Garbage Days Revisited #59: Love And Rockets - "Express" (1986)

 

"Are you confused by the chaos? If so it's no surprise/We all stand next to Jesus 'cos with Satan, we're both the same" - Love & Rockets - An American Dream

Love & Rockets are one of those bands who will arguably always be fighting to be heard over the echoes of their former band and it seems ironic that I'm doing a look back at their Express album the same weekend as I've reviewed a new Bauhaus single in the Singles Bar. And that's a real shame because, for their first two albums at least, I'd put them right up there with their former group in terms of quality. Mixing sinister goth dynamics with blissful psychedelia, they put a whole different spin on the genre which stood apart from what pretty much everyone else was doing and they deserve credit for it.

It's weird because I haven't really gone into my love of goth music much in the SFTJ and GDR columns over the last couple of years. I suppose because it would be my mid-twenties before I properly got into it although even as a 12-year-old I had singles by both the Sisters of Mercy (More) and the Mission (Deliverance) in my cassette collection. I still love both of those songs now - yes, they're big and bombastic but there's something just quite deliciously evil sounding about them and they way they sound supremely sinister without having to layer on brickbat guitars or similar. I think the gateway band for me might well have been the Cult to be honest who I'd already got into via a best of which I picked up as a teenager, ostensibly for She Sells Sanctuary before discovering the likes of Lil' Devil, Sun King, Edie (Ciao Baby), Fire Woman, Spiritwalker etc. and realising that actually this lot were so much more than their best known song.

Anyway, it was some time around this era I picked up a goth compilation CD in HMV one week mainly out of curiosity and something definitely clicked as I rediscovered the Sisters and the Mission along with the Cure, All About Eve, Spear of Destiny and of course Bauhaus via their sublime cover of Ziggy Stardust (surely one of the best cover versions ever) and the ominous She's In Parties. This was the dreaded "landfill indie" era where nothing much of note was really happening in the mainstream music press and it's safe to say it had a bit of a transformative effect on my psyche. Love and Rockets were also on that compilation with their ultra-intense take on the old Temptations number Ball Of Confusion and I made a note to give them further listening.

As it turned out, I was in luck - around this time Beggars Banquet (L&R's old label) were doing a reissue programme where you could pick up a five CD box set of some of the artists who'd been on their label in the '80s and '90s for just £12 and I quickly ended up buying a Love & Rockets one (along with ones by the Sisters and Bauhaus around the same time). The group's first two albums, 1984's Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven and 1986's Express quickly elbowed their way to the front of my CD rack and I would listen to them a lot over the next few years. Love & Rockets were essentially Bauhaus minus frontman Peter Murphy who'd departed for a solo career in 1983 just after the Burning From The Inside album which arguably pointed the way forward to where Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins would go next.

I think it's safe to say that Seventh Dream and Express were very much my chillout albums in my late twenties. While I was still enjoying listening to bands like the Wildhearts* and Therapy? around this time (although the latter were definitely going through a lean spell in this period), sometimes you want some music to counter that and wind down to. I remember Pepsi Sheen at the Sleazegrinder website (as I've previously established on here, a guy whose writings were a big influence on my listening habits back then) writing an excellent account of discovering their music while on an acid trip as a teenager in New York (link here - read it, it's a superb article) and weirdly, although it wouldn't happen until five years later, Love & Rockets always reminded me of my first year living in London in a similar kind of way with the whole "my eyes are open and the possibilities are endless" feel of those early albums of theirs.

(* Quick footnote - weirdly I seem to remember seeing Ginger wearing a Love & Rockets T-shirt in an early Wildhearts publicity photo from the Don't Be Happy Just Worry era although I'm still not sure if it was for the band or the sci-fi comic they were named after!)

I'll write a lot more about my move down south when I come to that time period in Sounds From The Junkshop I'm sure but I was 30 years old when I'd finally had enough of Leeds and decided to strike out on my own. By this time I was writing for Bubblegum Slut and Pure Rawk and all I knew is that while I was struggling to find a gig a month worth going to up in Leeds amidst the whole fallout from the dreadful Kaiser Chiefs/Arctic Monkeys scene as it burned itself out, all of the other writers who I was becoming friends with on these 'zines, most of them London-based, were forever telling me about the amazing gigs they were going to every weekend. I'd just split up very messily with the girl I was dating at the time (not to mention having my head turned somewhat by the various beautiful raven-haired art school girls I always seemed to end up running into and chatting with whenever I went to visit my London-based friends), my band at the time had been pretty much inactive for the best part of a year and the lease on the flat me and my friend were renting was up with him already having amicably made the decision to move on elsewhere. Sod it, I reasoned, if I didn't make the break now then I probably never would. One successful job application to work for a hospital and and a lease agreement on an NHS flat later and I was on my way...

