Garbage Days Revisited #86: Rene Berg - "The Leather, The Loneliness And Your Dark Eyes" (1992)

 

"I feel a fool in conversation/I'm so surprised by what you say/I can't control this situation/I've fallen all the way..." - Rene Berg - Secrets

Had this album come out five years earlier than it did then I'm pretty sure it'd still be being talked about by connoisseurs of good old fashioned knockabout Soho glam rock in the same breath as the Dogs D'Amour's In The Dynamite Jet Saloon and the Quireboys' A Bit Of What You Fancy. As it is, The Leather, The Loneliness And Your Dark Eyes is yet another of those great albums in this genre that came out a year or so after grunge came in and glam was essentially exiled back to the margins. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here.

Rene Berg then. I have to be honest, my knowledge here is a little bit sketchy so I apologise in advance if there's a few details missing from this here article. But the guy's probably best known for his spell as bass player in Hanoi Rocks' final line-up. This was after Razzle's tragic passing - Sami Yaffa would leave the band shortly afterwards leaving Michael Monroe, Andy McCoy and Nasty Suicide to struggle on with Berg joining on bass and former Clash/Lords of the New Church man Terry Chimes on drums. Unfortunately, Berg never really fit in with the Hanoi Rocks line-up and was quickly drummed out to be replaced by future Cherry Bombz/Dogs D'Amour guitarist Timo Kaltio for the band's final few shows. From an interview I read in Classic Rock with Mike and Andy around the time Hanoi Mk2 were active in the mid-noughties, I remember them saying that Berg could be a difficult character and his booze and drugs intake didn't help matters either. A Rene penned song, Fast Car (which would later surface on his solo album) did surface as part of the 1985 demos included on the Lean On Me album several years later.

After his departure from Hanoi Rocks, Rene's trail goes a bit quiet unless either you were there at the time or you investigate things a bit more closely with The Leather, The Loneliness And Your Dark Eyes surfacing in 1992. The first thing that strikes you about this record is Rene managed to get himself a hell of a backing band for it. On guitar was none other than Bernie Torme while Rat Scabies was handling drums and his former Damned colleague Paul Gray (also ex-Eddie & The Hot Rods, Johnny Thunders and UFO and, along with the Stranglers' JJ Burnel and the Lords' Dave Tregunna, one of the four stringers who was a major influence on this failed rock star's playing style). With a line-up like that, the pressure was definitely on and I'm happy to say that this album more than delivers. Secrets is an absolutely killer opener, all tales of midnight rendezvous' with mysterious femme fatales. I always wanted to do a cover of this and remember asking at least one former band if they'd be interested but unfortunately it never came to pass. Head Over Heels is almost as good, a proper giddy "early days of new love" song with some great guitar work from Torme ("Could this be love or just a sexual feeling/My head's in the air but my heart's up on the ceiling"). The whole thing keeps up the pace throughout with the likes of the title, Can't Get To Sleep and Rob The Bank (which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Darkness' I Believe In A Thing Called Love!) being absolute riots. Given that Mike Monroe was supposedly the member of Hanoi that Rene tended to clash with most of the time, it's a bit ironic that The Leather... is a pretty close relative of the excellent Demolition 23 album in its sound.

I did a little bit of extra research on Rene for the purpose of this article and it turns out he was actually a regular on the Soho glam scene throughout the '80s. The biggest surprise was that I was under the impression he was Swedish but it turns out he was actually English - just proof that you learn something new every day I guess! Rene had actually been in a band called Idle Flowers prior to Hanoi (they put out a solitary single, All I Want Is You, in 1984) and would initially return to them after leaving Hanoi in late '85 only for them to split up a matter of weeks later. He would appear as a guest on Andy and Nasty's Suicide Twins album Silver Missiles And Nightingales to sing on the song Sweet Pretending and put together an ongoing band called the Gang Bang Band which is where he first hooked up with Bernie Torme. The line-up also included various off-duty members of other late '80s Soho glammers like the Quireboys, Wolfsbane and the Babysitters and even Dumpy from Dumpy's Rusty Nuts for a bit! It was this that eventually evolved into the line-up that would do The Leather, The Loneliness And Your Dark Eyes. Rene also joined up with Nasty to form a group called the Soho Vultures after Andy McCoy left for L.A. and Shooting Gallery. Again, several of the Vultures' songs would eventually end up on The Leather...

As I mentioned at the start of the article, sadly The Leather, The Loneliness And Your Dark Eyes was an album very much out of time and Torme would soon move on to Widowmaker while Scabies would return to the Damned for the, erm, less-than-stellar I'm Alright Jack And The Beanstalk album with Gray also rejoining Vanian and Sensible just as Scabies was leaving the band in 1996. As for Rene, he would be a guest musician on Nasty Suicide's 1994 solo album, singing vocals on one track and backing vocals on another two (Nasty had been preoccupied with his Cheap and Nasty band with Alvin Gibbs, ex-UK Subs/Iggy Pop, around the time of The Leather... before moving on to Demolition 23 but would be back in the UK and going solo at this point) before seemingly drifting out of music for good. Sadly, he would end up passing away in 2003 with the circumstances of his death being somewhat of a mystery. Which just leaves The Leather, The Loneliness And Your Dark Eyes, a fine legacy from the man which really deserves rediscovering (it's also available in a reissued form under the title Gang Bang for some reason). If you should find yourself a copy somewhere, do yourself a favour and pick it up - it'll cheer you up when life's ailing ya, no question about it.