EAST 17: Walthamstow

 

(#472: 27 February 1993, 1 week)

 

Track listing: House Of Love/Deep/Gold/Love Is More Than A Feeling/I Disagree/Gotta Do Something/Slow It Down/I Want It/It’s Alright/Feel What U Can’t C

 

(Author’s Note: The CD edition includes three bonus remixes – “Gold [Paws On The Floor],” “Deep [Dark Mix]” and “Slow It Down [Liverpool Mix].”)

 

Walthamstow was a rough enough area in the early nineties, long before its attempted gentrification – and it remained slightly foreboding after it had become gentrified. I became quite familiar with E17 in the middle of the last decade for reasons which are none of your bloody business, hence can speak with some authority on the matter.

 

It is one of the nicest of pop ironies that the rough Walthamstow boys East 17 were put together as a consciously tougher counterpart to those politely conservative Northerners Take That, yet still managed to beat them to number one in the album chart. They were managed by the late Tom Watkins, who also managed the Pet Shop Boys (who’ll be coming on here directly quite soon, don’t you worry, ooer missus) and Bros – and it is helpful to look at East 17 and see where and how Watkins managed to get the equation right.

 

For a start, there was no attempt on the group’s part to evoke the triple demons of Soul, Passion and Honesty, even though few boy bands could have been more soulful, passionate and honest, in the broadest of senses. There was no Young Businessmen of the Year prattle about “the industry.” I think Tony Mortimer, Brian Harvey, John Hendy and Terry Coldwell knew full well what they were getting into – and they managed to express things with quite fabulous brilliance.

 

The band began in 1991, when Mortimer – who wrote all of their songs - was offered a contract with London Records on condition that he put together a group to perform the songs. They then came under the tutelage of Watkins, who doubtless jumped at the chance of providing a Stones to Barlow’s would-be Beatles. There was no reaching out to appeal to middle-aged Radio 2 listeners. If anything, East 17 arose from a distinct early nineties working-class London lineage which also incorporated Carter USM and Flowered Up.

 

Most importantly, they were far more explicitly political than Take That. What is particularly striking about this, their first album, is its relentless socialist outlook. Their “Gold” outdoes the Spandau Ballet one because it is emphatically more direct; “Life is worth more than gold,” they proclaim. “Gold!” goes the chorus, “We don’t need it – do we?” Meanwhile, on the startling “I Disagree” – produced by Steel Pulse’s Mykaell Riley – we are presented with a systematically spoken list of the world’s evils; “I disagree with prisons/I disagree with war/I disagree with powers and all that they stand for.” This sounds like the real People’s Music, and I wonder what that former resident of Leytonstone, E11, the late Cornelius Cardew, would have made of it. The chants we hear, whether quiet (“Gotta Do Something”) or loud (“I Want It”), sound like rallying cries at protest marches.

 

None of this would have proved remotely as effective had it not been soundtracked by vast-sounding, inventive music. The introductory track (and debut single) “House Of Love” is a brilliant fusion of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, KLF and Snap! which seems rather more concerned about the prospect of imminent total destruction than “Two Tribes” did, all the more convincing because of its fast-paced and unapologetic Cockney drawl, delivered in the manner of Ian Dury’s renegade grandchildren (Brian Harvey's is one of the great voices in British pop, up there with Tommy Steele). Even when they are talking sexual politics and lower the temperature, they do not lose our interest. “Deep” is a tremendous, base East End response to L.L. Cool J’s “I Feel Love” (and Momus’ “Closer To You”) with ellipses of fluid beats and echoing piano which predicate what William Orbit would go on to achieve with All Saints. East 17 have no problems at all with sex (whereas Take That have always seemed a little embarrassed about it). “Slow It Down” is a phenomenal 70 bpm diffusion of early eighties Imagination (“In And Out Of Love,” “All I Want To Know”) and the Malcolm McLaren of Fans and Waltz Darling (those half-tempo string lines). If songs like “I Want It” are on premature nodding terms with what would go on to be known as “trip hop,” then that is because Howie Bernstein (later known simply as Howie B) is involved in their production.

 

Elsewhere, “Gold” is soundtracked by a raw but lush backdrop worthy of their unlikely funny uncles the Pet Shop Boys (of course they would go on to cover “West End Girls”!) and “Love Is More Than A Feeling” is an exercise in Mancunian musical relocation which quite brilliantly (since it is done so unobtrusively) segues New Order tropes into Happy Mondays ones. Little wonder that Walthamstow was shortlisted for that year’s Mercury Music Prize; this is courageous and energetic music which has endured with far more resonance than most of the “political” bands and movements touted by the music press of the period (Senser? The 25th Of May? The New Wave of New Wave?). An extra hurrah for the presence throughout the album of rep reliable mixmasters Phil Harding and Ian Curnow, who once assisted Stock, Aitken and Waterman on their more extreme adventures, notably the work of Mel and Kim. If “Showing Out” and “F.L.M.” pinpointed the failure of capitalism to provide any real and lasting happiness, then the more pointed songs on Walthamstow escort that viewpoint to a new, and hopefully more receptive, decade. "Everybody in the House of Love" - shout it down the length of Hoe Street!

