Devotees of The Lemonheads may well have some knowledge of a time when the band was a Replacements-inspired garage band in which vocalist/guitarist Ben Deily occasionally shared singing and songwriting duties with spike-haired drummer Evan Dando. This was, as Fire records would have it so crassly as the title of the set (including stickers. Yay. Stickers) that collects these three releases, ‘When The Lemonheads Were Punk’. Well, it’s true. They were. And here’s the evidence.

Back in ’87, a year after the release of their debut EP – the scrappy, punch-drunk Laughing All The Way To The Cleaners - the band threw out their debut proper; the brilliantly titled Hate Your Friends, the first in this batch of reissues. It’s frantic, fitfully exciting and has occasional moments of brilliance. The downstroke heavy post-hardcore is as snot-nosed as you’d expect, but Deily’s Bob Mould-inspired melodies on songs like ‘Second Chance’ and the gorgeous ‘Uhhh’ (which also boasts a raw, fiercely heartbroken vocal from him) are a blossoming delight.

The lowest moments here are the ‘oh, of course’ punk-pop cover of ‘Amazing Grace’ (which must have seemed like a great idea at someone’s keg party) and the fact that Dando is nowhere near being a good songwriter at this stage, despite steering the stumbling, collapsing title track and giving out a gnarled, strangled vocal on the passable ‘Nothing True’. This was a band more intent on playing as fast and hard as they were capable than in the nuances of either songcraft or tunefulness, though there are flecks of imagination here that add a little colour to the heads down black and white tone of the record.

The extras here are fine. They include a cover of Big Star’s ‘Mod Lang’ that’s not as bad as you’d fear, Dando’s wavering vocal perfectly expressing the song’s naïve desires. There’s also ‘Sad Girl’ which, had it made it on to the album proper, might have been the most melodic thing on it. There’s a set from WERS Radio in ’87 that has the band knocking out songs in breathless fashion, pausing only to ask for pledges toward the publicly funded station. There’s a storming version of The Users’ anthem ‘Sick Of You’, as well as an early take on ‘Falling’ which would end up on follow-up album Creator.

Creator is a ripped-jean stride on from Hate…, and it’s clear from the off that Dando has chanced upon at least a prelude version of the magic musical formula that would eventually serve him so well. ‘Clang Bang Clang’ with its ragged, shimmering chorus and suntanned melody, is a jolt of suburban twilight pop that clashes horribly with the following song ‘Out’, a sloppy fallabout of stoner thrash that foreshadows Dando’s stunned slurring of the more distant future.

When it seems Dando is about to run away with the record, Deily drops the glorious proto-emo of ‘Two Weeks In Another Town’, then the wonderful, plaintive ‘Postcard’. Conversely, Dando is guilty not only of a Charles Manson cover but then of murdering Kiss’ ‘Plaster Caster’ too. If he told you at this stage he’d go on to make a neat career sideline in reinterpretations of other people’s songs, you’d pull the Sham 69 patch off his jacket. It’s interesting to note that Deily’s style – sweet, well-observed and boasting power-out minor chord anthemic qualities – could easily be equated with that of Dando’s later collaborator and the writer of many of the ‘modern’ Lemonheads best songs, Tom Morgan.

Regardless, on the extra tracks the band are back at WERS, Dando muttering “Yogi Bear for President” for reasons only known to himself before launching into a set that sounds, frankly, huge. Messier, even than their ’87 session, they absolutely thunder through this. Loud, unhinged and vital, the highlight is a thrashing, spitting ‘Crash Bang Clang’ that can barely stay on it’s feet.

One would assume that the fanboy draw here is a live version of Blake Babies’ favourite ‘From Here To Burma’, with future Lemonhead and Dando companion Julianna Hatfield on lead vocal. She’s dreadful here, out of tune throughout and a reminder as much as her terrible performance at their two-hander performance at Queen Elizabeth Hall last year, that she can be unutterably awful at times despite her obvious talent.

Though the Lemonheads had split after Creator – tensions between Deilly and Dando rising to breaking point it seems – they pulled themselves back together to tour Europe and create Lick, a patchwork of fresh recordings of old b-sides, covers and a few new songs. For a plate of reheated leftovers this is pretty tasty – opener ‘Mallo Cup’ introduces us to a new Lemonheads – the folk-pop metalheads who’d go on to become one of the more beloved artifacts of the 1990s. It fuzzes and swoons, Dando chugs and croons, stoned romance pouring from the speakers “I never can forget/I ain’t remembered yet/Like mackerel in a net/I forget to forget.” Opening line “Here I am outside your house at 3am/trying to think you out of bed” sets the scene for the teen devotion that was headed Dando’s way, summing up in a line the lunk-headed handsome naivety that would make the indie world fall so hard in love with him. Dando’s ‘A Circle of One’ is also simple, sad and superb.

Strangely ‘Glad I Don’t Know’ re-recorded from the ’86 Laughing All the Way to the Cleaners EP sounds entirely contemporary - a fizzing punk-pop blast, an ice cold coke in the face. Deily’s ‘7 Powers’ has a sweet and sour riff to drop to your knees for, “Don’t ever go / You know I need you so” he pleads in that adorable teenage way. Deily’s best ever Lemonheads song ‘Anyway’ is a powerhouse of luscious melody and a vaulting, heartsick chorus “I loved you so but that was long ago/But it only takes a day, it doesn’t matter anyway”, ‘Sad Girl’ (intended for Hate Your Friends) is another stinging sherbert delight.

Perhaps the key song here is Dando’s notorious cover of Suzanne Vega’s ‘Luka’ – relating to the original in only a tangential way, it shows Dando’s sudden knack for shaping unlikely source material in his own image and creating something entirely other along the way. His interpretation sounds like a party gone wrong, a nursery rhyme warped out of shape, a metallic romp with it’s legs pulled from under it, finally a wail of oppression that matches anything in the staid, glum original.

In the extras, original versions of the reworked material are a solid inclusion though the Lick versions are uniformly superior, a live take on ‘Mallo Cup’ is a delight – illustrating that Dando’s tendency to mumble lackadaisically through his sets had an earlier onset than his fame. There’s also an amusing interview track that purports to be with Evan Dando but is clearly with a hyper Corey Loog Brennan, who firstly intimates that the band are only interested in aping bands from Minneapolis then goes on to deride Lick as a few b-sides and covers chucked together to create the impression of an album. Well, it’s good to be a realist, but this is by far the finest album in the reissue set, and boasts the most interesting package of extras.

Of course this was the end for the Dando/Deily Lemonheads (until they reconvened in the studio under the fanboy eye of producer Ryan Adams earlier this year) and next, in 1990 we’d have the glorious Lovey and Dando as a nu-hippy heartthrob in waiting. In ’92 they’d release perhaps the most wonderful summer album of all time in the shape of It’s A Shame About Ray, and their legend would be set.

This collection is undoubtedly an interesting document of the journey Dando was starting out on. But that’s really only half the tale. The rest of the story is about how the now-forgotten Deily was a songwriter of some charm and substance whose talent was subsumed by his former bandmate’s fame. It was an undeserved fate and at least half the reason to pick up these records is to sample his offerings to a nascent punk band that went on, without him, to be a minor cultural phenomenon.