Chart entered : 30 April 1988
Chart peak : 72
Number of hits : 16
I must confess I never quite got my head round this lot.
Like Pop Will Eat Itself, The Wonder Stuff sprang from the band From Eden which featured Malcolm Treece on guitar and Miles Hunt on drums. Miles's uncle was Bill Hunt who'd been in ELO and Wizzard. Miles forsook the drum kit to be lead singer when the new band was formed in 1986. The rhythm section were Rob Jones who called himself "The Bass Thing" and drummer Martin Gilks who'd been with C86 also-rans The Mighty Lemon Drops before they recorded anything.
Within a few months The Wonder Stuff had released a self-financed EP "A Wonderful Day". The first two tracks "It's Not True" and "Like A Merry-Go-Round" are muscular Smiths -style guitar pop with a decent tune topped off with Miles's feline vocals. The subsequent tracks "A Wonderful Day" and "Down Here" are more throwaway but it was a more than decent debut record.
I won't discuss their second single in May 1987, "Unbearable" here because it became their "Goodbye " hit on reissue.
"Give Give Give Me More More More" was their first single for Polydor after signing for an advance of £80,000. It's a sarcastic expression of yuppie values from the point of view of an aspirant. It's hardly up there with Rent for insight but I suppose their hearts were in the right place. The jagged rhythm and ragged guitar hark back to Wire and slightly forward to Blur and it probably deserved to climb a bit higher.
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