When Elastica’s second album The Menace was released in April 2000 few people – least of all the band – really seemed to care. There was one single, a short tour and a handful of promotional activities. Typical of the tone was a knackered-looking Justine Frischmann appearing on pop TV show The O-Zone, saying the album “was something we just had to get over, and get out of the way to move on.”
There was no irony or ambiguity in the title The Menace. The album, or more precisely the band’s inability to bring it together, did indeed menace all involved – Elastica cycled through band members and spent years (alongside a reputed £350,000) on tracks that went nowhere. Yet the whole process, and the people who floated in and out of it over that half-decade, left shadowy imprints on the final record, even though the final version of the album was recorded in six weeks for ten grand. The Menace, then, is an unusual combination of glacial and frantic – which is perhaps why it’s a neglected masterpiece.
I often think about the liminal space between the two Elastica albums, their much-hyped debut released thirty years ago this month, and its follow-up nearly five years later . (Deploying an architectural metaphor like “liminal space” seems apt, since Justine studied the subject and, post-Elastica, co-hosted the BBC3 show Dreamspaces). This is because, and if it’s not obvious already, I was definitely one of those few people who cared about The Menace. I had loved them for years, with pleasurable memories of their 1993 to 1995 high life. Anxious to lock in my front-row spot at an Elastica gig I once queued from 2pm to get in. Guitarist Donna Matthews spotted me, came out, told me that she liked my fringe, and gave me a sip of her Beck’s.
I should have realised, back then, that a second Elastica album might be a while coming. In the summer of 1995, when their debut album was a few months old, Elastica played at the Kentish Town Forum. I had started to hope for new material by this point. Even though they’d been famous for a couple of years, Elastica didn’t actually have that many songs; moreover, the songs were short, so they got through a shit-ton of them at each gig. I’d experienced similar setlists for months. I had a fan’s impatience for more.
A new track, just the one, was debuted that night: the never-recorded ‘Keep It On Ice’. Listening to it now – there is a live version recorded in Japan on YouTube, dating from the same month as the Forum show – it’s striking how much it sounds like their first Peel Session from 1993. Perfectly serviceable, but hardly the basis for an inventive second album.
Then Annie Holland, the bassist, left the band.
“Always change, to remain” (‘Nothing Stays The Same’)
Annie Holland is the first of several Elastica ghosts to haunt the band’s inter-album years. Holland, aloof, older, black-clad and shaggy-haired, who thought The Stranglers were too arty and not proper punk, was gone. The reason Holland gave for leaving, in August 1995, was tour exhaustion. “At Glastonbury I could hardly hold my bass, let alone play it,” she told the NME. “That’s why I looked so miserable.”
Holland was to rejoin Elastica in 1999, just before the release of the 6 Track EP; and on the back cover photomontage of The Menace, she’s notable for appearing cheerful (two teeth-baring smiles: none on anyone else). In her absence, The Menace’s bass sound was developed by Annie’s replacement, Sheila Chipperfield.
Now a DJ living in Berlin, Chipperfield’s interests lean towards electroclash and abrasive European disco: Ellen Allien, Peaches, Stereo Total. She was younger than Annie, and younger than everyone else in the band too. Although Holland plays most of the bass parts on The Menace, Chipperfield’s bass is heard on The Menace’s ‘Image Change’; sinister, sombre, spacey.
Justine Frischmann also headhunted a fifth member in the form of Dave Bush, brought on board for keyboards and programming (in itself, a statement of intent), and chosen because of his work with The Fall in the early 1990s. Dave liked “dance music, it was always dance music,” as he told the F.a.l.l.o.u.t.p.o.d.c.a.s.t in 2024. He was sceptical of guitar bands, even The Fall, who he thought were “Les Dawson and piano” before he started playing with them. Bush had a talent for digitising the sounds in an awkward bastard’s head, and the first minute of ‘Crew Filth’, from Code: Selfish, is a foretaste of what he would bring to The Menace.
An appearance on BBC Radio 1’s Evening Session, broadcast on 5 August 1996, revealed the new line-up and debuted four tracks – ‘I Want You’, ‘A Love Like Ours’, ‘Only Human’ and ‘The Other Side’. Two were Frischmann-led, two by Matthews, but all were scuzzier, and far less happy, than the saucy monochrome directness of their debut album. Elastica had never particularly suited the Britpop label and they were, with this session, moving even further from it. ‘The Other Side’, in particular, sounds more like an American riot grrrl band such as Heavens To Betsy – only Frischmann’s accent gives the game away.
