Embrace

When Embrace first broke onto the music scene in the late 1990's, many music journalists were eager to label them as 'the new Oasis' simply due to the fact that they front fronted by a pair of brothers. Ultimately, the band are very different in style and scope to Oasis.

Danny (Vocals and Guitar) and Richard McNamara (guitars) formed the band in 1993, and recruited bassist Steven Firth and drummer Mike Heaton after placing an advert in the local newspaper.

Their first single release was 'All You Good Good people' on Fierce Panda in early 1997. However, it was only when they re-released the track on Hut recordings later that year that they acquired huge success. The following debut album, The Good Will Out, topped the charts in the autumn of 1998. Sombre, thoughtful and brooding, the album owed more to the melancholy of Radiohead than the bands of the Brit-pop era.

However, the band failed to replicate the commercial success of their debut with their next two albums Drawn from Memory and If You've Never Been. The albums were disregarded by critics and fans alike.

With a little help from their close friend, Chris Martin of Coldplay fame, the band successfully re-launched themselves with the release of the single 'Gravity' - which reached number eight in the charts. Originally penned by Martin for his own band, he himself admitted that the song sounded 'too much like an Embrace record', so he donated it to them. The following album Out of Nothing went straight to number one. Despite a vicious mauling from some critics, the album put the band at a position in the popularity stakes that they were used to six years earlier.