BOB : Swag Sack (2023 remaster)

Légère Recordings

LP | Download

Released 5 December 2025

 

Late 80s John Peel-endorsed indie legends BOB reissue their 1988 compilation Swag Sack in a newly remastered and expanded vinyl format to (belatedly) commemorate the album’s 35th anniversary, Martin Gray clambers on his trusty old two wheeler and takes a welcome breeze back down a memory lane littered with discarded flexi discs and transfer lettering kits.

Here’s something to think about: Many of today’s indie kids won’t even know what a Letraset strip is. I am smugly confident that the vast majority of them haven’t got the foggiest inkling of what the frig I am talking about. Even the very brand name Letraset seems to have passed into the annals of history and become banished to the Room 101 of 80’s obsolescence that also featured stuff such as snoods, leg warmers, bubble perms, filofaxes and archaic clunky mobile phones that weighed the same as a brick and had a separate charger that was about the same size (meaning that anybody who actually owned one at the time risked looking like a bit of a prat).

In the mid to late 1980s, when fanzine culture was absolute KING, the Letraset strip played an utterly crucial role in these resourceful little photocopied DIY publications (usually A5 or A4 in size). No self respecting fanzine creator would be without at least a few of these essential aids for adding a touch of semi-professional finery to their work, even if getting all the letters to line up would present a bit of challenge in itself. I too was a graphic designer by career and I still have a huge stash of old partly-used Letraset and other transfer lettering strips (the French equivalent Mecanorma being another big rival name – showing my age now aren’t I?) squirrelled away among my hundreds of boxes of hoarded keepsakes and detritus from years gone by.

Loads of bands inevitably also resorted to using them when production of sleeve art for their records was restrained by typesetting budgets. One of these bands – a much loved quartet who came to encapsulate the very essence of Peel-endorsed quirky indie pop brilliance – was BOB. Their debut recording from 1986 – a self-released one-sided flexi disc called Prune (Your Tree) – featured a defiantly DIY cover, endearingly created using Letraset, complete with deliberately wonky alignment of wording in a couple of different type faces. This initial release soon caught the attention of John Peel who of course warmly embraced it and played it on his show. Thus began the mutual admiration between both camps which lasted right up until the band split in 1994/95.

BOB were formed in North London in 1985 as a trio of Richard Blackborow, Simon Armstrong and Jem Morris. Initially augmented by first drummer Gary Connors, this position was soon – after the first official 12″ EP What a Performance in 1987 – filled by new recruit Dean Leggett – who had previously drummed with fellow London indie luminaries Jamie Wednesday (famous of course for having two of their members become Jim Bob and Fruitbat of Carter USM after their first band splintered).

The band soon gained increasing radio play via a series of John Peel Sessions (three in total, along with one apiece on the Simon Mayo and Radio Humberside shows) and issued a brace of singles / EPs initially on independent label Sombrero, followed by all remaining releases back on their own imprint House Of Teeth (set up in 1986). BOB specialised in sharp-witted, quintessentially English-sounding melodic indie pop with jangly guitars (but not always), Smiths-like bass lines and augmented with vintage keyboard/organs (Farfisa/Moog/Vox/whatever!) which gave them a very distinctive sound that distinguished them from other indie guitar bands at the time. Many of the songs were wry observations on life and sometimes had a whimsical or quirky underbelly (Brian Wilson’s Bed, Piggery, Banwell Blues # 2) and all came replete oozing buckets of charm and instant appeal.

Often vocals were split between the main writers Blackborow and Armstrong so this in itself created a neat contrast between styles and arrangements songwise. BOB were very versatile and gained a large loyal following through much gigging during their initial existence of seven years or so, changing personnel only one more time around the onset of the 1990s when bassist Jem Morris departed to be replaced by former Caretaker Race member Stephen ‘Henry’ Hersom, in time for their first debut album proper Leave The Straight Life Behind to be issued in 1991.

 

BOB’s history is a fascinating – if often adversity-plagued – one. For one thing, when they issued their debut album it was then poorly marketed owing to the then collapse of the parent distributor Rough Trade – which of course affected many other acts on the roster at the same time and caused what can now be looked upon as one of the first major disruptive record industry-related upheavals concerning a lot of band releases – many of which failed to see the light of day, resulting in some bands undergoing periods of considerable hardship or splitting altogether.

In the case of BOB, with momentum having stalled, they had to recoup the costs from the album’s recording by touring for much longer than initially anticipated, to gradually diminishing returns and increasing disenchantment. Thus this precipitated their demise by 1995 – just as the great big behemoth that was Britpop started to make headway and steamroller all before it (ironically bands such as BOB would have arguably benefited from that slipstream, but it was sadly not to be).

After almost 25 years in the wilderness post-split, with other vocations in life invariably becoming the priority for all concerned, BOB regrouped to play a short series of one off gigs, only to find that the passion and interest in their music among all the diehards and loyal fans, who took them so much to heart at the beginning of this journey, had not diminished.

Before this point they’d already reissued a couple of specially remastered and expanded CD editions of their debut 1991 album and a complete singles (and extras) collection – via 3 Loop Music during 2014-2015. Then this was followed in 2020 by a further set of previously unreleased material comprising what would have been their second album titled You Can Stop That For A Start on vinyl and CD (the latter also including a bonus CD2 of yet more unreleased songs from their considerable vaults that were recorded between 1988 and 1994). This release was through the specialist independent reissues label Optic Nerve Recordings.

