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.