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GOMEZ ANNOUNCES 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF BRING IT ON, OUT APRIL 20

For immediate release

GOMEZ ANNOUNCES 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF BRING IT ON, OUT APRIL 20

SUPER DELUXE 4CD COLLECTION FEATURES REMASTERED ALBUM + 35 PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED TRACKS INCLUDING RARE DEMOS, BBC SESSIONS & GLASTONBURY 1998 SET

ALSO AVAILABLE IN 2LP FORMAT WITH GATEFOLD PACKAGING FOR BOTH STANDARD (BLACK VINYL) AND DELUXE (RED/YELLOW VINYL) EDITIONS

27 FEBRUARY 2018 (Toronto, ON) – To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Gomez’s Mercury Music Prize winning debut album, Bring It On will be re-mastered and reissued as a super-deluxe 4CD with an accompanying remastered double LP release on April 20 via Universal Music Canada, the country’s leading music company. The 4CD reissued version of Bring It On contains the original album, remastered by Frank Arkwright at Abbey Road studios, as well as 35 previously unreleased tracks. Features include 25 demos & 13 songs never released in any form by Gomez, including covers of Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend” and “T-Bone Walker’s Mean Old World”, the band’s 1998 Glastonbury performance and BBC sessions, as well as a 10,000-word essay by music writer Paul Stokes, with new interviews with the band and those close to them. If that weren’t enough, the anniversary reissue will also be available in 2LP format with gatefold packaging, in standard black vinyl and deluxe red and yellow coloured vinyl.

Pre-order BRING IT ON – 20th ANNIVERSARY:

“No other record captures that period so perfectly,” says Elbow’s Guy Garvey. “The concerns of the songs. The stories, the experimental sounds. It was so brave for a band to record themselves at that time: it allowed a direct and undiluted account of the band as aspirational, big-hearted friends in love with making music and each other. It dared us to record ourselves. But they did it first. It’s the most deserving recipient of the Mercury Prize in its history: a breathlessly ambitious and lovingly crafted masterpiece. It should be called Bring It 'The F*ck' On.”

Twenty years on, the debut album by Gomez still sounds ahead of its time. You can hear its echoes in so much of the music that followed, not just in Elbow, but in any artist who heard Bring it On, and realized the possibilities of combining indie and roots music, with lo-fidelity electronics. The album synthesized styles in a way that seemed remarkable then, capturing a modern experimental sensibility with a love of the past. Where so many of its contemporary’s sound completely of their time, Bring It On sounds as if it could have come out to equal acclaim at any point over the past 20 years.

Bring it On sounds as if it's been made by kids who’ve been exploring the depths of Spotify for unlikely sources, rather than four lads in a Southport garage, and the fella they met at university. Though, in a way, Bring It On is the pre-streaming version of that very process, bringing together all the five members’ tastes, without ever allowing one style to dominate. You can hear their expansive love of music: Tom Waits, Tim Buckley, Prince, Talking Heads, Johnny Cash, Portishead, The Chemical Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, jazz and folk and indie and the West Coast and classic rock. Between them, Ian Ball, Ben Ottewell, Tom Gray, Paul Blackburn and Olly Peacock created something that was far more than the sum of its parts.

In 1998, of course, it sounded revolutionary. “Gomez came along at exactly the right moment,” says the DJ Steve Lamacq, who championed the band on his Radio 1 show. “After Britpop had collapsed in on itself, there was a massive hole on the Evening Session, waiting to be filled. But what we found was, people reacting against the commerciality of the Britpop wave and heading off on all sorts of strange tangents. The audience was really receptive to sounds that maybe wouldn’t have fitted in a few years earlier.”

Gomez hadn’t even recorded with the intention of making an album, which is perhaps why it sounds so authentic. The basis of the album was seven tracks recorded on an ancient four-track recorder. The band’s label, Hut, had to use the home recordings – for practical reasons. “They couldn’t recreate those recordings because they’d done them in one of their dad’s garages on the four-track, and just after they’d finished doing the last one the thing broke,” says Hut’s David Boyd. “So, we decided it needed a little bit of mixing and embellishment, but not a lot, and they trotted off to Liverpool to do the touch-ups, but to all intents and purposes that was Bring It On.”