Buddy HOLLY and The CRICKETS: Words Of Love

 

(#471: 20 February 1993, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Words Of Love/That’ll Be The Day/Peggy Sue/Think It Over/True Love Ways/What To Do/Crying, Waiting, Hoping/Well…All Right/Love’s Made A Fool Of You/Peggy Sue Got Married/Valley Of Tears/Wishing/Raining In My Heart/Oh, Boy!/Rave On/Brown Eyed Handsome Man/Bo Diddley/It’s So Easy/It Doesn’t Matter Anymore/Maybe Baby/Early In The Morning/Love Is Strange/Listen To Me/I’m Gonna Love You Too/Learning The Game/Baby I Don’t Care/Heartbeat/Everyday

 

Listening to the song “Words Of Love” in a 1993 context, it is striking how indie and lo-fi it sounds; the recording could pass as an outtake from Bleach, and indeed the Lemonheads covered “Learning The Game” for a single B-side (“Into Your Arms”) in that year. I am also cognisant that a few weeks after this compilation’s appearance, the first Beck album, Golden Feelings, was released to little acknowledgement. Moreover, it was only a year before Weezer hit big with their song “Buddy Holly.” Perhaps the man’s importance lies partly with the notion that his art and being permitted the chimera of the indie geek to flourish.

 

I am unsure why Words Of Love hit so hugely, or at any rate to a degree; the album went gold and only stayed on our charts for nine weeks. It was advertised on television and the tie-in with the cosy sixties police drama Heartbeat cannot be evaded – that series’ then-star Nick Berry had made number two with his rendition of the Holly song in the previous year. The series was remarkable for lasting much longer than the sixties ever did – it ran for 372 episodes, from April 1992 to September 2010 – and for avoiding entirely the gritty and none-too-pleasing nature of police dramas broadcast during the actual sixties, including Z-Cars, Softly, Softly and No Hiding Place. Perhaps its producers had in mind the cheerfully-reassuring Dixon Of Dock Green, which starred Jack Warner and remained on air as late as 1976 (by which time its star had become an octogenarian – and the seventies episodes were markedly tougher than their predecessors had been). In addition, of course, the series documented the comings and goings of a decade which Buddy Holly did not live to see.

 

Anyway, enough of feelgood Sunday evening television – I looked up what I previously had to say about Holly here, and have not changed my views in any meaningful way. Nineteen songs from 20 Golden Greats reappear here – for some reason, “Not Fade Away” did not make the cut – and a liner note and song-by-song commentary by Jerry Allison himself certainly mark an improvement on the over-excitable sleevenote of 1978. The extra songs are intriguing, though largely not really necessary – “Valley Of Tears” is an engaging, piano-heavy take on the Fats Domino template, “I’m Gonna Love You Too” displays a rare and not particularly palatable aggression on Holly’s part, and his “Early In The Morning” was perhaps too anxious to compete with co-author Bobby Darin’s contemporaneous reading.

 

On the other hand, “Learning The Game” is a simple but very profound song whose gradual waves of influence slowly spread throughout the history which succeeded it, and Holly’s interpretation of “Baby I Don’t Care” may pinpoint his appeal; whereas Elvis’ famous recording engenders growls of unanswerable hipness, the implication here is that Holly is as much of a square and a nerd as the girl he idolises.

 

Most extraordinary is Holly’s “Love Is Strange”; if, as Allison attests, “Words Of Love” is evidence of a huge Mickey and Sylvia influence, this version, largely because the analogue synthesiser overdubs which Norman Petty added to Holly’s basic home demo in 1968, points directly to the future. It still sounds strikingly radical, not simply because in the synthesiser’s event horizon we can glimpse visions of Jimmy Webb and “Wichita Lineman” in particular, but because it anticipates, with nearly deadly precision, “Atmosphere” by Joy Division (same tempo and, largely, same key). It provides a beyond-eerie snapshot of a future which Holly (or for that matter Joe Meek) never lived to experience but unwittingly predicated.

