This review first appeared in the NME on the release of "Will Anything Happen" in 1997.
AH, THE mid-'80s. Long greatcoats, fizzing guitars, Doc Martens, jumpers for goal posts. Enduring image, isn't it? Especially when you consider how shite it all was.
Not that we realised at the time of course. We armies of students, fresh from rubbish provincial towns, newly arrived at rubbish big-city colleges, enthusing over rubbish guitar bands and doing that rubbish jerky-elbow dance in rubbish indie discos. And whose rubbish records did we primarily jerk about to? Edinburgh's Shop Assistants, if memory serves, were pretty big in the elbow league. Oh dear. So listening back to this CD retrospective of their finest, erm, 38 minutes, it's hard to separate the warm tingle of nostalgia from the faint stench of arse. And, to be fair, the Shoppies - yes, we really did call them that - were actually one of the better options in the post-Smiths jingle-jangle crop.
They were three-quarters female, for a start, which was still something of a novelty in boyrock circles back then. They could sing sneery put-downs like 'I Don't Wanna Be Friends With You' without sounding like twee teenage prima donnas, then go all Nico-and-the-Velvets on twinkly xylophone serenade 'Somewhere In China', and still melt your heart with the wistful 'Before I Wake'.
With post-riot grrrl, Kenickie-assisted hindsight, however, everything here sounds terribly drab and tinny and emotionally stunted. The Shop Assistants were a phase you went through before discovering grown-up pop, and for that we gratefully salute them. But these days, apart from the odd nostalgic twitch, our elbows remain resolutely unmoved.