“But we wouldn’t have chosen for our most notable single a Neil Diamond cover with Liberace piano that was made for an obscure EP and kind of as an in-joke. “In terms of the internal band politic, Pulp Fiction was something we badly needed,” Roeser asserts. Like Pulp Fiction, the Urge didn’t do conventional happy endings. Tarantino’s intervention in their wayward career was as timely as it was unexpected, but ultimately it was not to be decisive. That summer of 1994, they were meant to be prepping a follow-up, but Kato and Roeser were at loggerheads and Onassis in the grip of a ruinous heroin addiction. Saturation seemed destined to blast off, but it never left the launch pad. All of a sudden we’d been handed half a million dollars." Nash Kato "We had made records for a six-pack and a bag of weed. The first album they recorded for Geffen, 1993’s Saturation, was their great leap forwards, so laced with arena-size choruses, wit and smarts that it came on like a Bond-movie Cheap Trick. Soon after, they were also signed to Nirvana’s major label, Geffen, and being touted as the next ‘great white hopes’ of the alt.rock boom. In 1991, the Urge got hand-picked to support Nirvana on their tour across the US and around Europe, just as Nevermind was blowing up. Very quickly people came to expect it of us.” It wasn’t a far cry from what we were doing off the clock, but we dressed it up for the cameras a bit and it worked. What a great one: this punk rock band that can’t really play, but they’ve got identical suits and come on shaking Martinis. “We needed a fast route to the front of the queue and were on a constant hunt for the next big gag. “Back then there were a million punk rock bands all vying for the same brass ring,” explains Kato. They topped off this rakishness by swigging Martinis from elegant cocktail glasses. Where their earliest records were loose, slapdash affairs, Kato, Roeser and, more latterly, Onassis adopted a singular uniform of matching suits and polo-neck jumpers, into which their ‘UO’ logo was finely stitched. Rising up out of the still nascent Chicago punk scene in the mid-80s, the Urge, as they liked to be known, had made something of a name for themselves as much for the way they looked as for how they sounded.
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