Garbage Days Revisited #23: Flesh For Lulu - “Long Live The New Flesh” (1987)

 

“I’m riding the bullet train to your central nervous station…” - Flesh For Lulu - Postcards From Paradise

I remember where I was when I got the news - on the platform at Harlow Town station on a sunny June morning in 2015 waiting for a train into London. At the time I was working at Harlow hospital and part of my job occasionally required me to commute into the Smoke for the odd day of meetings there. Waiting for the train I was checking Facebook on my phone and saw the news from Nick Marsh's wife Katharine Blake that he had tragically lost his year long battle with cancer.

Hands up, I'd only met Nick once at a gig by the Urban Voodoo Machine, the "bourbon soaked gypsy blues bop 'n' stroll" band he played guitar in fronted by the inimitable Paul-Ronney Angel at the Lexington venue in Islington. A girl I was friends with who knew I was a huge Flesh For Lulu fan was nice enough to guide me over to him and we had a quick chat during which I told him how much I loved those '80s FFL albums (as well as the Voodoos obviously!). He was an absolute gent and a pleasure to talk to.

I think it might have been Alison, my editor at Bubblegum Slut fanzine who first got me into Flesh For Lulu - I would've been in my mid to late twenties at the time and starting to rediscover a lot of '80s goth music like the Sisters of Mercy and the Mission. I remember one review which described them as sounding like a cross between the Sisters, Hanoi Rocks, Mick Taylor era Stones and Billy Idol. Well, that certainly intrigued me! The group had come up with the Batcave group of London goth bands like Specimen and Alien Sex Fiend but were a lot more straightforward than the above - they'd started out as a Suicide-style minimalist two man electro outfit consisting of Marsh on vocals, guitar and synths and James Mitchell on drums but soon expanded taking on guitarist Rocco Barker from East End post-punk/goth crossover types Wasted Youth and bassist Glen Bishop. A deal was inked with EMI but their self-titled album, although a good effort (the Stonesy strut of Restless and the sinister goth anthem Subterraneans being particular highlights) failed to sell with the band being dropped.

Stung, the group would retreat to the minors and put out the Blue Sisters Swing mini-album and the Big Fun City album with its languid lead-off single Baby Hurricane. En route they expanded to a five piece with Bishop being replaced by former Specimen bassist Kevin Mills and Del Greening joining from comedy oi punks Peter & The Test Tube Babies as second guitarist. It did good numbers and brought them to the attention of Beggars Banquet where they would come up with two further albums before things went south.

There seems to be a bit of a consensus in the articles I've read on Flesh For Lulu and the many tributes to Marsh after his death that FFL's two albums on Beggars, 1987's Long Live The New Flesh and 1989's Plastic Fantastic are a bit weaker than their earlier goth stuff and I think this needs redressing a bit as I'd go so far as to say that most of my favourite songs by the band are on these later efforts. Postcards From Paradise, the lead-off single from Long Live... is a near perfect slice of alt-pop with Marsh's yearning vocals, the chiming synths and a killer guitar solo from Barker combining to make a song which all these years later I still can't believe wasn't a huge hit. It's certainly true to say that the group did get a lot poppier in this era - I think the introduction of Mills and Greening who were both contributors on the songwriting front and came up with a lot of the later singles was certainly a factor here but there's also the fact that the group were actually picking up plaudits faster across the Atlantic than in their homeland, not least the director John Hughes who used several of their singles in his '80s Brat Pack films, most notably I Go Crazy in Some Kind Of Wonderful. I'm pretty sure that this might have turned their heads but for once, I think it actually benefitted them - the poppier edge to this material really seemed to bring out the best in them and both of their Beggars albums have some absolutely killer tunes on them

As well as Postcards From Paradise, Long Live The New Flesh also had the awesome twisted glam stomp of Siamese Twist, the creeping paranoia of Lucky Day and the quite cosmic closer Dream On Cowboy to recommend it while Plastic Fantastic, recorded in Australia by INXS producer Mark Opitz behind the desk, belied its status as being put together while the band was basically falling apart by having some absolute stormers on it from the right-on anti-capitalism diatribe of Decline And Fall to the yearning House Of Cards and the quite beautiful one-two balladry of Time And Space ("I heard she's leaving town so I won't stick around") and Every Little Word ("Swim in the ocean, follow the moon, waiting for lovers to fill up my room") through to the weary Day One and the languid acoustic led closer Bloodshot Moon which could almost have sat on the Dogs D'Amour's classic Graveyard Of Empty Bottles. Needless to say I heartily recommend both of 'em.

I still don't know why it never quite happened for Flesh For Lulu over here in the UK. Was their combination of glam rock, synth pop and goth just a bit too niche for the British market? Did they concentrate too much on breaking the States after signing to Beggars? Feck knows but we missed a trick there, no question about it. Unfortunately by the time of Plastic Fantastic, the band had essentially all fallen out - some reports have it being the old favourite of musical differences and others have it down to the band just not getting on and personality clashes (Nick once mentioned in an interview that the problem stemmed from one band member nicking another's girlfriend but didn't go into any further detail - I'm not sure if he was joking or not!) Either way, by the time they were touring the album both Mills and Mitchell had gone and the band would wind to a close by 1992.

Nick and Rocco would attempt the odd periodic reunion with FFL, first under the new name of Gigantic in the mid-'90s when they recorded an album for Columbia that was canned before it was released, eventually seeing the light under the FFL banner a decade or so later. There was another reunion in the late noughties (when your friendly journalist discovered them whilst working for Bubblegum Slut as mentioned above) which led to a new single Cold Flame, a re-recorded Best Of and Rocco bizarrely starring in his own reality show Costa Chaos which had him and his soon to be ex-wife trying to build a holiday villa in Spain! Soon after this, Marsh would join the Urban Voodoo Machine and would put out a trio of excellent albums with them in 2010's Bourbon Soaked Gypsy Blues Bop 'n' Stroll, 2012's In Black And Red and 2014's Love, Drink And Death. He would also find the time to do an excellent solo album in 2010's A Universe Between Us which I highly recommend especially Destiny Angel, Girl On The Roof and the title track.

Nick also resurrected Flesh For Lulu in the early 2010's with a whole new line-up (including ex-Rachel Stamp and future Adam & The Ants guitarist Will Crewdson) and I was lucky to catch them a couple of times, once at the excellent Some Weird Sin night in Holloway supporting the not entirely dissimilar Jonny Cola & The A-Grades (another SFTJ for the future) and at what would turn out to be their final gig at the Brooklyn Bowl in the bowels of the O2 Arena in Greenwich. The gig had originally been scheduled as Nick's return to touring in June 2015 with the band hoping to use it as a springboard for a US tour but then his cancer returned and it was hastily pushed forward to April - we didn't know at the time that it was going to be the group's final concert and I actually remember closing my review of it for Pure Rawk with the words "Get well soon Nick - we're all rooting for you". Sadly he never did. Life's horrible like that sometimes.

Nick's widow Katharine Blake (Medieval Baebes and ex-Miranda Sex Garden) and his Urban Voodoos partner in crime Paul-Ronney Angel managed to finish producing and mastering Nick's last few recordings and they finally saw the light of day last year as the Waltzing Bones album (Nite Songs review here). It was a fitting tribute to the man and a great record. I seem to have drifted a bit from where this article was going here so I do apologise but in conclusion, I heartily recommend both Long Live The New Flesh and Plastic Fantastic - they may be a more poppy Flesh For Lulu sound than their more goth influenced debut (which is well worth a listen in its own right) but they have the sort of tunes that most of FFL's contemporaries would have killed for. Go back, listen, reminisce and enjoy.