Garbage Days Revisited #71: Electric Angels - "Electric Angels" (1990)
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"My head's still spinning/My insides aching/For a while you were so intoxicating" - Electric Angels - The Drinking Song
Another one of those bands who got obliterated by the grunge wildfire that killed off hair metal despite being a million miles away sound-wise from the likes of Poison and Warrant, the Electric Angels are a group who really deserve a bit of a re-evaluation some three decades on. I've often mentioned in both Garbage Days Revisited and Sounds From The Junkshop columns past that I'm a bit of a sucker for bright sunshiny songs that actually disguise some pretty dark lyrics and the Electric Angels were definitely masters of this. The group started out in the early days of the Sunset Strip as Candy who were pretty much doing the glam-pop-rock thing a good five years or so before Poison et al and had Kim Fowley (yup, him again) managing them at one point.
Candy managed one album, 1985's Whatever Happened To Fun? and it wasn't a bad effort really with the title track being the obvious single (although it missed the charts) and the rest varying from the anthemic American Kix ("I know that paradise is far away and I'm stranded in LA..." - I've got fond memories of listening to that one stood on a bridge looking over Las Vegas Boulevard watching the traffic going up and down the Strip the first time I went out there) to the gentle epic The Last Radio Show even if there's a bit of filler mixed in there. The group are mostly best known though for what their members would go on to - guitarist Gilby Clarke would go on to join G'n'R in the early '90s and play on their Spaghetti Incident covers album, fellow six-stringer Ryan Roxie would join Slash's Snakepit and now plays guitar for Alice Cooper and singer Kyle Vincent would go on to an MOR solo career which would bring him success in the States but less so over here.
Anyway, Candy would break up a year or so after that album came out with Vincent going solo and Clarke moving on to his more straight ahead rock outfit Kill For Thrills (one album, sadly a bit underwhelming tbh). The remaining three members - Roxie, bassist and main songwriter Jonathan Daniel and drummer John Schubert - would pack their bags and relocate away from the sunshine to New York where they'd bring in new singer Shane Mansfield, change their name to the Electric Angels and sign to Elektra.
The key weapon in the group's arsenal was Daniel's songwriting. Like Wiz from Mega City Four with Andy McCoy's dress sense, the guy was simply very very good at pairing some deceptively upbeat rhythms with some very dark lyrics. I mean, the group's sole self-titled album is a pretty downbeat affair despite the upbeat sounding likes of lead-off single Rattlesnake Kisses (another hit that should've been) and the raucous closer Drinking Song (aka I Never Really Loved You, I Just Drank Too Much - I think we've all been there right, guys and girls?). Certainly the likes of Home Sweet Homicide (not to be confused with the Wednesday 13 song of the same name), Cars Crash and the heartbreakingly stark True Love And Other Fairy Tales (the line "Our bed of roses has become a bed of nails" was later pinched by Bon Jovi for their Bed of Roses song) were genuinely dark songs about the flip side of love, when it's all gone wrong and the other person's left you sat alone drowning your tears in a pint of whatever your poison is.
Unfortunately even the presence of legendary Bowie producer Tony Visconti couldn't help Electric Angels' album become a hit and it passed into history as yet another great album that was unjustly ignored at the time - I seem to remember reading in Visconti's biography that the group were seriously angry at Elektra who they regarded as having not promoted it properly, unfortunately an all too common story with bands in this era (Rock City Angels being another good example) and they'd leave the label soon afterwards. Roxie would promptly up sticks back to LA to join up with Slash and would also contribute to his former bandmate Clarke's Pawn Shoppe Guitars album. The other three would recruit new guitarist Richard Tressan and change band name again, becoming the Loveless.
The group would have one last hurrah in the form of the sole Loveless album Another Tale Of Gin And Salvation. Similar to the Electric Angels album, this was another great album of sunny melodies and dark lyrics (Return of the Ex-Girlfriend especially) which deserved to do so much better than it did but by this time it was 1995, the glam rock era was long gone (yes I know that the Angels/Loveless were a very different proposition to yer standard glam metal band but unfortunately for better or worse they'd undeservedly been lumped in with that scene) and even grunge which had succeeded it was tanking by this point. The group would finally call it a day after this with Daniel becoming Butch Walker's manager. Schubert would go on to become a teacher according to Wikipedia, I've no idea about the others.
It's a real pity that the Electric Angels and the Loveless were essentially ignored at the time because they definitely presented something different to what was making up the majority of the hair metal scene by this time - a more gentle and thoughtful take on the formula which was much more morning after than the party the night before. It's a shame that Daniel's pretty much given up on songwriting in favour of management as the guy was definitely very gifted at writing those barbed lyrics hidden under sugar-sweet tunes and personally I'd love to see the guy making some sort of musical comeback, be that with a reformed Electric Angels/Candy/Loveless or someone else. But either way, for something to soothe your heart and your soul when love and life has gone wrong, these albums are definitely hard to beat.
"You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?" - Silverfish - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split. I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
"I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..." - The Quireboys - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
"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,
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