Fresh off the heels of announcing their first album in 15 years, Happiness Bastards, legendary rock band The Black Crowes today announced their 2024 headline tour – set to hit 35 cities in North America and Europe this Spring in support of their forthcoming studio album. Opening with “100 Mile High City”, a guitar-tactic high water mark in the band’s career, it’s an album which kicks off with no little vim and vigour and the first three tracks raise the expectation that it may eclipse its predecessor. Their first album is reissued on 20 January with Marchin’ Already scheduled for release on 17 February 2014. 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.

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. One of the few acts that genuinely deserved their moment in the Britpop sunshine was Ocean Colour Scene, a West Midlands quartet whose previous record label had remixed their debut album without their consent in a cynical attempt to jump on the baggy bandwagon of the early 90s. On 4 February 2014, Marchin' Already was reissued as a two disc deluxe version, with the second disc containing B-sides from previous singles. The Ocean Colour Scene debut will be issued as a two-CD deluxe edition with a bonus disc which gathers up early singles and B-sides in addition to a couple of outtakes. 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.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. 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". 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. 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. 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. Anyone who has read more than a handful of my reviews will be familiar with my oddly conflicted attitude to the mid-90s Britpop movement.This will come packaged with a book that includes new sleeve notes with testimony from the band themselves, four badges and a poster. It’s a great way to sign off a mixed bag of an album that inspires wows and indifference in equal measures. 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 model was not built to last, so by the end of the decade Britpop had burned itself out, leading to mass-culls from record labels now desperate to save cash and leaving a bunch of acts who should never have seen the inside of a recording studio feeling really rather bitter about the entire experience. Australian composer and producer Madeleine Cocolas has always been an artist who finds no need to differentiate in her inspired post-classical/ambient work.

The songs were taken from the band's catalogue that they had built up since forming several years earlier. 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. 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. History suggests that they were always destined to dwell in the twin shadows of Paul Weller (pretty much Britpop’s only solo act) and the omnipresent Oasis, however at this point in the 90s, with Weller enduring something of a temporary lull in form and Oasis’ being exposed as the musical snake oil salesmen they had always been, OCS were able to outshine both.Having been burnt badly by the experience, half of OCS eventually looked up and found themselves backing Paul Weller, while the band as a whole circulated a newly recorded demo-tape. Steve Cradock famously retorted "it's an honour to be described as Britain's second best band, ahead of Oasis but behind the Beatles".

Moseley Shoals changed the course of OCS’s career and had established them as a retro rocking quartet who realised that there was more to the history of rock and roll than just a bunch of white blokes with guitars. 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" ! 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.A more subdued version of "Traveller's Tune" originally appeared as a B-side to "The Day We Caught the Train". It’s also an album which confirms the belief of some that at least two thirds of Britpop acts were capable of great singles, but struggled when it came to album-length statements (that said, there’s a truly great multi-artist box set of the Britpop Years still waiting to be compiled).