1984 Music: The Waterboys, A Pagan Place

Release date: 1 June 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Very much so. 

The Waterboys were my favourite band from 1985–8, and the most exciting concert I’ve ever been to was their gig at Liverpool University Student Union on 2 May 1986. As the previous post suggests, I only became aware of them after This Is the Sea was released in 1985, but I quickly bought everything I could find – and nowadays I consider 1984’s A Pagan Place to be the superior album. Its successor is a little too pompous, the cavernous reverb on the wall-of-sound production a little too much. 

It’s worth noting that the version of A Pagan Place now available on digital download and CD after a remaster in 2002 is not quite the album I bought on vinyl in 1985. There's an inferior outtake ('Some of My Best Friends Are Trains') inserted in the middle, and two of the songs included on the original release have been altered: the outro for the second track ‘All the Things She Said’ is pointlessly extended, adding an extra minute or so to the running time to no good effect, while the third track ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ substitutes a different take with a much looser vocal than the original release – one might argue it’s more emotional; alternatively one might describe it as more amateur. I have no idea why these alternate versions weren’t just included as extra tracks – fiddling around with the contents of an album many years after its release (beyond remastering) makes no sense to me. But this is a great album in whatever iteration one encounters it. 

The Waterboys are really a vehicle for songwriter, vocalist and guitarist Mike Scott. The group’s composition changed from album to album, and this was part of Scott’s design, to keep things fluid (hence the name). Indeed, the first album released by the ‘group’ was really a collection of solo demos with occasional contributions from other musicians, notably saxophonist (and later mandolinist) Anthony Thistlethwaite. A Pagan Place was therefore the group’s first proper release, and notably features keyboard virtuoso Karl Wallinger (later of World Party), though he was not present for the earliest sessions in 1982. 

This fluidity creates a sense of musicians newly excited by the possibilities of working together, and reconfiguring regularly to recapture that excitement. It's there in the immediate burst of energy in the album’s opening seconds, when a fastly strummed acoustic guitar charges forward into ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’, and is then joined by Wallinger’s rolling piano, drums – and trumpet from Roddy Lorimer. This song is one of the great album openers of all time, and the first lyrics we hear are a quotation or paraphrase from CS Lewis’s The Last Battle: 

Bye bye shadowlands 

The term is over 

And all the holidays have begun

At the time, Scott was also a fan of Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and was interviewed in Strait, the Christian music paper I mentioned in my post on the Violent Femmes. However, as the album’s title of A Pagan Place suggests, he did not define his beliefs as narrowly as Lewis did, and has subsequently I think disassociated himself from this connection entirely. He was for many years (perhaps still is) a resident in the Findhorn community in Scotland, which doesn’t seem to have any doctrinal commitments beyond a belief in holistic ‘spirituality’ and a commitment to ecology. More of a hippie than a Christian then – he even looks a little like Donovan. But in 1984 the lyrical allusions on the album and the sense of yearning for transcendence the music shares with U2 were more than enough for me to identify a kindred spirit. 

The childlike frame of reference borrowed from Lewis is important I think – part of the album’s Romantic openness to innocence and wonder. At the climax of ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’ a chiming, soaring electric guitar solo follows the similarly childlike declaration ‘Isn’t that a pretty sun? Sitting in a pretty sky. Ooh, will we stay and watch it darken?’ 

Interestingly though, the album’s ‘relationship’ songs are all clouded by adult emotions and regrets (‘All the Things She Gave Me’, ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ and ‘Rags’) – my distant memories of reading Scott’s memoir suggest that these songs may have been inspired by the same person. 

One of my favourite songs on the album is ‘Red Army Blues’, about a Soviet soldier condemned to the gulag in 1945 for fraternizing with Americans. It has revealing lyrical weaknesses: ‘I prayed for Mother Russia, In the summer of 43, And as we drove the Germans back, I really believed that God was listening to me’ doesn’t really sound like the sentiment of a loyal Soviet atheist, and ‘Bit my lip against the snow’ hardly does justice to the savagery of the Russian winter. But the song ultimately works because it has a very clear dramatic structure: in other words, it works as a story. And the music serves that Doctor Zhivago conception of individuals caught up in larger turmoil, with fake Russian choirs and pseudo- balalaikas, and epic saxophone solos. It all requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but it takes you places.

The album’s closer, ‘A Pagan Place’ takes us back to the state of mind of its opener, and its ‘Church Not Made With Hands’ – significantly, Roddy Lorimer’s trumpet reappears here. And we are definitely back in the world of Romanticism, where nature is the gateway to the world of the spirit, not its antagonist, and where some some sacrificial, Christ-like hero – or perhaps just a fellow seeker – serves as our point of identification: 

How did he come here? 

Who gave him the key? 

It slipped into his hand 

So secretly 

Who put the colour 

Like lines on his face? 

And brought him here 

To a pagan place

Like the subject of ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’ the figure invoked here is mysterious, elusive. It’s important that the lyrics are phrased as a series of questions. For Scott, unlike CS Lewis, it’s being open to the questions that matters – not pretending to have the answers. And if this figure is a ‘god’, then perhaps it is Pan, who is named in ‘The Pan Within’ on This Is the Sea and ‘The Return of Pan’ on Dream Harder. I’m also reminded a little of Herne the Hunter in the fictionalised pantheism of Robin of Sherwood, a television series first broadcast in 1984, though this is certainly a coincidence rather than an influence, since it wasn’t broadcast until most of A Pagan Place had been recorded.

I haven’t mentioned the album’s most famous track. ‘The Big Music’, which gave its name to the sound of all the groups who shared Scott’s wide-eyed wonder – it’s not one of my favourites. 

For the music weeklies in mid-1984, Scott was a person of interest, but not a star. Someone to keep an eye on for the future perhaps, but not yet entirely convincing. For the NME, the album’s release seems to have fallen into the gap created by the strike I mentioned in my post on the Violent Femmes, but David Quantick reviewed one of the group’s first concerts at Strathclyde University on 5 May: 

The Waterboys are one of those bands who get played on David “Kid” “Jensen”’s show without actually manifesting any signs of existence outside that world; I contend that nobody owns a Waterboys record. At all. This is a pity, since Mike Scott and his Garçons D’Eau are the purveyors of what we forest folk call a rocking sound. … 

Mike resembles Chris Jagger, which fact of course instantly reminds the funky young reviewer of the rough-edged and smelly-men-in-food-stained-coats aspect of the Waterboys’ music; you could say the boys play a kind of r’n’b, but you’d need a very supportive family to get away with that simple a remark, because The Waterboys have a sense of pop as well, one which occasionally gets too grandiose, granted, but a sense of pop that knows a good tune and goes out with it for years until people wonder when the wedding is. … 

I like The Waterboys: although occasionally harking back to a ‘70s idea of rocky pop and songwriterly posing, they stay on the right side of contemporary. Their main problem is that they’ll always be a serious-minded and intelligent group lacking the power actually to move you. …

In Melody Maker, Jeremy Lewis wrote a short review of the album for the 2 June issue: 

The Waterboys have gone halfway to making a great record, filled with bright and brassy pop. Roddy Lorimer’s incisive trumpet breaks the surface of the music with a flourish as bright as gleaming chrome, and although their little portrait of the world contains more grey than that of the Pale Fountains, the same reliance is placed upon enticing melodies and synth-less sound. 

Yet there is an outmoded element within the album that revolves around the persona of Mike Scott himself, a sort of pre-punk early Seventies folksiness that occasionally spills out all over the sound and mars the enterprise.. If Scott falls short of excellence, then it is because he pulls himself down into the more of some rather tacky past influences.

