Music Monday: Veruca Salt

Let me take you back to a time before the internet, before Spotify, before 6Music.  A time when the only place to hear new music was on Lamacq & Whiley's Evening Session on Radio 1 or in your local indie record shop.  Nowhere to read about new artists apart from the NME, Melody Maker, and the shoddily photocopied zines that advertised in the back pages of the music press.  This was my era, when I came of age as a music fan and somehow managed to discover a new and exciting world: riot grrrl.

To be fair, Veruca Salt didn't exactly fit into the riot grrrl genre, being more a grunge/pop band in the vein of Belly.  But for sixteen year old me in suburban West Yorkshire, they seemed pretty damned riotous.  I found Number One Blind on a coloured vinyl 7" in a record shop in Halifax and proceeded to play it death.  My appreciation for the band only deepened when I was given a copy of this book, Never Mind The Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock (which you can buy for 1p on Amazon, and which has one of the coolest book covers ever), which contained a long interview with Veruca Salt's Nina Gordon and Louise Post. 

While the Deal sisters were steeped in the seedy glamour of drug addiction, Kristin Hersh was excitingly bipolar, and Courtney Love... well, she was Courtney, Louise and Nina seemed to be refreshingly normal.  Heroin use, mental breakdowns and flings with Evan Dando and Billy Corgan were clearly beyond me, but playing guitar in a band with my mates; that was something that I could aspire to.