 

Otherwise, noting in passing the “UN-DER-STA-HA-AND!” staccato backing vocals on “Peggy Sue Got Married,” a song which espies and underlines the potential impermanence of this thing called pop music – life, people and art move on whether you want them to or not (even if Buddy Holly didn’t) – the endurance of the Holly myth in Britain (much holier and more holistic than it ever was in his homeland - the cover shot to Words Of Love was provided by the Victoria and Albert Museum) is perhaps enclosed in his incomplete completeness; here is somebody who was never spoiled by misguided forays into psychedelia or even disco, whose body of work is imperfectly perfect, who was at home with domestic demos (Lindsey Buckingham, anyone?) as with huge studio orchestras, who was entirely comfortable within a two-minute span but whose work suggested that he might struggle with three minutes. And yet, if you wish an unlikely but fitting monument to Holly, look around you now – think of the minimalist simplicity of the younger Neil Diamond, for instance, but also of another pop star of already incalculable influence and who, though coming from West Reading, Pennsylvania, rather than Lubbock, Texas, has firmly demonstrated how apt and creative they can be when dealing with country, pop and folk and how unfailingly they have similarly kept their own being at their music’s epicentre.

 

Yes, Buddy Holly would certainly have been old enough to have been Taylor Swift’s grandfather.

The CULT: Pure Cult: For Rockers, Ravers, Lovers, And Sinners

 

(#470: 13 February 1993, 1 week)

 

Track listing: She Sells Sanctuary/Fire Woman/Lil’ Devil/Spiritwalker/The Witch/Revolution/Wild Hearted Son/Love Removal Machine/Rain/Edie (Ciao Baby)/Heart Of Soul/Love/Wild Flower/Go West (Crazy Spinning Circles)/Resurrection Joe/Sun King/Sweet Soul Sister/Earth Mofo

 

The Cult – or Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy, who basically are the core of The Cult - are rock’s equivalent to Peter Glaze. What I mean by this is that if you recall the ancient British children’s television series Crackerjack – which ended around the time “Spiritwalker” was first released – then you will remember Mr Glaze’s determinedly cornball vaudevillian antics. As Danny Baker subsequently pointed out, however, what Glaze and his various assistants – you cannot call Don Maclean or Rod McLennan “straight men,” since Glaze himself was supposed to be the straight man, the feed – were doing was not retro-nuevo recreation or sardonic, in-inverted-commas postmodernist pastiche. Glaze came directly from the British music hall tradition – for many years he had served as an understudy to the Crazy Gang – and, by God, he MEANT it and had the necessary, meticulously-honed skills to express it. This was, as Baker was at pains to emphasise, the genuine article; see also why the Goons worked so well, since they emerged from the exact same tradition and background. There was no point sending up Sellers or Milligan or Secombe; they were music hall.

 

That’s how it is with The Cult. I remember when Ian Astbury was interviewed in Melody Maker at the time of the release of their second album, Love, where he modestly proposed that, hey, you know, that Led Zeppelin, they were actually pretty damn good, weren’t they? In what was still the immediate post-punk period, this was considered by some tantamount to blasphemy.

 

But Astbury spent most of the seventies growing up as a teenager in Hamilton, Ontario, attending Glendale Secondary School and discovering Iggy, Bowie and the New York Dolls, before relocating to, of all places, Glasgow, where he went to see Apocalypse Now – I wonder if he was in the same audience as my father and myself – and the film’s use of “The End” by The Doors did something to him (many years later, of course, he became Jim Morrison in a briefly-reconstituted Doors line-up).

 

The point here is that Astbury never laboured under assumed notions of what it was like to be “cool” or “hip.” He took and accepted everything he absorbed at face value. He really didn’t give a toss whether or not it was cool to like Zeppelin in 1985 – the general consensus at the time was that it still wasn’t – but felt that somebody had to say it.

 

By 1980 he had moved to Liverpool, and then to Bradford, where he put together the much-admired Southern Death Cult. Then in 1983 he ran into guitarist Billy Duffy – a childhood friend of Johnny Marr who had also worked in a pre-Smiths punk band with Morrissey (Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds) – and promptly threw in his lot with him and formed a new band which the two called simply Death Cult. In 1984 the band’s name was simplified to “The Cult,” and here is where the story told on the Pure Cult compilation begins.

 

The early songs like “Spiritwalker” and “Go West” clearly arise out of a Gothic backdrop – for a few years The Cult were, perhaps misleadingly, labelled a Goth band – although Duffy’s guitar flange techniques, though obviously taking up from where John McGeoch had left off with the Banshees, were something new (Duffy used a Gretsch White Falcon, about the least fashionable guitar you could get at that time). “Resurrection Joe,” a non-album single from Christmas 1984 (erroneously spelt “Ressurection Joe” on early pressings), got lost in the immediate post-Band Aid rush but did not pass unnoticed by me, and remains a magnificent piece of work, clearly signalling a way out from the Goth cul-de-sac towards a wider rock-based future.

