Sounds From The Junkshop #89 - The 69 Eyes

 

"They won't let us into heaven/And hell's closed tonight" - The 69 Eyes - The Good, The Bad And The Undead 

To say the 69 Eyes have had a bit of a back and forth sound in the last 30 years since they first slithered on to the scene from whichever Finnish rock 'n' roll reptile pit spawned them is to put it very mildly. I first encountered the band around the time I started reading Bubblegum Slut fanzine. I was actually a regular reader of the 'zine for a good three years or so before I finally plucked up the courage to e-mail Alison and ask if I could become a contributor and at the time it seemed like a cool glimpse into another world of party all night sleaze rock and dark and mysterious goth music that I very much wasn't experiencing up in indie-obsessed Leeds where I was unsuccessfully trying to head up a punk revival with my endearingly amateurish bunch of miscreants Brookside Riot Squad in the wake of every other bugger trying to copy first the Libertines then the Kaiser Chiefs then the Arctic Monkeys. To be fair, that's probably where the seeds were first sown of me moving to London half a decade or so later.

Around this time, the early noughties, the Eyes were pretty much the toast of the European goth scene, regarded as the natural heirs to the Sisters of Mercy with frontman Jyrki being acclaimed by some as a modern day Finnish Jim Morrison (the fact that they had an album called Wasting The Dawn and a song about Pere Lachaisse probably didn't hurt them). The first album of theirs I listened to was Devils and I have to admit I enjoyed it - a dark beguiling slice of goth rock which made a nice change from the whole Strokes/Libertines anaemia that the NME was trying to offload on us or the whole Sum 41/Blink 182/Wheatus frat-punk crap spilling out of the pages of Kerrang! However, on a bit of investigation, it quickly became apparent that the band hadn't always been like that...

A few months after becoming a Bubblegum Slut reader, I also discovered the Sleazegrinder website, another one of my big inspirations with my music writing which I've touched upon in Sounds From The Junkshop and Garbage Days Revisited columns past. I was a bit surprised to see the 69 Eyes crop up in their Flash Metal Suicide column (arguably the column that both of my aforementioned ones took most of their cues from) one week as I thought they were a new-ish band at the time. Turns out I was wrong - the group had actually been active for over a decade at this point and, much to my surprise, I found out they'd actually started out as a Backyard Babies-style sleaze rock band (well, a couple of years before the Backyards in fact). Intrigued, I duly ordered a copy of two of their early releases Bump And Grind and Motor City Resurrection (a collection of early singles and compilation appearances) and, yeah I'll admit it, this is probably the bit that reeled me in properly.

I still love Bump And Grind and Motor City Resurrection now. They're pretty much a million miles away from what the group would have mutated into by the time I got into them - scuzzy punked up rock 'n' roll with a love of classic splatter horror movies, the scummier end of sleaze rock and a bit of black leather jumpsuit era Elvis (the fact that Bump And Grind ends up with an enjoyably sloppy run through the King's Burning Love which is great fun). Add in covers by the likes of Alice Cooper (Is It My Body?), the Dictators (Science Gone Too Far), the Misfits (Return Of The Fly), Kiss (an awesome fired-up take on Deuce), the Stooges (TV Eye) and the Dolls (Vietnamese Baby) plus some gleefully boneheaded originals like House By The Cemetery, Barbarella, Mrs Sleazy ("That girl got 69 ways to please me!"), Hills Have Eyes and Stop Bitching! ("I'm gonna ride my rocket to the moon 'cos you know honey it feels so good!") and you kind of get the picture. It was great fun and I'd often put those records on to cheer me up after a day slogging it out in one of the bottom rung of the ladder temp jobs that comprised most of my early to mid-twenties.

The drift across from sleaze rock to goth was a fairly slow one for the Eyes - 1996's Savage Garden and 1997's Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams still had plenty of the old band's DNA mixed in there but by the time of 1999's aforementioned Wasting The Dawn, they'd pretty much undergone a full-on goth transformation and chart success in their homeland which had pretty much eluded them until this point duly followed.

Devils, where I'd discovered the band properly, would come a good three or so albums down the line from that and was pretty much a straight-up goth rock album a la Type O Negative or Paradise Lost with very little of the old scuzz-rock DNA of old remaining. However, its follow-up 2007's Angels saw a slight shift with the goth rock vibes still very much present but a sly sense of humour lurking underneath on the likes of lead off single Perfect Skin which sounds like it could've sat on the Sisters' Vision Thing while the likes of Rocker and Frankenhooker (named after the notorious early '90s schlock-horror B movie) definitely marked a little bit of a shift away from the none-more-serious tone of the previous few albums.

2009's Back In Blood would mark even more of a shift with the sleaze rock side of the band, which had pretty much lain dormant for a decade at this point, starting to make its way back to the surface leaving the group as almost a sort of sleaze-goth hybrid. I have to say, I think this might be my favourite 21st century 69 Eyes album with the stomping likes of the title track and the awesome The Good, The Bad And The Undead being some of their strongest efforts for many years. I think it was around this time that I first saw the group live as well at the Electric Ballroom in Camden (I really want to say it was supporting the Mission but I think that might have come a few years later) and they put on a good show. Given that this was the time that Marilyn Manson's stock was starting to fall after a few decidedly under-par albums (prior to the horrible revelations that deservedly turned him into a pariah), we needed someone to take over the goth-glam-warlords mantle and Jyrki and co seemed like just the guys to do it.

The full 69 Eyes story isn't gonna be told here today, not least as the band are very much still an ongoing concern and in cases like this, I feel it's usually best to just leave it at how I discovered the band and those early experiences with them. However, the standard of their output has remained pretty high since with 2012's X, 2016's Universal Monsters and 2019's West End all being worthy additions to the band's back catalogue which saw them combining the sleaze and goth elements to their sound well. Recently of course, Jyrki has been busy with both his solo career (we reviewed his most recent effort American Vampire on this site at the tail end of last year which was sadly a bit of an inconsistent effort) and with his gothabilly side project the 69 Cats (whose Seven Year Itch album we also reviewed on here and most definitely IS worth a spin). However, the timescales would suggest that we're due a new 69 Eyes album proper in the near future and rest assured that your correspondent is very much looking forward to giving it a spin. In the meantime, I'd heartily suggest checking out some of this band's excellent back catalogue if you haven't already. From the dark Doorsy laments to the scuzzy early sleaze rock days, rest assured it's all good.