The Childballads
9:30 Club, Monday, October 15 [tickets]

Bands that show indescribable promise, deliver on it for a brief moment, then spectacularly implode are a dime a dozen in rock'n'roll, but few of their stories are as dramatic, intriguing and, ultimately, tragic as Jonathan Fire*Eater's. This brilliant group of childhood best friends from New York, via Washington DC, went from being perhaps the most hyped American band of the mid-nineties, signing a million dollar contract with David Geffen's DreamWorks (the label's launch band), being courted to model for Calvin Klein, then totally self-destructing three years later. It seems almost impossible to imagine but, according to their publicist at the time (a former professional dominatrix called Erin Norris), the band held a meeting before the release of their major label debut, 1997's Wolf Songs For Lambs, to request that sales be halted at 500,000. For a number of reasons, not only because it was their least immediate recording, it ended up selling somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 and has long, long been out of print. The two records that preceded it, The Public Hanging of a Movie Star EP from 1995, and 1996's mini album, Tremble Under Boom Lights, are also lost to time, despite being responsible for all the hot fuss, and understandably so: the blueprint for the New York garage rock explosion that The Strokes would end up leading five years later can be found in those eight short songs. It's not fair to say The Strokes wholesale ripped Jonathan Fire*Eater off, but they have openly acknowledged a huge debt, and so have the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol.

Stewart Lupton, though, is not just another example of a super talent who pissed his chance up the wall. Unsurprisingly, when he found out about his supposed demise he plotted something of a comeback. First thing, he posted a message online saying not only was he alive, he also had a new band together called Childballads. Simultaneously and coincidentally, James Oldham, former NME editor, huge Jonathan Fire*Eater fan and boss of Loog Records (home of The Horrors, Patrick Wolf and The Bravery) had himself been Googling Stewart's name to try and find out where he was. He stumbled upon the post, tracked him down and suggested putting a Childballads record out. That was 2005, seven years after Jonathan Fire*Eater split. It took till March 2007 for the folksy six-track mini album to arrive and, best of all, it wasn't just good, it was exceptional. "I keep hearing talk of the doom and they're sending the meek home," the title track begins, revealing, "But that ain't half as bad as the shadow that's caught in the hollow of a cheekbone." [The Stool Pigeon]