Nineties Music: The Glasgow band that had to change their name after touring with Nirvana

A collection of Glasgow musicians, led by Eugene Kelly, were sued by Marvel and had to abandon their name shortly after being signed to a label in America and before going on tour. “Eugene's first band, The Vaselines, were Kurt Cobain's favourite band. Nirvana covered 3 of their songs” Grant McPhee explains.

“When Eugene's second band started they were called Captain America. Nirvana were just about to become huge and Kurt took them on tour. In an attempt to boost his new favourite band's popularity he appeared with one of their T-shirts in the press, resulting in Marvel suing them and forcing a name change to Eugenius. 

“It was quite an amazing time for them to witness Nirvana explode. They played with them a few days before Nevermind was released and experienced them changing from a tiny underground band to the biggest band the world, almost overnight.” This is just one of over 100 stories in Grant’s new book that brings together first person interviews with the musicians, record labels, venues, promoters and journalists central to the landscape across a colourful and critical 12 year period of change for Scottish music.

Postcards from Scotland: Scottish Independent Music 1983-1995 is an oral history of the era’s DIY music scene. Grant McPhee is a filmmaker and music writer. His feature length documentary Big Gold Dream was adapted into book form as Hungry Beat with co-writer Douglas MacIntyre. His documentary Teenage Superstars about the Glasgow independent music scene between 1982 and 1992, focusing on the bands that emerged from in and around the city at this point 

He has now turned his attention to a remarkable overview of music in Scotland, with first hand accounts of the rise of many of the most prolific bands from the 80s and 80s, including Cocteau Twins, The Soup Dragons, Shop Assistants, The Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Orchids, The Trashcan Sinatras, Jesse Garon, Finitribe and Primal Scream, as well as labels including Creation Records, 53rd & 3rd Records and Narodnik Records. You can order your copy of the book here. Below is an entertaining extract on Captain America, Eugene Kelly’s band after The Vaselines, featuring former members of BMX Bandits and Teenage Fanclub.

The band had a far more US underground sound; but it should be said that this influence was in part due to The Vaselines’ influence on the US underground scene itself. It had come full circle. On this side of the Atlantic, the new band brought their own unique touch.

Eugene Kelly (Vocals/Guitar): I think we chose the name just because I like Captain America comics. I’d always liked the name and I’ve never been very good at thinking of band names... I think at that point I was watching our friends be in Teenage Fanclub and I was excited to see them perform and I went to quite a lot of their early shows and I think that was a big, kind of, inspiration for Captain America.

You can even hear it in the music, we tried to sound like them and even the first couple of shows we had Brendan on drums. So it was just like ‘I love that band’ and I kind of... that’s what I want to do and it was quite derivative but if you’re a songwriter you just want to write songs and you want to play them so the songs I was writing at that point were quite influenced by Teenage Fanclub. And the same things that they were influenced by, like Big Star, because that’s... we all kind of swapped music and we all kind of had similar interests and influences. So it was just like ‘Let’s do something and let’s get out of the pub and get on the road.’

Gordon Keen (Guitar): The initial line-up was Eugene, myself, James Seenan on bass (from The Vaselines) and Brendan O’Hare (Teenage Fanclub) on drums. Frank Macdonald (Teenage Fanclub, The Pastels, etc. etc. etc. etc.) took over from Brendan after a while.

Andy Bollen joined on drums after Frank Macdonald. I don’t really recall specific influences at the time. Velvet Underground, Neil Young, Dinosaur Jr., all kinds of west coast psychedelia was what I was listening to, but from my days in the Bandits (which I was still in at the start of Captain America) we listened to such a range of music that all kinds of stuff seeped in, I think.

David Barker (Label Owner): I remember seeing Eugene Kelly in the bar at King Tut’s and saying if you get a new group going I’m up for it. I loved The Vaselines. This was maybe late 1990 or early ’91. Captain America played in London with Mudhoney in early 1991 and Brendan O’Hare was helping out on drums. Must have been there I talked to Eugene seriously about doing something.

Gordon Keen: Dave Barker had Paperhouse Records, which was one of a small collection of labels under Fire Records at the time... It was a bit of a whirlwind, as Dave had signed us after our first show. I also met my (future) wife Yuka and mother of our daughter Misa at this time, so life had suddenly changed for me in every respect. It was quite overwhelming at times, plus we were drinking and partying quite a bit, so it’s also partially hazy!

Eugene Kelly: First Captain America record, ‘Wow’, was just a, I think it was just a 12-inch. I seem to have just released 12-inches and hardly any 7-inches and... I don’t remember much about it, I mean it was just kind of a recording, we’d just signed to Fire (Paperhouse) Records, which, I mean Teenage Fanclub had been on briefly and... ’cause they seemed to be interested in what was going on in Glasgow and they were scooping up everybody that was here. And I think it just felt good to get a record out and be able to perform live again.

Gordon Keen: We recorded with Jamie Watson at Chamber Studios in Edinburgh. Eugene wanted to record there as he’d recorded The Vaselines with Jamie... I had no expectations really. We were getting a lot of attention suddenly but there was no plan, it’s not how we rolled. We were getting to put out a record on a London label, that in itself felt like the achievement.

Eugene Kelly: When you think you’re never going to really reach any great height, you don’t think anybody’s going to hear about you so you think you can get away with calling your band something that’s, you know, that is somebody else’s trademark and copyright. So, I mean, that was a big mistake.