Another new track was released without ceremony in 1997, a cover of the X song ‘Unheard Music’, performed in duet with Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. In all of these jarring, very fresh-sounding songs, it felt like Elastica had stopped trying to please people. “We’re trying to find a new sound for the band because the line-up is so different now,” Frischmann told Alternative Press in 1997. “I spent the whole of last year trying to write songs that were Elastica Mk I, and they just didn’t feel right. You can’t force a direction because that’s what you think you should be doing.” She went on to say that they had recorded 25 songs and demoed a further 30: this material was “dramatically darker”. While ‘A Love Like Ours’ and ‘Only Human’ – both the Donna Matthews compositions – would be re-recorded for The Menace, it seems that all of Frischmann’s Menace tracks date from 1997 or later.
“E! The possibilities / L! Keep going on” (‘How He Wrote Elastica Man’)
There’s a Mark E. Smith Esquire interview from 1997 which caught, in real time, his recruitment to The Menace sessions. “Excuse me, are you Mark E. Smith?” asked Sheila Chipperfield, spotting him in a London pub. After he confirmed the bleedin’ obvious, she called someone – perhaps Dave Bush, perhaps Justine Frischmann, perhaps Donna Matthews. “I’m in the pub. Mark Smith’s here… yes, in the pub.” Matthews joined Chipperfield and, along with Fall keyboardist Julia Nagle, they started to chat.
Mark E. Smith had been dismissive about Elastica in the past – well, they were hardly the only ones to suffer that fate – and was frank with them now. He observed, not unreasonably, that they’d “been sitting in this studio for a year with your fingers up your arses.” The Dave Bush connection helped, and Smith and Nagle went along to the studio later. “I was terrified,” Frischmann admitted in 2000. “My knees were actually knocking.”
The first, and most distinctive, of the two Mark E Smith and Julia Nagle tracks is ‘How He Wrote Elastica Man’. Elastica had been working on this unnamed track for a while. “We didn’t know what to do with it,” Frischmann told the NME in 2000, “and he walked into the studio room and plugged his mic into an amp, turned it up until it was all feeding back and started shouting.” While the title is an on-the-nose tribute, the scrappy clash of styles is almost perfect; and it would give The Menace a rare moment of levity. The second track, ‘K.B.’, leans more towards The Fall equation (and is reputed to stand for ‘Karl Burns’, that band’s drummer, known for his hard hitting and frequent spats with Mark E. Smith). Frischmann barks out non-sequiturs, and Elastica drummer Justin Welch does Karl Burns proud, putting in one of his greatest performances. According to Dave Bush, ‘K.B.’ was “knocked together in about five minutes”. Mark E. Smith would later be a live guest of Elastica when they returned to the stage, not performing exactly, but prowling the stage, dismantling Justin’s drumkit, irritating the stagehands.
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“It might be better / If I left you now” (‘Image Change’)
Unquestionably the biggest between-album loss to Elastica was Donna Matthews. Although she had written only a minority of the songs in Elastica Mk I, her compositions were arguably more exploratory (‘2:1’, the debut album’s ‘Fade Away And Radiate’, was hers). “She could play guitar better than me, and sing better than me, and at that point her songs were working better than my songs,” Frischmann said in 2003 of the early Menace development period.
Matthews has called her material of this period “intricate”, but “because we were out of our heads, we couldn’t seem to put it in a cohesive form.” This brittleness eventually became a source of sonic strength, and her tracks – ‘Image Change’, ‘Nothing Stays The Same’, ‘Human’ and ‘Love Like Ours’- are among the most splintered Menace moments of all.
Matthews became de facto band leader when Justine took a few months away from the sessions. She gained confidence (she has called herself “egotistical”), but when Frischmann returned, the two clashed and Matthews quit. In 2004, when she had started a new, komische musik-inspired band called Klang, Matthews spoke of her musical loves, which included Scout Niblett, Erase Errata, and the Blues musician Elizabeth Cotton. The variety of her influences can be heard in her Menace songs, refracted through her knotty, upset mind.
“What I want / Is a big love, two spoons in a drawer, the master plan” (‘My Sex’)
And what of Justine Frischmann? Although I’m sure I would have liked a Matthews-led band (indeed, Klang’s 2004 album No Sound Is Heard is excellent) it was Frischmann who inspired my devotion. I’m sure that there were many points in the process that she wanted to permanently walk out, just as others had, leaving the album in scraps. But she didn’t.
