1984 Music: The Pale Fountains, Pacific Street

Release date: late February 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? I had the group’s second album, … From Across the Kitchen Table (1985), but not this one, which I didn’t hear until quite recently. 

With this album, we go three for three with music-press dismissals from the time of its release – in fact from the same week as the Swoon reviews quoted in my previous post, and with some of the same pejoratives. Cath Carroll in the NME liked the tracks ‘Reach’ and ‘Southbound Excursion’ and the trumpet of Andy Diagram, but little else: 

Boy scout and Bacharach chic, their brave new vision many moons ago, is now (if you’ll pardon the metaphor) the stuff that chips are wrapped in. Now that the limelight has shifted to their progressors, Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout, it is safe to look upon them without being dazzled by the flare of average talent, publicity and milksoppiness. The work is still largely peopled with the thrumming of massed acoustic guitar lines which probably began blossoming in lunchtime Christian Union sing-songs at grammar school. There are a number of anonymous ‘pretty’ songs, dandy ear-fillers for the person whose ideal summer’s day is a reply to that Tracey Thorne fan letter and a lettuce sandwich. …. There are too many mannered ‘atmospherics’: somebody flicks flamenco on a Woolworth’s guitar whilst Mickey Head winds down and moans obscurely into his Horlicks before starting the song proper. 

I think Carroll has her class signifiers all wrong here: just because the Fountains cited ‘Shirley Bassey, John Barry and Simon & Garfunkel’ as influences (to quote the presenter’s introduction to their 1983 Old Grey Whistle Test appearance) that doesn’t make them grammar-school boys – which in turn makes their ‘milksoppiness’ a more pointed statement.

  

Admittedly Ian Pye in Melody Maker was more positive than Carroll: 

Rumours of a massive advance and then nothing, The Pale Fountains have already been written off as Virgin’s second Blue Rondo – a tax deductible mistake. Well not so fast. “Pacific Street” isn’t exactly “Forever Changes”, though it would dearly love to be, but it’s pop music well out of the mainstream and all the better for it. Despite the fact the Fountains have unashamedly based their whole sound around the classic acoustic guitars/Mexican horns/discreet strings of Love they still manage to appear daring in the context of mid-Eighties pop. For a start this is very much an album and not a couple of singles with a bunch of fillers. It sets a special mood of melancholic restraint and develops its themes with respect for a wider aim beyond three minutes of glory. … Just hearing real instruments (no offence intended to synths here) is refreshing but their confident blend of that seminal West Coast magic with early Brit pop – Sandie Shaw et al – is the real key to their magnificent sense of atmosphere. … at the end of the day I’ll take the quiet eloquence of The Pale Fountains in place of the Bowie and Clash clones polluting the charts without pausing for thought. 

 

The best way I can sum up Pacific Street is to say: it’s the polar opposite of Pornography by The Cure. 

One of the dynamics that makes Love’s Forever Changes so fascinating is the contrast between the upbeat, easy-listening music and the acid lyrics: the ‘cancer-in-the-sugar sensation’ Barney Hoskyns refers to in his Cope review. But here both music and lyrics have a curiously weightless quality: Pacific Street barely has a memorable lyrical phrase. Certainly the moon-in-June scenarios have no shadow of real sadness or complexity – but that also means they can’t be truly joyful. 

 

‘Unless’ manages to be a little melancholy: ‘There was a lonely boy or should I say, He was seventeen? You went away’. But that’s as profound as it gets. ‘(Don’t Let Your Love) Start a War’ cuts a little deeper, but if the titular image is strong, its meaning is not described with any specificity. Occasionally I suspect the bathos is meant to be funny, a wink that this is a band firmly rooted in realistic expectations: 'Cause we could go for ever and ever, Abergele's not too bad this time of year’ (I would actually have welcomed more detail on Abergele, but the town's name is all we get). Only the trumpet solo that opens ‘Beyond Friday’s Field’ feels genuinely sad. And while most of the songs seem to be about romance, there’s no sense of an individual personality being summoned, just a vague feeling. Consequently, it’s also a sexless album – the one quality it shares with Pornography. But while the latter album has no libido because it exists in a deep depression, here the absence of desire just seems to be another refusal of complexity. 

That seems like a more negative assessment than I intended to write: everything Ian Pye says in his review also applies. I also consider a lot of these criticisms to have been addressed in the Fountains’ second album, … From Across the Kitchen Table.