Voice of the Beehive Weekend: 2003 reunion

We conclude our brief zip through the VOTB presence on YouTube with a taste of their 2003 comeback, when they emerged to support The Wonderstuff:



[Part of Voice of the Beehive weekend]

Voice of the Beehive Weekend: Monsters And Angels

This one is for James... (blimey, we're doing requests. It's a short step to Two-Way Family Favourites)



[Part of Voice of the Beehive weekend]

Voice of the Beehive Weekend: On The Tube

Continuing our trawl through Google's video search to harvest some Voice of the Beehive gems, this is the band doing the Beat of Love live on The Tube:



[Part of the Voice of the Beehive weekend]

Embed and breakfast man: Voice of the Beehive weekend

"It's those American girls again" - that would be my Dad's observation whenever I played Let It Bee, and he wasn't wrong. Although he used to confuse Voice of the Beehive with The Rhythm Sisters, so it could be he didn't really recognise them. They were, perhaps, the ultimate Janice Long Night-time Radio 1 Band: kinda ballsy, kinda cute, confusingly transatlantic (Tracey and Melissa were, indeed, American, but their percussion section - Woody and Mark - came from Madness, which is about as British as you could get at the time without being Norman Tebbit.

Twenty years ago, their debut, Just A City (an early release on Dave Balfe's Food records, back while Damon Albarn was still sounding his haitches) came drifting out the radio. Here was a song, surely, that would change lives and be attached to hearts for years to come.

Of course, I was on the point of leaving home, leaving the town I'd grown up in and striking out, and that might be why it resonated with me more than it seemed to with anyone else, and the record disappeared without trace. But a leap to London Records - and a larger marketing budget - changed the band's fortunes. A little. And for the next four or five years, they'd pop up in the lower reaches of the charts, a sweet burst of colour and shouting and running-down-the-street-in-your-pyjamas-laughing.

Just A City isn't on YouTube, so instead, to start us off, here's their number 23 smash Don't Call Me Baby:



More Voice of the Beehive over the weekend:
Beat Of Love live on The Tube
Monsters and Angels promo video
2003 comeback