Garbage Days Revisited #41: Brian Setzer - "The Knife Feels Like Justice" (1986)

 

"Boyhood dreams are burnin' to the ground, long dark shadows hang over this town" - Brian Setzer - Chains Around Your Heart

Oh boy does this album seem to divide people. I think I first discovered Brian Setzer via the Stray Cats when I was taking  my first tentative steps into listening to punk in my early twenties - for some reason the Cats always seemed to crop up on a few of the punk/new wave compilations I was listening to at the time which isn't as far fetched as it sounds. Lest we forget, this was the era of Sid Vicious covering Something Else and C'mon Everybody so the Cats' souped up take on rockabilly wasn't that far out of step with the times.

Hand on heart though, I've always kind of regarded the Stray Cats as a band I can take or leave. Their albums were decent enough but apart from the timeless Rock This Town, they never quite had that "haul you back in for repeated listening" thing that the best of the bands from that era did. And it surely can't be just me who finds She's Sexy And 17 a bit uncomfortable to listen to in the post-Yewtree era...

Anyway, long story short, the Cats broke through big in the UK initially as the ‘70s turned into the ‘80s but took a few years to make any headway in their native States then by the time they did, they were kind of regarded as last year's thing on this side of the Atlantic and had dropped into obscurity. The group would split in 1984 with Brian going on to a solo career which would spawn the 1986 album The Knife Feels Like Justice. I didn't realise until looking back into this album after first hearing it just how much disdain there seems to be towards this LP from Stray Cats fans which I find utterly baffling. Were they upset because the bassist was playing a regular four-string instead of a big double bass? Because the drummer was actually sitting down? I dunno but it certainly doesn't deserve the flack it gets.

First thing to be aware, this is a much darker album than anything the Stray Cats ever did. By the time it was released, the US was well into its second term of Republican rule under Reagan and, similar to Thatcher over here, the blue collar working classes were being pounded into the ground for the greedy rich at the top to increase their profits, the age of "me me me, pull up the ladder Jack and bugger the rest of you". Chains Around Your Heart lays it bare in heartbreaking fashion - "And the families have all gone now/Their jobs went before them I’m sure/They knocked down our corner barbershop/Put up a super triple level parking lot/There once was a time you could vote for a man who wouldn't try and stick a gun in your hand".

I think similar to Nobody's Heroes by SLF, this is just another album that happened to get me at the right time in my mid-twenties. By this point, I had kind of given up on the NME and Kerrang! in favour of fanzines like Bubblegum Slut (which I'd just started writing for at this point) and the Sleazegrinder website, especially the Flash Metal Suicide columns on the latter (which, hands up, were a big influence on both Sounds From The Junkshop and Garbage Days Revisited on this website). All of the writers who used to contribute to the FMS columns like Stu Gibson and Sleazegrinder himself had a really good style of writing but it was Pepsi Sheen whose columns I used to really enjoy - they were really raw and angry but heartfelt tales of a life less than wisely lived and he used to recommend some amazing albums that I'd not heard of before including this one. I mean, I'm pretty sure he'd have thought I was a middle class wanker but those columns really did help me a lot in shaping my music taste as my twenties went on and I increasingly lost faith in what the mainstream music weeklies were trying to sell me (Emo? Screamo? Landfill indie? No thanks).

As I mentioned in the SLF GDR entry, by my mid-twenties it's safe to say that my life had gone into a bit of a tailspin - I was going through a series of bands which always seemed to descend into the whirlpool of line-up instability and split within a few months, was bouncing between various low paid jobs either slogging it out in warehouses or bottom of the pile admin posts in offices and was drinking heavily and taking a lot of, erm, cheap mood-enhancers shall we say. It all culminated in a nightmare year in 2005 when I lost my job, split with my girlfriend and ended up moving back into the parental home that I'd sworn I'd never go back to a few years previously (now occupied solely by my mum post-divorce). Repeated trips to the job centre were proving fruitless and as the days without work turned into months, I pretty much ended up completely retreating right back into my shell, becoming a nocturnal hermit who'd spend most of his nights up till 3am drinking cheap £1 a bottle ale (all I could afford on the £30 a week or so dole money I was getting) and browsing the web then just sleeping during the day, the reason being that there's no worse feeling than waking up at 10am and realising that it's gonna be eight hours before you next have any interaction with another human being.