Occasionally, though, it works. “Rags” unrolls with an almost organic elasticity towards a series of great, gushing climaxes. “The Big Music” is filled with booming echoes, vitality and tension balanced in a dramatic equilibrium. “Red Army” has a powerful, pained saxophone replete with tragedy. … 

An odd record, wearing a mask of commerciality, but with something a little more elusive at its core. I don’t think Mike Scott wants to be pinned down and his record is rather like a blurred snapshot of a slippery spirit. … A record marked by too much cant and not enough candour: “I have seen the big mountain/And I swear I’m halfway there”. Perhaps next time, he’ll give us the view from the peak. 

Some of this doesn’t feel like it’s engaging with the music at all – the accusations of unfashionable influence just seem silly now. And r’n’b – even ‘pop’ for that matter? Surely this is music positioned interestingly between folk and rock (something increasingly obvious on subsequent albums)? Its ‘elusive’ qualities are correctly identified – but this is a feature, not a bug. Just when you think you’ve got Scott pinned down, he’s on to something else. 

The NME also ran an earlier interview with Scott on 21 April, in the run-up to the album’s release. Paul Du Noyer’s framing remarks here are notably more positive: ‘[advance single ‘The Big Music’ is] his strongest effort yet, the record’s a blessed match of power and grace. It’s definitely rock, and proudly so; an avalanche of acoustic guitars, real drums, impassioned vocals, trumpet and sax as bold as brass can be’. They later ran another interview on 11 August, in which Scott explained: 

“I am really interested in life. What it is, where it comes from, what is behind physical being … and I think all that is religious. It’s hard for me to give you an answer. I care about what I say. 

“I went to church as a little boy. I was always quite pissed off with church. It was really miserable, all these miserable people in their best clothes with flash cars outside, inside these four walls, singing dirgey hymns. It didn’t seem like a celebration of life, and there’s no better way to pay tribute to the thing that gives you life than by celebrating life. Bob Marley said, I don’t go to church – I am a church. That was how he celebrated life.” … 

In the thoughtless modern way of categorisers, The Waterboys will be simply indexed with U2/Bunnymen/Big C and their garrisons of hero-rock. Almost any sector of ‘A Pagan Place’, with Scott’s overwhelmed voice at its heart and the music swelling and swirling all around him, keeps that promise: of warrior legions galloping to the crest of a hill … 

“… Over which lies the new world!” Scott offers a sharp giggle. “I don’t see that really …”

1984 Music: The Dream Syndicate, Medicine Show; Rain Parade, Explosions in the Glass Palace (mini-album)

Release dates: both unknown, but Medicine Show was likely in May on the basis of the Melody Maker review quoted below 

Was I listening to these albums in the 1980s? I had The Dream Syndicate’s first record, The Days of Wine and Roses, but not this one, which was their second; similarly, I had the Rain Parade’s 1985 live album Beyond the Sunset, but not this 1984 mini-album. 

Both these groups formed part of LA’s Paisley Underground movement, who looked to 60s psychedelia for inspiration (generally in its West Coast incarnations), though as is often the case with ‘movements’ identified by critics, the groups themselves were often touchy about being labelled. Nonetheless, there’s an identifiable shared influence and a common location.  

Here’s an oral history of the scene from The Guardian in 2013. 

I bought several Paisley Underground albums on the basis of a report on BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, which is up on YouTube in a rather fuzzy rip, which dates it to 1985. A clueless Richard Skinner here doing a fair impression of DJ Smashie in a hideous Hawaiian shirt: 

Or at least, I thought this report was my impetus, and it does include a great live version of ‘No Easy Way Down’, the Rain Parade’s best song, but it doesn’t mention Green on Red or The Dream Syndicate or The Bangles, and most of the groups it does feature are now unfamiliar to me. The Bangles, The Long Ryders, the Rain Parade and Green on Red all visited the Whistle Test studios during 1984–5 when they were touring the UK – perhaps at the behest of Andy Kershaw, who was one of the scene’s most vocal enthusiasts in the UK. But why did I buy The Days of Wine and Roses? Perhaps there was additional Whistle Test coverage/discussion besides the footage posted above. 

In any case, The Dream Syndicate’s first album was a good buy, as it was the best Paisley Underground record. Its closest equivalent in my collection at the time was probably Hallowed Ground – but only the more abrasive tracks from the latter album. At the time, The Days of Wine and Roses felt like the expression of a sneering cynicism I found both unsettling and exhilarating, e.g. the blasé frustration of the narrator of the title track at his girlfriend’s threatened suicide. 

The word from outside 

Is she’s on the ledge again 

Drawing a crowd 

And threatening everything 

I’m here wondering 

Just where I fit in 

 

The debt to The Velvet Underground is very blatant: as previous blog posts have made clear, they were an almost-ubiquitous reference point for music criticism in 1984, but in practice their more conventional later albums seem to have had more of an influence than the experimental records with John Cale. Here even the rudimentary thudding of Dennis Duck on drums seems to replicate Moe Tucker. But there’s a real energy to the Syndicate’s music that’s partly attributable to its air of simmering violence. 

After releasing The Days of Wine and Roses on an independent label, the Syndicate signed to a major and created their second album in a proper studio with a name producer: Sandy Pearlman of Blue Oyster Cult. The recording process was apparently gruelling, with take after take – in contrast to the spontaneous feel of the first album, recorded in three days – and frontman and main songwriter Steve Wynn was unhappy and drinking heavily. The songs are great, but the album sounds airless – the worst kind of ‘professional’ sheen, with every hint of personality and idiosyncrasy suppressed – and the versions of the songs on the later Live at Raji’s, from 1989 are arguably superior:

Most of the independent Paisley Underground releases came out under licence on Zippo in the UK – where there was a larger fan base. Because of the national coverage of the music press, and on Radio One (not just John Peel, but Janice Long, Annie Nightingale and Kid Jensen), it was sometimes easier for American bands to gather an audience here than at home (following in the footsteps of 60s acts like Jimi Hendrix and The Walker Brothers). The Days of Wine and Roses was freely available in Liverpool in its Zippo iteration (I bought it from HMV), but I don’t remember seeing the group’s second album at all. I note that the following review by David Fricke from Melody Maker on 26 May describes it as a ‘US import’, and I wonder if it even had a proper UK release, which would be ironic, given that the move to a major was intended to broaden the group’s reach. 

Unlike R.E.M., who continue to maintain a playful, almost exotic separatism, the band has plunged headlong into the belly of the big money beast, armed only with their dangerously raw, eccentric guitars and Steve Wynne’s [sic] nervous reedy rant … But at the very least “Medicine Show” is a great guitar album, Blue Oyster Cult without the motor cycle fantasies, The Clash without the self-important rebel yap. Pearlman’s production – which includes the introduction of a few brassy keyboards and boyish vocal harmonies – has forced lead guitarist Karl Precoda to at once tighten up his serrated modal buzz and drive it to even further extremes. In songs like “Still Holding On To You” and the long “John Coltrane Stereo Blues”, with its awkward punky pillow talk and spooky “Born On The Bayou” riff, Wynne and Precoda almost seem to argue with each other, building into frenzied crescendos that don’t let go even in the fadeouts. … “Medicine Show” is not as immediately exciting as the last album’s garage meltdown yet it is strangely more absorbing in its fattened sound and offbeat clutter.

