Garbage Days Revisited #49: Birdland - "Birdland" (1991)

 

"Your evil sun is rising up and he's shakin'/Shakin' for you..." Birdland - Shoot You Down

We're taking a quick break away from the whole biker sleaze rock this week to wander into more English territory. Don't worry, we'll be back there next week - blame the random playlist on my Itunes for this diversion as earlier in the week during a quiet afternoon at work, it cued up a song I'd not heard for a few years, namely Birdland's classic Hollow Heart and it made me think "Feck, now if EVER there was a band who deserved a Garbage Days Revisited entry..."

I do actually vaguely remember Birdland from way way back in the day just when I was starting to get into guitar music as a 12-year-old - they had a minor Top 40 hit with Sleep With Me (it got featured on the Top 40 breakers on TOTP but a full appearance was not forthcoming) then seemed to disappear from view very quickly afterwards. The group had appeared on the scene in a blizzard of good publicity in the dying months of the '80s with an absolute stormer of a single in Hollow Heart (look up the full EP on Youtube and cue up the full three track seven minutes blast of that song, Crystal and Gotta Get Away, it's a hell of a rush) which saw everyone claiming they were the future of rock 'n' roll. I seem to even remember James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire claiming that EP was a big influence on the early Manic Street Preachers sound (play Hollow Heart and Motown Junk back to back and you can't miss it really) so it does make you wonder what might have been.

The trouble is that similar to the likes of These Animal Men or Gay Dad in future years, Birdland were hugely hyped at the beginning and the "knock 'em back down" campaign from the more cynical arm of the music press quickly sprang into overdrive. By the time the group's debut album came out in early 1991, they'd put out a good four or five singles but none of them had topped Sleep With Me's minor success. The album was absolutely pilloried in the press, the group saw the Manics fly past them and would soon be no more.

And it's a shame because I actually think Birdland isn't a bad effort at all taken out of the context of how much the band were being hyped at the time. I think I ended up checking it out after it was briefly re-released on reissue specialists Castle around the turn of the millennium and remembering how the Manics had said Birdland were a huge influence on them (other bands I liked at the time were less keen - I remember the Senseless Things being particularly vitriolic about Birdland being all hype and no substance in an interview at the time). The main problem is that first EP had been so good that there was realistically no way the band could ever have hoped to follow it up and yeah, it's arguably more the sort of album where you think "there's plenty of promise here, it just needs a bit of extra focus and refinement and they're sorted". Unfortunately, they were already so far down the road of being an indie press laughing stock at this point that they were never gonna get the opportunity and they'd have split by the time 1992 rolled around.

Digging up that old Manics comparison again, similar to Generation Terrorists there's definitely a bit of filler on this album (I mean, that cover of Patti Smith's Rock 'n' Roll Nigger definitely goes under the category of being a brave but very foolish idea) but man, when Birdland nail it like on the venomous Shoot You Down (recently covered by SFTJ alumni The Black Halos) or Wake Up Dreaming or Beat Me Like A Star, they really do nail it and listening back my main feeling is it's a pity they never got the chance to build on what was actually a pretty promising first effort and start rounding their sound out the way their peers like the Manics and Suede did. I s'pose the trouble is that both hype and ridicule tended to stick like mud back in that era and the group never really stood a chance. You can almost hear Cliff Jones nodding his head and muttering darkly in agreement...

More recently of course, Birdland lead singer Rob Vincent has returned to the fray with the excellent Diablofurs and their Neon Satellites album (Nite Songs review here) was a genuinely triumphant comeback, mixing all the best bits of '70s glam and early '80s new wave and synth rock to come up with something genuinely inventive and packed with cracking tunes and hooks. You should really go and give it a listen if you haven't already. Anyway, Birdland - I guess with the hype they were never gonna stand a chance unless they'd delivered a truly flawless album but what they did leave behind was a flawed but enjoyable slice of snotty attitude-laced art school punk which sits alongside the first Manics album or TAM's (Come On Join) The High Society as a good example of how sometimes propelling yourselves along on sheer bravado and some of the old Hanoi Rocks stardust can get you further than you'd think. Definitely worth a revisit and reappraisal I'd say.