Snubbed Again

Another dip back into the world of late 80s alternative culture as filtered through the lens of Snub TV, an early evening independent music show of the kind that seems inconceivable now. In December 1988 The House Of Love were filmed playing live at Top Rank in Brighton- the seven minute clip opens with a ferocious take on Destroy the Heart, Terry Bickers' guitar and Guy Chadwick's vocals in some kind of war to be the most ragged and fraught. Bickers was a really talented guitarist, capable of slow burning shimmer and understated pyrotechnics. The clip then has an interview with a fresh faced Chadwick. The rest of the band look like they'd rather be anywhere else. Snub then cut back to the gig with Man To Child. 

I loved The House Of Love, saw them live several times in the late 80s including one occasion at the Queen's Hall in Widnes just a few days before they kicked Terry out of the band, abandoning him at a service station as they were driving to Wales. Relations were fraught and Terry called Guy a breadhead and set fire to a £5 note and then drummer Pete Evans punched Terry in the face- I might be misremembering the details but it was along those lines. The first album, released on Creation in 1988, was possibly the last gasp of this kind of indie guitar music before acid house and indie dance came along the following year. 

Road

Throwing Muses were on Snub in 1988, filmed live at The Town And Country Club in Camden in May. There's a brief interview section at the start of this clip, step- sisters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, facing the questions and Kristin talking about feminism. The clip then goes to the gig, an intense performance of Downtown (a song from their 1988 album House Tornado). They were a powerful live band- they'd been going since 1981 so by '88 they were pretty seasoned performers. 

Manic Depression is a cover of The Jimi Hendrix Experience song. This is a live instrumental version, no vocals- I've no idea where or when it's from but a version of the song was on 1992's Firepile EP. 

Manic Depression

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Three

A third Sunday covers mix for October this time with an 80s indie edge and some repeat offenders from the last two weeks present and correct. Starts out all small hours and hushed, goes noisier, comes down again and finishes where it started with The Velvets, one of the most covered bands. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Three

• Cowboy Junkies: Sweet Jane
• Sonic Youth: Superstar
• Primal Scream: Carry Me Home
• The House Of Love: Who By Fire
• Ciccone Youth: Into The Groovey
• World Of Twist: This Too Shall Pass Away
• Red Snapper: Sound And Vision
• R.E.M.: Indian Summer
• Minutemen: Have You Ever Seen The Rain?
• Calexico: Corona
• Paul Quinn & Edwyn Collins: Pale Blue Eyes (Western)

Cowboy Junkies covered Sweet Jane on their magical 1988 album The Trinity Session. The album was famously recorded in Toronto's Church of The Holy Trinity. Their cover was based on the version the Velvets played on their 1969 Live album rather than the one on Loaded. Lou Reed said the Cowboy Junkies take on the song was his favourite, the way the song was meant to be done. 

Sonic Youth featured twice last week and do this week too- their version of Superstar came out on a 1994 tribute to The Carpenters. Richard Carpenter didn't like it at all. Sonic Youth take a blow torch to the song, a huge amount of reverb, one massive piano note, some wobbly guitar sounds and surely nail something true about the song. The Carpenters released it in 1971 with LA session musicians The Wrecking Crew and a toned down, less suggestive lyric ('I can't wait to sleep with you again' was changed to 'be with you again'). The song was written by Bonnie Bramlett and Leon Russell and recorded first by Delaney and Bonnie in 1969, a song about the relationships between rock stars and groupies in the 60s.

Carry Me Home was on Primal Scream's Dixie- Narco EP, a bleak Dennis Wilson song made bleaker still by Primal Scream and Andrew Weatherall while recording at Ardent in Memphis in 1991. Weatherall's production and arrangement is superb, an extension of the Screamadelica sound into darker places. Dennis' song is sung from the point of view of a dying soldier in Vietnam.

Who By Fire is a Leonard Cohen song covered by The House Of Love on a 1991 tribute album, I'm Your Fan- there are loads of 80s/ 90s alt/ indie stars on the album including R.E.M., Pixies, The Lilac Time, Ian McCulloch, Lloyd Cole, Robert Forster, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, James and John Cale. I'm not sure any of them really improve on the original songs. 

Ciccone Youth were a Madonna inspired Sonic Youth side project with Minuteman Mike Watt on bass. Watt was in a bad way after D. Boon's death and what became The White Album was a way to get him playing again. Into The Groovey is a cover of Madonna (obvs) and samples her too. SY loved Madonna in the 80s, they loved Into The Groove. They also covered Robert Palmer's Addicted To Love. 