By 1984, other groups from the scene had signed with majors as well: The Bangles with Columbia, and the Rain Parade with Island. I bought the latter group’s live album rather than any of their studio releases – I suspect it was cheaper – but it features several of the songs from their 1984 mini-album Explosions in the Glass Palace, including the epic ‘No Easy Way Down’:

I also bought Green on Red’s 1983 album Gravity Talks, but this last suffered an ignominious fate. Since I was unimpressed with it, I took it back to HMV on the basis it had a ‘scratch’, and while I was browsing the racks trying to decide what to exchange it for, This Is the Sea by The Waterboys came on …

Essay on The Eucatastrophe

I wrote an essay for Lithub, which is ostensibly about Tolkien's idea of the eucatastrophe, but is really about what happens *after* the tragic ending. What if the story keeps going? 

Miracles are not subject to Aristotelian laws of cause and effect; they do not follow inexorably according to the internal logic of the story so far. Rather, they erupt into it from somewhere outside: they break it open. Grace is always arbitrary and gratuitous. It can’t be predicted or compelled—or even prepared for. It is the deus ex machina so despised by modern screenwriting gurus. 

The whole concept of the deus ex machina implies a secular worldview, in which divine intervention can never be the real subject of a drama, and so its introduction is always evidence of a failure of human imagination. But what if you actually want to say something about the nature of grace? Its true manifestations never provide closure. Rather, they destabilize narrative logic. The eucatastrophe is the narrative equivalent of a conversion experience: the entire story is rewritten retrospectively. 

If all this seems too pious for readers who don’t share the faith of my protagonists, then the idea of the eucatastrophe still has something to offer. Conceived more broadly, it’s really about what we do with failure. And worse than failure—the damage and hurt our actions have created, which we can’t simply wish away. It’s about what you do after the catastrophe that destroys all your assumptions about what your life was supposed to be—even if, especially if, that catastrophe was of your own making.

Interview for Joe Bedford's 'Writers on Research' Series

I did a written interview for Joe Bedford's 'Writers on Research' series, which you can find here. A brief excerpt:

What I draw from Twin Peaks is the juxtaposition of an achingly sincere, even naïve, depiction of goodness – which Lynch associates with images of 50s America – with disturbing intrusions of adult complexity and supernatural evil.

1984 Music: U2, The Unforgettable Fire

Release date: 1 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Very much so. 

U2 were the focus of much critical ire and jealousy almost from the start of their career, but the Liverpool bands whose thunder they stole were perhaps especially bitter. Head-On, Julian Cope’s memoir of his time in the Teardrop Explodes contains this ironic, self-mocking anecdote: 

Meanwhile, our New York show was a stupid and mistaken ‘double bill’ with U2 at the Palladium in Lower Manhattan. 

In Liverpool, we thought that U2 was a bad joke, a record company’s idea of a northern group. They talked of passion as if it was their exclusive right. Ho-hum. …

Double Bill, huh? We went on first, did really well and left. I’d seen U2 in the soundcheck. Led Zep, man. Uncool. But they were dead sweet and a bit younger than us, so we gave them some leeway. They weren’t gonna do shit anyway. To quote Gary Dwyer, U2 were really called the Hope Brothers. ‘Cause they’ve got two hopes of making it: Bob Hope and No Hope.’ 

This dismissive attitude is perhaps the only thing on which Cope and erstwhile friend Ian McCulloch agree. The latter has several famous bon mots about U2, but I’ll quote one from a 2011 interview: ‘U2 have never been liked in Liverpool. We know a fake when we see one.’ 

‘Fake’ was of course the direst insult anyone could muster for a pop or rock group in the 80s, although it was flung in all directions – notably against synth bands by fans of ‘real’ music, that is, music made with ‘real’ instruments – like guitars. In the eyes of their detractors, however, it was U2’s obvious straining after sincerity that left them most open to the charge of fakeness. Such are the incoherent politics of authenticity. 

I can only say that for this Liverpool resident and several of my friends, the release of The Unforgettable Fire was the most exciting musical event of 1984 (sorry Ocean Rain). It also received a cautious welcome in the music press of the time. Here’s Paul Du Noyer (another Scouser) in the NME on 6 October: 

It seemed about time for U2 to make their worst album. But they haven’t. 

It seemed like they’d moved from an early artistic peak (‘Boy’) to a commercial peak (‘War’) and what with America sewn up they were set for something rather more comfortable, and rather disappointing. In the old U2 you saw a straining after greatness, and that was the magic. But by 1983 their shows suggested a band who’d now achieved their own notion of greatness, and looked content to re-cycle it for as long as anyone wanted it. 

It got a bit pompous. And I got a worrying suspicion that if you crept up to this magnificent edifice U2 had become, and if you gave it a little rat-a-tat-tat with your knuckle, you might hear something hollow. Just in time, U2 have swerved off to one side. In ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ I think they’ve made the record they needed to make. Swopping Steve Lillywhite for the production team of Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois, they’ve staved off the predictability which threatened to wreck their original promise. The results are generally as welcome as they’re surprising. 

The old four-square rock unit has been de-constructed. In its place there’s a panoramic soundscape, multiple textures, subtle shifts in emphasis. In parts, U2 are scarcely recognisable. String and synth arrangements abound, sometimes replacing the group line-up entirely. 

Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker wrote along similar lines, although with stronger reservations: 

“The Unforgettable Fire” is the other side of the coin from “War”. Where the latter opened with the shattering paramilitary drumbeat of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Fire” launches into the long shimmer of “A Sort Of Homecoming”, whose sort-of-mystical lyric adorns the romantic maroon-and-gold sleeve: “See the sky the burning rain/She will die and live again/tonight”, sings Bono. It’s all a bit Kerrygold-country. 

We’re a long way from Steve Lillywhite here. In place of the harsh rock attack with which both he and U2 became inextricably entwined, producers Eno and Daniel Lanois have forged U2 into an electronic chamber-unit. The strident belting clamour of yore is virtually absent – the lovely single “Pride” is the closest to it, and even that offers a few different tints – and instead there are interleaving layers of synths, guitars and percussion. Melodic instruments are frequently used as near-abstract tonalities, shedding any distinct identity in favour of producing a wash of sound whose components can’t always be exactly enumerated. … 

My friends and I liked U2 because they were ‘our’ band: their lyrics contained many coded or overt references to their Christian faith. So they are also the favourite band of Robert, the protagonist of my novel, The Angels of L19. But my novel ends in summer 1984, so it doesn’t include any reference to The Unforgettable Fire. As the above reviews suggest, it was rightly seen as a significant departure from U2’s previous sound. To me, it remains a more daring break than the more trumpeted change of direction on Achtung Baby, and – along with Zooropa – it is their most experimental album. All the more remarkable then that it was their greatest success to date, and confirmed their hold on the American imagination, though possibly that had as much to with the accompanying world tour as the album, where the songs were presented more conventionally.

Reviews of the album are likely to use several words from the following checklist: atmospheric, shimmering, wash, texture, smear, effect (you’ll already recognise several of them from the NME and Melody Maker above). Adam Sweeting’s observation that it was no longer always possible to distinguish or identify individual instruments in this landscape of sound seems crucial. Previous albums had certainly used a lot of guitar effects – this was part of The Edge’s signature sound – but the sounds were still very identifiably a guitar. And any keyboard or violin overdubs were clearly and distinctly positioned in the mix. Here, instead of the astringent folk-inflected violin of Steve Wickham, used on War, there was a full chamber orchestra, and, whereas previously the group’s live sound was just four clearly separated channels, here they needed pre-programmed sequencers to come anywhere near to replicating the album’s sound.

