Peak Oil and the Frackers

Peak Oil and the Frackers: An Important Musical and Political Influence

By LD Chambers

With the sad passing of the last member of the band, Sam Staveley, it seems timely to reflect on their enduring influence and attempt to take stock of their impact.

Peak Oil and the Frackers was by no means the only environmentally conscious band of their time, but they were almost certainly the only group classified as a ‘single-issue’ band of the now much-diminished genre of enviro-rock. In my opinion, this slightly derisory description is unfair. While the focus of Sandra Obern’s lyrics did tend to channel the group’s legitimate concerns over hydrocarbons, there was always room for playfulness.

Take the jaunty early single, ‘Stuff that in your Pipeline’. Obern’s tongue-in-cheek delivery of the opening lines: ‘I fell in love with an oilman’s daughter/ Together we swam in polluted groundwater’ showed off the band at their more outrageous. Along with Staveley’s booming drum sound and Martine Gonzalez’s whiplashing bass, re-listening to that song highlights them as the musical risk-takers they often were.

Peak Oil and the Frackers were, of course, the only enviro-rock group to make use of the moog, persuading the mighty Georgio Moroder to take the controls on their 11-minute epic ballad, ‘Exploratory Drilling is Still Drilling’: further evidence of their musical guts. On the other hand, the reunion album, twelve years after the dramatic split, is rightly called up as an instance of fading adventurousness. ‘Earth, Wind, but no Fire’ was a re-tread of many of their old ideas, played in a style more akin to other, more middle-of-the-road enviro-rock groups such as Scrubbers or Tear Down the Flues, than their distinctive fashion. However, I’d rather not dwell on that probably misguided move.

The band achieved early notoriety with ‘that cover’ for their debut LP, the fizzing ‘Barrels of Lies’. The image of the group, naked save the strategic smearing of raw bitumen, simulating the drinking of diesel from a forecourt pump established Peak Oil and the Frackers as a major force. Sadly, it is thought that the exposure to tar for this photo shoot contributed to Obern’s cancer and her untimely death two years ago.

‘Barrels of Lies’, which exposed ugly stories of corrupt lobbying and the backhanders routinely used by Big Oil and his corporate friends, was soon followed by the more circumspect ‘Renewable Utopia’. The second album was more of a critical success than the first, although it did less well commercially. The album, and the activism the band carried out in a novel take on promotion of the record, is often credited with playing a vital role in the approval of the twenty-two turbine strong wind farm over Chipping Campden, overcoming considerable local resistance.

The group were lambasted by some sections of the right-wing press for this victory, but it merely added to their aura of infamy, precipitated initially by ‘that cover’. Their popularity as voices of radical environmentalism grew. The UK tour during which the band travelled only by bicycle (albeit with a support van for instruments and other equipment) and which culminated in a second billing appearance, behind headliners Mineral Rights Collective, at the Live Earth concert marked the peak of their environmental posturing.

By the time of the third album, ‘Platforms of the Soul’, Obern’s increasingly ascetic lifestyle was influencing the musical style, which became more stripped down. Prolonged funk-like jams were preferred to the more direct, urgent sound of their earlier work. Still, the band remained no strangers to controversy, with Gonzalez appearing on stage dressed entirely in the pelts of animals she claimed were recovered from roadsides after accidents. The noble effort at upcycling did not chime with all of their fans, however, and the album marked a low point in terms of sales.

Yet the band was to find a new audience after a two-year space. The recruitment of keyboard player Simon Martin Le Fylde marked a shift towards a more chart-friendly sound and his experience in the music industry secured the group a major-label deal. The track that sealed their renaissance, the eminently catchy ‘Trees of Rome’, made its mark in the UK chart top twenty: still their biggest hit. Arguably, the lyrics indicated a softening of the hard-line attitude on earlier records, but to me it sought instead to reach a wider audience with more oblique references to dependence on fossil fuels. One reading of the lyrics places the track as an allegory for the decline of civilisation as oil, gas and coal run out, with its description of the fall of the Roman Empire due to excess deforestation. Most fans, perhaps, were instead drawn in by the anthemic refrain: ‘I kiss the last of/ All the trees of Rome’.

The more commercial incarnation of Peak Oil and the Frackers regrettably alienated a portion of their original followers, who could not get past the use of pyrotechnics in the evolving live show spectacle. These fans saw the use of combustible gas as hypocritical. Even when the band switched to the use of biogas from fermented cow dung, a core of deniers remained. It was these people who of course caused the harrowing early demise of Le Fylde after his head injury in the bar fight after their show at Sheffield Arena. The aneurysm caused prevented him from playing with the band again and led to his death aged just 36.

The band produced one more album before their break-up, in the absence of Le Fylde – a return to the initial line-up. The remarkable concept album ‘AfterLife’ depicted various visions of a post-fossil fuel world, some more optimistic than others. The sweeping opener and title track imagines a lifeless planet, with a rocky, watery surface – a return to the early Earth. The song is tinged with redemption, nonetheless, as it suggests the rebirth of life and evolution picking up once again in the post-ordial soup. The album was a success, largely on the strength of the last song penned by Le Fylde before his injury and the only single released from the album, the powerful, elegiac ‘Many Wells to Drain’. It is at this point that I prefer to remember the band; before the split and the ill-judged reunion.

Obern had been drifting from the other band members for some time, as her involvement in the monastic Devotional Non-duality movement became the dominant influence in her life. The tabloid press enjoyed making hay as images of her performing the ‘tree meditation’ ritual and details of her diet of eucalyptus oil and raw locusts emerged. Her behaviour became increasingly frustrating for Gonzalez and Staveley. The proverbial final straw, however, was Staveley’s drunken spilling to journalist Robin Reeves. His suggestions that the band was out of ideas, that the loss of Le Fylde had cost them their commercial edge, unsurprisingly did not go down well with the rest of the band. Obern and Gonzalez scrabbled out a statement declaring that it was nothing important and Staveley checked into rehab, probably only as a gesture. Nonetheless, soon they had to admit that Peak Oil and Frackers were over.

And so they were, until their reunion. The intervening years had coloured the band with the status of cult figures, even as the new tunes did not live up to this reputation.

Now, with the virtue of hindsight, we can reflect on the band’s legacy. Their sound is clearly an influence on modern groups such as Micro Machines and Catch Catch Catch. Their brand of environmentalism has been inherited by blogs such as Boiling Oil and by author Madeleine Brock. The band will be remembered for their unique sound, their experimental mind-set and their lasting effect on the landscape of environmentalism.

So the impact of Peak Oil and the Frackers lives on, even now none of the four are with us any longer. RIP Sandra, Simon, Martine and Sam.