When it came to nu metal, the UK never really stood a chance. The few nu-flavoured bands the country managed to birth always felt like pale, inauthentic imitations of what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Mostly, anyway. In February 2002, a new single emerged bearing all the hallmarks of a nu metal banger: chunky downtuned riffs, chest-beating choruses and a hint of record scratching.
And it managed to break the Top 10 on the UK singles charts. Finally, a UK nu metal hit! Only, Suffolk rockers A had absolutely nothing to do with the subgenre.
“That’s a disservice to nu metal,” A vocalist Jason Perry says with a chuckle, when we put it to him that his band wrote the only major UK nu metal hit.
Winding the clocks (way) back, A started life in 1988 as a prog rock band called Grand Designs (“We were terrible, but we also loved Rush,” Jason explains). By the early 90s, it was obvious that their prog career wasn’t about to take off, so the band decided to follow in the footsteps of countless other hopefuls and move to London. Moving into the flat of future The Darkness guitarist Dan Hawkins, they began looking for new ways to express themselves.
“A mate of mine in the band Jesus Jones went out to America and came back, like, ‘You need to hear these guys, they’re called Green Day,’” Jason recalls.
“I loved the energy. It made me realise we had been so caught up in being something that we’re not, really – an arty prog band – without feeling that. We were in London, skint, but having the time of our lives, and that’s what we wanted to sound like. We stopped trying to get a record deal and within six months we’d got 10 offers.”
We’d been signed as ‘a punkier Supergrass’, and if we’d made a record like that we’d have stood a better chance.
Jason Perry
Rebranding as A, the group signed to Warner Bros Records and began making scuzzy punk rock. So far, so not metal. The only problem was, they’d come just a little too late. A few years prior, the Britrock movement had made waves as bands like The Wildhearts, Terrorvision, Skunk Anansie and Therapy? tore their way up the charts. But by the time A’s debut album, How Ace Are Buildings, arrived in 1997, the movement was already on the wane.
“We always felt like we’d just missed the mark,” Jason agrees. “We’d been signed as ‘a punkier Supergrass’, and if we’d made a record like that we’d have stood a better chance.”
1999’s A Vs Monkey Kong fared marginally better than their debut – it hit No.62 in the UK album charts at least – but it was still seen as a big disappointment by Warner. A could see the writing on the wall: if they didn’t do something big with their next record, they’d be out. So, they took a gamble.
“We said, ‘We know you’re going to drop us – we would drop us too. So why don’t we rip the record deal up? We won’t ask you to put out our third record as is, but keep us on the label,’” Jason reveals. “They were taken aback by that, but we just wanted to make an album. So it was like, ‘If we could get the money just to get in the studio – no advance, no wages – we’ll give you some songs.’”
The gamble paid off. Warner stumped up just enough cash to get the band to I.C.P. Studios in Brussels. While there, conventional wisdom – and knowledge of their sonic shift – suggests they stumbled onto a shabby, dreadlocked shaman wearing a tracksuit who enlightened them on the commercial magic of this newfangled nu metal music. As ever, British reality squashes that: Nothing actually came from a riff that guitarist Mark Chapman had been tinkering with in his shed.
“I was always really conscious of the fact people might look at Nothing and go, ‘Oh, the record company have made them write a big hit,’” Jason acknowledges. “It was never like that at all. We were just messing around with ideas, as you do, and Mark started playing that riff.”
There’s no denying the magnetic power of Nothing’s riff. A mid-paced stomp, it was exactly the kind of tune that could blast out in a metal club and gets heads banging. What makes Nothing really stand out, though, is that it doesn’t really sound like any other A song. That was by design – kind of.
“The chorus was originally the bridge – ‘Fly away’ – which I always think is more of a classic A bit, really,” Jason says. “I was obsessed with bands like EMF with Unbelievable and Van Halen with Jump, this one-word chorus. The song basically got written around that word because ‘Nothing’ sounded great on top of that riff!”
Nothing came out as a single in February 2002, and by the time the Hi-Fi Serious album was released on March 4, the song had peaked at No.9 on the UK singles charts. In turn, the single’s success helped Hi-Fi Serious earn a career-best placement at No.18 on the UK albums charts. Thanks to their newfound success, A began to get exciting opportunities. In summer 2002, they went to Japan to play the massive Summer Sonic Festival with The Offspring.
“We’d toured for five years, so it wasn’t like we had overnight success, but it opened a lot of doors for us,” Jason acknowledges. “Gigs-wise, the highlight was going to Japan for the first time and hearing the whole crowd sing Nothing. This little song we’d written in a shed in Suffolk now being sung by 90,000 people.”
“One of the record label guys in Germany read one of us had been shot.”
Some of their gigs were memorable for other reasons. Playing at Coventry’s Colosseum on the Hi-Fi Serious tour, A made national headlines when police were called to the venue after reports that someone had shot at the band from a nearby building. It turned out to be a local with an air rifle who’d harassed them and their support band earlier that day, the BBC reporting that the suspect had pelted their bus with bricks as it pulled in, and “a pair of youths pulled a knife on their driver when he caught them trying to break into the vehicle”.
“Yes! One of the record label guys in Germany actually read a report that one of us had been shot,” Jason says, laughing it off now. “There was a guy literally shooting at us from his balcony in this block of flats. It turned out he’d been sniffing glue or something.”
Although Nothing helped A into the charts, the band weren’t interested in mindlessly replicating its success. The rest of Hi-Fi Serious was very much in keeping with the punk sound they had cultivated on their past two albums. 2005’s Teenage Dance Ordinance followed the same vein. Unfortunately, by that point the winds of change had kicked in for rock again. Nu metal was dead and A were too sunny for emo and too gritty for pop punk. So the record faltered at No.95 in the album charts, leading to the band getting dropped from Warner.
“We always felt like a square peg in a round hole,” Jason says. “The only time the stars actually aligned was when Nothing came out. Normality resumed when we went to do the fourth album. We’d gone to make a big rock record with Terry Date and the big thing at the time was the Kaiser Chiefs. It was just like, ‘We don’t stand a chance.’”
A entered hiatus in 2005, and the members explored other jobs in the music industry. Bassist Daniel P. Carter became a rock DJ for the BBC and drummer Adam Perry joined the Bloodhound Gang, while Jason became a producer, subsequently working with bands such as McFly, Don Broco and The Blackout.
The band came back for brief reunions and the occasional tour from 2008 onwards, returning to full ‘active’ duty in 2018. Then, in June 2021, they were booked for Download Pilot – a smaller version of the festival, initiated by the British government to research the spread of Covid-19 in crowds. Playing to people who hadn’t been to gigs for more than a year, Jason recalls the sheer rapture when the band started Nothing as their finale.
“Even people who don’t know our name know that song,” he says proudly. “I was once with Ellie Goulding and she began humming the riff because she’d heard it in catering – she had no idea it was my song!”
As for why Nothing has stood the test of time, Jason puts it down to its simple theme. “The idea behind the song was that everybody’s always concerned about money, jobs… all this stuff. But when you are left with nothing, all that matters is love,” Jason says. “It’s about how you live your life. Without love, it’s pretty hopeless. I really liked that we had this message of love in something that doesn’t sound like a love song at all.”
A’s new album Prang is out now. The band support The Darkness on tour in the UK in December.
