Wener also dismantles the myth that the likes of Blur were intelligent pop revolutionaries. She describes their rudeness, their ruthless ambition and their "easy, bohemian, moneyed odour". And then there are the groupies. Wener leaves nothing out. The bassist Alex James tells a young woman, "You're ugly, but I'm going to fuck you anyway," while their tour manager is despatched to select attractive girls from the audience and give them after-show tickets, known as "Blur-job passes".
In the long history of bemusingly reviled bands, Sleeper were probably one of the most unfairly attacked. The main charge against the group seemed to be that Louise Wener was pretty (although so was Brett Anderson) and said interesting things in interviews (although, again, so did Brett Anderson).
The band's debut album Sleeper in fifteen years old next March - if it was a child, it wouldn't be talking to you now, except for the odd grunt over breakfast and to roll its eyes when you try to do the drugs talk. And what better time that five months before this birthday to revisit the record in video form?
Track one was Inbetweener, the official video for which is on YouTube - complete with Dale Winton - but is unembeddable at the insistence of Sony Records.
This, though, is the track being done at one of those odd Top of The Pop live gigs:
and there's also a version from The Word, again unembeddable.
A quick scrabble round some desleeperbloked Louise Wener stuff.
First, here's Lou playing Poker with the bloke out the Barclaycard Advert and the bloke out the Pimms advert. Presumably she must have creamed them, which would explain why they did the adverts. If you don't want us to spoil the result, don't worry, it's got something to do with cards: Not embeddable, unfortunately
Next, a brief snatch of Louise pre-guest seating on Shooting Stars, Vic and Bob's welcome-wearing-out gameshow:
Finally, her doing what she does every bit as well as playing snap for money and standing on a revolving disc - singing, inevitably, on TFI, doing Life's A Gas:
The number of times Sleeper appeared on TFI Friday, you might almost suspect that Chris Evans had a small part of his heart that would, forever, be at Lou Wener's beck and call. This is from Christmas 1996 - we're guessing, based on Evans' gear, although it could also be from the period when he started to believe he was Lord Of Entertainment.
Continuing our mini-festival of Sleeperdom, here's a double bill from the Top Of The Pops weekend. Louise - still dreaming of finding a shirt long enough to tuck into her jeans - leads her colleagues through Inbetweener and What Do I Do Now?
We did do a YouTube selection for Louise Wener ages ago, but that turns out to have been one link, to a video which has since been removed. And, since we fought passionately on the side of Sleeper in the 'it's not proper guitar music if you quite fancy the person singing' wars, it seems only right we should give the band a proper celebration.
There was always a slight disdain for the band; Louise was too opinionated; too pretty; the band were too poppy. All the things that, say, Suede were praised were seen as weak points for them. There was a nasty sense that indie kids didn't mind girls in bands, but not ones who actually wore skirts. It probably didn't help that the rest of the group weren't entirely memorable - hence Sleeperblokes - but how many members of Mega City Four could an average punter have supplied if required?
And were they really that dull? Jon Stewart wound up doing session work for KD Lang, which is a handy item to fling on your CD.
Louise has gone on to write books. Pretty good books. But it's music's loss.
Anyway, this is just too good to resist: Statuesque on the Tony Parsons fronted Big Mouth from the 30th April 1996:
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