Everything’s Alright Forever

vinyl reissue

Taking its name from the 1958 Jack Kerouac novel The Dharma Bums and issued in 1992, The Boo Radley’s second album, their first for Creation Records, was the sound of the Merseysiders increasingly finding their feet with a selection of accomplished, effects-laden tunes by Martin Carr.

Producer Ed Buller skilfully captured both their straight up rock side and their exploratory tendencies, while singer Sice’s vocals cut through the maelstrom, sweetly and gently grounding the songs as the guitars swoop and dive around him. This is particularly notable on ‘Smile Fade Fast’, the excellent single ‘Does This Hurt?’ and the shimmering opening number, ‘Spaniard’, which gains additional atmosphere from guest performer Roddy Lorimer on trumpet.

Something of a shoegaze classic, Everything’s Alright Forever remains a strangely slept-on record, but it did make waves well beyond the UK and was nicely summed-up by Canada’s Calgary Herald, whose review observed that: "buried beneath several coats of mind-gliding guitar are some of the catchiest pop songs this side of Teenage Fanclub.”

the band’s recollections of the making of this record…

Unlike all our other albums after Everything’s Alright Forever, we had rehearsed up some of the songs that would end up on the record before we went into the studio. Plus, we had played some live.

We recorded this in First Protocol studios on Benwell Road, north London. And mixed it in Air Studios on Oxford Street. The Beautiful South were there at the same time - which was a treat!

Our first experiences in recording, the first Rough Trade EPs, were done with Rudy from AR Kane (Kaleidoscope) and then Alan Moulder (Every Heaven and Boo! Up).

The album was due to be released as part of our deal with Rough Trade and so we were working with their somewhat meagre budget. We were blissfully unaware that the label was about to go bust.

Creation Records stepped in and signed us after we’d finished recording. They did a fantastic job promoting the band and the record, with both the album and the Does This Hurt? single making the charts.

My memory is that we had wanted Alan Moulder to produce the record but, as he wasn’t available, we agreed to work with Ed Buller. But once we started recording, the choice didn’t really sit well with any of us. It felt off. A mismatch.

We had a bunch of great songs written by Martin but, rather than allowing us to indulge in guitar pedal analogue noisiness, Ed was floating pristine rack mounted digital effects over the top which didn’t quite sound “Boo dirty” enough. The fact that the gear we owned at that time was shite might have been one of the reasons for his preferences!

So, we felt some of the songs lost their raw power with the ethereal, panning, guitar effects shifting the overall sound towards the emerging “shoegaze” genre. A label we found horribly derogatory at the time.

We had left our Dinosaur Jnr / MBV soundalike past and were moving towards our Giant Steps future. See Buffalo Bill, one of the tracks on the Boo! Forever EP, which pointed the way forwards.

Without Ed there would have not been the spectacular Spanish-esque trumpet solo on Spaniard. He got the right man in (Roddy Lorimer) and it sounded amazing and unique.

But the album didn’t sound like the noise we were making live and we had no one to blame but ourselves with our disappointment at how it turned out. But this discontent led to us arrogantly saying “we’ll do it ourselves without a producer”.

We maybe didn’t realise it at the time, but we learned a lot of studio craft from Ed - without which our confidence to self-produce could have proven to be our folly.

And Giant Steps landed with a huge critical thump after that, and Everything’s Alright Forever was a crucial step in our development as a band.

Tim, Sice & Rob, July 2026