Garbage Days Revisited #43: The Jacobites - "Robespierre's Velvet Basement" (1985)

 

"And as the snow fell on her doorstep, she wipes away another tear. And he says he's always gonna miss her but she always knows when he's not here" - The Jacobites - It'll All End Up In Tears

As this is our last Garbage Days Revisited of 2021, I thought I'd finish on an album that always reminds me of Christmas for some reason. Hailing from the same pool of Birmingham troubadours that brought us the great Dogs D'Amour, it was actually through Tyla's band of outlaws that I first encountered the Jacobites in the mid-noughties. The Dogs had just reissued their debut album The State We're In which featured future Jacobites six stringer Dave Kusworth on guitar and after hearing the band spoken of in hushed terms in the review of it, I was sufficiently intrigued to splash out on a copy of this album which, happily for me, had also just been reissued at the time.

After he left the Dogs in late '84, Kusworth would join up with Nikki Sudden to form the Jacobites and the pair would remain together on and off for the next two decades. Both of them had cut their teeth in the lo-fi post-punk scene at the turn of the decade with Kusworth starting out in the Hawks with Stephen "Tin Tin" Duffy after the latter left Duran Duran and Sudden starting out in Swell Maps with his brother Epic Soundtracks. However, the music they'd come up with in their new venture was pretty much a total departure from that.

I think the song that really sealed the deal for me was It'll All End Up In Tears, a beautifully desolate break-up lament. Although the Jacobites definitely shared some musical DNA with the Dogs, it was the Graveyard Of Empty Bottles style acoustic side of the repertoire - don't expect any raucous rabble rousers like Debauchery on Robespierre's Velvet Basement (the group's second album), this is an album to listen to with a glass of wine at 3am rather than getting your glad rags on to go out on the town. But man were these guys good at it. Songs like Snow White, Son Of A French Nobleman and Where The Rivers End are beautiful stripped back odes to love, loss, friendship and escapism, perfect for soothing the savage beast.

The group would never really achieve any sort of commercial breakthrough sadly - I mean this was the era of Madonna, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, big mid-'80s bombast, there was no way a couple of skinny troubadours clad in their finest gypsy rags were ever going to be stars plus they were caught between two stools - much too fey to fit in with the burgeoning Soho glam scene and too heart on sleeve to really fit in with the indie scene at the time. Having said that, the group did manage to get a couple of albums out on Creation in 1986's Texas and 1987's Dead Men Tell No Tales, not quite up to the same standard as Robespierre but both well worth a listen in their own right. They would break up shortly afterwards with Sudden resuming his solo career and Kusworth going off to found the Bounty Hunters who were a bit more in the classic Stones rock 'n' roll vein (give their Threads album a listen, it's good stuff).

Sudden and Kusworth would reunite in the early '90s and two further albums, 1995's Old Scarlett and 1998's God Save Us Poor Sinners would follow. Unfortunately Sudden's untimely death in 2006 at the age of just 49 would curtail the band's activity - I'd literally only discovered the band a couple of years before so I was gutted I never got the chance to see them live. Nikki's posthumous album The Truth Doesn't Matter was a great album too. Kusworth would carry on with his solo career until his own passing a couple of years ago.

As I said at the start of this article, Robespierre's Velvet Basement has always been an album I've associated with Christmas with all the references to winter and snow in there (plus the fact that the group did a song called Teenage Christmas although it's not on this album) so it's one that I usually dig out around this time of year to wind down with over a glass of something and enjoy the respite from nine to five life that the festive season briefly brings. If you're unlucky enough not to have encountered the Jacobites before then I'd heartily recommend you doing the same - pretty much all of their stuff is gentle soothing fodder for the soul when you need a musical arm around your shoulder the most. RIP Nikki and Dave, both much missed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A brief return from the dead...

Image
  Yup, we're back. Don't all get excited at once. I’d been toying with the idea of doing an end of year list again this year and after a lot of umming and aahing eventually decided to go for it. As with last year, inevitably there were bumps along the way. As of the start of December, I thought this list would be around 40 albums but inevitably reading other people’s lists pointed me towards a bunch of stuff that had passed me by earlier in the year. Plus of course there’s always a few teasing buggers who put stuff out at the last possible moment. So 40 became 50 which became 60 which finally became 70. You lucky people. Actually though, reading through this list, the main thing that strikes me is that I think this might be the most musically varied end of year list that Nite Songs has ever done. From gentle acoustics through acclaimed indie veterans to punk thrash and good old fashioned scuzzy rock ‘n’ roll via some decidedly unexpected diversions (industrial folk music? Check...
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure, ...
Read more

Album Review: The Fades - "Night Terrors"

Image
  Hailing from South London, the Fades are gaining a reputation of one of the premier garage rock bands in the capital these days and, as with a few albums we've reviewed in these webpages of late, Night Terrors  was written during the lockdown as it was a recurring feature of life for the band's frontman Dave during the lockdown. As befits its title and subject matter, Night Terrors  is an off-kilter effort which might take a few listens to get into but rewards those who persevere with it. Certainly, the discordant vocals and guitars often give the impression of the whole operation being on the verge of collapse on the likes of The Pessimist  and Known It All Along  while Lost My Job  goes into XTC/Nightingales style post-punk territory. However, the likes of People In General  show that they can rein the weirdness in and build up an intriguing multi-part epic which starts off as tuneful new wave before drifting into a nightmarish state-of-the-nation ...
Read more