1984 Music: Violent Femmes, Hallowed Ground

Release date: June 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes. 

The NME and Melody Maker were not published throughout most of June and July 1984 because of a strike: I’m not sure if it involved journalists or printers, but it now seems incredible that Britain’s two major music papers just disappeared for two months (I don’t know if the strike also affected Sounds and Record Mirror, their smaller rivals: if not, surely a welcome boost for their circulation). In any case, I know why I bought this album, and it wasn’t because of the NME or Melody Maker, but because of coverage in Strait – a Christian music paper produced in association with the Greenbelt arts festival. I can barely find any mention of Strait online, let alone an archive, so I’m relying on memory alone here. I presume it was released monthly: I doubt there was a large enough potential readership to sustain a weekly. And I also presume I bought my copy in the Scripture Union bookshop in St John’s Shopping Centre in Liverpool town centre, which also sold albums released on Christian labels. 

The CCM scene (Christian Contemporary Music: a term I wouldn’t have recognised at the time) was not as large in Britain as in the US, but from 1984 onwards I went to several concerts by Christian pop groups in churches, at Gordon Hall in Liverpool city centre, or at the annual Crossfire festival at Aintree racecourse, which I think began in 1985. In 1984, I bought albums from the Scripture Union shop by established American artists like Larry Norman and the Resurrection Band, but also by UK acts, e.g. Fire Coming Down by Giantkiller. This is the only trace of that last album I can find online: 

 

Strait covered these artists, but also more mainstream acts who were on record as being believers, or who broached Christian themes, or just used Christian imagery. U2 were particularly favourites of theirs of course: they played the Greenbelt festival in 1981, the year October, their most overtly Christian album, was released. But Strait also liked The Alarm, and I remember a brief interview with Mike Scott of The Waterboys (on whom, more later), whose song ‘A Church Not Made with Hands’ opened with a CS Lewis quotation. And, more to the point here, they also interviewed Gordon Gano, the lead singer and songwriter of Violent Femmes, and the son of a Baptist pastor (he played a solo show at Greenbelt in 1986). 

The Femmes’ first album is a much-beloved celebration of teenage horniness, so many listeners were no doubt non-plussed by their second record, Hallowed Ground. It also contains one horny song, ‘Black Girls’ (the lyrics are as bad as you think, though theatrically and performatively so), but also a pure gospel number, ‘Jesus Walking on the Water’, and a couple of songs on the same apocalyptic theme as the Giantkiller album: ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (narrated by a very smug Noah) and the title track, which invokes a more up-to-date nuclear version of the end of the world. 

 

Were these supposed to be ironic, or in character? And what to make of their juxtaposition, not only with ‘Black Girls’, but also with a song about an insane farmer murdering his family (‘Country Death Song’), and another narrated by a psychotic stalker who won’t take no for an answer (‘Sweet Misery Blues’)? The music was similarly eclectic: the basic band was a three piece with acoustic guitar, acoustic bass and drums, but their hyperactive playing managed to evoke folk, blues, rockabilly, and – in the frenetic guest horn section on ‘Black Girls’ – a kind of hysterical jazz. 

 

I don’t remember much from the Strait interview with Gano, except an introductory phrase along the lines of ‘He’s the one doing the “religious” interviews – Strait slipped in anyway’ (it’s notable that his band mates didn’t accompany him for his Greenbelt appearance a couple of years later). But the interview did establish something of Gano’s purpose: to juxtapose the sacred and profane in order to dramatise the conflict between them. Even ‘Black Girls’ interrupts itself to declaim: 

You know I love the Lord of Hosts, 

The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. 

I was so pleased to learn that He’s inside me, 

In my time of trouble, He will hide me. 

The same push-pull duality is at work in my novel, The Angels of L19, about evangelical teenagers in 1984: its transcendent moments spill into its abject ones, and vice versa. Maybe I learnt that trick from this album. But back in 1984, it was something of an outlier in my record collection: the Christian connection legitimised its lyrical and musical strangeness, and meant I made more of an effort to engage with it on its own terms.

  

Although Hallowed Ground was released in the music papers’ hiatus, Allan Jones – later editor of Uncut magazine, then newly promoted to editor of Melody Maker – was a vocal champion of the group. The following is from a 28 July concert review (the first issue after publication resumed), which sneaks in a belated album review: 

On their first album, the group sang about the tortures of a terrorised adolescence; their music was a lurid orchestration of the worst kind of teenage nightmares. It was fraught, hysterical, sometimes oddly touching, often excruciatingly funny, its dense, black humour a cut and a slash above everything else around at the time. They were invariably compared to the Velvet Underground and the original Modern Lovers; but such comparisons were eventually misleading, certainly didn’t please the group and served only to obscure their originality. 

Just released, “Hallowed Ground”, their second LP, should finally dismiss any remaining misconception of the Femmes … [It] synchs into a current of American music that, the occasional forays of Gram Parsons and John Fogerty apart, has rarely been tapped by the rock mainstream. 

Its dark sonorities, its eerie lyricism, bug-eyed religious overtones, its compelling preoccupation with death and the devil, vividly evoke the haunting chill, the mournful vibrations of the kind of Old Testament country music played and sung by the Delmore Brothers or the Louvins, whose “Weapon of Prayer” wouldn’t be at all out of place in their current repertoire. Gano emerges from “Hallowed Ground” as an heir, apparently, not so much of Lou Reed or Jonathan Richman, as Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor whose raging deep south prophecies are echoed in songs like “Jesus Walking On The Water”, “Country Death Song” and the epic “Hallowed Ground” itself. 

This sounds like the prologue to an evolving and complex career – unfortunately, for most listeners, the Femmes were forever identified with their first album: an example of an audience refusing to let a group grow despite the group’s best efforts.