The Bravery - An Honest Mistake
Listen to The Bravery in 2014, and your mind might get to thinking “what did actually happen to those guys?” and you might start to wonder why it didn’t work out better for them. And your mind might then wander over to some BBC Radio 1 meeting at some unspecified time in the 1980s, in which a bunch of radio people play God with the week’s new releases, choosing some for constant rotation, while others get tossed into the bin. At no point does anyone want to point out the obvious flaw, which is that they might as well just choose what to play by picking shiny balls out of a cloth bag. Except then it turns into that episode of The Apprentice series 48 when the team leader is chosen on the toss of a coin because there’s only two of them anyway so how else are two prime alpha males going to decide in a way that is suitable for pre-watershed broadcast? And then Sir Alan / Lord Sugar is mad because that’s no way to run a business, and what is this daft nonsense of a song about anyway, and I’ve never heard of them, have you Nick? Eyebrows: no.
What I mean is An Honest Mistake is an incredible song to have in your armoury, and even if the rest of the self-titled debut album didn’t quite match up to it (although Fearless, Tyrant and Public Service Announcement weren’t too shoddy), this song alone could have been a solid foundation for future glories. Successful bands have surely kicked off their first album in far worse style.
But then perhaps it’s just a case of right time, right place followed very swiftly by oh, sorry actually wrong thing, wrong time, wrong place, wrong sound, wrong wrong wrong. An Honest Mistake reached number 7 in March 2005, but the two singles that followed - Fearless and Unconditional - failed to crack the Top 40 in its wake. And then people started saying things like “Landfill indie”, and it was game under.
Still - hell of a way to kick off the indie disco playlist, you have to say.