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Mock Turtles
| NAME: |
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Mock Turtles |
| MEMBERS: |
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Martin Coogan, Martin
Glynn Murray, Steve Green, Steve Cowen, The Beautiful
Keyboard Player (forgotten her name - sorry! Jo perhaps??) |
| HIGHEST CHART SINGLE: |
|
Can You Dig It? |
| ESSENTIAL TUNE: |
|
And Then She Smiles |
| ESSENTIAL ALBUM: |
|
Turtle Soup |
| FASCINATING FACT: |
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The band's top guitarist
Martin Glynn Murray was a major character in a day
time soap that appeared on the BBC. Can't remember
its name though! |
| BAGGY RATING: |
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Were one of the best,
should have been one of the biggest |
SOME WRITING ON THE BAND:
The Coogan family are a talented bunch!
Steve is a very funny fella, Brendan is a TV presenter
and Martin fronted one of the best Manchester bands of
the late eighties and early nineties - The Mock Turtles.
The band started their career signed to the Imaginary
Label and contributed to a number of the label's tribute
compilations. They covered tracks like No Good Trying
by Syd Barrett and Big Sky by The Kinks and the band did
them justice.
Before long they were recording their own material and
displayed a wide variety of styles from pop to rock via
folk. They took easily to each style and the future looked
promising…particularly when their debut album Turtle
Soup went down well with the music press and the record
buying public. It is a top record featuring great tunes
like Lay Me Down and And Then She Smiles.
Yet the band were to become perhaps the most unlucky casualty
of the Madchester scene. And here's why…
They left Imaginary to join a Siren Records desperate
to get their money wielding hands on a band that came
from Manchester. The Mock Turtles fitted the bill and
they were snapped up.
The relationship started well. Can You Dig It (the b-side
of the Lay Me Down single that was issued on Imaginary)
was re-recorded with an exuberant guitar solo in the middle
and it went down a storm with indie dance fans and the
kids who watched Saturday morning shows like Going Live.
It smashed into the Top Twenty, stayed around for sometime
and the band appeared on Top of the Pops.
Unfortunately, the follow up a re-recorded And Then She
Smiles with an exuberant guitar solo in the middle(!)
failed by one place to make the Top 40.
By this time Madchester had fallen. Labels were no longer
so hot on Manc bands. And the Mock Turtles were thrown
into obscurity when the Two Sides album failed to shift
a momentous amount of records and they were dumped by
their record label.
It was a crying shame. Not long after that I saw them
play to a sell out crowd at The Leadmill. It was a quality
gig. They had taken a new direction and I reckon they
could have been major players in the soon to come Brit
pop scene if it hadn't been for a label that didn't recognise
true talent when they saw it.
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