Technicolor anachronisms on the casp of the 1990s JELLYFISH were sunshine pop anters with fab gear, fabber harmonies and a beatles-cam-brian Wilson gift for melody. But the cartoon good vibes hid a more complicated story: three classic songwriters iostling for space, and a folatile frontman who would” push people until they broke”. Three decades on, TOM DOYLE an covers the sting in the tale of a band out of time.

The life aquatic with Jellyfish: (from left) Jason Falkner, Chris Manning, Andy Sturmer, Roger Manning Jr, San Francisco, August 28, 1990.

Photograph: JAY BLAKESBERG

FROM OVER THE HORIZON, FOUR long-haired young men stroll into view, through the heat shimmer of the Califor-nian desert. They are dressed in colourfully odd get-ups: stovepipe hats, striped trou-sers, flowery bell bottoms, like hippyfied Dr Seuss characters. It looks like the sum-mer of 1967 or ’68, an outtake from The Monkees’ tripped-out film, Head. But it is in fact 1990, and the video for the first single, The King Is Half-Undressed, by Jellyfish. The song itself motors along in a distinctly Beatles-esque direction, souping up the beat from Tomorrow Never Knows and dipping into the dreamy harmonies of Because, its soaring chorus belted out by gutsy-voiced frontman Andy Sturmer.

A joyful anachronism caught between the demise of hair metal and the rise of grunge, Jellyfish appeared to be a cartoon rock band come to vivid life. “We were afraid of being painfully boring, showing up in jeans and a T- shirt with guitars strapped to our backs,” explains key-boardist/co-founder Roger Manning Jr. “That was not an extension of who we were personally.”

“Roger had been raiding thrift stores for funny, weird, wacky clothing,” says Chris Manning, his younger brother, and Jellyfish’s original live bassist. “Five bucks for a pair of platform shoes, two bucks for bell bottoms. It was the opposite of, ‘I want to look as cool as I can.’”

Not everyone in the band, however, was going with the gaudy hippy look.

“In that first video, I’m extremely uncomfortable,” laughs guitarist Jason Falkner. “Oddly enough, the things I picked to wear look the most Brady Bunch in retro-spect. That wardrobe case stank. These clothes were all polyester and pre-owned. So you just smelled like the hairy guy that owned them originally. But I have to say, at the end of that video shoot, man, I started to get into it.”

If Jellyfish were effectively an early-’90s Beatles re-vival in the shape of one group – at a time when the Fabs’ direct influence on new artists had mostly died away, save for the flame-keeping of World Party or Tears For Fears – they were by no means a straightforward pas-tiche act. On the Californian quartet’s 1990 debut al-bum Bellybutton, Jellyfish’s cavalcade of inspirations in-cluded The Beach Boys, Badfinger, XTC, Harry Nilsson, Wings and Queen.

Jason Falkner (far left) in The Three O’Clock, 1988

Jay Blakesberg

Gone ’Fishing: Jellyfish on-stage in LA, September 9, 1990

Bellybutton (1990) and Spilt Milk (1993).

Greg Allen (2), Jay Blakesberg (3), Peter Ashworth

Steven McDonald, bassist with LA powerpoppers Redd Kross, played on three Bellybutton tracks. He remembers bumping into Roger Manning in a Hollywood pizza joint, and Manning telling him how his band “wanted to be somewhere between Queen and The Partridge Family”.