Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

 

"I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..." - The Quireboys - One For The Road

In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs looked that little bit cooler and more rock 'n' roll way back then.

When I discovered Bradford Rio's in the early '90s though (as detailed in the SFTJ columns on Love/Hate and the Almighty), it was probably inevitable that I'd become reacquainted with Spike and co as they used to play those hallowed halls a LOT. I seem to remember my first encounter with them live was some time around 2004-5 or so - a couple of weeks earlier they'd been out supporting Whitesnake on tour but had been booted off unceremoniously after a gig across the city at St George's Hall when the headliners had thrown a snit about the QB's outselling them on the merch stand. Seeing Spike gleefully sauntering onstage and grinning "Alright Bradford! Who wants to hear some David Coverdale stories then?!" before the band slammed into opener This Is Rock 'n' Roll might well have been the clincher into them finally reeling me in as a fan some 15 years after I first discovered them!

A wee bit of a back story for the uninitiated - the Quireboys formed in the mid-'80s after a group of rag-tag glam rockers slowly came together in London led by Geordie exile Spike, guitarist Guy Bailey (he of the massive hat) and bassist Nigel Mogg (nephew of UFO singer Phil and now of the very excellent pub rock/glam crossover types the Brutalists along with ex-L.A. Guns guitarist Mick Cripps). Various guitarists and drummers came and went (including two future Wildhearts in the form of Ginger and Willie Dowling) before the band would settle on Chris Johnstone on keyboards, Guy "Griff" Griffin on guitar and...well, to be honest, the group have continued to go through drummers at a Spinal Tap style rate down the years.

The group would hit their commercial peak in 1989-90 with their debut album A Bit Of What You Fancy going Top 3 and spawning four Top 40 singles but momentum seemed to stall thereafter (I remember reading an interview with Ginger where his take on things was that he got sacked from the band for doing too many drugs while the others only drank then after the first album half of the band were checking themselves into the Betty Ford Clinic with coke addictions - make of that what you will...) and their second album Bittersweet & Twisted wouldn't surface until 1993, well into the nuclear winter of grunge. I've often said that while I understand why grunge had to happen given some of the more ridiculous excesses of the Sunset Strip scene, there were several bands who ended up going down with the glam metal ship who really didn't deserve to and, similar to the Dogs, the Quireboys are another prime example. Their comeback single Tramps & Thieves literally only just grazed the Top 40 and although they chalked up a second chart hit from it with a rather pointless cover of Hot Chocolate's Brother Louie (still baffled by that, I mean that album had at least three other songs that would've been much better choices in Can't Park Here, Last Time and White Trash Blues). However, the failure of the album saw Griffin and Bailey walk out in quick succession and they'd split in 1994.

The late nineties would see Spike remaining active musically, initially with an ill-judged attempt to jump on the grunge bandwagon with his God's Hotel project before putting out a solo album It's A Treat To Be Alive which was much more in the vein of the traditional '70s influenced Quireboys sound with Wins, Ties And Losses, Won't Ya Stick Around and True Friends being particular high points. Some time around the millennium though, he reconciled with Griff and Nigel and the Quireboys reformed with Paul Guerin and Keith Weir from Spike's solo band replacing Guy Bailey and Chris Johnstone respectively.

The group's first two post-reformation albums This Is Rock 'n' Roll and Well Oiled were a little bit patchy musically and I seem to remember it was on the Well Oiled tour that I first saw them as described above. It'd be the first of many encounters with Spike and co down the years but the big surprise really came with the group's following album Homewreckers and Heartbreakers. A proper return to form from the band, I'd actually put it up there with A Bit Of What You Fancy as one of their best. While upbeat rockers like I Love This Dirty Town and Josephine showed that the group had plenty of fire left in the tank, it was the tears-in-yer-pint slowies that really lifted this one up to being a great album - lead off single Mona Lisa Smiled was a case in point and would have been a surefire hit in the hands of a more commercially fortunate band. Elsewhere, the sinister swampy blues of Blackwater, the heartfelt ode to Spike's northern upbringing One For The Road and the surprisingly tender one night stand ode Late Night Saturday Call were fine stuff indeed especially when you consider how many of the Quireboys' one time companions in the late '80s rock scene were pretty much phoning it in by this point.

The Quireboys remain active to this day and are still an excellent live band - I must have seen them well into double figures times live and they've yet to put on a bad gig in that time. I even met the girl who's now my wife at a QB's gig at Kentish Town Forum in late 2010 (King of New York off of Bittersweet & Twisted would subsequently be our first dance at our wedding) - I'd interviewed Spike and Griff earlier in the afternoon for Pure Rawk and they'd invited me to the backstage party afterwards. I always joke that the fact that I missed said party to catch the tube back to Tottenham Hale with my missus-to-be to make sure she got her train home safely was a sign of how much I like her to which she always responds that I was a pillock for turning down the chance to go drinking with the Quireboys! True love and all that... The Quireboys would sign to Off Yer Rocka records (run by the people behind the Hard Rock Hell festival franchise) in the early teens and go on a surprisingly prolific run, putting out no less than four albums in three years. Although their workrate was commendable, you could kind of tell by the end of this run that they might have fallen into the dreaded "quantity over quality" trap but thankfully 2019's Amazing Disgrace, their most recent effort, was a solid addition to the catalogue pretty much encapsulating everything that made them a good band. In between times, Griff, Paul and Keith have been acting as a backing band for Joe Elliott from Def Leppard in his Mott the Hoople influenced side project the Down 'n' Outz and after two covers albums they put out a storming set of originals in 2019's This Is How We Roll which would've been my album of the year if the Wildhearts hadn't put out the storming Renaissance Men around the same time and comes highly recommended to those unaware of it.

The Quireboys are pretty much a British rock institution and I'll continue to roll with 'em until the end. Always a great live band, their recorded output isn't too shabby either and Homewreckers and Heartbreakers and A Bit Of What You Fancy are pretty much essential listening to sink a few pints of whatever your poison is and bellow along with the chorus to with Bittersweet And Twisted, This Is Rock 'n' Roll, Beautiful Curse and Black Eyed Sons all coming heartily recommended as well. Raise a toast and let's enjoy.