Marchin' Already

Product Information

It’s a great way to sign off a mixed bag of an album that inspires wows and indifference in equal measures.

One of the few acts that genuinely deserved their moment in the Britpop sunshine was Ocean Colour Scene, a West Midlands quartet whose previous record label had remixed their debut album without their consent in a cynical attempt to jump on the baggy bandwagon of the early 90s.

Where it hits its highs, OCS prove themselves to be a great guitar-orientated rock band with a well honed soulful edge, however there’s also a fair bit of the album that sounds like retro-rock by numbers. This will come packaged with a book that includes new sleeve notes with testimony from the band themselves, four badges and a poster. Marchin’ Already was the album that confirmed Ocean Colour Scene as a capable rock and roll singles act that were a cut above the more generic Britpop footsoldiers. Australian composer and producer Madeleine Cocolas has always been an artist who finds no need to differentiate in her inspired post-classical/ambient work.

A further audio disc offers up a hour of live performance capturing the band’s gig at the Manchester Apollo on 22 February 1998 and a DVD – Travellers Tunes: Live at Stirling Castle (originally a VHS release in ’98) – completes the set. This inevitably resulted in a lot of mediocre acts getting signed and ultimately a lot of tepid music that were then shoved down the collective throats of my generation.Fresh off the heels of announcing their first album in 15 years, Happiness Bastards, legendary rock band The Black Crowes today announced their 2024 headline tour – set to hit 35 cities in North America and Europe this Spring in support of their forthcoming studio album. For the Marchin’ Already box (which will also be issued as a two-CD deluxe), the original album takes up the first disc and is joined by a second CD of B-sides, radio sessions and previously unreleased demos. The album knocked Oasis' Be Here Now off the top spot in the UK Albums Chart— Noel Gallagher sent Ocean Colour Scene his congratulations through a plaque on which he had inscribed, "To The Second Best Band In Britain". There is also a three disc/one DVD super deluxe version with added demos and radio sessions on Disc 2 and a live concert from the Marchin' Already tour from the Manchester Apollo on 22 February 1998, with the original released VHS of their concert from Stirling Castle making up the DVD release. Marchin’ Already is just one of those albums where the singles released from it overshadowed the vast majority of the album, with only the instrumental “All Up”, “Foxy’s Folk Faced” and the aforementioned “It’s a Beautiful Thing” avoiding that fate.

Granted, the quartet’s innate talent pretty much carries them through the album’s less interesting songs, and the fact that they displayed significantly less opinion-splitting arrogance than either of the Gallagher brothers ensures that even their lesser numbers never explore the teeth-grindingly awful depths that the very worst Britpop frequently sunk to. Steve Cradock famously retorted "it's an honour to be described as Britain's second best band, ahead of Oasis but behind the Beatles".

One of these tapes ended up in the hands of a Mr N Gallagher, whose opinions were at the time held in such esteem that the once washed up Ocean Colour Scene found themselves re-signed and heading in the studio to record what would ultimately result in Moseley Shoals, one of the biggest selling albums of 1996, and one which found them rubbing shoulders with both the worthy, and unworthy, Britpop elite. Their first album is reissued on 20 January with Marchin’ Already scheduled for release on 17 February 2014. This led to a lot of acts that weren’t really Britpop being tagged with the name when they were nothing of the sort (Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers, etc), as well as a bizarre goldrush of record labels trying to sign any four or five piece who happened to be drinking in a Camden that weekend.