1984 Music: Other Stuff

Some other albums from 1984 I don't have the energy to write about in-depth, but that were/are on my radar and/or in my wheelhouse: 

The Go-Betweens, Spring Hill Fair 

Biba Kopf in the NME on 6 October: 

Spring Hill Fair? How do you get there? 

Ride in on the tide, the tidal wave flooding the suburbs where civilised streets trail off into the wild, drowning the last livestock, swallowing up liquid assets. And wait, wait for the waters to subside. Then cling like a leech to the mudstained walls, count the damage and latch onto what’s left. 

What’s left are The Go-Betweens, immigrant craftsmen watching helplessly as their dreams are dashed on the rocks, their dreams carried off on successive waves, their lives and loves rent apart. Cling like leeches to them, for if they don’t always seem like good company, there’s plenty of sustenance here. It just takes time for their abundant qualities to surface and shine. 

It’s taken me to this third LP to even notice they’re alive. I would have gone on blissfully ignoring them if it weren’t for the hooks of their current single ‘Bachelor Kisses’ – the LP opener – that affecting male rejoinder to ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’. The mud, it transpires, wasn’t mud after all, but a lifegiving silt deposit, staining everything it touches a rich, melancholy brown.

 

   

Prince and the Revolution, Purple Rain

 

Siouxsie & the Banshees, Hyaena 

This album is the one with Robert Smith of The Cure filling in on guitar, after a run of classic albums featuring John McGeogh in that role. I therefore expected it be inferior, but it's pretty good, and Smith makes a decent lead guitarist:

  

David Sylvian, Brilliant Trees

   

 

The Replacements, Let It Be

   

 

The Alarm, Declaration 

My first 'proper' concert was The Alarm on the Declaration tour at the Royal Court in Liverpool in 1984, and I went back to see them again on the Strength tour the following year. Now the lyrics remind me a little of the scene in This Is Spinal Tap (also released in 1984), where Nigel talks about his amp that goes up to eleven – but whereas Nigel understood this setting was to be reserved for special occasions, The Alarm used it as their default (I'm speaking of the group's emotional register, not necessarily the actual volume). I now find the resulting cascade of cliches and mixed metaphors a little wearing, but when the songs are simpler and more direct, it works better. In their Cliffs Notes summary of Stephen King's The Stand (a book and author I had no knowledge of in 1984), sticking to a script provided by someone else actually gives the lyrics more focus:

   

 

Billy Bragg, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg 

The Falklands War didn't produce too many great protest songs, perhaps understandably, given its scope was whatever the opposite of epic is. The greatest of this meagre haul is undoubtedly Elvis Costello's 'Shipbuilding', in either version (by Robert Wyatt or Costello's own), but the second-best is perhaps this track off Bragg's second album:

 

 

Television Personalities, A Sense of Belonging

And this is perhaps the third-best:

  

 

Cocteau Twins, Treasure 

I bought Head Over Heels, the Cocteau Twins' second album, with my 1984 Christmas money – I think because the cassette version included a bonus EP, so it seemed better value – but I now think this, their third album, is better.

 

 

Bronski Beat, The Age of Consent 

A truly groundbreaking song and album: 

  

 

The Sound, Shock of Daylight (mini-album) 

Something of a comeback for The Sound, after being dropped by their record company after their previous album. A statement of intent. Here's Allan Jones in Melody Maker on 7 April:

This is the way it sometimes goes: a group plays its way into the frame, cheered on by the enthusiasm of the music press, which always likes to think it knows a good thing when it hears one. Albums are championed, success is predicted; record companies look forward to emphatic ticks in profit margins.

Increasingly, however, the public isn’t quite so easily convinced. At first, the group’s supporters stand their ground, berating the public for its cloth-eared insensitivity. But the public refuses to budge, carries on buying Howard Jones albums.

By the time the group releases maybe its third LP, alarm bells are ringing. And, if that record stalls at the counter, heads start to roll: critics become embarrassed by their original declarations, start looking for new favourites. More often than not, the group ends on the heap, its dreams of glory vanquished by the harsh realities of a commercial market-place that demands immediate returns, obvious definitions of success. Crushed by the wheels of industry, the group is simply discarded and the world moves on, not terribly touched by the group’s demise.

