Wake Up! by The Boo Radleys

Wake Up!, the Boo Radleys' fourth album, landed on Creation in 1995 and went all the way to number one in Britain. The Wallasey band had come up in the shoegaze fog, but after "Lazarus" won them a Lollapalooza run through America in the late summer of 1994, they holed up at Rockfield Studios in Wales that autumn and produced the record themselves, with Andy Wilkinson engineering and Al Clay mixing it in London.

What came out is Britpop at its most sugar-rushed. Sice sings Martin Carr's songs over a pileup of extras, with Carr adding glockenspiel, harmonica and keyboards, bassist Tim Brown on piano and drummer Rob Cieka ringing a bell for good measure. It's bright, busy and bursting at the seams, the feedback swapped for sunshine. "Wake Up Boo!" is the giddy centerpiece, and it handed the band their only top-ten single.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.