Justine Frischmann’s songs on The Menace, for me, are incredible. Her lyrics now reject the cute rhymes of the debut (such as “Honda” with “Peter Fonda” on ‘Car Song’) and delve into sadness, yearning, ugly anger. She also became far more experimental in electronic sounds. ‘Mad Dog’, as she explained, was “my first go at programming.” Dave Bush set her up with the music software Cubase, and that’s “what I came up with, the drum beat and the dog noises.” ‘Mad Dog’ is also the first song that Elastica Mk III worked on – the line-up that saw Linoleum’s Paul Jones replacing Matthews, Chipperfield leaving and Annie Holland rejoining, and the addition of (Sharon) Mew on vocals and keyboards. Jones took a prominent role in writing ‘Generator’ alongside Frischmann, arguably the only song from The Menace that would have snugly fitted on their debut.
Two songs, in particular, were by Frischmann without much band input: ‘Miami Nice’ and ‘My Sex’. These featured a co-writing credit for Kingmaker’s Loz Hardy. Kingmaker! The butt of indie jokes, and yet here was Loz, co-writing two melancholy ambient-edged tracks. It seems Frischmann and Hardy supported one another at a time when their respective band links were faltering, and both were feeling the sting of the press: for Frischmann, intrusion thanks to her relationship with Damon Albarn; for Hardy, indifference and hostility. “Me and Justine started to do some tunes which kinda caught the mood at the time,” Hardy said in 2000. “It was good for me because I wasn’t releasing anything, I wasn’t ready for that, so it was a good confidence builder.”
Frischmann saw the instrumental ‘Miami Nice’ as an isolationist experiment; the bridge between her songs, and those written by Matthews. But ‘My Sex’ was not so detached. It was widely assumed that the lyrics of this half-spoken track were aimed at an ex-boyfriend: not so, she said. Although it was “probably the most personal thing I’ve ever done,” she said, it was general; “the most perfect moments you’ve ever had with anyone in your life.” ‘My Sex’ is an undoubted album highlight, and an Elastica completely unrecognisable from their earlier incarnation.
The final ghost with her spectral fingerprints on the very last leg of The Menace was a friend of Frischmann. Like Loz Hardy, Maya Arulpragasam was independent of the sometimes supportive, sometimes destructive Elastica energy. But unlike Loz, Arulpragasam was not famous – yet. “I met Justine, and we just hit it off,” she said in the 2018 documentary Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. Arulpragasam seems to have given Justine a real late-surge in enthusiasm for her own music, taking her friend out of an Elastica past she had dragged around with her like a beached whale.
Arulpragasam directed the video for ‘Mad Dog’ for £100, featuring B-girls dancing under the Westway; she photographed Frischmann’s growling mouth for the cover of The Menace; and she also accompanied Elastica on tour for a never-completed documentary. “I hated it,” Arulpragasam said of the tour. Uncomfortable footage, seen in Matangi/Maya/M.I.A, shows her lonely and crying, with a frazzled Frischmann caught between her friend and her band. But away from the tour hothouse, the friendship between the two endured. Back in London, Frischmann lent Arulpragasam her Roland MC-505. M.I.A.’s debut single, ‘Galang’, was composed on it.
The Frischmann of 1999/2000, as seen in Arulpragasam’s videos, now had long hair, favoured sleeveless t-shirts, 80s sun visors, and army jackets. She also seemed shyer than she had been before. She was usually interviewed alone, was very unwilling to answer personal questions, and made it clear to all that, as she put it, “the whole notoriety, fame game thing totally sickens me and always has done.”
“It’ll be alright.” (‘The Way I Like It’)
The Menace spent two weeks on the UK album chart, reaching a high of number 24. Only ‘Mad Dog’ was pulled from it as a single. It appeared it a couple of months afterwards, almost because someone remembered that’s what you were meant to do. In the UK, The Menace was met with a critical shrug, although it got a better reception in the US. As for me, buying it on the day it came out (obviously), I soon realised that The Menace would become one of my favourite-ever albums.
Elastica lasted only a matter of months longer. It was almost as if, now that had exorcised their menace, there was nothing bonding the group together anymore. Later, details of substance and inter-personal issues also emerged (which this essay, intentionally, has only gently touched on) and The Menace is remembered, if at all, as the my-drugs-hell collapse of a promising band.
This does the album an immense disservice. While some of those struggles clearly influenced the sound of The Menace, to say that album is only a result of that is to dismiss the multiple and disparate influences, the electronic experimentation, and bravery of the band to break with their past. “I loved Elastica,” Dave Bush said in 2024. “Great people. We had a really great time.” I heard it as a genuine sentiment.
Listening to The Menace now, the anxiety of the present day suits the songs and, away from the expectations and baggage, the album can be heard on its own terms. And maybe Justine Frischmann did care far more about it than she let on in those promotional duties. “I think it’s a great album,” she said backstage at the Reading Festival in 2000. “People just haven’t listened to it with open ears.”
