When most people talk of Fubar on a Friday night, the term ‘dodgy’ is mentioned almost without question. However, as part of Bulge Promotion’s attempts to re-ignite Stirling’s music scene, one forgotten band from the 90s played an intimate set featuring some of the biggest anthems from a hazy golden age of British music.
You might not even remember Dodgy as a band, but two lines from the chorus of their biggest hit ‘Good Enough’ (if it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me) will instantly ring a bell. That song hit the heady heights of 4th in the UK Singles Charts whilst their other high hitter ‘Staying Out For The Summer’ was their first foray into the top 40 and paved the way for their future successes.
That song epitomised and embodied much of a new and exciting period in British music. Feel good festival anthems with a ‘summery’ vibe. However, they’re still very quick to distance themselves from the label of being a ‘Britpop’ band. Despite lead singer of the band Nigel Clark describing the phase as ‘spectacular’, he claims they never wanted to be a part of it. When speaking to Brig newspaper, he said “That whole period was to do with imagine, and we were just too much influenced by music to really care”.
In fact, in a damming critique of the music industry and the media, Clark lambasted the significance of image on record sales. “Many artists rely upon their image, where as we’ve always relied upon our music”. Matthew Priest, the band’s drummer said “looking back, you can see, the bands that do go down in history are the ones that really carefully crafted their own myth and were very pretentious about what they said in interviews, and the image they wanted to portray. Damon Albarn was very calculated and pretentious in what he did and in shaping the image of Blur and we would look at him and go ‘what a cunt’, and that’s what journalists lap up. All those bands did well, not necessarily because of their music but because they were very good at cultivating their image and we were never were”.
During the 90s, the band toured tirelessly around the world, racking up well over 250 shows in 1994/1995. Clark jokingly claims the band “never knowlingly turned down a gig” pinpointing the band’s success to their graft.
True musical romantics, Dodgy feel music has the power to unite, however the current music scene is doing the opposite. Matthew Preist said “today, music is about attitude, I’m not so keen on that, music isn’t about attitude its about opening your ears and getting into something. Music isn’t bringing people together and making it work together, I mean at the moment you’ve got JLS and Tinie Tempah, what’s that sorting out?”.
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