As I've said before, there will be many stories of those early days in London when I come round to it in Sounds From The Junkshop but for the first year at least, it was pretty much everything I'd hoped it would be. I managed 100 gigs in that first year there (and 88 in my second) which still amazes me now. Places like the Gaff and Big Red in Holloway, the 12 Bar or the Intrepid Fox in Soho, the Black Heart, the Purple Turtle or the Flowerpot in Camden, the Boston Arms, Aces and Eights and the Dome in Tufnell Park, the Archway Tavern, the Bull & Gate in Kentish Town, Bardens in Dalston (home of the Urban Voodoo Machine's Gypsy Hotel club) and countless others became my homes from home. I ended up meeting and drinking with people whose music had made such an impression on me over the previous couple of decades and it was awesome. Once work was done, it would be catch the Overground back to Hackney (I got in there just before the multimedia hipster types who put the rent prices through the roof did which was what ultimately forced me out a couple of years later), get my best rock duds on, get the train back west and prepare to cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war, all to a soundtrack of glam, goth, sleaze, punk, indie, ska, rockabilly, folk-punk, straight up rock 'n' roll or wherever the four winds blew us to that night. Then afterwards, if I wasn't going on to a house party elsewhere, all aboard the N253 (as immortalised by that Chris T-T album) and back to the flat, grab a couple of beers out of the fridge and chill out listening to some Love & Rockets. Songs like A Private Future, All In My Mind, Haunted (When The Minutes Drag) and An American Dream sound absolutely brilliant at times like that - the perfect soundtrack to the night winding down as the booze takes effect and you slowly drift into unconsciousness. And I still say the truly ferocious six minute pounding Kundalini Express is a great getting ready to go out song to as well.

The good times wouldn't last of course. For me or L&R. As 2010 turned into 2011, it became pretty clear that something stunk in London and it smelled an awful lot like gentrification. Encouraged by the greedy scumbag who was the mayor at that point (and who unbelievably is now our prime minister), projects such as the epic waste of time and money that is Crossrail would see landlords in Soho jack their rents up to unaffordable levels forcing all the cool independent businesses, boutiques and bars out to make way for superfluous branches of Giraffe and WH Smith and Camden would soon follow suit. So much of that magical world of 2010 is gone now. The Gaff was turned into a branch of Costa. The 12 Bar shut, tried to set up shop again in Holloway and failed. The Crobar and the Fox are both gone. So are the Kilburn Luminaire and the Walthamstow Royal Standard. Madame Jojo's, the infamous Soho drag revue club where a lot of the glam and sleaze bands I was friends with in those early days used to play regularly, was closed down by the council who used a punch-up between two drunks outside it as an excuse to revoke the bar’s license so they could clear out the freaks who might put the chain restaurant customers off. Gypsy Hotel ended up moving all over London before the lockdown put it on hold. Even Koko aka the Camden Palace, got torched in what looked suspiciously like an insurance job (allegedly) just the same as the market had a few years before. Apparently it's soon to become a hotel - read into that what you will. These days, as laid out in that heartbreaking Beans On Toast song Once Upon A Time, the whole bottom has fallen out of the London music scene - the 100 Club continues to grimly hang on over on Oxford Street (though even that's come perilously close to closing in recent years) and the Black Heart is still there but much of the rest outside the soulless corporate-owned venues is all ashes to ashes and dust to dust now. Similarly, Love & Rockets' quality would fade after those first two albums as well - they would go on to do another couple of albums (1987's Earth Sun Moon and their self-titled 1989 effort) but while they would bring the band chart success Stateside, they just didn't feel as special as those first two. Again, maybe I'll have one of my periodic attempts to get into them again some time soon as it's been a while but as of yet they've never quite won me over.

Looking back at that time of my life now, while I don't think I've got the energy anymore to live the way I did back then (to be honest, it's probably a miracle I didn't get fired from my job the amount of days I missed due to "having a stomach bug" - I was probably lucky that I was usually fairly hard working when I was there and that my line manager was in a band as well and probably sympathised!), I do miss that year a lot. The time when it really felt like anything was possible, where every weekend was an adventure which could literally lead anywhere in the big city spent with friends where we'd laugh, drink, smoke, socialise, introduce each other to new music and have as much fun as we could before the developers and the money men spoilt it all. And Love & Rockets were the soundtrack to a lot of that, falling into bed and drifting off to sleep at 5am with a big stupid grin on my face and the gentle sound of A Private Future swirling around the room. They were good times. It's just a pity that they didn't last.