We were spoilt in the mid 1990s, with new bands and new musical movements being touted every week by a music press drunk on their own powers. But this meant it was a very good time to be a music-obsessed teenager. Britpop’s last rites were beginning to be read by journalists around the time of Further’s release in 1997. But in my bedroom in North Yorkshire, I was still gulping in the latest “next big things” with hunger. I loved pop too – The Spice Girls and Let Loose rubbed shoulders with the Cocteau Twins and Underworld – but it was guitar indie that gripped my eager heart by ’97.
The problem for bands like Geneva is that they arrived at a time of incredible over-supply in the indie arena. Pulp, Blur and Oasis were ridiculously huge and beginning to lose the plot. Radiohead avoided the Britpop tag. The also-rans were hardly lost minnows (Supergrass, The Verve, The Bluetones) either, with regular trips to the top 20. Geneva were more mysterious and important-sounding, at least to me. They were Suede-ish without the litter on the breeze.
In my book, Connection is a Song: Coming Up and Coming Out Through the Music of the ’90s, I describe “a tangle of urgent guitars and a voice that could orbit the moon” on first listening to Further. I’m describing Andrew Montgomery’s falsetto notes on the album’s best song, ‘Into the Blue’and other key tracks, ‘No-One Speaks’ and ‘Best Regrets’.
“It makes my skin feels tender, shoots shivers down my arms; its driving upward urgency is like the feeling of falling in love, or how I imagine that to be. The tree in the pale blue at the edge of the world [on the album cover] belongs to them but its moonbeam casts a pathway to me.”
The problem was that nobody else seemed to notice Geneva and without the internet to help join the dots of indie fandom back then, I thought I was their only fan. And yet they were, for a few days, the best new band in the world. They had helped me start my journey to the verges of the indie music scene “with its jewels of rain, its beetle pathways and its muddy fingernails”. I loved this album because it felt like mine. Which album feels like yours?
More reading: The Everlasting Tale of the Teenage Outsider
A version of this article first featured in The New Cue.
Anna Doble
June 2024
For your savage amusement 
The album that feels like mine is A Walk Across the Rooftops by The Blue Nile. I’ve never heard anything like it before or since. Having said that, I played Bernard Butler’s new album (‘Good Grief’) the other day and it felt like he was in the room, speaking to me.
My album is an oxymoron. I’ve got many, so it depends when you ask. A Walk Across the Rooftops by the Blue Nile is up there. Never heard anything like it before or since. I have a real fondness for Mainstream by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. It passed a lot of people by but it’s really good. I’ll have a different selection tomorrow, but there’s today’s.