Beyond all the vague adjectives I’ve just listed, I might note that the drum sound here is completely different from the gated reverb on War (or Sparkle in the Rain): it’s more muted and diffuse. And the drum patterns are also different: less of the goose-stepping martial snare and more rolling tom-toms, possibly in several different layers. Less beat, more rhythm. 

Obviously Eno and Lanois were partly responsible for all of this, but they didn’t push the band anywhere they weren’t ready or willing to go. And in fact the tracks that most clearly suggest the influence of Eno’s ambient albums, ‘’Promenade’ and ‘4th of July’ feel insubstantial and pointless in this context. The penultimate song, ‘Elvis Presley and America’, with a backing track of the album’s first song played backwards, is also unimpressive: interminable and lyrically incomprehensible, while the closer ‘MLK’ is just a sketch. So the album’s claim to greatness rests on its peerless opening sequence of four songs, including the singles ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ and ‘The Unforgettable Fire’, and on ‘Bad’ and ‘Indian Summer Sky’ from its second side. 

Is this a Romantic album like The Crossing, or a Futurist one like Sparkle in the Rain? The cover suggests the former, with a ruined castle shot on black-and-white infrared film to render it more unworldly, and a colour scheme of imperial purple and gold. The opener ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ is certainly set in a natural landscape: ‘See faces ploughed like fields … The wind will crack in wintertime’ (‘Kerrygold country’ as Adam Sweeting says), although it seems to be a landscape ravaged by nuclear catastrophe. ‘Indian Summer Sky’ contains the lines: ‘In the forest there's a clearing, I run there towards the light, Sky, it's a blue sky’. But several other songs have no discernable setting at all, and insofar as they are (allegedly) about (someone else’s) heroin addiction, they presumably take place in Dublin (‘These city lights, They shine as silver and gold’). 

Really the landscape here is an internal one, and the songs are about psychological states – in particular, they’re about struggle. The absence of anything resembling a conventional love song is notable – there are relatively few of these in early U2 in general, and none at all here. In ‘Pride’ and ‘MLK’, the struggle is against external agents of oppression, but, perhaps significantly, this is someone else’s struggle (Martin Luther King’s); for the most part, the battle here is against oneself, or ‘the world’ in more general terms. In other words, it is as much existential as spiritual – the lyrics are also notable for the absence of the explicit references to God or the Bible one can find scattered through their previous albums. 

‘Wire’, the third track, tends to be treated rather dismissively, but it was then and remains one of my favourites:

Innocent, and in a sense I am 

Guilty of the crime that's now in hand 

Such a nice day, throw your life away 

Such a nice day, let it go … 

Is this the time 

The time to win or lose 

Is this the time 

The time to choose 

It doesn’t get much more existential than that.

Literary Fiction or Horror?

What kind of story is The Angels of L19? It’s published by a press whose mission statement emphasises literary fiction. I also submitted the manuscript to several publishers of speculative fiction, but when I met with an editor at one of these presses, she insisted she wasn’t the right home for my book: that it needed to be published by a ‘literary’ press. So there did seem to be a consensus on that point.

If we’re talking about the shape of my book’s plot, its structure, then it’s a redeemed tragedy (I have a guest essay upcoming on Lithub that will talk about this in relation to Tolkien’s idea of the eucatastrophe). But it can also be described as a horror novel.

There are four specific strands within the horror tradition that seem important here:

1) The Gothic. All horror novels are the children or grandchildren of Gothic novels, but in this case the genealogy is particularly clear. Haunted houses, doubles, labyrinths, supernatural beings, demonic pacts, the decaying corpse as the ultimate challenge to human reason: my book features all these Gothic motifs. But I’d particularly like to emphasise the idea of the Gothic as being about the return of the repressed, and the uncovering of secrets, including but not limited to the awful secret of what happens to our bodies after we die.

2) The Uncanny. There’s a prolific literature on this concept, often drawing on Freud’s seminal essay on the subject, but I’ll go with Mark Fisher’s definition: uncanny fiction is 'set in “our” world – only that world is no longer “ours” any more, it no longer coincides with itself, it has been estranged.’ The clearest example of this in my book is the semi-detached house: that is, a house accompanied by its own mirrored double, its own conjoined twin, to which it is sutured by a common wall that both joins and separates its two halves. A couple of key episodes in my story try to draw out the strangeness of this, with my doubled, mirrored house standing for the complex relations between my two protagonists, Robert and Tracey, who live on either side of its common wall.

3) The Weird. Again I’ll go with Fisher’s definition: ‘The Weird … depends upon the difference between two (or more) worlds - with “world” here having an ontological sense. It is not a question of an empirical difference – the aliens are not from another planet, they are invaders from another reality system.’ I talk about the applicability of the weird to my representation of angels and demons in an essay at Ginger Nuts of Horror.

4) Folk Horror. This is a more recent variation, which is generally about the hidden presence of atavistic forces within our degraded modern landscapes, which then reassert themselves and erupt into our disenchanted present. But while most versions of this focus on pre-Christian paganism, and often on forces associated with nature, I’m more interested in Christianity and medieval Catholicism as atavistic forces underlying modern secular life. This links back to the Gothic: in early Gothic novels, one of the repressed secrets that reasserts itself against Protestant rationality is precisely the medieval, which is associated with the irrational and superstition – the ruined abbeys and monasteries that were the preferred sites of Gothic encounters were ruined because of Henry VIII and the English Reformation. The Gothic is therefore haunted by the ghost of Catholicism – and so is my book.

None of these interests are antithetical to literary fiction, but their presence definitely suggests I’ve written a horror novel. 

To sum up:

Do you like literary fiction? Then you might like my novel.

Do you like speculative fiction, especially horror? Then you might also like my novel.

1984 Music: Simple Minds, Sparkle in the Rain

Release date: 6 February 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Not in 1984, but my next-door neighbour Richie had several of the group’s earlier albums, and someone else made me a tape of Sparkle in the Rain a few years later. 

It was compulsory in 1984 to compare Simple Minds with U2, whether to dismiss both groups, or to elevate one of the two above the other. For example, Don Watson’s review of Sparkle in the Rain in the NME on 11 February has a splendid pun for its headline: ‘Give the Kerr a Bono’: 

Perhaps it was inevitable that the flirtation with perfection that was [Simple Minds’s previous album] ‘New Gold Dream’ would leave them struggling to re-establish their identities. What is disturbing, though, is that in this process they appear to have fallen under the unfortunate delusion that they actually are U2. … in recent releases [singer Jim] Kerr and Bono seem to have merged into some form of common entity. 

First we saw Bono crouched in Kerr-like position on the cover of ‘Blood Red Sky’ (a Simple Minds title, if ever I heard one); now we see Simple Minds burying their subtle power of inspiration in the percussive huff and guitar grumble of U2 producer Steve Lillywhite. On occasions the result is a heaving and uncharacteristically self-celebratory affair in which, instead of carrying the listener upward, Simple Minds dump power chords on them from a great height. In its most affecting moments, though, it’s the grace of Simple Minds sound which saves the band from the ravages of the inelegant production. 