A double whammy of legal woes befell the band. The first was, bizarrely, clothes chain C&A taking issue with the homage to their logo, as used on Captain America records. The second, more serious, issue was Marvel sending a cease and desist letter to the band and demanding they change their name. Eugene Kelly: And then we had to change the name very quickly and we made a bigger mistake by changing it to Eugenius, which probably could be the worst name ever for any band. But yeah, we chose Captain America and it would have been great if, you know, if we didn’t get a bit of interest from major labels and they didn’t tell their friends at Marvel comics that they’d just signed a band called Captain America. And if they didn’t decide to try and sue us. It would have all gone really well.

Roy Lawrence (Drums): This time for us was so mixed, but it certainly didn’t feel like game over. They happened at different times: C&A was when we were still at Paperhouse and it actually felt quite surreal, almost comical, and because we were still an indie band it held the hint of the rebellious and I think actually gave us some publicity – I still have some clippings! The record still did well enough in the indie charts, even though I think in the redesign of the sleeve we forgot to put the barcode on to clock up sales.

The Marvel one happened when we signed with Atlantic Records (in the US). My memory is that we were in Billboard magazine where Atlantic announced our signing, which caught the attention of Marvel and then subsequently their lawyers. Oomalama hadn’t been released and we had to change our name so the album came out as Eugenius.

I remember feeling a mixture of positivity and exhilaration because we had just signed to Atlantic Records and despondence that we had to lose our cool name, which I thought could be damaging, firstly because it was a great name and secondly because any momentum we had gathered had been as Captain America and people might not make the connection or want to wear a Eugenius T-shirt in the same way!

However, our first album hadn’t even been released and we were lining up for our first American and Canadian tour with the wonderful Mudhoney so I felt our world was opening, not closing.

Gordon Keen: I think we garnered mixed reviews for the album, and the expectations around the album had got a bit out of hand in my opinion. Maybe people weren’t expecting that the album was reasonably lo-fi in production as an aesthetic.

We didn’t have a really settled line-up as yet, that came when Roy Lawrence joined on drums and Raymond Boyle on bass, that’s the line-up which was our finest, in that we really gelled as a band and as a group of people. Roy and Raymond were as good a rhythm section that existed at that time, I used to love rehearsing with them.

Some of our best work was probably never committed to tape. That said, we do have hours of unreleased material we recorded, post-Mary Queen of Scots, which would be nice to share with the world at some point.

Roy Lawrence: [Why did the album not do as well as expected?] It’s a big question that probably needs a lot of views to construct a narrative that explains it, like everyone in a room drawing a picture of a lightbulb. It’s there, we all see it from a different angle, and only when everyone’s pictures are seen collectively can we see the whole lightbulb!

Some of my thoughts – as mentioned before, the fact it was Eugenius and not Captain America that released [Oomalama] I believe will have had some impact, either through people not knowing, or no longer liking or caring for us as passionately. We had a good following as Captain America and gigs were busy (see the Buttermilk video, which was filmed at a real gig in Windsor the night the castle burned!).

This is also a perception in the UK, because I think the album did well on college radio in America. I remember seeing a college chart somewhere where we were number one while on tour with Mudhoney. There was a real break between the UK and America when we signed to Atlantic.

Atlantic weren’t too concerned about the UK and wanted to break us in America so we spent a lot of time touring there, and in Canada and Japan.

I think that led to a drop in our profile and popularity in the UK, because we weren’t focusing on it, because of Atlantic’s plans. I also believe this led to the music press, who were so England/London-centric anyway, to have further reason to take a dim view of us.

You have to remember, they weren’t much better with the Fanclub and gave them a hard time for Bandwagonesque! We had writers like Everett True giving it a kicking, though without the courage to admit that when he was in Seattle (if you read the review he says he liked it when he was with Kurt, but didn’t when he came back to the UK). So we started to get some traction in America, Canada and Japan and get more resentment back in the UK. Such are the choices we make.

Despite the (unjustified) mixed reviews the album did reasonably well. As mentioned, the band were hugely being pushed in America, most notably by Kurt Cobain. Nevermind was about to be released and would change the landscape of the US charts. Anything remotely connected with Nirvana or grunge was now big business and the band Kurt talked about most was his hero Eugene Kelly’s new band.

Nirvana played the Reading Festival on 23 August 1991. This was a month before the release of Nevermind and three days before ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was shared with the world. Not everyone was aware of the tsunami awaiting them, but the audience were more than sure they were the hottest band at the festival.

In November and December, as Nevermind mania hit the world, Nirvana took Captain America on a tour of the UK as support. They revisited Calton Studios, where Eugene had played with the reformed Vaselines a year earlier, now to a hugely different reception.

Andrew Tully (Singer, Rote Kapelle): It was pandemonium. About five weeks before Nevermind came out, Ewan Mathieson, who was now working for Rough Trade, sent us up a taped copy of the album that he had been given by our mutual friend Keith Cameron.

As soon as we put it on in the shop it was like Moses and the burning bush – a revelation. We ended up playing it in the shop three times a day. What was lovely about Nirvana was how they seemed to fit into that Scottish thing of being pals with the bands that you like and taking them on tour with you ’cause you want to hang out with your pals!