This is very nearly what happened to The Sound; but The Sound refused to go under. The Sound didn’t flounder on the indifference that followed “All Fall Down”, they reorganised their lines of attack, prepared themselves for fresh assaults. The result is, of course, “Shock of Daylight”; what we call these days a “mini-LP”: six tracks, 30 minutes of bright, highly-charged music that stands as a defiant testimony to The Sound’s resilience, their determined reluctance to exit on cue for premature obscurity. …

The record rattles off the deck with the pneumatic clatter of “Golden Soldiers”, which finds Adrian Borland delivering an impassioned declaration of love over slurred brass fanfares, pugnacious bass and thoroughly hectic drumming. A breathless juggernaut of rhythm, “Golden Soldiers” successfully buries the idea of The Sound as some dreadfully dour old conglomerate. “Golden Soldiers” introduces a new Sound: more alert to the physical nuance of music; frankly, it sounds like The Sound have discovered sex and the arch poetics of yore have been put on hold, indefinitely.

  

 

The Triffids, Raining Pleasure (mini-album)

  

 

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Born in the USA 

It's actually the previous album, Nebraska, that gets a mention in my novel. However, the release of Born in the USA was a big event in 1984, even for the music papers. Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker on 28 July rather oversells the album’s gloom, perhaps in order to emphasise that it is ‘serious’ music he is entitled to take seriously:

All over Bruce Springsteen’s America, the lights are going out. In the bars, in the factories, in the frame houses. On “Born In The USA” Springsteen is older, even more claustrophobic and increasingly desperate.

It seems astonishing that Springsteen’s morbid obsessions – prison, busted marriages and the futility of good times – should have made him such a legend in the American heartlands. The man’s a walking museum piece, conceived and formed in the primeval days before MTV, still adhering to the simple, robust formulae of the rock’n’roll music he grew up with. He has more in common with Henry Fonda than with Boy George.

Armed only with some badly-corroded blue collar dreamscapes (“Blue Collar” director Paul Schrader gets a thank you on the sleeve, coincidentally) and the mighty E Street Band, Bruce has forged a collection of songs here that ranks with anything he’s done, and indeed, “Born In The USA” might be his best record. Nevertheless, the last mythic rocker paints pictures of unremitting gloom. I find this rather odd. …

If you were to boil down the subject matter of “Born In The USA”, you’d end up with death, either literal or metaphorical. Dead relationships, ruined lives, dead-end jobs and dead people. The fifth word Springsteen sings on the record is “dead”. The opener, the title track, blasts off with Bruce accompanied by a funereal snare drum. It’s a veteran’s lament (“Had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong/They’re still there he’s all gone”), a saga of a man who chose the army over prison and ended up with nothing. Springsteen sings it like a wounded bull while the band sound like an avalanche. …

It’s the earthy comradeship between Springsteen and his group which prevents this from being a cultural suicide note. On the inner sleeve the band are pictured in monochrome in a shadowy unfinished house, so deglamourized that Clarence Clemons looks like a plumber, while the rest could be detectives from the 38th precinct. Age has withered them, but they endure. …

Orange Juice, Texas Fever (mini-album) and The Orange Juice

 

 

The Mighty Wah!, A Word to the Wise Guy 

The mysteriously named 'X Moore' reviewed this album for the NME on 11 August:

The parallel between vainglorious Liverpudlian bands and Derek Hatton’s Liverpool Council Labour Group – banging of drums and beating of chests being dead popular with each – has been staring us Marxist pop commentators in the face these last few months, just waiting to be exposed. 

When I finally tracked down the lyric booklet for ‘A Word To The Wise Guy’ I discovered, blow me, that Wylie’s parting line on ‘Come Back’ is indeed “And hats off to Hatton…” and not “Let’s hitch up to Heather!” as had been painstakingly gleaned from weeks spent listening to Radio 1. 

From the sleeve of the album onwards – its logo the City crest overpainted with the cross of Lorraine, the cover painting’s portrait of The Resistance, the City’s motto ‘God Gave Us This Leisure (To Enjoy)’ scratched in the paint, the vision of Free Liverpool and occupation – ‘A Word To The Wise Guy’ is a document of a city in struggle. 

Maverick? Certainly. Magnificent? Possibly. It is unquestionably the best album about municipal socialism I’ve heard in many a year.

 

 

The video for 'Come Back' has invaluable footage of Liverpool in 1984, and it's a cracking song, whose call to return to the city I followed to write my novel (at least in spirit): 

  

 

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, From Her to Eternity

 

The Icicle Works, The Icicle Works

I'm not sure how much this is remarked upon, but surely the first album of this Liverpool band drew on the example of the Teardrop Explodes? In any case, Helen Fitzgerald in Melody Maker on 24 March quite liked it:

There’s something growing out of season. Something strong and fiery, something new and exciting, something only a fool would ignore. This record is mine and I’m not sure I want to share it. The Icicle Works are more than a favourite band, their music is a germinating seed of a rebellious attitude that isn’t falsely acquired. … “The icicle Works” is more than my album of the year – it might well be the album of my lifetime. You can agree or argue, that doesn’t matter – but the next time someone tells me there’s nothing exciting happening in music anymore, I’m going to laugh in their face.

