album for taking me back to a time in my life. A time that, now I think about it, is quite a while back (a decade or so). It is very poppy in places, it's fun, it has a very good Beatles cover, it's rocky, it's rocky and it could have been a hit had the lead singer been thin and attractive rather than heading towards middleage and bald.

Since these teen years I have grown to like their other albums (including the two subsequent ones) as much as You Are Freaking Me Out. Few have the same memories attached though. However, there are memories attached to their most recent release as I had the chance to not only see them twice in two days (once at Underworld in Camden and once in Jacobs Well in Leeds) but I also, thanks to Scrip, got to interview Sergie Loobkoff (Guitarist, and primary songwriter) for our radioshow. We called him an hour early and woke him up....then I giggled my way through an interview with rather pathetic questions in. I thought Id be able to link a copy of the show where we interviewed Sergie into this blog but I cannot find it online and I no longer have access to the PC I had at the time - maybe Scrip has a copy.