 

Then, in 1985, “She Sells Sanctuary” gave the band both aesthetic and commercial breakthroughs. A stalwart student disco floorfiller almost from the moment of its release, it works its magic via the simple device of Duffy essentially using all of his guitar effects pedals at once (and the stinging swipes of acoustic guitar underscoring the song’s central riff is also key to the record’s success). The attendant album, Love, saw the band manfully trying not to reproduce “Sanctuary,” although both “Rain” and “Revolution” are best viewed as Satie-like alternative perspectives on the same artifact.

 

Their third album was due to be called Peace but the band were dissatisfied with it and went to New York to ask Rick Rubin to remix it. Rubin recommended that the entire album be re-recorded. The band’s then-record label huffed and puffed over budgetary overspends, but it was clearly the right thing to do since in the interim since Love, Zeppelin and rock of their ilk had become cool again, mainly thanks to Rubin’s work with Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys and Slayer.

 

The album was retitled Electric, and everyone with ears flipped immediately. The appearance of “Love Removal Machine” in early 1987 was a firm declaration of principles. It was as if the window to the stuffy bedroom of rock had been thrust wide open for the first time in a decade and all the “forbidden” pleasures and thrills had been allowed to burst back in. It was an expression of aesthetic liberation. This went beyond Joey Tempest and Europe’s arch reproduction of cock rock mannerisms. This was COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO ROCK, designed to wake people UP. The band were shameless and blameless and if you do not agree that “Love Removal Machine” was the best and most thrilling pop single of 1987 – as a manifesto it is up there with the JAMMs’ “All You Need Is Love” – then, frankly, you are fooling yourselves. It threw down its glam gauntlet and offered post-punk a grin of pure fuck-you-ness. Leather trousers and all.

 

Other songs from that album, including “Lil’ Devil” and the storming “Wild Flower,” proved that “Machine” was no fluke – even their take on “Born To Be Wild” is bearable (because who else was doing it in 1987?). It broke them big, and their next album, 1989’s Sonic Temple, recorded in (where else?) Vancouver under the watchful eye of Bob Rock, was similarly entertaining – and, in the case of the tender and palpably heartfelt ballad, “Edie (Ciao Baby)” – more than simply entertaining. Tracks like “Fire Woman,” “Sun King” and “Sweet Soul Sister” possess an unanswerable bravado and confidence, and once again confirmed that Astbury had – and has – one of the greatest yells in rock. As a singer, as a performer, he takes us into his confidence and makes us empathise. He knows just as much as we do how great this music is. With all due respect, they were, at this point, making fellow Bob Rock clients Bon Jovi sound like the Sooty-Braden Showband.

 

Things were not quite so settled for the band as the nineties dawned; Oliver Stone reportedly offered Astbury first refusal at playing Morrison in The Doors, and Astbury turned him down, unhappy with how the man was being portrayed in that film (and I’m afraid that he was quite correct in doing so). Longtime bassist Jamie Stewart quit, wishing to spend more time with his family. And, as with so many other rock acts of this period, Nevermind was suddenly making The Cult’s life difficult (ironically the first song on Love had been entitled “Nirvana”). Moreover, Astbury and Duffy had by then basically fallen out and hardly communicated with each other in the studio. 1991’s Ceremony got good reviews but commercially was a disappointment, and looked very unhip next to what was emanating from Seattle (there were also serious issues arising from the cover, which depicted a Native American boy, leading to legal action). Nonetheless it contains some of the band’s best and least acknowledged work, including “Wild Hearted Son,” “Heart Of Soul” and the spectacular closer to Pure Cult, “Earth Mofo,” their finest four-and-three-quarter minutes, wherein they seem to summon up all of their hitherto suppressed rock demons and release it in an enormous cavalcade of riffs, rhythms, noises and, ultimately, Astbury’s repeated “fuck you”s, as in, we’ve resuscitated rock ‘n’ roll, fuck you, hipster.

 

Astbury and Duffy had low expectations of Pure Cult at the time; they didn’t believe it would do much business, so presumably were delighted when it went double-platinum in the UK. Certainly, listening to the album anew for this blog was a particularly cheering experience, which in my view indicates their brave purpose. I don’t think The Cult really sound anything like Zeppelin; nor do I agree with Robert Christgau most of the time. Yet I would suggest that they sound quite close to an unspoiled Yorkshire (via Manchester and Canada) version of Aerosmith, much as Aerosmith sound like a more acceptable (to American ears, at least) Bostonian variant of Slade. For a parallel, I would suggest another band from the north-east of England whose career ran absolutely parallel to The Cult, though pursued very different paths and approaches, and who spent 1992 cheerfully attempting to destroy the singles chart. The Wedding Present! Does everyone think that looks, or sounds, daft? Crackerjack!!!!

 

(Author’s Note: the next Then Play Long update will appear on Tuesday 26 January. Monday is my birthday, and I will have better things to do then than writing a blog!)