Garbage Days Revisited #14: Lords of the New Church - "Lords of the New Church" (1982)

 

"Truth can't be found on the television/Throwaway youth, you gotta make a stand!/Music is your only weapon/Spanners in the works, go and start your gang!" - Lords of the New Church - "New Church"

One of THE great lost bands of the 1980s, the Lords of the New Church should have had a headstart just for the caliber of the guys involved alone. Fronting the operation was ex-Dead Boys legend Stiv Bators, on six string duties was original Damned guitarist Brian James, on bass Dave Tregunna from Sham 69 and on drums Nicky Turner from the Barracudas. Yet for some reason a chart breakthrough well and truly eluded them and they split after three awesome albums to essentially be remembered as a cult band.

The group would put out three albums and all of them are well worth your while but for the definitive Lords statement, it's the debut you want. You'd maybe expect a band with the pedigree mentioned above to be a straight up Stooges style punk band with maybe a hint of garage rock in there but Lords of the New Church is all that and so much more.

It all kicks in with some sinister gothy style organ before Turner's pounding drums, Tregunna's thundering bass and James' razorwire guitar kick in with opener and Lords manifesto New Church with Stiv screaming out the band's instruction for the youth of today to mobilise up and kick back against the pricks ("When the heroes have all died away/The priests and politicians have lied away/Actors after all were only acting/The church killed knowledge, took the world a slave") The full assault knocks the air right out of your lungs before the sinister Russian Roulette (written by the band's original rhythm section of ex-Generation X man Tony James and former Clash drummer Terry Chimes) takes things down a notch to give you an early breather with its sinister gothy overtones and Burroughs style imagery ("Got lust for glory and a tape machine/I'm livin' out Frank Coppola's dream") The Lords always had a definite goth streak to them throughout their careers and this is a great demonstration of it.

Just when you've got your breath back though, the Lords promptly take you back on a white knuckle ride for the rest of side one with a sinister cover of the Balloon Farm's garage/psychedelic classic A Question of Temperature and the sheer fury of Eat Your Heart Out (a much more evil take of Alice Cooper's Wish I Was Born In Beverly Hills) and the manic rush of Portobello ("If voting would change things, they'd make it illegal/Truth is the sword of us all!")

The start of side two sees the group drop the tempo again (probably necessary to avoid peoples' heads exploding) with the sinister Open Your Eyes, another razor-sharp urge to insurrection ("Video games train the kids for war/Army chic in high fashion stores/Law and order's done its job/Prisons full while the rich still rob"). There were a fair few at the time who dismissed Stiv as a wacko conspiracy theorist but looking around at the political climate today with a greedy government shamelessly asset-stripping the country and a toothless opposition doing nothing to stop them, you can't help but feel that the guy was definitely on to something.

Side two continues on in good style with the sinister Livin' On Livin', Lil' Boys Play With Dolls, a tribute to those boys from New York, the furious Apocalypso and the ominous closer Holy War with Stiv's vitriolic take on the Pope's visit to Britain that year. It's a fittingly apocalyptic closer to a real all killer no filler album and one of the great under-appreciated albums of the '80s

As I've said before, the debut album didn't take the Lords above ground and they'd remain very much a cult band for their decade or so existence - the nearest they came to anything approaching a hit was with Dance With Me, the lead-off single from their second album Is Nothing Sacred?, which stalled at a lowly number 85 in the charts. A shame as had they put this out a couple of years later when groups like the Sisters of Mercy were having hits with a not entirely dissimilar formula, I'm pretty sure they would've had some success with them.

The other issue was that I'd be surprised if the group's outspoken stance on a lot of sensitive political issues didn't hamper them a bit - they even addressed this on their third album's title track The Method To Our Madness ("You said we should be nice boys like all those other wimps/I talk about conspiracies and then you crack the whip/'Well boy, you better shut your mouth, we can't afford your bail/Now don't go tellin' secrets, this record's gotta sell!'"). By this point, the group's failure to make headway was starting to put them under strain - Dave Tregunna would leave to join up with ex-Hanoi Rocks guitarist Andy McCoy in the Cherry Bombz and would subsequently have a short spell with SFTJ alumni the Dogs D'Amour playing on their excellent (Un)Official Bootleg Album and Nick Turner would also quit to start a new life living in the States. James and Bators would struggle on for a few more years with a revolving door line-up (with Tregunna coming back on board towards the end) but when James placed an advert in Melody Maker in 1990 looking for a new vocalist for the band without telling Bators, it proved to be the final straw - Stiv would appear at the group's next gig wearing a T-shirt with the ad in question on it and unsurprisingly it turned out to be their last. Stiv would tragically pass away later in the year after sustaining internal bleeding from a road accident (as with his fellow CBGB's iconoclast Johnny Thunders who I'm sure we'll deal with in GDR at some point, there's still a bit of a shroud of mystery over this) ending any chances of a reunion and that was that.

Fast forward ten years or so - I first discovered the Lords via a punk compilation I picked up in my third year at Uni which featured the sleazy funk of M-Style, their final single. It stuck out like a sore thumb among the likes of the 4 Skins, the Last Resort et al and while it initially threw me for a loop, it stuck in my head like glue and led me to go out and check out the group's back catalogue. It was definitely one of my wisest decisions as a fledgling music fan - the sheer sinister variety combined with the "open your eyes, see the lies right in front of you" lyrics make, to these ears at least, the Lords one of THE essential '80s bands - goth, garage rock, punk, power pop, these guys did it all and did it in style.

Brian James and Dave Tregunna did try to resurrect the Lords in the early years of the 21st century with a new singer, (Adam Becvare), but the result was a brave but ultimately disappointing album and this incarnation of the band didn't last very long. However, ten years later I was lucky enough to see the two of them sharing a stage at a gig at the Screen on the Green in Kensington. Hearing them play Method To My Madness is probably the nearest I'll ever come to seeing a Lords live gig and it genuinely did feel pretty special. There was talk of the group reforming for the Vive Le Rock awards with Stiv's old mate Michael Monroe fronting the band which I would have loved to have seen but unfortunately Covid put paid to that. If it ever does happen though, rest assured I will very much be there front and centre. In the meantime, I can't recommend all three Lords albums, but especially the debut album, highly enough to anyone curious. Go out and investigate - this is the dark side of the '80s that you've not been told about.