World Of Twist did a few covers- Kick Out The Jams, She's A Rainbow, Life And Death- and this one, This Too Shall Pass Away, which sits in the middle of side one on their sole album, 1991's Quality Street. Quality Street is a heady stew of psychedelic pop, Northern Soul and late 80s Mancunian indie. The original version of This Too... is a 1964 single by the Honeycombs.

Red Snapper's cover of Bowie's Sound And Vision is on Ban- Di- To, out earlier this year and thoroughly recommended. Red Snapper are a formidable live band and Sound And Vision is a live favourite- I saw them do it at The Golden Lion in 2023.

Indian Summer is a semi- legendary song by Beat Happening, lo fi indie pioneers from Olympia, Washington. The song is a slow burning tale of youth and lust, originally released in 1988. R.E.M.'s cover is from a 2008 single, Hollow Man. I have versions by Spectrum (Sonic Boom), Luna and The Jazz Butcher as well as this one. In fact Spectrum's may be the best version and should probably have been included here- R.E.M. find some late period magic and intensity here though.

Minutemen covered Have You Ever Seen The Rain? on their fourth and final album, 1985's Three Way Tie For Last, a cover of Watt and Boon's teenage heroes Creedence Clearwater Revival. AT two minute thirty seconds long it's an epic by Minutemen standards. D Boon died shortly after the album's release.

Calexico's cover of Minutemen's Corona was on their 2003 masterpiece Feast Of Wire. The original is from 1984's Double Nickels On the Dime, one of D Boon's best songs, a heartfelt protest song for the downtrodden people of mid- 80s Mexico. Calexico played it live and then covered it, adding mariachi horns. Let's forget the fact it became the theme tune to Jackass. 

Back to The Velvets. Paul Quinn and Edwyn Collins covered Lou Reed's Pale Blue Eyes for a one off single in 1984, done for the soundtrack of Alan Horne's Punk Rock Hotel. It's a much loved cover, Edwyn and Paul both sounding as good as they ever did. 

V.A. Saturday

In August 1988 Creation Records released a fifteen track compilation called Doing It For The Kids, a summary of the label's then roster and a statement of intent, with a sticker on the front reading 'An LP for the price of a 7" single'. Doing It For The Kids is one of the definitive statements of that scene and period, as much as any record from the summer of '88 that has guitars at its core. You wouldn't guess from listening to it that the musical world was changing, there is no hint of the Summer Of Love, acid house, Detroit techno, Screamadelica, The Roses and the Mondays within it's grooves. Doing It For The Kids is Creation in all its pre- acid house indie glory, all winkle pickers and black leather, feedback and 60s guitars, groups that are quintessential Creation bands, that lived, gigged and released records entirely within that world- The Jasmine Minks, The Weather Prophets, The Jazz Butcher and Biff Bang Pow all appear, Alan McGee and Richard Green selecting the then best songs these groups had written and recorded. Felt's Ballad Of The Band is up there with that band's best songs. Primal Scream's All Fall Down is as good as any of the songs from their indie phase. Along with My Bloody Valentine (represented here by the mighty, head spinning Cigarette In My Bed), Primal Scream would go onto to bigger things sooner or later. 

The House Of Love's Christine is the opener to their debut Creation album, a perfect three and a half minutes marriage of Guy Chadwick's classicist songwriting and Terry Bickers' guitar playing. They wouldn't last the course, throwing everything into a big money deal that never really worked out for them. Briefly, in this pre- Manchester indie summer world (Bummed came out in November 1988, Made Of Stone in March '89), they looked like the future. The sound Bickers' gets in the intro, that insistent, drilling guitar noise, is worth the price of admission along, never mind the sigh as the chords and Guy Chadwick's voice descend in the 'and the whole world dragged us down' part and the subsequent rise as he grits his teeth to song the song's title.  

Christine

Heidi Berry and Nicki Sudden both stand out from the indie guitar boys. Heidi's songwriting and folk styles saw her release albums on Creation and 4AD. She had connections with the Creation massive, Pete Astor and Martin Duffy played on her two Creation albums, Firefly and Beneath The Waves. North Shore Train is a piano and cello song, reflecting Heidi's love of Nick Drake and Sandy Denny.

