The Vaselines formed in Glasgow in 1986 around the duo of Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee, who were briefly a couple. Their songs were short, scuzzy and gleefully filthy, with innuendo-laden lyrics delivered in sweetly harmonised vocals over primitive, punky guitar pop. They released a handful of singles and a single album, Dum-Dum (1989), before splitting almost as soon as it came out.
That might have been the end of the story had it not been for Kurt Cobain, who regarded them as one of his favourite bands. Nirvana covered ‘Molly’s Lips’ and ‘Son of a Gun’, and on MTV Unplugged in New York transformed the Vaselines’ ‘Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam’ into something hushed and devotional. Eugene Kelly even joined Nirvana on stage at Reading in 1991. It is often said that Cobain and Courtney Love named their daughter, Frances Bean, partly in tribute to Frances McKee.
Cobain’s evangelism prompted Sub Pop to release Enter the Vaselines, a compilation of their recordings, in 1992, and ensured their songs were discovered by successive generations of indie kids. Kelly went on to form Captain America, later renamed Eugenius after Marvel objected, while McKee worked as a solo artist.
The pair reunited in the late 2000s and, to many people’s surprise, made a genuinely good second album, Sex with an X, released on Sub Pop in 2010. The title track, home of the song featured on Sombrero Fallout, shows that their talent for cheeky, catchy, faintly scandalous pop had not dimmed in two decades. They followed it with V for Vaselines in 2014.