Colin Irwin’s Melody Maker review was much more positive. Tellingly, the U2 comparisons here are, while still present, an afterthought, delivered in passing: 

Electrifyingly determined, exhilaratingly [enormous], and so totally sure of themselves that it wounds, Simple Minds have come up with a stunner. They don’t mess around with [platitudes], they don’t waste their time on [aspirations], they just steam right in, sending misconceptions and reservations fleeing for mercy as they obliterate all opposition. You can’t stay non-committal for long listening to these boys. … 

The ebullient “Up On The Catwalk”, all jangling guitars and crashing chords, and the superb singles “Waterfront” and “Speed Your Love To Me” represent the more traditional rock end of the band, but swirling keyboards also play an influential role in the mountainous drama “Book Of Brilliant Things” … [which] is rich, evocative and mighty – shades of U2 with its almost religious portent, while Kerr’s relatively restrained vocals still wield that overwhelming sense of purpose and destiny that at the end of the day always rises to the surface. 

As these reviews suggest, there are several possible lines of comparison between Simple Minds and U2, beginning with the producer of Sparkle in the Rain, Steve Lillywhite, who also helmed U2’s first three albums. In fact, the sound most closely associated with his work from this period is not, as this track record might suggest, a guitar effect, but rather a technique for recording the drums, originally invented for Peter Gabriel’s third solo album in 1980, which Lillywhite also produced (the drummer was Phil Collins – credit for the recording innovation is disputed). One of my protagonists in The Angels of L19 describes this technique while listening to the Gabriel album: 

[It] was recorded with two microphones: one close to the drum kit, the other farther away to capture the echo in the room. The sound from the drum lasts about half a second; the echo has a longer half-life as it bounces around the walls. A machine called a noise gate shuts off the room mic when the volume on the close mic drops below a certain threshold. So the sound’s multiplied, but there’s no natural decay: the echo’s chopped off. 

Gated reverb. 

This effect, in a more exaggerated form, is all over 80s stadium rock. It accounts for the ‘big’ sound of the drums on these records, a sound which is also, simultaneously, somehow flattened and compressed. It’s very noticeable on Springsteen’s Born in the USA from 1984, for example, and throughout Sparkle in the Rain:

It’s most apparent on the snare- and kick-drum sounds I think, the ones you hit with the hardest impact (and indeed I suspect it doesn’t work as well on tom-toms).  

Sparkle in the Rain certainly represents a move towards a bigger sound for Simple Minds – perhaps also towards more conventional song structures (though they’d already shifted in that direction on their previous album, which featured their first two hit singles). For those more enamoured of the group’s earlier, experimental phase, Sparkle in the Rain therefore marks the point when they succumbed to bloated grandiosity, a direction rewarded when they hit it big after ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ was included on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack the following year. I follow the alternate line of thought, in which this is their last great album: its widescreen sound opening onto a world of excitement and possibility. 

If Lillywhite was by this point associated with guitar bands, Simple Minds don’t actually fit that description: guitarist Charlie Burchill is part of an ensemble in which keyboards are arguably more important, and he usually plays what amounts to rhythm guitar. Mel Gaynor on drums and Derek Forbes on bass were also very talented musicians and their instruments are just as much a part of the Simple Minds sound. 

Another point of comparison with U2 might be religious imagery and spiritual yearning. The Simple Minds album before this one, New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84) had a cross and a sacred heart on the cover, and single 'Promised You a Miracle' declared that ‘Belief is a beauty thing’, but, unlike Bono, singer Jim Kerr was uncomfortable in being identified as a Christian on this basis, and the lyrics for Sparkle in the Rain retreat even from these vague allusions to an entirely generalised invocation of awe, which may not even be spiritual. ‘Up on the Catwalk’ reels off an entertaining montage of inspirational figures, which includes Martin Luther, but also Nastassja Kinski and Robert De Niro. The imagined apotheosis here is entirely material: fame or celebrity. Or more specifically, perhaps the rush and ersatz communion of performing onstage, which Kerr certainly seemed to relish. By implicitly comparing himself to a fashion model, Kerr presents performance as something one does with the body as well as the voice – and his stage presence and mannerisms bore this out. 

Simple Minds and U2. If we cast our net wider, we might also make comparisons to Big Country, whose first two albums were also produced by Lillywhite. And If we add some non-Lillywhite bands – The Waterboys, The Alarm, maybe the neo-psychedelic Liverpool groups – we have a roster of what is sometimes called ‘the big music’ after the song by The Waterboys of the same name on their 1984 album, A Pagan Place. All these groups came from Britain’s Celtic margins, or from Ireland. And they weren’t just ‘big’: they were reaching for the transcendent and the sublime. This might suggest the Romantic tradition: an engagement with nature, with weather and landscape. Certainly this is there in Big Country’s first album, The Crossing (‘Fields of Fire’, ‘Harvest Home’, ‘The Storm’). But their second album was called Steeltown, and this also points to something distinctive about Sparkle in the Rain. 

The titular phrase comes from the song ‘Book of Brilliant Things’ – it’s tempting to read this as an allusion to the Bible, but the lyrics suggest a more literal interpretation: illuminated by light. What kind of light? 

I thank you for the shadows 

It takes two or three to make company 

I thank you for the lightning that shoots up and sparkles in the rain 

Some say this could be the great divide 

Some day some of them say that our hearts will beat 

Like the wheels of the fast train, all around the world 

Insofar as this is a landscape at all, it’s not a natural one: it’s a cityscape, animated by global transport networks of trains and aeroplanes. There’s certainly a lot of rain in this world (from the album title on down), but things ‘sparkle in the rain’ at night when the city is lit by streetlights – which also create the deep shadows summoned in the first lines of this lyrical excerpt – so perhaps the ‘lightning’ here is actually a shorting bulb or cable. Similarly, the ‘Waterfront’ in the album’s lead single is not the same thing as a riverbank: rather,  it’s a place where ships dock and unload. 

All this is not Romantic then, so much as Modernist, even Futurist. Not an attachment to place, but an attachment to movement as an end in itself (‘Speed Your Love To Me’), and to experience mediated by technology (‘Thank you for the pictures of living in the beautiful black and the white’) – compare ‘I Travel’ and ‘Thirty Frames a Second’ on the group’s earlier album, Empires and Dance. 

The lyrics are often rather simplistic, but they are treated as raw material for incantation: repeated over and over to acquire a faster and faster momentum, both forwards and upwards – particularly the ‘Just my imagination, You go to my head’ couplet on ‘Speed Your Love to Me’. The ‘wheels of the fast train’ on ‘Book of Brilliant Things’ are also summoned mimetically in the music after Kerr repeats the phrase later in the song (from 3:30), and for me this is the key passage on the album:

Official Publication Day and Essay on 'The Christian Weird'

Today is the official publication day for The Angels of L19, and I have an essay up at Ginger Nuts of Horror, which explores how the story uses the conventions of weird fiction to dramatise the Christian supernatural (angels and demons, etc.). It's called 'The Christian Weird'. Here's a brief excerpt:

In his book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher describes the weird as an eruption or egress from elsewhere – from outside – into our world of something whose very existence disrupts our notion of reality. For Lovecraft, one of the founding fathers of weird fiction, this transcendental, alien outside was never supernatural, even if ignorant people sometimes mistook it for such. But even if we reject Lovecraft’s materialism, there is a larger problem in representing the Christian supernatural in these terms: because the invisible presence of supernatural beings is an accepted cornerstone of Christian belief. Even if few believers claim to have actually encountered an angel or demon, their existence is taken for granted. They are not elsewhere: they are all around us. We just can’t see them. As such, they are familiar, and their depiction in art and fiction is conventional – indeed, it often verges on kitsch (feathery wings, bulging muscles, luminescent pale skin and blonde hair, etc.). But this need not be so.

