Inspiral Carpets

Inspiral Carpets are an alternative rock band from Oldham in Greater Manchester, England formed by Graham Lambert and Stephen Holt in 1983. The band is named after a clothing shop on their Oldham estate. Their sound is based around psychedelic keyboards and guitars.

Schoolfriends Lambert and Holt recruited drummer Craig Gill, and formed Inspiral Carpets in 1983, originally as a garage punk band. After various other members had come and gone, by 1987 the line-up included bassist David Swift and organist Clint Boon (whose Ashton-under-Lyne studio the band had been using for rehearsals). The band released two albums worth of demos in the 1980s, Waiting for Ours and Songs of Shallow Intensity, including songs that would later be re-recorded.

They came to prominence, alongside bands like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, in the 'Madchester' scene of the late 1980s. After a flexi-disc featuring Garage Full Of Flowers given free with Manchester's Debris magazine in 1987, followed by the Cow cassette, their first release proper, the 1988 Planecrash EP on the Playtime label received much airplay from Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who asked the band to record a session for his show. At the time of their initial success, the band earned some notoriety for their squiggly-eyed cow 'Cool as Fuck' T-shirts; a student at Oxford Polytechnic was prosecuted on obscenity charges for wearing one. They reworked their single "Find Out Why" as the theme tune to the 8:15 from Manchester. As their popularity grew, Playtime's distributor Red Rhino Records went bust, leading the band to form their own label, Cow Records in March 1989, the labels' first release being the Trainsurfing EP. In the same year, Holt and Swift departed to form The Rainkings, with the band recruiting Too Much Texas singer Tom Hingley and Martin "Bungle" Walsh of The Next Step to replace them. After a handful of singles on their own label, the last of which, "Move", came close to the UK top 40, they signed a deal with Mute Records, and immediately had their first top 40 chart success in the UK with "This Is How It Feels", which is a song about unemployment and touches on themes of domestic violence. The single reached #14 in the singles chart, and debut album Life reached #2 in the album chart, both in 1990.

The following year's The Beast Inside was less well received by critics, but still achieved a top 5 album chart placing. The "Caravan" and "Please be Cruel" singles only reached #30 and #50 respectively, and an attempt to crack the American market largely failed. The band did, however, gain a strong following in Portugal, Germany, and Argentina, with the band's 1992 album Revenge of the Goldfish becoming their most successful in those countries. The album peaked at number 17 in the UK, and spawned four UK hit singles. The next album, Devil Hopping (1994) reached number 10 in the album chart, with "Saturn 5" and "I Want You" giving them top 20 hits, from that LP. (The latter's single version featured Mark E. Smith). Next single "Uniform" stalled at #51 and in 1995, after the release of a Singles collection, the band were dropped by Mute, and split up soon after.