The Family Cat - Place with a Name

How cool were the Family Cat in the very late '80s/early '90s? Pretty fucking cool. So cool, in fact, that in the US city where I was living at the time, when a media war broke out between two indie record shops, one of them made a triumphal claim of oneupmanship over the other by pointing out that "We had the Family Cat before they did". (I was in London a couple months after this, and met the band and told them this story, and to say they were delighted would be a bit of an understatement. One of them told me there were little towns in the US that they had never heard of, where they were number one on the college radio station.)

There's probably an element of "you had to be there". There wasn't anything particularly spectacular about their music; catchy, shambolic indie guitar bands were kind of a dime a dozen in those days (aren't they always?) but something about the Family Cat really did stand them out from the rest. I suppose a lot of it just probably came down to attitude...and song titles like "Tom Verlaine". How can you go wrong with a song called "Tom Verlaine"?

I'll post that song another time but for now I think I'll go with this, their third single, from 1990. Probably the most "accessible" of their early material, it's a song that never fails to give me a lift - even though it's a little darker, lyrically, than the tempo and deceptively cheery chorus might suggest.