North Shore Train

Nicki Sudden was in post punk band Swell Maps with his brother Epic Soundtracks. Nicki 's solo career saw him zig and zag through the 80s, the records of Johnny Thunders never far away. He recorded with Mike Scott, members of R.E.M. and Rowland S. Howard. Sadly Nicki died in 2006 aged just 49. 

Death Is Hanging Over Me

Side Two drifts about, collating the outliers in the Creation team- Pacific (with Jetstream, a song about the sinking of the Belgrano by the Thatcher government), a group that hint at the electronic sounds coming just around the corner, Momus (a one man Pet Shop Boys- the song on Doing It For The kids is A Complete History Of Sexual Jealousy Parts 17- 24, a rather brilliant song), the lo fi, DIY Reflect On Rye by Emily and finally Brighter Now by Razorcuts, one of those songs that is tailor made for homemade compilation tapes, lovingly complied for prospective girlfriends/ boyfriends, twelve string acoustic guitars, reverb and wistful vocals.

Brighter Now

Creation knew exactly what they doing in August 1988, a fifteen song summation of what made the label great, singles and songs pulled together that balance and complement each other, songs that push and pull, available at a budget price. Cramming fifteen songs onto two sides of vinyl may not have made for sonic perfection but that didn't really matter- these songs weren't made for audiophiles or high end equipment. A pretty much perfect V.A. compilation. 

Eighteen

 

Eighteen years ago today this baby was born, our child number two and daughter number one, Eliza. Unlike her brother's traumatic entry to the world and subsequent difficulties, she was an easy birth (obviously that's easy for me to say, I wasn't the one doing the hard work at that exact moment) and she has been a joy to be around ever since. Reaching the point where both your children are eighteen or older is a good way to make you feel old but having a lively, witty, grounded and occasionally sarcastic eighteen year old around also keeps you feeling young. She has a week's worth of partying planned, from today through to Friday but today's the actual day so happy birthday Eliza. 

Back in 1987 when I was seventeen The House Of Love released a single that became their calling card, the shimmering indie rock of Shine On. In the lyric Guy Chadwick (definitely not a teenager at the time, not even in his twenties I reckon) sings, 'I'm so young/ Just eighteen' before Terry Bickers' guitar soars into the stratosphere and the chorus kicks in, 'she/ she- she- she shine on'. So, keep shining Eliza, on and on. 

Shine On

I was seventeen when I first heard this song and eighteen when they released the single Christine and their debut album. These records are indelible imprints of my youth. In the way that things worked back then the band were indie sensations, darlings of the NME, Creation Records wonderkids and as a result hawked around the major labels by Alan McGee. They signed to Fontana for a typically large advance. The group's drug use was spiralling at the time and the first thing Fontana did was release a single without the band's consent (Never, a record I adore but which the general feeling was fell short of the songs that propelled them in the first place). Terry Bickers, guitar whizzkid, was increasingly uncomfortable with all aspects of chasing fame and fortune and life on a major label and his relationship with Chadwick broke down. Bickers' drug use and mental health deteriorated jus as they worked on an expensively recorded album for Fontana and a mammoth sixty date tour was about to start. I saw them play at Widnes Queen's Hall on 27th November 1989 and the tensions were evident from the floor of the venue. The following week Terry was kicked out of the tour bus at a service station near Bristol. A week later The House Of Love played Portsmouth Polytechnic with hastily recruited Simon Walker on guitar. This re- recorded version of Shine On was included on their Fontana album and released as a single in March 1990. The single hit the dizzying heights of number twenty and they made their only Top Of The Pops appearance, Bickers out of the group and on his way to forming Levitation. In a lot of ways this was the end for them, even though they crawled on for a few more years, increasingly desperate attempts at flogging singles in multiple formats and albums to recoup the advance Fontana threw at them. They never recaptured what briefly made them special in 1987- 8. Despite Guy Chadwick's ambition, some bands just aren't built to be big. 

