Creams

by Stewart MasonThe Creams, a neo-psychedelic quartet from Leicester, England, regrouped out of the remnants of Ruth's Refrigerator -- a short-lived side project between Alan Jenkins, guitarist/songwriter formerly of the Deep Freeze Mice and the Chrysanthemums -- and an indie pop group called Po! (not to be confused with either the female singer/songwriter named Poe or the American alt-rockers P'o). Throughout their eight-year career the Creams changed personnel and musical styles so often that keeping track of the group's progress is a head-spinning endeavor, but the core duo of Jenkins and his keyboard-playing wife Robin (who prefers the pseudonym Blodwyn P. Teabag) remained constant, with Jenkins' surreal and often hilarious psych-pop songs their focal point.
For their first two albums the group was known, for no particular reason, as Jody and the Creams. On their debut, 1991's A Big Dog.n, the Creams were Jenkins, Teabag, guitarist Ariadne Metal-Cream Pie, drummer Jonathan Lemon (who as Jonathan Staines had played guitar and keyboards in the final incarnation of the Chrysanthemums) and Ruth Miller on vocals. The second Jody and the Creams album, 1992's Lords of the Grommet Canning Factory, consisted of two 20-minute suites and was originally released in a very limited edition (25 copies!), but later reissued in a more normal run with 17 untitled bonus tracks; Miller had returned to Po! by this time and was replaced by Sherree Lawrence, who had been Jenkins' bandmate in the Deep Freeze Mice.
By the time of 1993's ie, the "Jody" conceit had been dropped; the double album ie was credited to Alan Jenkins and the Creams, nomenclature which didn't last past this release. The band name was once and for all straightened out for 1994's puckishly-titled The Creams and Nico, but pretty much everything else had gone haywire; Lawrence, Lemon, and Metal-Cream Pie were all absent, and although only four band members appear on the Picasso-derived collage cover, six are credited, including Robyn Gibson, who would remain in the drummer's chair for the rest of the band's existence, and newbies Martin Howells (who had played bass in the Chrysanthemums), singer-violinist Alison Mackinder, and extra keyboardist Peter Pengwyn. Even more confusingly, the vinyl and CD editions of this album have only a few tracks in common, with the LP featuring remakes of two old Chrysanthemums songs plus a 22-minute track occupying all of side two; the CD was 25 tracks long, with a dozen of them written by Howells, Pengwyn, or Gibson, the only time Jenkins would cede that much control over the band's direction.
Although 1995's Pluto contained a number of Howells and Gibson tracks, it's a much more consistent album, and probably the band's artistic high point. Unfortunately, this edition of the Creams split up shortly after the album's release, and although Jenkins, Teabag, and Gibson forged ahead, they never quite reached these heights again. Adding bassist Howard Fairey, the reconstituted Creams released 1996's Malcolm, a double-mini-CD with a handful of very strong songs and some obvious filler. They quickly followed this with the live Are You Real or Just Some Sort of Disgusting Fridge Magnet?, a surprisingly strong collection featuring songs from all previous Creams lineups and even a couple of Ruth's Refrigerator and Chrysanthemums oldies.
This lineup of the Creams stayed together for the rest of the band's career, but other than another pair of live albums, 1997's Net Yangers for the Pizza Froy and 1998's Fuck My Ass, which were originally released in even smaller editions than the initial run of Lords of the Grommet Canning Factory, the Creams only released one more album, 1999's 42-track double CD The All-Night Bookman. A wildly varied collection of trippy psych-pop songs and twisted noise interludes that features contributions from nearly everyone who was ever in the Creams, The All-Night Bookman has the feeling of a career summation. Indeed, the Creams split up shortly after its release, with Jenkins and Teabag forming a new group called the Thurston Lava Tube. Jenkins released a solo album, Free Surf Music #1, in 2000.