In Liverpool, engineer Ken Nelson awaited them, and helped them turn those seven tracks into a whole album. “They’d have an idea and would look to me to make it work,” Nelson says. “Their self-taught skills transferred well to the studio and I believe we learned so much from each other. I’d never worked with a band who were so creative before: it was truly exciting for me.”

The spectacular results had an immediate impact and influence. Coldplay frontman Chris Martin admired Bring It On so much, that the band hired Ken Nelson to produce their first album, after which he went on to produce three more. Indeed, without some of Gomez’s freewheeling influence, it's much harder to imagine the British music scene making a comfortable home for the innovating likes of Alt-J, Everything Everything & Field Music, or across the pond where subsequent harmony bands blending indie, anti-folk and art rock have thrived.

Bring It On went on to win the 1998 Mercury Music Prize, beating Pulp, Massive Attack, Cornershop and The Verve, with the judges describing the album as, "an intriguing blend of swamp blues, bar-room rock and eerie power.”

While Gomez are best known for Bring It On, the album was only the starting point of a spectacular career. The band went on to build audiences internationally, especially in the US, where Gomez have become bigger and bigger, with their two most recent albums, A New Tide (2009) and Whatever’s on Your Mind (2011), becoming the highest-charting records of their career.

Despite their ongoing success, Bring It On remains a landmark: The introduction to their singular nature. Hence the deluxe reissue, and forthcoming anniversary tour through the U.S. and U.K., on which many of the shows – including an appearance at the Royal Albert Hall – sold out in moments. Twenty years later? Once again, bring it on.

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Bring It On – 20th Anniversary (Super Deluxe 4CD Edition) Tracklisting:

CD1: Bring It On (REMASTERED)

  1. Get Miles
  2. Whippin' Piccadilly
  3. Make No Sound
  4. 78 Stone Wobble
  5. Tijuana Lady
  6. Here Comes the Breeze
  7. Love Is Better Than a Warm Trombone
  8. Get Myself Arrested
  9. Free to Run
  10. Bubble Gum Years
  11. Rie's Wagon
  12. The Comeback

CD2: B-sides (REMASTERED) + 1997 Southport demos

  1. Who’s Gonna Go the Bar
  2. Steve McCroski 
  3. Wham Bam
  4. Flavors 
  5. Old School Shirt 
  6. The Cowboy Song 
  7. Pussyfootin’
  8. Pick Up The Pieces
  9. Whippin’ Piccadilly (Turbo Version)
  10. Flats 1 & 2 
  11. Collapse
  12. Hit On The Head
  13. Slot Machine 
  14. Sweetest Song 
  15. Buena Vista
  16. 78 Stone Wobble
  17. Sun Rim Dips
  18. Walking Wounded 
  19. Bluest Heaven
  20. Getting Rained On

CD3: Demo tape to record labels + Sheffield demos + other demos

  1. 78 Stone Wobble 
  2. Whippin’ Piccadilly 
  3. Get Miles 
  4. Tijuana Lady 
  5. Rie’s Wagon 
  6. Here Come The Breeze 
  7. Steve McCroski 
  8. Bring It On
  9. Emma Freud
  10. Touchin' Up
  11. Free To Run 
  12. Unknown Legend 
  13. Get Miles 
  14. Mean Old World

CD4: BBC radio sessions + Live at Glastonbury 1998

  1. Brother Lead 
  2. 78 Stone Shuffle 
  3. The Way You Do The Things You Do 
  4. Here Comes The Breeze 
  5. Stag O’Lee 
  6. Whippin’ Piccadilly 
  7. Get Miles
  8. Get Myself Arrested
  9. Love Is Better Than A Warm Trombone
  10. R & B
  11. Here Comes The Breeze
  12. Tijuana Lady
  13. Buena Vista
  14. Make No Sound
  15. 78 Stone Wobble
  16. Soul Kitchen
  17. Whippin’ Piccadilly

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