I'd dealt with being an angry young man before by listening to SLF, the Angelic Upstarts (get well soon Mensi) and the Pogues but at this point I really felt as if I'd fallen through the cracks and was unlikely to find anyone willing to employ, let alone date, me ever again. I alternated between doing everything I could to shut the horror of the real world and just being argumentative and unpleasant to be around for the sake of actually getting angry and feeling something. I know that I drove away and hurt quite a few people who were only trying to reach out and help me back then and for what it's worth, I truly am sorry for that. Again, as often in my past when things have been going wrong, music ended up being my crutch - I started listening to Big Country a lot as Stuart Adamson's (RIP and much missed) tales of trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel no matter how far away it was really seemed to resonate back then. Ditto Cinderella's Long Cold Winter and songs like The Last Mile ("I dunno where I'm goin' but I know where I've been/I look around me everybody's tryin' to win"), Ginger Wildheart's Valor del Corazon (especially The Man Who Cheated Death). And The Knife Feels Like Justice.

Right from the opening title track looking at successful friends who've forgotten their roots and now just seem to ignore you, it's pretty clear that this is Brian Setzer at his most reflective - "There ain't nobody ever looked at me without looking right through me, there ain't nobody ever looked at me without looking right by me, and you can't go on when the knife feels like justice" - oh boy, I related to that in the shitshow that was my life in 2005. Although Haunted River is a brief return to the fired-up rockabilly of old about a murderer running loose in New England (and a damn good tune as well), Boulevard Of Broken Dreams (not to be confused with the Hanoi Rocks or Green Day songs of the same name, good though both of those are) is another with some lines that really hit home - "I wonder where you are, are you satisfied to go through life with a chill in your soul and a memory that lives by your side?". Bobby's Back tells the story of a fellow greaser who returns to Setzer's hometown traumatised after some horrific incident which eventually ends up with him dying after crashing while driving drunk ("Another brother led astray/Well I'll be damned if I go that way") before the boozed-up freewheel of Radiation Ranch and the aforementioned album high point Chains Around Your Heart finish side one.

Similar to SLF's Nobody's Heroes, side two of this album can't quite live up to side one although the soaring Aztec and the closing fury of Barbed Wire Fence which sees Setzer raging against social injustice ("They led a blind man to a cliff, gave a crippled man a kick, took the poor man to the cleaners while the rich man takes his pick") are high points. Overall though, this is a great album which really doesn't deserve the poor reputation history's given it. Yes it is very different to the Stray Cats but it shows a different side to Brian Setzer's style and has some brilliant gut-wrenching songs on it. Not to mention that it helped me get through a very difficult time in my life until I started to slowly rebuild things back up in 2006 and slowly crawl back out of the abyss meaning I'll always have a soft spot for it.

I think the criticism for this album might have stung Brian a bit and his next album, 1988's Live Nude Guitars saw him going back to the tried and tested rockabilly formula. It was decent enough (Red Lightnin' Blues, Nervous Breakdown, Love Is Repaid By Love Alone and The Rain Washed Everything Away are all worth a listen) but it felt a bit like he was playing it safe with that one to my ears. After that came the days of his big band outfit the Brian Setzer Orchestra which to be honest I never really had much inclination to investigate. These days of course, Brian is back with the Stray Cats who are doing the sort of music they’ve always done and, fair play to ‘em, still doing it well (2019's 40 was a much better album than it really had any right to be) in tandem with his solo career and there may be a review of his new album going up in these pages very soon. I never did find out what happened to Pepsi Sheen after the Sleazegrinder website went on hiatus but hopefully the guy's okay. I did used to worry about him massively when reading his work as he clearly wasn't in a good place for a lot of it - hopefully his luck's changed a bit since then and he's doing better for himself these days. Similar to Steven Wells a few years before, he was a huge influence on both my writing style and my music taste and I really wish I could've been in a position to help him out in some way back then if I hadn't been struggling so badly to make ends meet myself. Anyway, back to the point at hand, The Knife Feels Like Justice was the sound of Brian going out of his comfort zone and doing it in fine style with some great everyman songs for society's down and outs. If you're in the position where you need some food for the soul to keep the flame burning and to comfort you that you're not suffering alone then I really can't recommend this one enough.