ALL HAIL THE RENAISSANCE MEN!
As the first decade of the current millennium ended, so did The Wildhearts. This shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who had followed the band for the first 20 years of their career. A group for whom volatility was as natural as breathing, they had split up many times before, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years.
But this was different. It was final. Their most recent album at the time, the anaemic Chutzpah!, had come and gone with a whimper – a far cry from the fuck-the-world roar of their audacious, brilliant 1993 debut Earth Vs The Wildhearts and its follow-up PHUQ. Their latest tour had ended three days before Christmas 2009 with an undersold gig at London’s 800-capacity Islington Academy. They had reached the end of the road, broke, demoralised and ultimately kaput. “The Wildhearts was over,” frontman Ginger says now. “So I got on with loads of other things.”
Guitarist CJ, who co-founded the band with Ginger in 1989, went even further. He didn’t just quit The Wildhearts, he also quit music. He ended up “running a couple of cleaning crews”, clearing the houses of hoarders and taking care of the aftermath of suicides.
