Marchin' Already

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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. 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. On 4 February 2014, Marchin' Already was reissued as a two disc deluxe version, with the second disc containing B-sides from previous singles. But how is it that no one has ever noticed the striking resemblance of the song "Hundred Mile High City" to the SRC song, "Up All Night" !

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.

A more subdued version of "Traveller's Tune" originally appeared as a B-side to "The Day We Caught the Train". 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. Much like Moseley Shoals, Marchin’ Already struggles to maintain its momentum, resulting in an album of peaks and troughs and little in the way of consistency.

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. 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. 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 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.

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".

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.Marchin’ Already is OCS’s only album to hit the top of the charts, displacing the charmless bloated mess that was Oasis’s Be Here Now as it did so. 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. Australian composer and producer Madeleine Cocolas has always been an artist who finds no need to differentiate in her inspired post-classical/ambient work. In 2007 the song "Get Blown Away" was covered by British indie band The Enemy as a B-side to their single "It's Not OK", albeit just a piano and vocal version.