It's Safe In A Little World

The House Of Love played The Albert Hall, Manchester on Friday night. I saw them a handful of times back in 1988-1990 (a gig at Widnes days before Terry Bickers was kicked out of the band was memorable for the wrong reasons and one in March 1990 with his replacement where they didn't seem to catch fire both stick in the mind). Guy Chadwick and Terry re-united a while back, buried hatchets and put demons to rest and released an album of new songs which was fairly well received but the main draw of this current tour is the promise of the debut album played in full. Which is what they do, opening with Christine and then blazing their way through the Hope, Road and Sulpher, the twin frontmen dressed in floral shirts and dark trousers, even their wardrobe choices still in that brief period between the end of The Smiths and the arrival of The Roses and the Mondays. On record the album is covered in a sheen, producer Pat Collier's 1988 haze. Live they are a little looser and more ragged but none the worse for it. The star here is Bickers, who occasionally explodes into life careering round his side of the stage with jolts, dropping to the floor, scissor kicks, all the while playing those startling lead guitar lines which are imprinted into my musical DNA. The two slower songs from the album Fisherman's Tale and Love In A Car glower and then detonate. It's good stuff, done well, without the issues that scuppered them 30 years ago- Bickers with his guilt about selling out and subsequent behaviour on the tour and Chadwick's desperation to 'make it'.

Once the album is done they seem to relax a little, actually speak to the audience and set about a second half of B-sides and other songs, all from the period between signing to Creation and the first album for Fontana (the Butterfly album). 1991 song Marble is a blast, a Camberwell version of the Velvet Underground for radio. Safe, a B-side from the 1989 single Never (but could have and should have been a single) bristles and burns. They introduce I Don't Know Why I Love as their Tina Turner song and then roar through it, Bickers guitar playing loud and to the fore. Early pre-debut album songs like Real Animal and Love get played and they finish with the pairing of Shine On and Destroy The Heart (John Peels' single of the year in '88). Everyone seems happy. To quote my brother's friend, a more succinct review than this one, 'it was good, I enjoyed it'.

Marble

Safe

The Spy

Listening to some of 2017's shoegaze survivors put me in mind of 1988's great indie guitar hopes, Creation's House Of Love. Signed in 1987 Guy Chadwick, already a veteran of several bands but in 1986 inspired by seeing The Mary Chain, put a band together from an advert in Melody Maker and Terry Bickers dropped into his lap. Bickers was an understated but mercurial whizzkid. Much of the 'sonic cathedrals' aspect of shoegaze can be traced back to Bickers wall of fuzz and melody. Singles Christine and Destroy The Heart took them to the top of the Festive Fifty and the NME and briefly they looked like the boys most likely to. Then drugs, disagreements, major label problems and ego took over- and so did Manchester- and they never really recovered (despite making some songs that still stand up on various follow up lps and singles). But as well as the indie shimmer they could also be direct and full on. Road is drama filled, widescreen late 80s indie, chiming, ringing guitars and existential dread in the vocals followed by Guy's indie boy dream of freedom- 'Steal a car, the highway calls, stick some pins, in your toes, suck your cheeks, dance boy down the road'.

Road

Album track Salome enters on driving drums and a killer riff before Guy comes in with 'I love the way she cries...' Bickers fires off blasts of guitar. Echoes of The Bunnymen in this one, not least Chadwick's closing lines 'Salome is dead, the king is free... I'm sailing on the sea'.

Salome

The dreamier side of them is captured well on this 1989 appearance of Channel 4's Big World Cafe. Whatever it is, they had it briefly.

Lay Right Down In My Favourite Place

This has been added to a recent re-release of The House Of Love's debut album, a live cover version of I Wanna Be Your Dog. Pretty standard fare you might think- it's an easy song to cover, it's a lot of fun to play, it stakes your left-field credentials as a Stooges fan. To be fair Guy Chadwick doesn't really try to out-Iggy Iggy but the twin guitar work is a joy and this is a top quality live recording sound-wise. It also sounds like the mic was about three inches from Terry Bickers amp.

I Wanna Be Your Dog

I'm The Window Fitter (In The House of Love)

It turns out that recent postees The House Of Love have got a new album out and are doing a short tour in April. When I'm going to be away. Damn.

Terry Bickers and Guy Chadwick have reunited. There's no real change in direction- Guy's voice and lyrics could have been cut and pasted from the late 80s and Terry's guitar playing is as good as ever. An article in Sunday's Observer claimed that Guy made/makes a living by fitting windows in South London. It also says that near the end of the Bickers first tenure in the band he spoilt a gig in Wales by singing Sham 69 songs over the band's own songs. I saw them at Warrington a few days before he was dumped by the side of a motorway and his backing vocals and playing that night seemed to be almost deliberately off key and out of time- but I don't recall him singing the words to Borstal Breakout over Christine. I'm pretty tempted by their new lp. But it's probably mainly nostalgia on my part.

