Tragic Kingdom - No Doubt

'No Doubt' came to the attention of the UK public with 'Tragic Kingdom', on the release of the single 'Don't Speak', which was a fairly massive hit, topping the charts for several weeks in the mid-nineties. They enjoyed a brief spell of popularity thanks to their style of punk rock without too much noise. They could have become huge here then, but the marketing just seemed to give up after the re-release of their single 'Just a Girl'. Very odd, and also a shame, as 'Tragic Kingdom' was a great genre-straddling album, finding its way on to the shelves of even the most vacuous 'Take That' loving adolescents. A couple of disappointing albums later they would storm back with ...

Remember when Don’t Speak made number one in 1995? It really doesn’t seem that long ago. Nobody seemed to hear of No Doubt before or after but that’s because they are an underground band. This is one of many of their albums, their latest being ‘Return to Saturn’. So What All The Music About? 1: Spider Webs (4.28) This is about an obsessed boyfriend. He constantly rings Gwen (lead singer) and it annoys her so much she screens the number before answering. It seems at first she puts up with it but after a while it’s got worse and worse until she is being woken up in the middle of the night. Spider ...

There are two good tests of an album in my book. Firstly, can you listen to it all the way through without finding one track you really cannot stand? Secondly, can you put it on years after you bought it and enjoy it again as if you had just bought it? Well for me the No Doubt album "Tragic Kingdom" passes those tests with flying colours. The group from Anaheim, California, released this album in 1996, and it helped make their name on both sides of the Atlantic. I was fortunate to see them coming (so to speak), as I was out in Santa Ana (another part of Orange County, just down the road from Anaheim), California from January to March in 1997, just ...