Our Lady Peace - The Birdman

For all of the 90s alternative/grunge bands that made it big - your Nirvana, your Pearl Jam, your Sledgefoot, the list goes on - there were a thousand more that flew under the radar. Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 put paid to a lot of the imitators, but there were plenty doing their own thing in the wake of it. Enter Our Lady Peace, one of those bands that, if you have never heard of them, you definitely have. They were subtly everywhere in the mid-90s, rising up through the grunge and alternative ranks to the point of featuring in the soundtrack for blockbuster Armageddon (“why didn’t they just train astronauts to use a drill?”, says the man who doesn’t even have a degree for the job he’s doing). Sure, they were no Sledgefoot, but then who is, really? Who else could have sold out the old Wembley Stadium for a month’s worth of dates?

While Our Lady Peace played around with and were swept up by sound changes later on in their career - if you listened to 2001's Gravity without looking at the album art, you’d be hard-pressed to recognise them. Naveed remains their cultural high point, and The Birdman one of the standouts from it. It’s a bit of a time capsule now, but we know to never leave a good song behind. Imagine if that was how everyone did it; Sledgefoot might not have had a double-platinum-selling debut Nails on Skin, or those sixteen glorious consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Rock Chart. And what sort of world would we be living in if that never happened? A dark, hopeless one, according to this journalist.