BOB were far more prolific than many (even their fans) realised. During these 30 or so ‘lost years’ they had stockpiled such a remarkable canon of work – much of it never before released – that they are still even now going through numerous tapes and looking at ways to issue yet further material.

It’s also worth noting how they have always sounded like a fully formed outfit – despite their earliest songs coming across as decidedly DIY (tinny drum machines featured on many of these early songs), their ongoing development through assured indie poppers with an astute knack for a smart melody and clever way with words (that’s all of their Sombrero output and their first couple of singles on H.O.T. up to the change in bass player in 1990) then saw them broaden their palette with a considerably more accomplished and expansive sound – taking in psychedelic rock, more dance-oriented grooves, power pop, noise/space rock and grittier sounding tracks that could be as good a match for some of the more celebrated guitar acts of the time (say mid-1990s). They were indeed a band of many facets that always sought a more ambitious approach whilst still retaining their own distinctive songwriting identity.

 

By way of backtracking then, Swag Sack, thus, is a compilation that was originally issued in 1988 on Sombrero Records to collect together their first three releases – the Prune (Your Tree) flexi and the following two 12″ EPs What A Performance (1987) and Kirsty (1988). It also served as a bit of an introduction for newcomers to their catalogue, as well as a full stop to their time with Sombrero as they soon continued using their own label House Of Teeth to release everything from 1989 onward including what is generally acknowledged as their biggest ‘hit’ and most renowned single of them all Convenience – released in spring 1989 and featured at the end of the year at number 31 on John Peel’s celebrated Festive Fifty listing.

This new reissue appends a further two extra tracks to the dozen already featured and was originally scheduled to be released in late 2023 to mark the 35th anniversary of the first issue of the album in 1988. However, as alluded to above about adversity rearing its unwelcome head again, the timing was also fraught with its own set of problems. The compilation was initially planned to be put out via Optic Nerve Recordings – the same label that issued their previous unreleased collection You Can Stop That For A Start (in 2020), but due to unforeseen and inexplicable circumstances, the album never materialised, despite new release dates being repeatedly set….and a full year on, still nothing transpired. Sadly it appears that the label itself had ceased operations at some unknown juncture and everything had gone AWOL, and no further releases that were on its schedule ever saw the light of day.

After more than 18 months delay, salvation finally arrived in the form of a small Hamburg-based independent, Légère Recordings, who have how taken over the reins and the compilation will finally surface in December after what has seemed like an almost interminable period in complete limbo.

Revisiting the collection is a blast. Key tracks such as the poptastic organ-driven single Kirsty (another beloved Peel staple – a twisted love song with that killer couplet ‘we could argue till hell starts to freeze / we could fight each other to our knees / your fingers in my eyes / mine round your neck!’) happily rub shoulders with gleeful romps through the playground like What A Performance, Deary Me and the twin-speed (slow/fast/slow/fast again) So Far So Good, whilst more reflective tunes like the beautiful plaintive The Hippy Goes Fishing (‘he’s kitted out, he has the gear / sou’wester rod and six inch beard’) and the gorgeous dreamy existential swoon that is the harmonica driven Banwell Blues No.2 (‘I’ve got more friends than I deserve / but in the week they’ve all got jobs to do’) – the latter a contender for one of the most exquisite BOB tunes of them all – offer up the variety as no two songs are really the same on this collection.

 

Then there is the almost skiffle-paced Times Like These, which often reminds me of something by alt-folk legend Martin Stephenson, the leisurely countrified swing of Piggery (‘oh what in the world was your real intent? / you can’t say that that was an accident’). The tracks on the flexi sound almost archaic by comparison, with the quickfire nagging put-downs of Prune (Your Tree) offset by that charming toy organ (‘you shouldn’t talk to me like that / you spilled my tea, you kicked my cat…… if you don’t love me any more / then what are you hanging round here for?’) whilst the whimsical Brian Wilson’s Bed* (one of two bonuses on this expanded vinyl version) is another all too brief and brisk drum machine, guitar and organ driven canter with some witty self deprecating lyrics (‘for a dole boy with less soul than a Wigan casino / I’ll languish here just flicking through back issues of Beano!’). Bocker Spammy, meanwhile (the other extra track), is a speedy C&W hoedown instrumental that is so delirious it is positively asking for a few hi-falutin’ ‘YEE-HA!‘s to be appended at the end.

* There also exists the far more accomplished and thus familiar 1988 Peel Session version – played in fake lounge jazz style – which graces the Leave The Straight Life Behind expanded 2CD release.

Swag Sack is ostensibly a small dip into the luxuriant waters of BOB’s vast back catalogue of top tunes, taking the listener back to a time (pre-post-Millennial Total Overload) when things were just that much simpler in many respects, and the very concept of ‘indie music’ was still largely verdant and self-sustaining. As long ago as 1989, there have been cassette tapes circulating from the band HQ of an entire C90’s worth of demos and other unreleased tracks that went under the collective / prospective title ‘The Spring Collection’. A few of those songs did surface later on in the reissues under new mixes (and in some cases, new titles), but most still remain under wraps, possibly to be unveiled at some future time? Given the band have already hinted at another likely ‘anthology’ of unreleased material, it could be that the time might be right for a fair number of these other hidden gems to be made available at long last. Here’s hoping.

 

 

All words by Martin Gray
Further writing by Martin can be found on his profile

BOB can still be followed on their social media page
and on their official House Of Teeth website

Purchase Swag Sack here (available in strictly limited edition):

Légère Recordings

Rough Trade Stores