Reminder: Launch Event Tonight

The Angels of L19 is officially released tomorrow, but the online launch event is this evening at 7 for 7.30. Tickets are free if you order a copy of the book from the event host, Topping & Co. (link below – they have signed copies) – and also if you've already pre-ordered the book from the publisher, Weatherglass. The info to access the Zoom meeting will be sent out by Topping today, or email james@weatherglassbooks.com.

Here's the link to the event page on the Topping site:

https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/st-andrews/jonathan-walker-and-adam-roberts-for-the-angels-of-l19/

Review at Ginger Nuts of Horror

Really lovely, in-depth review at the splendidly named Ginger Nuts of Horror review site. Here's the tag line:

Highly original, thought-provoking, personal, and undoubtedly one of the literary highlights of 2021.

My publisher's mission statement emphasises literary fiction, but I also think of my book as a horror story (I see no contradiction between these two terms), and I really wanted it to be reviewed by horror readers. 

I'll have more to say on The Angels of L19 as a work of weird fiction and/or horror in a guest piece for Ginger Nuts of Horror shortly, and in a related blog post here.

Guardian Review by Nina Allan

There is a fairly lengthy review of The Angels of L19 in The Guardian, by Nina Allan. Though I think it is best described as 'mixed', it does have several nice things to say, e.g.: 'The book is beautifully written, making use of a low-key colloquial language that is always apposite and never intrusive or forced'.

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.

Charles Williams

The Acknowledgements page of my novel states my debt to the poet and novelist Charles Williams, friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, and like them a member of the Inklings reading and discussion group. I discuss his last two novels, Descent into Hell (1937) and All Hallows' Eve (1945), in a short essay for Neglected Books – here.

L19

It’s always better for a novel to be set somewhere rather than nowhere, and the more specifically that somewhere is delineated the better.

The Angels of L19 takes place mainly from January to July 1984, and mainly within the titular postcode area in south Liverpool – close to where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. Like Lennon, my protagonist Robert also lives with his aunt after his mum’s death.

In 1984, the area in question had David Alton as its Liberal MP (the sole non-Labour MP in the city), and included the council wards of Saint Mary’s (Labour) and Grassendale (Conservative) – a fact mentioned in passing in the book because the uncle of one of the secondary characters is a Labour councillor. However, my two protagonists live in Grassendale ward: a relatively prosperous zone of semi-detached houses dating from the 1930s (or perhaps the immediate post-war period), part of a small right-wing island within the larger socialist sea of the city as a whole. But obviously ‘Lower Middle-Class Hero’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

 Geographical limits for The Angels of L19 (map courtesy of openstreetmap.org)

The action of the novel mainly takes place within an area whose north-west corner is the junction of Rose Lane and North Mossley Hill Road, near where one of Robert’s adult friends lives. The north-east corner is somewhat lower down, at what used to be the site of the upper-school building of New Heys Comprehensive School, which Robert and his best friend Tracey both attend. New Heys doesn’t exist any more, but it was a strange hybrid of a school, split over three campuses: one was a prefab excrescence, another occupied what used to be a boy’s secondary modern (my father went there in the 1930s), and the upper school had once been a girl’s grammar.

On the west side of the map, the boundary runs down Mossley Hill Road, along which Robert walks to his friend’s house, past the fields where the Iron Marsh campus of Liverpool John Moores University now has some of its buildings. At the south-west corner, the boundary is formed by the leafy, secluded houses around Cressington railway station, where Kevin, one of Robert and Tracey’s posher church friends, lives; and then farther down, at the south-east corner, by what used to be Alfred Jones Memorial Hospital in Garston, a building now replaced by the South Liverpool NHS Treatment Centre. On the east, the marker is the cenotaph at the end of Long Lane, which is close to the church Robert, Tracey and all of their friends attend.

There are scenes outside this zones (e.g. in the city centre, at church camp in north Wales), but most of the action occurs smack bang in the middle of the map above: on South Mossley Hill Road, where Robert and Tracey live next door to one another.

I lived on this same road with my aunt and uncle from 1981–8, my secondary-school years. The borders of the map are therefore the borders of the area I regularly traversed on foot during this period. I still think this is the best way to know a place. In fact, I’ve never learned to drive. So when I’m not walking, I’m usually confined to train or bus. In Liverpool, I regularly caught the train from Cressington station into the town centre, or the 82 or 80 buses (the route of the latter passed close by my aunt’s house). So that’s also how my protagonists negotiate their environment – by bus or on foot.

1981–8 is the longest continuous period I’ve ever lived in one place. In 1988, I moved back to my dad’s house on the other side of the River Mersey, but I didn’t stay long. From there I went to Kent for a job; then very briefly back to my dad’s before fleeing to a friend’s house in Liverpool; then Glasgow for university; then Cambridge for a PhD; then back to my aunt’s in Liverpool during the summer of 1998 before moving to Swansea for a teaching job; then Cambridge again for a research post; then an inter-continental move to Sydney; then all the way back to Glasgow; then back again to Sydney, and on to Melbourne; back to Glasgow again; then Kent again for a second PhD in creative writing; and finally (so far) back to Glasgow. In total, I’ve lived in approximately thirty-nine different houses, or, more usually, rooms or flats. ‘Approximately’, because I’m not counting places I stayed on the sofa or in a spare room for a week or two between more permanent arrangements. Nor am I counting most of the places I stayed in Venice during the decade (roughly 1995–2005) when I regularly visited that city for periods of a month or two at a time to research its history in the archive.

I couldn’t wait to leave Liverpool in 1988. I felt like I’d outgrown the idea of me that everyone there seemed to have. But in the face of the relentless restlessness and insecurity that my life subsequently became, those seven years in Liverpool – even though I lived in someone else’s house – now seem the closest I have to roots.

I’ve known other cities better: I worked as a security guard and a postman in Glasgow, which took me to lots of different places there; and in Venice, I systematically photographed the whole city for a research project. But I’m not sure I’ve ever identified another territory as ‘mine’ in quite the same way as I did with the area I marked out on foot on the map above.

In The Angels of L19, Robert, who has visions and believes in an eternal Christian cosmology, thinks about his uncle in dismissive terms: ‘Robert’s world reaches up to the heavens and down into hell. Uncle Edward’s goes from the television room to the bedroom.’ But as the map makes clear, the limits of Robert’s movements are scarcely larger – and in any case, he has fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent. The juxtaposition in the novel’s title is deliberate: Robert’s visionary encounters with spiritual beings and realities do not nullify his connection to a material place. They are only possible because of that connection.

1984 Music: Big Country, Steeltown

Release date: 19 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Sort of. 

I liked Big Country’s first album, The Crossing, but didn’t own it. I didn’t pay much attention to the release of Steeltown but encountered it a couple of years later in someone else’s record collection. I was a bit sniffy. Even in the 80s, I found romantic elegies for industrial masculinity passé and regressive – they said nothing to me about my life – and explicit politics of any kind were inherently naff (I didn’t like Billy Bragg either). 

  

This is very definitely a rawk album, not a pop one, but it has in common with Rattlesnakes not only its Scottish connection but the fact that it’s ten bangers in a row without a duff track, and every one of them fizzing with energy. Of course Cath Carroll (again) in the NME hated it (I’m really beginning to enjoy her invective): 

So strong is the crusading tone of the recorded Big Country that a stubborn image has formed in the old mind’s eye: it concerns Stuart Adamson who, each and every time he undertakes a vocal track, cannot reach the emotional peak required unless he is standing in front of a wind machine and a blinding light. …  As usual Big Country here sound heroic, tempestuous, impossibly romantic. Every instrument and voice has been put through their unique ‘Cavalry Charge’ effect and still, every time Adamson opens his one mouth to sing, at least three other Stuarts are heard in varying stages of folksy harmony. Nothing has changed. The diddle-diddle solo is given plenty to do and must by now be ready to take its place in Celtic history alongside tartan-edged white parallel trousers and hung-over New Year’s Days at Balmoral. 

