The Boo Radleys were a British guitar band of the 1990s who made experimental indie music, and were briefly associated with the Britpop movement. They were formed in Liverpool, England in 1988, with singer/ guitarist Sice, guitarist/ songwriter Martin Carr, bassist Timothy Brown and drummer Steve Hewitt. The band split in 1999.
The band's name comes from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, in which Boo Radley is the name of a character who is feared by the neighbourhood children as some kind of freak, but ultimately turns out to have been misunderstood.
Fans sometimes called the band "The Boos".
In 1990, the band's first album Ichabod and I was released on a small British indie label, Action Records. It was similar in style to much of the then-popular shoegazing sub-genre, and bore the influence of My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr. Although not a commercial success, this release brought the band to the attention of Rough Trade Records, to whom they signed. Around this time, Hewitt was replaced on drums by Rob Cieka.
Almost immediately after the release of the Every Heaven EP in 1991, Rough Trade collapsed and the Boo Radleys were signed by Alan McGee's Creation Records. Their first release for Creation was Everything's Alright Forever in 1992, which was the first step in a move away from the shoegazing sound. That development in their sound was to be fully realised on their first album for Creation, Giant Steps ( 1993). The album takes its title from a song by jazz musician John Coltrane, of whom Martin Carr is a fan. Carr said the album "was a step away from the MBV sound into using more instruments and less conventional arrangements." The record was well-received by critics, and was awarded 9/10 by the influential weekly music magazine NME, which wrote: It's an intentional masterpiece, a throw-everything-at-the-wall bric-a-brac of sounds, colours and stolen ideas. That The Boo Radleys (of all people!) have decided to accept their own challenge and create a record as diverse and boundary-bending as this is, at first glance, staggering. Isn't this the job of the U2s and the leisured idols of rock, unable to do anything without the tacit approval of history? Fortunately not. The Boo Radleys are sifting through time (the mid-'60s, mostly) and conjuring up something that's as cut-up and ambitious as anything you'd care to mention.