Sounds From The Junkshop #17 - Strangelove

 

"I'm not the same as you. That's always been the problem, it's a problem that we hide away but true..." - Strangelove - Beautiful Alone 1996

Every generation of teenagers always has a sort of cache of groups who they turn to in their darker moments. Those lucky enough to come 10-15 years before me had goth in its heyday and were lucky enough to witness Bauhaus, the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission, the Cure etc first time around.

By the time I reached the age where teenage mood swings kicked in of course, I wasn't so lucky. Some time around the start of the '90s, goth kind of split in two with one arm heading off into heavier industrial waters (Ministry et al) and the other sort of melding with the more ethereal end of indie and mutating into shoegazing (Lush etc). By the time the mid-'90s came around, the whole idea of goth as it was in its prime was pretty much dead in the water and it wouldn't be until my late twenties when I re-discovered the Sisters and the Mission retrospectively that it started to grow into my psyche and become one of my favourite styles of music.

However, even in those Britpoppy days of 1994-5, there were a few bands who were, however covertly, tipping a sly nod of the hat to those doomy feelings of hopelessness. This shouldn't be confused with groups like Gene who I covered on here a few weeks ago or the Divine Comedy - as much as Martin Rossiter and Neil Hannon both had a definite ear for writing songs that tugged at your broken heartstrings when you'd been knocked back by that girl you'd spent weeks trying to pluck up the courage to ask out, you couldn't really call either of them goth in any sort of sense.

Lurking on the fringes of the Adidas-clad Camden-centric scene though were other bands who, though not directly goth, were drawing from the same sort of influence pool, and I suspect the two main ones would be the Manic Street Preachers, whose doomy musings on mortality definitely owed a nod to Joy Division, and the Bowie influenced glam-noir of early Suede. Neither of them really constitute SFTJ material because, let's be honest, you'd hardly call either of them overlooked - both are still revered for their music and command a healthy following even to this day and rightly so. Initially, I was very sceptical of both bands due to their status as alternative press darlings (even back then I was instantly suspicious of anything that was being pushed that aggressively in the indie weeklies - lord only knows what the 14-15 year old me would've made of the Strokes a few years later!) But the Manics' Gold Against The Soul and The Holy Bible Suede's first two albums (although for the purposes of this particular column, the widescreen doom-laden epic of Dog Man Star is more apt than the group's blood and glitter flecked debut) definitely slowly crept into my psyche during my mopey teenager phase - even now hearing lines like "There is no true love, it's just a finely tuned jealousy" from the Manics' Life Becoming A Landslide or "And oh if you'll stay, we'll ride from disguised suburban graves, we'll run from these bungalows where the debts still grow each day" from Suede's The Wild Ones instantly take me right back there.

By 1995 though, things were starting to go a bit iffy for both the Manics and Suede. Richey James' sudden disappearance saw the Manics retreat in shock and return with the much more reined-in sounding Everything Must Go which is kind of where I started going off them - from thereon out, all of their albums would include a few great songs but they would never be as breathtaking as they'd been up until that point. Similarly, when the tensions between Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler finally boiled over leading to Suede going on hiatus after the Dog Man Star tour wrapped up and then coming back with the glam-pop of Coming Up, it felt like a bit of the old stardust had been lost. I thought was...okay-ish I guess at the time but having listened to it again recently realised that it hasn't aged well at all compared to its predecessors - the screechy high-end production really grates on the ears at times and twenty odd years on from the fact, Trash and Beautiful Ones sound less anthemic and more like self-parody (now Head Music on the other hand...that's probably one that may well end up being covered on here if I ever do a "great under-rated albums" feature or similar. But I digress).

In the run-up to Coming Up though, news leaked out that Brett and Richard from Suede had been doing some production work with an up and coming band called Strangelove on their new album. It was enough to persuade me to check out the album in question, Love And Other Demons, when it came out a couple of months later and, controversial opinion alert, I think it well and truly towers over Coming Up in terms of quality.

A bit of background on Strangelove - they'd formed in Bristol in the early years of the decade and after signing to Food (home of Blur etc) had put their debut Time For The Rest Of Your Life in 1994. I only really discovered this one retrospectively and to be honest, although it's the most lauded of their albums, it's probably my least favourite as it's much less immediate than the ones that would follow it and goes into very dark territory musically with a lot of the songs sprawling over the five minute mark. It's probably one that deserves a re-listen from my side but like I say, it's what came afterwards that we're here to discuss today.

