Mew released a single called She Came Home For Christmas in 1997. Somehow, in the early 2000's I stumbled across the video for it on MTV and thought it was nice (although it's now been at least 15 years since I heard it, so I wonder what it sounds like now). Looking at Discogs, it might be because ...Christmas was also on Frengers, an album that collected some of their earlier releases and was released in 2000.
Anyway, I kept the name in my mind as a band I should check out. In 2003 my local HMV happened to stock a 7" of their newest single for a very reasonable £1, so I bought it one morning before college (along with a cheap cd of Minor Threat's first demo tape - quite the odd pairing of purchases). Am I Wry? No did much less for me at the time than I remember She Came Home For Christmas doing. In a sense there was a comparable grandeur - only here it was in the songwriting, rather than the song itself; they squeeze a lot into that song, possibly at some detriment to it. The b-side is a live recording of Behind the Drapes from the same album, which I remember preferring to the a-side. The gentle backing vocals just hovering behind the lead singer later in the song always appealed to me. It was a much simpler affair, but nice.
Anyway, that was the extent of my dabbling with the band Mew. However, in the 14 years that followed I'd occasionally see their name pop up, often from friends I wouldn't have expected to be fans. Recently, Frengers was reissued for Record Store Day and lots of people got very excited. It's nice that the band grew a large and obsessive fanbase whilst I wasn't paying attention. That's much nicer than finding out that they faded away to obscurity.
Format: 7"
Tracks: 2
Cost: £1 new
Bought: HMV Winchester
When: 16/06/03
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no