The Girl With The Loneliest Eyes

The Girl With The Loneliest Eyes was an end period song from The House Of Love when everyone, probably including the band themselves, had given up on them. It isn't up there with their peerless, perfect early records on Creation, with all those FX and wobbly guitars, but for a band (in 1993) totally out of time and running out of ideas it isn't half bad. In fact it shimmers.

The Girl With The Loneliest Eyes

House Creation

House Of Love Creation that is. What was funny in the Creation documentary the other night was a couple of Creation talking heads saying that they were all 'working class boys' and then Guy Chadwick turned up 'talking like Kenneth Branagh'. British music like British society is class obsessed. And class riven. No matter- very briefly the House Of Love had 'it'. They lost it pretty quickly, but for a while it was theirs. This is another Creation Peel Session song, from August 1988, featuring the slow burn drama of a great track from their debut album.

Love In A Car (Peel Session)

Meetings With Footballers 2

One night in either 1988 or 1989 a group of us are outside Liverpool University Students' Union. The House Of Love are playing the smaller venue in the Union, the Stanley Theatre. I saw them on their previous tour. Another band are playing the larger Mountford Hall. My memory tells me it was The Fall but it could've been The Wonderstuff. I know at around the same time we went to see the up-and-coming Charlatans instead of The Fall. Choices, choices. None of these cost more than a couple of quid. We were spoilt I tell you. Well, except for the Wonderstuff. Anyway, we were outside the Union and a man on crutches approaches us, floppy hair and Scottish accent- 'Excuse me lads, can you tell me where The House Of Love are playing?' As one of us begins to direct the man down the road, an Evertonian among us says 'Hey, you're Pat Nevin'. Pat Nevin, formerly of Clyde and Chelsea, at the time Everton's injured winger, scuttles off as fast as his crutches will take him. I don't know what he thought we might do to him, but it was the 1980s. Football was yet to become what it is today.

The House Of Love were riding high when Destroy The Heart was released on Creation, and it's shimmering guitars and pent-up drama are still exciting today. They left for Fontana and never really recovered. Pat Nevin has since dj-ed at Bowlie Weekender, not having the usual footballer's musical tastes.

Destroy The Heart

Your Face Is A Hammer In My Head

Whatever that means.

The House Of Love were the new Weather Prophets. In Dave Cavanagh's biography of Creation Records he describes The Weather Prophets slagging off Guy Chadwick's band as 'too psychedelic'. The House of Love's first album The House Of Love was 1988's indie heavyweight, chock full of great songs and two blistering singles- Christine and Destroy The Heart, all guitar effects and mystery. They signed to Fontana and came back with Never, which the press didn't like, and then this I Don't Know Why I Love You. Recorded with guitarist Terry Bickers but released after he'd been dumped at a motorway service station for unreasonable behaviour- drugs, ego, burning a tenner in the van, punched by the drummer etc etc. This is a great song, played to death on my stereo when it came out. Yes, it has iffy lyrics and lacks some of the 'ethereal' nature of the first album's songs but it's got a great drilling riff. After this it was all downhill, then scuppered by Madchester but briefly they were very good.

10 I Don't Know Why I Love You.wma

The House Of Love 'Never'

I reckon we've all got bands or records we love, that we know secretly, arn't, maybe, really, that good but we love them regardless. This is one for me. I bought this on 12" towards the end of the summer 1989, along with some more 1989-ish records. I played this one endlessly. As a song it found The House Of Love caught in a difficult place. They were set up by the music press as the next big thing after the demise of The Smiths, but The Roses and Mondays blew this kind of guitar pop away. The House Of Love looked outdated compared to the baggy trousers and flared jeans of that year. Poor Guy Chadwick. He always seemed to have a look on his face that said 'this isn't going to work'. He was caught between his first lp (on Creation) that critics and skinny white boys loved, all shimmer and 'sonic cathedrals', and this single, which was *gulp* rock-y. The press slated it, and everyone else was going dancey. He was caught with a talented guitarist Terry Bickers, driving the band round the bend, soon to be dumped out of the van mid-tour at a service station. And it got me, caught between living at home for the summer and going back to a student life in Liverpool. And although I suspect it isn't really that good I still love this song , with it's 80s drums intro, clunky lyrics and out-of step-with-the-times-ness.

08 Never.wma