So my first introduction to the band was the classic Beautiful Alone single which became the first of a trio of Top 40 hits for them in early '96. It took the foreboding of old ("Some people say to you that they wanna be your lover 'cos they wanna turn you into someone else not you") but added a killer tune to it and quickly wormed its way into my angsty twisted teenage psyche. I quickly went out and bought the parent album Love And Other Demons soon afterwards and it was a regular on my listening list for the rest of that year.

Kicking in with the squealing riff of Living With The Human Machines (Beautiful Alone's predecessor as a single) you quickly knew that Love And Other Demons was going to be a good listen as soon as you hit the play button. Machines features Brett on backing vocals and Richard on extra guitars and sees Patrick Duff howling "This is a message to the sky!" like Ian Astbury in full Shaman of Doom mode as he rails against technology (and this was a good decade before smart phones turned us into screen-fixated zombies!). Elsewhere, the mournful alcoholic’s lament of Sway and the sinister brilliant album highlight She's Everywhere (also featuring Mr Anderson chipping in with some backing vocals recalling Bowie on Iggy’s Berlin records) showed their skill at writing dark poetry for the wounded hearts. I remember seeing them playing it live a year or two later - after they'd finished the song, Patrick venomously spat "Well, I'm glad something positive came out of that relationship..." Make no mistake, they very much did mean it, man...

Within a year, the group would follow Love And Other Demons up with a self-titled third album which saw them making their sound even poppier albeit still with the dark lyrics underneath. It's another good effort - lead-off singles The Greatest Show On Earth (with the eye-catching lyric "Christopher Robin blew his friends away/Wrapped 'em up and moved up Barnsley way") and the snarling Freak (another favourite of mine) gave the group their second and third Top 40 hits while elsewhere the likes of Superstar and Wellington Road were good stuff too while the seasick Another Night In goes from an almost music hall style opening into an eerie closing couple of minutes.

The change in direction wasn't to everyone's taste though - I remember the NME absolutely slamming Strangelove and saying that it sounded like the band were trying to write "Richey Edwards - The Musical!" Ouch. It also kind of felt like the group were almost deliberately flying in the face of the musical trends of the time - 1997 was the year that Radiohead and the Verve were in the ascendant and had Strangelove put Time For The Rest Of Your Life part 2 out at this point they'd probably have been in a good position to coast in Thom Yorke’s slipstream. However, by going the other way (almost back towards the Britpop movement which was in its dying throes by this point), they kind of ended up swimming against the tide and the album stalled in the lower reaches of the Top 75 while Love And Other Demons had made the Top 40.

Away from the studio though, the group were facing much bigger issues as Duff was suffering from serious depression (as his song lyrics frequently attested quite openly to) and taking out his struggles on drink and drugs - this interview from the time shows just how bad things had got for him. Supposedly the reason for the slightly more upbeat nature of the third album was that he'd been through rehab and got clean - however, upon going back on tour he was starting to relapse again and decided to break the band up to sort his head out properly. Apparently he spent most of the next couple of years living in a forest outside Bristol - extreme but it evidently worked as he's been back out there as a solo artist ever since. To my shame, I've not heard any of his solo stuff which is something I really should probably put right in the near future. Elsewhere, keyboardist/guitarist Alex Lee would go on to join Suede for their disappointing A New Morning album after ill health forced Neil Codling on to the sidelines but would find he'd jumped off one sinking ship to land straight on to another one. The others? No idea but feel free to write me if anybody knows.

I saw Strangelove live just the once on the third album tour in Stoke at the Stage. I'd literally just arrived at Keele Uni a week before and it was pretty much my first night out away from the campus. It was absolutely amazing. Duff really was a fantastic frontman, holding the audience in the palm of his hand throughout whether lurching through Freak and Superstar or the desolate balladry of She's Everywhere. Behind him the band were pin missile precise with their attack and, looking around at the rest of the audience of eyeliner and feather boa clad glam-goths, I genuinely thought that Strangelove were going to be the band who would swoop in to become the favourite band of those Manics fans who'd been put off by the group's move from combat fatigues and eyeliner to Ben Sherman shirts.

Six months later, both Strangelove and the Stage venue were no more. Sad times.

I would say that all three of Strangelove's albums are worth a listen - start with the self-titled one and work backwards if you want to go most accessible first or if you want to kick in with the really good stuff, go with Love And Other Demons. Maybe you need to have been a troubled semi-goth teen who then spent their twenties dabbling with quite a lot of stuff they probably shouldn't have in order to really get it but for me, music to speak to you during the dark night of the soul from this era really doesn't get much better than this.