Garage sales, perfect places to discover hidden treasures

Christian Girl 

by Hefner (2000)

Hefner, "Britain's largest small band"; could I discover anyther but in a garage sale? Around 1 canadian dollar for a dense best-of album, this is even better than merely discovering such an hidden treasure.

Hefner published 4 albums in 4 years, from 1998 to 2001. A pure indie band, with raw guitares & wonderful lyrics, full of British irony & small lovely sketches; songs like cheap poems from a lonely dreamy boy, a boy too old to suffer like a teenager but still connected to some kind of everyday mythology: disappearing girls, drinking your head out, singing just for the sake of gaining a couple of fags thrown from the crowd. Small sketches, exactly, drawn without any ink, just a fast pencil, power of the instant, teenage flashes, similar to some Irish punks who used to celebrate suburb love & teenage kicks; no doubt that John Peel enjoyed Hefner, no doubt that the American from Pitchfork remained moderately enthousiastic: so fresh & so British.

And the video for their single Christian Girl flows so freshly & British too: four lads hanging around in a basic brick-built English suburb, four lads trying to catch the eye of the pretty girl next door. The blond girls always keeps walking dressed in red, and the four youngsters in their late twenties keep playing tricks like high-school students. They even dare to sing romantic, cute & stupid sentences:  But the idea of sex seems so bleeding stale when her heart is as big as a house.