
Eat Junk Become Junk – Six by Seven (2000, Mantra Records)
In 2015, fans of Six by Seven started a campaign to get ‘Eat Junk, Become Junk’ to Number One at Christmas. It failed to make the Top 100. The Christmas Number One that year by the way a NHS choir doing (in their words) ‘a mash up’ of Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by Simon and Garfunkel and ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay. It was for charity and whilst its hard to criticise the intent, and god bless the NHS because its brilliant, my god that sounds awful, and almost worth shutting the NHS down so that something so terrible cannot happen again.
As campaigns go, the one by the fans of Six by Seven it was pretty rubbish. ‘Eat Junk, Become Junk’ did, if it matters get to Number One in the ‘Rock Download’ chart for Christmas 2015, which I would imagine the band would see as a success. Although in reality, at number 3 in that download chart was ‘Every Rose Has A Thorn’ by Poison, which sold 12 downloads. I might have imagined that.
‘Eat Junk Become Junk’ is a tremendous song, one that I would personally love to have seen in the Top 40. It’s full of screeching guitars, pounding drums and sneering lyrics that take aim at commercialism and people being sheep as well as being rocks greatest and most angriest piece of nutritional advice.
Musically Six by Seven kind of crafted a noise that didn’t have a specific home. Whilst they were very capable of making a record that was firmly embedded in the Britpop genre, they were on the whole way too angry for it.
Candlelight – Six by Seven (1998, Mantra Records)
They sort of sat in that gap between Britpop and post rock, the sort of bands who happily cited Sonic Youth as an influence. They make the sort of songs that might get played on the radio once a week on a specialist show.
Another Love Song – Six by Seven (1998, Mantra Records)