Once again, Carroll’s review is shadowed by Steve Sutherland’s in Melody Maker. But he was a full-fledged believer: 

“Steeltown” is, simply, superb, and everything Big Country ever said they were and everything we sort of hoped, with fingers crossed, they might be. There’s no ifs or buts about it – no “if only they weren’t so naïve”, no “if only we weren’t so cynical”, no “if only The Clash hadn’t cocked it up so badly for everyone else”, no “if only they didn’t wear those checked shirts”, no if anything. 

The sound that emanates from this album exhilarates – the power is internal, dynamic and emotional, not external cosmetic bluster. All the rockist arguments have been defeated, we never stop to consider this passion might be posturing. Thin Lizzy doesn’t come into it, nor do those nagging doubts that the bagpipe guitars might be a gimmick. This is sheer purpose made practise, adrenalised action. 

The debate whether Adamson is capable of reinvesting cliché with meaning is rendered redundant. The deed is done. 

What’s interesting about this gushing is how closely it replicates the emotional arc of a Big Country song – if you’re willing to give yourself over to it – staring off into the middle distance, avoiding paying attention to inconvenient particulars under your feet. 

In fact, only two of the group’s four members were Scottish (and both of them were born outside the country). In any case, the group’s fetishisation of ‘Scottishness’ might seem to contradict my generalisation that few of the albums I’m discussing here show any real commitment to place. But if one were to be unkind, one might say that Big Country’s songs are set in the same country as Braveheart: an idealised, fantasy landscape, as opposed to, say, Glasgow – or Dunfermline. Let’s call it ‘Wonderland’. Here’s a 1984 performance of a track from The Crossing: 

 

I should clarify that ‘The Storm’ is my favourite track on the The Crossing, and seeing it played live only underlines the group’s high level of technical skill. They have fantastic chemistry together onstage – no doubt the result of a lot of practice. So I’m being unfair: the film that Big Country actually soundtracked in 1985, Restless Natives – which I went to see at the cinema, surely because of their association with it (it was probably a deserted cinema, since no one in England followed my example) – is cleverer and funnier about Scottish identity than Carroll’s review is able to imagine. 

 

As for ‘Steeltown’, well, in the early 1990s, I did a few shifts as a security guard on the old Ravenscraig steelworks near Glasgow. That enormous site, itself as big as a village or small town, had closed, but was yet to be decommissioned or dismantled, and so it had to be patrolled – for years – to prevent thieves, and for insurance-liability reasons: that is, to stop any trespassers from injuring themselves and suing. Some of the men I worked with had once been steelworkers there, at far higher wages. Not so much the world of Steeltown then: more that of The Full Monty. I described this experience obliquely in my first novel, Five Wounds: 

Everything was preserved in a sticky grease coat, to which dust stuck and was fruitful and multiplied. The uneven concrete floor was encrusted with ridges of once-molten metals and alloys, with oil and with pigeon droppings, which fanned out in pale, luminous layers under the places where the pigeons squatted in the roof. … As he grew up in these massive enclosed spaces, Cur rose from the floor onto gantries that had once moved over mysterious pits. Long-dead jokes and insults were sprayed on walls and pinned to bits of paper in the rest quarters. Cur read them with curiosity, and began to feel nostalgia for a life he had never known. He spent much of his childhood enclosed in what had once been a control booth for one of the gantries. It had scratched plastic windows and cracked leather seats. Underneath the windows, every inch of wall space was covered in pictures of naked women with spread-eagled legs. 

I think the legacy of these places is more complex than clichés normally allow. So I prefer the Big Country songs that sing – very effectively – not from the point of view of the men working in these places, but the women who love them: ‘Chance’ on The Crossing, and ‘Come Back to Me’ on Steeltown: 

 

I have your child inside me 

But you will never know 

I never will forget you 

While I watch that child grow

1984 Music: Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, Rattlesnakes

Release date: 12 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes. In my collection of home-taped C90 cassettes, number one had Kilimanjaro by the Teardrop Explodes on one side, and Rattlesnakes on the other. (I owned both albums on vinyl: I just didn’t have a record player.) 

This was the most commercially successful among the albums I’ve looked at so far, and given that its success was arguably based on taking the Postcard Records aesthetic and smoothing off its rough edges, I expected the music press to take a dim view of its hit-friendly gloss. But for the most part this doesn’t seem to have been the case. In the NME, the review by Cath Carroll (last encountered slagging off The Pale Fountains) fortuitously sits next to the review of Spring Hill Fair by The Go-Betweens in the 6 October issue: 

There have been many albums lovingly created under the working title of ‘I’ll Be Lou’s Mirror’, from the Dream Syndicate to the Blue Orchids – and that’s only in the last couple of years. Lloyd Cole’s marvellous all-purpose reptilian drawl can rescue a struggling melody, can turn re-translations of ‘O’ level French essays into testaments of suffering and the cool … Is there anyone who doesn’t like Cole and his cronies, who have made the Velvets do a part C&W album and part deep-south blues-funk – gentle, self-mocking, inoffensive and superbly balanced. Every song is instantly memorable. … The record plays like a film, heavy on limpid atmospherics and post-coital maudlinity shot through with illogical bouts of teenage exhilaration. 

Admittedly Steve Sutherland in Melody Maker was rather more critical, and along the exact lines I was expecting, but my impression is that he was the outlier, not Carroll: 

Like Orange Juice’s “Texas Fever” and ABC’s “Lexicon of Love”, “Rattlesnakes” is an album of cynicism masquerading as romance. It’s about past pop’s legacy to the present rather than love or hate or any of the emotions it feigns. It’s about how modes of expression haven’t moved on one iota from early Bob Dylan, how a generation bereft of its own voice falls back on playing with the language of its peers. It pretends to comment on this situation, boasts its own cleverness, preens its wit and says nothing. 

This sounds more like a review of Scritti Politti than Lloyd Cole, but it’s more targeted here: 

Of course, he’s really a cardboard Edwyn Collins and it’s as if he burst from nowhere to steal Edwyn’s thunder. He’s like a swot graduate from some pop school … Edwyn, an acutely sensitive and self-conscious youth, makes self-deluding records to pretend he’s wasted and reckless. … Cole, on the other hand, keeps a cool business head and seldom strays far from a settled, scholarly perspective. 

But even Sutherland concludes: 

I’ve been too hard here on purpose because this record’s good enough to stand it. Compared to most else around, it’s a gem ...

It’s hard to deny how polished Rattlesnakes sounds, especially for a debut – by that I mean that every song is laden with lyrical and musical hooks: there’s not a dud among them. Whereas Ian Pye damns with faint praise by describing Pacific Street as ‘very much an album’, by contrast this sounds like a greatest hits compilation (and in fact nothing Cole has done subsequently has had anything like its impact: I can only imagine how frustrating that must be). Moreover, everything is in service of the song: the only instrumental solo on the entire album is the guitar one in ‘Forest Fire’. 

