HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL immerge from post-industrial wasteland to pitch for pop success. James Attlee reports.

Hope Springs Eternal

It's easy to get totally disillusioned with pop music, when Top of the Pops is dominated by Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, Thunderbird puppets and 31-year-old millionairesses extolling the virtues of sado-masochism to children. But then a band comes along to remind you of what the best of rock and roll is all about.

Emerging from the post-industrial wasteland of the Northeast, Hope Springs Eternal have a sound that refreshes parts sewer-dwelling amphibians cannot reach. They make you dance, they make you laugh, they make your ears ring. They give a jaded music fan hope.

It must be 100 degrees in the cavernous basement Hope Spring Eternal are shortly to be filling with their wall to wall sound. Outside, the night is tropical and the drink-vendors adjust their prices accordingly. The band have spent ten-hours on the motorway and singer Bill Angus confesses at the sound check to feeling like he's "on another planet - the planet Transit van."

The promoter hovers and cannot resist the occasional glance out the door as if hoping to catch sight of the absent audience. Selling rock and roll in Brixton on a baking Friday night looks like being about as profitable as taking ice-cream to the Eskimos.

Come showtime and a potentially disappointing evening is turned around. Enough punters materialise to soak up at least some of the sound, and I lope Springs Eternal play it like it's Madison Square Gardens in any case.

The Middlesborough beat is kicked along by Baz Davies, surely the most powerful and inventive young drummer around, rhythm partner Aidan Poulter on bass appears to have been fitted with springs for legs, while in contrast guitarist Andy Elliott (the only man, incidentally. to sport a pair of one-size-fits-all jeans that will be forever linked with another town beginning with 'M') rocks back on his heels and grins serenely at the ceiling. And then there's Bill Angus, HSE's diminutive mouthpiece for the band's fragmented and impressionistic lyrics targeting topics like yuppies, immortality and money. He's stripped in the heat to a pair of cut-down Levis and a stratocaster and his flyweight frame strains with passion. It occurs to me that the Angus ribcage has much in common with Dr Who's Tardis - somehow into that confined space someone has poured a voice that would fill a stadium. And Billy knows who.

It's hard to describe the sound these guys make when they collide. If you can imagine the passion of a U2 without the pomp, the Edge's guitar meanderings condensed to intense 20 second melodic-bursts, Bono's vocals injected with the hoarse urgency of a Joe Strummer delivering melodies that stick to the back of the brain and won't let go, the whole thing taken at double speed - you still wouldn't have it.

Put it this way: saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal are innocent enough substances on their own - then a couple of thousand years ago someone put them together and came up with gunpowder, and changed the face of the earth. For every great rock and roll band there are ten thousand failures who never get the mixture quite right. Then from an obscure garage somewhere emerge a bunch of people who have combined their talents and cracked the combination of the magic formula - the results are explosive. Hope Springs Eternal are such a band.

After it's all over and the rest of the lads are humping gear back up the steps (no loyal fans down here as yet to take the place of roadies) Bill Angus puts a towel round his steaming shoulders and agrees to talk outside, after expressing an initial worry that he might catch pneumonia. Pneumonia in a heat wave - with this lot anything can happen.

We talk around the origins of the band - it's Bill's baby and it's two years old now with only bass-player Aidan a recent recruit. Andy the guitarist is Bill's cousin, and Baz the drummer was in Bill's first band when he was 17: "We were atrocious." As for musical roots and influences Bill confesses a love for the early Chamaeleons but rejects the idea of treading too closely in anybody's footsteps.

"For the last few years we've been concentrating on not copying anybody. As far as influences go, before the Chamaeleons there was punk and before that there was all kinds of nameless things in my early adolescence which you don't go into!"

I suggested that in terms of sheer energy the punk influence may have endured. "Punk was a very important time for live bands, I don't think there's been a time like it for live bands since the early 60s. I heard a lot of bands and saw a lot of bands that were atrocious and I thought if I can't do better than that...well, I was certain I could do better. It's an inspiration when you see someone truly atrocious and they're on the TV. you know what I mean? It's not to do with complication is it, its not to do with musicianship, because that ends up as heavy metal guitar solo's...it's better to be able to do the things and deliberately not do them, which is another thing we've tried to do."
I wondered what Bill's reaction to the current music scene was, specifically the media-besieged city of Manchester and the much-vaunted scene emanating from it. Can he relate to it?

"I can relate to it, but only on a business level. I can see the approach they're taking but I don't really care for it, I'm not really bothered by it. We could jump on the bandwagon and do the Manchester beat which has become like the Motown beat - although it won't turn out to be anything like it - but we could do that and get the right haircuts and shake the right tambourines and the right maracas at the right moment but we're not prepared to do that, we're not interested in following any trend, we're just interested in being ourselves...we're more confident than we've ever been. One thing the Manchester scene and bands like The Wonder Stuff have done is open up possibilities. Anything that's decent people'll listen to. Fans of the Stone Roses will dance to The Wonder Stuff and Wonder Stuff fans will dance to The Stone Roses - it's good because it's breaking down social barriers.

"We've got a local following at home but it's something we don't like to count on, otherwise you end up playing to your friends and your friends love you and you love them back. We're looking for a long term record contract - we're not interested in short term deals because we're not interested in fame for a year or two years, then being flushed with the rest of the junk that comes out with the record companies - I'm looking at as long as it takes. Then again I realise we're writing songs now that if we don't record them they'll be lost. We're building up a lot of new songs and we're looking back at old songs and thinking it would have been nice if that was on an album."