Garbage Days Revisited #27: Generation X - “Valley Of The Dolls” (1979)

 

“But it’s always the same, like Citizen Kane, you end up with NOTHING! And you leave for home…” - Generation X - Paradise West

It’s a well known fact that Billie Joe Armstrong regularly mentions in interviews that he considers Generation X’s first album to be one of the greatest ever. Well, I hate to tell ya but not for the first time, Green Day’s frontman is wide of the mark. While Billy Idol and co were very much in there with the first wave of punk - Idol and Tony James had both been part of the "Bromley contingent" of punks along with Siouxsie Sioux et al - their first album to me has always felt, in spite of a few crackers like Day By Day and Youth Youth Youth, the work of a band who were still finding their feet. As far as I'm concerned, that album's the journey and their second one, Valley Of The Dolls, was the sound of them arriving properly.

The group had taken their fair share of flack in their early years for being punk bandwagon jumpers (ridiculous given that they were pretty much there right from day zero) due to their more pop-based approach with future Daily Heil hack and trash novel writer Tony Parsons memorably dismissing them as "polite punks". Valley Of The Dolls was essentially the sound of the band saying "ah fuck it, those uptight scenester wankers are never gonna accept us anyway, let's just make the album we've always wanted to make". Drafting in the legendary ex-Mott the Hoople frontman Ian Hunter on production duties was a stroke of genius as it allowed the band a free reign to revisit the glam rock albums they'd grown up with and the result was an absolute stormer of an album that owed as much to Mott or the Faces as it did to the New York Dolls and the Stooges.

Whereas the group's debut had given them one minor hit in their debut Your Generation which just scraped the Top 40, Valley of the Dolls saw the group notch up a brace of Top 20 hits with the thunderous King Rocker and the strutting title track, both fine stuff indeed. And y'know what, if the likes of Parsons and that bigoted transphobic harpy Julie Burchill couldn't hack it then it was no big loss.

I think the main thing that I've always loved about this album is just how surprisingly varied it is - while several of Generation X's first wave peers like X-Ray Spex, the Adverts and even briefly the Damned were quickly falling by the wayside after being unable to follow up the white hot '77 magnesium flash of their debuts, GX were quickly working out how to move their sound out in new directions and while Night Of The Cadillacs and Love Like Fire showed they still had plenty of the energy of their debut left, they also came up with some stuff which was genuinely breathtaking.

Case in point - Paradise West midway through side one which might just be the best song the band ever did. Building from its gentle opening to an absolutely thunderous conclusion over its five minute span, it sees Billy absolutely nailing all the hopes, fears and frustration of being a teenage boy absolutely brilliantly ("Lying here waiting for a hero to rise/But a lazy man lies back instead") as the song grows and grows. I first heard this album as a 19 year old who was really still figuring everything out in terms of life and...well, fuck me, it's powerful stuff, y'know? Even twenty plus years later, still one of my favourite songs ever.

Elsewhere, English Dream was the big Won't Get Fooled Again style anthem that GX should have been playing at the end of three nights headlining Wembley and The Prime of Kenny Silvers (which reminds me a bit of the old Dogs D'Amour classic Baby Glass lyrically - wonder if Tyla was listening to that when he wrote it?) was another big heartstring-pulling epic to finish the album off. I mean, generally speaking, punk bands just didn't do songs like that - the general orthodoxy was that it was supposed to be two minutes, go in, say what you gotta say, bosh, get out again. But with this album, Generation X showed that the movement could be so much more than that.

Unfortunately although the album spawned two hit singles, it performed poorly with three chord punk fans taking to it like a duck to mountain climbing. Soon afterwards, Idol and James would fire guitarist Derwood Andrews and drummer Mark Laff (both of whom were in favour of moving in more of a Joy Division style indie-goth direction which was pretty much anathema to Idol and James who were all for being full on rock stars), bringing their old bandmate James Stevenson from Chelsea as well as former Clash drummer Terry Chimes. This line-up would produce just the one album, 1981's Kiss Me Deadly (not to be confused with the song of the same name on the band's first album) but aside from the all time classic lead-off single Dancing With Myself, it was a disappointment. Soon afterwards, Billy would disappear off Stateside to kickstart his solo career with a re-release of Dancing With Myself, James would briefly stop off in the Lords of the New Church before moving on to mid-'80s synth rock jokers Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Stevenson would go on to Porthcawl's gothiest Gene Loves Jezebel and later the Alarm, Chimes would return to the Clash and then on to the Lords with James and then the final post-Razzle line-up of Hanoi Rocks and Andrews and Laff would resurface in electro-rockers Westworld (of Sonic Boom Boy fame).

In a way, I can kind of see why Valley of the Dolls wasn't a success way back in the day - even though it came out two years after the movement broke, a lot of punks still had a very short-sighted year zero orthodoxy about them at this point. Had they released an album like this in 1982 or so when bands like Hanoi Rocks and the Lords of the New Church were starting to break through then Billy and co would've been right on the zeitgeist. Take it out of the context of its timing though and I still maintain that this is a fantastic and under-appreciated album - the sound of a band reaching for the sky to grab their dreams rather than boxing themselves in because it was the "cool" thing to do. Of course, in recent years Tony James has teamed up with Mick Jones of the Clash to form the under-rated Carbon/Silicon and James Stevenson remains in the Alarm who've been on a good run of albums of late.

And Billy? Oh don't worry, we'll be seeing him in this column again very soon...