 

And whereas you have to work hard to figure out the relevance of whatever obscure allusion Paddy McAloon is making on Swoon, here the references are all wrapped up in pointed one-liners (or couplets). While this can certainly be shallow – quotations instead of emotions, or an appeal to the snobbery of those who ‘get’ the references – it’s also a lot of fun if you don’t take it too seriously (‘She’s sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan’). And there’s more specificity and deft characterisation in this quatrain than in the entirety of Pacific Street: 

Jody wears a hat 

Although it hasn’t rained for six days 

She says a girl need a gun these days 

On account of all the rattlesnakes

  

Many of these songs were written in a basement room at Glasgow Golf Club, where Cole’s father worked, and while Cole was as an undergraduate at Glasgow University. But the songs seemingly owe very little to that Glasgow connection. As I noted when discussing Julian Cope, this free-floating quality is shared by most of the albums I discuss. The Pale Fountains came from Liverpool and Prefab Sprout from Newcastle, as was very obvious when they spoke in interviews – but you wouldn’t know it from any of the songs on their first albums. The NME review of Rattlesnakes notes that ‘The contradiction of an English laddie groaning away in high Trans-Atlantic has become our firmest, unquestioned alternative tradition’. And most of Cole’s songs on this album also seem to be set in a fairly generic version of America (one with freeways and forest fires and the New York Times crossword). Only ‘2CV’ is explicitly set in London – and maybe ‘Charlotte Street’ since the road of that name in Fitzrovia is well-known, though that is also the song with the New York Times crossword, and a ‘union card’ (not necessarily American, but probably intended as such on an album that references On the Waterfront).* 

This kind of thing is often aspirational. It not only represents a desire to speak to American audiences and therefore be successful internationally, but more symbolically, it’s a rejection of provincialism: America is the great beyond, the place you escape to – the same place represented by the Western frontier, or by LA and Hollywood, in the American imagination. And in fact Cole later married and settled in America. 

The best thing I can say about this album is that it hasn’t dated at all: perhaps the fact that the allusions are all to 60s music, books and films helps in that respect. 

*There is also a Charlotte Street in Glasgow, though nothing in the song suggests it’s set there.

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.

1984 Music: Prefab Sprout, Swoon

Release date: 12 March 

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

I remember buying this on cassette very shortly after its release and reading the lyrics on the train home from Liverpool city centre. My god, this is poetry! I knew other people who listened to the Teardrop Explodes (though not, I think, to Cope’s solo records): I didn’t know anyone who liked Prefab Sprout. I then bought the EP that compiled their two early singles and, slightly later, the 12-inch version of the first release of ‘When Love Breaks Down’. I don’t know why I took a chance on Swoon: I didn’t read the music papers regularly, and the reviews quoted below would scarcely have encouraged me to spend my pocket money even if I had seen them. Perhaps Annie Nightingale or Janice Long played a track on the radio (I listened to both more regularly than Kid Jensen or Richard Skinner – I didn’t listen to John Peel at all). But I suspect my purchase was a response to The Tube broadcasting a ‘video’ of ‘Cruel’: 

 

I haven’t gone back into 1982–3 to check the early coverage of the Sprout in the NME and Melody Maker, but I suspect they may have been victims of music-paper syndrome: fawning early coverage, followed by bitter dismissal when they threatened to become successful. In any case, in 1984 their first album fared no better than Julian Cope’s. From Jim Shelley in the NME on 10 March: 

‘Swoon’ absolutely swims in wordplay, coy clues, dumb puns, arch artificiality, smart-alec allusion in a way that is so-so, clever-clever, ham-fisted, high-handed, even half-hearted … ‘Swoon’, in rejecting simplicity and sentiment, does have a definite, caring craft to it, a self-involved craftiness, a plucky capacity for cunning. But for all its deft complication and wordiness, it never excites or excels, is wildly harmless, consistently irksome and virtually passionless. Finally, it doesn’t say much. 

Or Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker on the same day: 

One way and another, this is drivel, mostly of the twee and gutless variety. … it’s rambling, disjointed, strings of devious chord changes toppling into one another without any sense of urgency or consequence. … “Swoon”, apparently an acrostic from Songs Written Out Of Necessity (bullshit), is a gigantic folly, a tour de force of self indulgence. As you can tell, I’m horrified. 

The group also seem to have been dogged by comparisons with Steely Dan, which seem baffling now, but this was obviously a serious black mark against them in 1984, allowing journos to dismiss them as too-clever-by-half sterile musos. 

There is some force to the criticisms in these reviews – insofar as one can identify actual criticisms among the rhetorical flourishes, which are almost as baroque as those in the songs under attack. Swoon is very much a first album by a young man trying to impress: again, I’m no musicologist, but I have no doubt that it’s full of weird chords and time signatures, and many of the songs have a herky-jerky, stop-start quality, with the vocal lines overcrammed with words. As Sweeting notes, ‘Technique’ begins with a 1-2-3-4-5 count-in, seemingly just to let you know it’s in 5/4, while ‘I Couldn’t Bear to be Special’ opens with an irritating scat-line ‘Bo, bo bee, bo’, whose purpose similarly seems to be that it isn’t ‘La-la-la’. The lyrics to the album’s opener ‘Don’t Sing’ are based around an ekphrastic paraphrase of the plot to Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, about a ‘whisky priest’ hounded to his doom by revolutionaries in Mexico – as ludicrous a conceit as Scott Walker’s mariachi re-telling of The Seventh Seal fifteen years earlier. Even worse: Paddy McAloon seems to be not merely retelling the story, but using the novel’s emotional arc as a parallel for some vaguely defined personal crisis. Similarly with the summary of Bobby Fisher’s dramatic career as a chess grandmaster in ‘Cue Fanfare’. 

But isn’t there something admirable about this throw-everything-at-the-wall overegging? Showing off isn’t always a fatal flaw – if one has something to show off about. And there’s real talent on show here: not a paucity of ideas, but a surplus. 

 

A comparison with the Sprout’s second album, Steve McQueen, is instructive. The production on Swoon is relatively anonymous and, since the indie-label budget from Newcastle label Kitchenware was presumably limited, there are few flourishes, just a basic palette of sounds focused around various guitars (mainly acoustic) and keyboards (mainly electric piano). All the instruments have their own space in the mix. The band get a co-production credit with David Brewis. Conversely, Steve McQueen is very identifiably produced by Thomas Dolby, and while his presence is not as oppressive as, say, Martin Hannett’s on Joy Division’s records, the songs somehow feel simpler and more direct even among the addition of various studio effects. They have a clearer identity despite sharing the limelight with Dolby’s production. 

We all know that pop songs have a Proustian quality, summoning us back to our youth – especially, perhaps those we first heard between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. But I have two later memories associated with this album. In 1994, when I hadn’t heard it for several years, I caught a crackly broadcast of ‘Cruel’ on a pirate radio station on my first visit to Italy to do a language course before starting a doctorate in Italian history – and realised I could still quote the lyrics verbatim (which I suppose makes this a memory of a memory). 

I'm a liberal guy, too cool for the macho ache 

With a secret tooth for the cherry on the cake 

With a pious smile, a smile that changes what I say 

While I waste my time in regretting 

That the days went from perfect to just okay 

Quite what it was about this student-union sexual-politics handwringing that appealed to my goofy, jug-eared, never-been-kissed fourteen-year-old self I don’t know. Probably only that I had so few albums that I knew the lyrics to all of them (I can also quote large chunks of Larry Norman’s Only Visiting This Planet, for example, a 1970s Christian album with a sensibility far removed from Swoon). 

Another memory: in early 2015, when I’d bought the album again to immerse myself in all-things 1984 before starting to write The Angels of L19, I used to listen to it on the bus on my way to work in a call centre. So now it summons in me not just a feeling of teenage nostalgia, but also a sensation of dread and smothered panic attack.