  

 

Meat Puppets, Meat Puppets II

Not a million miles away from the Violent Femmes:

 

 

The Bangles, All Over the Place

This interview was broadcast on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1984 or 1985, and it was accompanied by the video for the single ‘Going Down to Liverpool’. This was where I first encountered The Bangles – possibly in the same show as the report by Richard Skinner I mentioned in a previous post. The dates are a little uncertain: the YouTube rip of the Skinner report dates it to 1985, and some discussion on a forum dates this interview with the Peterson sisters more specifically to 19 February 1985. But the YouTube post of the interview says ‘circa 1984’, and the release of ‘Going Down to Liverpool’ is here described as forthcoming, which would also mean 1984. And I’m fairly sure I bought the album with my Christmas money at the end of 1984, and not in 1985.

The Bangles were the most commercial of the Paisley Underground bands, and – eventually – the most successful. They are a little poptastic for my tastes nowadays but I enjoyed All Over the Place at the time – especially ‘Going Down to Liverpool’. As Andy Kershaw’s interview suggests, the song was written by Kimberley Rew, ex-member of English psychedelic revivalists The Soft Boys, for his new group Katrina and the Waves, who also recorded it, in several versions. 

In the interview, Kershaw expresses scepticism that the very Californian Bangles even knew what a UB40 was – as any fule kno, it was the form you needed to sign on for unemployment benefit in the UK, and as such the inspiration for the band of the same name. I wonder if even Rew – an Oxford graduate – was self-consciously slumming it a little when he wrote the song, though most semi-professional musicians in the UK at the time were familiar with the Job Centre, since unemployment benefit effectively served as an arts bursary throughout the 70s and 80s. But the date of the song’s composition – 1982 – and the seemingly arbitrary reference to Liverpool suggest to me that it might have been inspired by Alan Bleasdale’s Boys From the Blackstuff, the most talked-about television show of that year (though it was not broadcast until November, so I may be wrong about this). 

I don’t know anything about the milieu The Bangles grew up in, but it’s hard to imagine them dropped down into Bleasdale-world for a musical guest spot in the way that UK bands appeared in the middle of each episode of The Young Ones (the second series of which was broadcast in 1984) – hard to imagine them on The Young Ones for that matter. Certainly there’s none of the scuzziness of The Dream Syndicate in their music, and everything feels very sunny and light – in ‘Going Down to Liverpool’, their delivery of the line about doing ‘nothing, All the days of my life’ is therefore unconvincing. 

Nonetheless I find their appropriation of the song interesting, in that it mirrors the American response to the so-called British Invasion of the 60s. This attitude is made clear by a 1986 performance, in which the introduction describes ‘Going Down to Liverpool’ as a trip ‘far, far away, across the ocean wide, to the land where The Beatles and The Rutles came from’. The inclusion of the latter group with the former feels significant here: the pastiche lumped in together with its inspiration. Both Liverpool and the UB40 are treated as fetishes of authenticity, but entirely detached from their original context. 

 

Echo & the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain 

Yes, yes, I know, I know. But I have nothing to say about it that Donnie Darko hasn't already said better. I admit didn't pay much attention to this at the time of its release. In my experience, you either liked the Teardrops/Cope or the Bunnymen, rarely both.

1984 Music: The Smiths, The Smiths and Hatful of Hollow

 

Release dates: 20 February and 12 November 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Not in 1984. I acquired a copy of Hatful of Hollow in about 1987, and The Smiths at university in the early 90s. 

There are plenty of songs about heartbreak in the canon of pop music, but before The Smiths there were few songs about those who felt themselves excluded from love – and life – entirely. The classic 1960s pop song asserts the singer’s teenage identity against those who don’t understand him (or, less frequently, her) – but that usually means parents or authority figures, or, later in the decade, ‘squares’, the representatives of conformity. The Smiths occasionally approach this territory (e.g. ‘The Headmaster Ritual’), but members of an older generation are just as likely to be kindred spirits (‘Vicar in a Tutu’), and for Morrissey the real threat comes from one’s peers. 

Love, desire, infatuation, the misery of rejection: these had all been familiar emotions in pop music. But embarrassment, boredom, impotent frustration – these all came in with punk, and reach their apotheosis here. 

The teenage songs of an earlier era relied on a shared identity and appealed to shared experience for their impact – their loyalties were tribal as much as individualistic – but here the only shared experience was that of imagining other people might feel as alone as you did. Above all, the characteristic emotion is disappointment: crushing, humiliating bathos. ‘I look at yours, you laugh at mine, And “love” is just a miserable lie’. 

 Or in one of the group’s most famous moments from ‘How Soon is Now?’: 

There's a club, if you'd like to go 

You could meet somebody who really loves you 

So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own 

And you go home and you cry and you want to die 

The succession of ‘and’s really sells this: the misery is familiar, expected, never-ending. And Marr’s guitar shimmers and shivers and grinds our faces in it. 

Stereotypically, The Smiths were a student band, and certainly the world of work is only present here as a source of oppression: ‘I was looking for a job, And then I found a job, And heaven knows I’m miserable now’. But none of the band actually went to university, and the ‘exams’ mentioned in several songs were likely O-levels (certainly the weird 1984 tabloid accusations of paedophilia directed against ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ and ‘Handsome Devil’ assumed this). So the songs don’t actually describe the student experience. Rather, they are situated in the places the group’s student fans had escaped from: northern, provincial, urban, lower middle class or upper working class. Council houses, but not tower blocks. Clubs, sometimes, but not pubs: little alcohol in general, and no drugs, which Morrissey disapproved of (bassist Andy Rourke was later temporarily sacked when his heroin addiction was discovered). The threat of violence as a public crime outside in the street, but, interestingly, not usually in intimate settings behind closed doors (except in 'Barbarism Begins At Home' on Meat Is Murder). 

Sometimes this milieu has quite precise geographical and historical markers – the Manchester suburb of Whalley Range, the names of the victims of the Moors murderers – but mainly it’s defined by more general social, economic and cultural details: patios, disused railway lines, houses with doorsteps on the street, the News of the World, the end of the pier, kissing outside under iron bridges (presumably because there's nowhere else you can go), trips to the countryside on bicycles with punctured tyres; and so on. The frequent literary references and occasional archaisms (‘a jumped-up pantry boy’) situate this world in a tradition, but not primarily that of pop music, although both Morrissey and Marr were fans of 60s girl groups in particular, and helped to resurrect the career of Sandie Shaw. Instead the tradition is that of Middlemarch, Shelagh Delaney and the kitchen-sink novels and films of the 50s and 60s. 

Most of this is noted in the group’s early music-press coverage, though both the albums under discussion here are rarely considered definitive in the context of the group’s longer career: The Smiths, their debut, had been delayed and then re-recorded from scratch, and perhaps shows some fatigue at that process. To me, it feels a little forced and tired in some of the performances. Hatful of Hollow, released later in the year, was actually a compilation album, including several singles and associated tracks, and versions of songs recorded in session for Radio 1, many of which actually predated The Smiths –and a few of which also appear in different versions on that album. I think it’s generally assumed that the release of Hatful of Hollow was a tacit admission that the first album didn’t quite work, and although much of the compilation was never intended to be definitive (radio sessions, recorded fast and cheap, are by definition works in progress) it is for me one of the group’s best albums. 

Having said that, Allan Jones in Melody Maker had no reservations at all about the first album. Here he is on 25 February (note once again the ubiquitous Velvet Underground references, shoehorned in whether or not they belong): 

These songs, this music, The Smiths themselves, seem to owe nothing very much to anyone: they appear to exist without convenient contemporary comparisons. For music as lean and urgent, as passionately articulate and eerily beautiful as the most haunting episodes on this record, you have to refer back to the stark emotional lyricism of the Velvet Underground’s third album, and the decisive genius of songs like “What Goes On”, “Some Kinda Love” and “Pale Blue Eyes”. 

There really isn’t much room for anything but perfection on this LP. There are moments here that float and shimmer with a spectacular inevitability, a timelessness, an opinion of their own enormous qualities that only the very best pop music can boast. And, like most of pop’s most enduring moments, The Smiths’ music is often bruisingly mordant in its preoccupation with states of melancholy, regret, an ironic nostalgia for the way things might have been, but obviously weren’t and, perhaps, were never intended to be. 

The following passage seems less convincing to me: 

Like most great pop, “The Smiths” is also consumed by an extravagant romanticism, a touching conviction that love and the act of loving can overcome the most critical of life’s squalid realities. The beguiling sensuality of songs like “Reel Around The Fountain” and the awe-inducing “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” proposes an intimacy, a sense of communication through fingers, tongues and senses – a sense of coming together, if you like – that will enable us to survive wider disasters. … When Johnny Marr’s exquisite guitar caresses the provocative melodic nudge of “I Don’t Owe You Anything”, The Smiths sound like the very definition of Marvin Gaye’s idea of sexual healing. 

Marvin Gaye! Surely the only time his vocals have been compared to Morrissey’s ‘celibate cries’ – especially given the latter’s noted contempt for Motown, an early hint of his current odious politics. It’s true that for The Smiths, intense emotional connection to a love object might offer redemptive possibilities. One may even express desire towards such an object (‘Let me get my hands, On your mammary glands’), but more usually, being the recipient of such declarations provokes paralysing anxiety or conflicted feelings. In general, it’s safer to retreat into platonic territory: ‘But I don't want a lover, I just want to be seen, In the back of your car’. The most common position here, then, is not wanting, but wanting to be wanted: ‘Girl afraid, Where do his intentions lay? Or does he even have any?’ In any case, the consummation of desire is always a mistake – always excruciating. 

Jones’s review continues: 

The world inhabited by Morrissey’s blistered imagination and Johnny Marr’s evocative melodic settings is a world that’s been betrayed: their songs describe impoverished lives, circumscribed options, limited achievements, murderous equations. Illness, corruption and death are frequently present as central images. … 

I don’t mean to make “The Smiths” sound like an exercise in cerebral bleakness: there’s a robust physical enthusiasm at work on most fronts here, a very natural sense of what makes a song work. 

I seem to have missed the NME review of the first album – surely there was one –but here’s Adrian Thrills on Hatful of Hollow from 10 November: 

It is a patchy, erratic affair and often all the better for that. A song like the maudlin epic ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ that was later fleshed out and cushioned by the softer production on the debut album is included here in raw, less ‘pleasant’ form; ‘Accept Yourself’ and ‘These Things Take Time’ from the Jensen session are thrillingly abrasive; ‘Still Ill’ and ‘Girl Afraid’ remind one of a dull, prosaic competence which marked the group’s musicianship in their early days; the wistful ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’ and the dense, relatively complex ‘How Soon Is Now’ illustrate the new heights to which they have recently aspired. 

But what difference does it make? The most staggering changes are not in Morrissey’s beguiling, ambivalent obsessions, which have remained similar throughout, but in the flowering of Johnny ‘Guitar’ Marr, that chiming man, into one of the era’s truly great instrumentalists. Compare the monosyllabic flatness of his early picking with the cascading mandolins that close ‘Please, Please, Please’ and it will be clear just how much he has come on. His role in the band is now worthy of at least equal billing with Morrissey’s, a fact acknowledged on the awesome ‘How Soon’, a track previously only available on the ‘William’ 12”: with the voice buried deep in a clammy, claustrophobic mix, Marr – adroitly supported by the two unsung grafter Smiths – unleashes a barrage of multi-tracked psychedelic rockabilly, his Duane Eddy twang destroyed in an eerie quagmire of quivering guitar noise. Magnificent! 

And so to the calculated mystique of Morrissey: the man-child has mastered the knack of giving away absolutely nothing while appearing to be the most frank, disarming and explicit wordsmith currently working in pop. But, for all their sexual ambivalence and lyrical unorthodoxy, his songs are universal in the vulnerabilities and desires they seek to express. … 

I won’t quote Adam Sweeting’s dismissive Melody Maker review of Hatful: I get the impression they chose the one person in the office certain to dismiss it, purely to prove the paper wasn’t a pushover. 

Above I’ve focussed mainly on the lyrics, but the reviews are an important reminder that there were four members of The Smiths. Marr’s guitar and melodic genius are almost as lauded as Morrissey’s words, but the rhythm section of Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke – the ‘unsung grafter Smiths’ – were also superb. Infamously, the last two were entirely excluded from songwriting credits and given only 10% of performance royalties each. And while Morrissey probably bears the greater share of the blame for this state of affairs, Marr agreed to it too. A fairer division would surely have been 10% of songwriting royalties and 25% of performance royalties: I just don’t believe that such skilled and inventive musicians contributed nothing to these songs in the studio. Or did Marr really write all the basslines and drum patterns as well as the melodies and chord sequences? 

Parenthetically, I might note that groups who make a decision to split royalties evenly from the start – notably U2 and R.E.M. – tend to have long and happy careers. In any case, they don’t end up hating each other if and when they split.

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.