Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

 

"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, you may laugh but play EZN's New Thing and Oasis' Rock 'n' Roll Star back to back and you'll see what I mean. In fact, I'll demonstrate below.

See? Anyway, back to the subject of this column after that little diversion - the Soho Roses were formed in the mid-'80s out of the primordial soup of the area that gave them their name by guitarist Andy Riff who'd been in early '80s goth-punks the Dark with a pre-Hanoi Rocks Razzle (give their The Masque single a listen below, it's a proper goth-punk classic) and drummer Pat Walters (aka Patrice Panache). Apparently their rationale was to recruit the three coolest looking blokes they could find around the whole Gossips scene and thus they ended up with Paul Blitz on vocals, Andy DeGray on lead guitar and Joolz Dean on bass. Riff wouldn't last very long with the group thanks to DeGray manoeuvring them over to a more glam-influenced sound and they'd soon slim down to a four-piece  Similar to fellow GDR alumni the Babysitters, or the Dogs D'Amour and Quireboys for that matter, they had a reputation for being an endearingly ramshackle live band but unlike a lot of their compadres, a record deal was not forthcoming and they ended up self-releasing their two EP's and only album.

I mean when you consider that even most of the minor players in the Soho glam scene at least ended up on a minor label deal on somewhere like Razor (Tattooed Love Boys and the Grip) or Heavy Metal Records (the Babysitters and Wrathchild), the Roses really must've been an incredibly unlucky bunch. Then again, as Paul Blitz remembered in an interview with Sleazegrinder's Stu Gibson (link here), the sleaze rock scene was already changing by the time the Roses reared their heads and not necessarily for the better. "By the time the Roses started playing though, things were changing...The very English scene of the year before had suddenly been infected by LA fever. People started posing around the Marquee in cowboy boots and bandanas which possibly looked perfectly okay on sun-drenched Sunset Strip but, to me, always looked a bit out of place in Wardour Street in the pissing rain. I personally felt that the scene that Hanoi had started in London a few years before had been nicked and then bastardised in LA by adding metal guitars, humourless sexist lyrics and slightly crapper clothes and then sold back to us. We weren't buying it though - but a hell of a lot of people were..."

As I said earlier, The Third And Final Insult definitely isn't a typical sleaze rock album - if anything the closest influence I can spot here is the Ramones with the rough 'n' ready wun-too-free-for approach - had the Roses started up a decade earlier you could easily see them sharing a bill at somewhere like the Vortex with the Lurkers or the Boys. They attack right from the off with the first four songs blending into each other (similar to Birdland's classic first EP which actually came out around the same time) from the joky intro to the "woh-oh-oh-oh" singalong of Why D'Ya Always Break My Heart, the demolition derby of Dance With Me (not a Lords of the New Church cover sadly but still a fine effort in its own right) and a rip-snorting run through the Buzzcocks' What Do I Get? which ties right in with their sound.

The standard remains high throughout from the chugging This Ain't Called Anything Yet to the surprisingly gentle balladry of First Kiss (which you could almost imagine a band like the Speedways or Los Pepes doing nowadays). It's the group's debut single So Alone that's the best track here though, coming on like a speeded up Here Comes The Sun and capturing that mix of bravado and desperation when you're trying (and failing) to get a last dance for the evening at the nightclub just as the DJ spins up the closing time song. Certainly it sounded like a band out of time but with a fair bit of promise. So what happened?

Well, the Wildhearts happened in a nutshell. After Ginger was sacked from the Quireboys, he was basically putting a band together of the coolest musicians he could find from the people he knew in the whole Gossips scene (to be fair, much the same as Riff and Pat had when they were putting that original Soho Roses together a few years before) and he quickly swooped to bring in first Joolz and then Pat into the nascent Wildhearts line-up which spelt the end of the Roses. Both would have lost their places in the band, to Danny and Bam respectively, by the time the 'Hearts made their recording debut with the Mondo Akimbo A-Go-Go EP and would move on to a new group, the excellently named Guns 'n' Wankers, with Dunc from Snuff, again proof that the Roses definitely owed as much to the pop-punk scene as they did to glam. G'n'W reformed a couple of years back (which I was completely unaware of prior to doing this article!) and hopefully some more gigs will be coming up from them now that lockdown's over.

I did actually meet Pat from the Soho Roses a few times in my early days of living in London as we used to hang around with the same crowd and he was a good guy - always happy to have a drink and a chat when I ran into him. Although I do remember one of the first times we ran into each other at a post-pub house party in Barnsbury a couple of days after Alex Chilton died, I was horribly wrecked on booze and...erm, other stimulants let's say...and spent about five minutes gibbering at the poor guy about how great Big Star were in my intoxicated state. Thankfully, he'd evidently forgiven or forgotten next time I ran into him! Either way, I probably owe him an apology for that - sorry bud.

All of which just leaves the Soho Roses' output which your correspondent managed to get when it was briefly reissued as the Whatever Happened To The Soho Roses compilation on the sadly short-lived Full Breach records (who were also reissuing the Joneses' back catalogue at the time) and should you be able to find a copy then it's well worth a listen. Yup, they were unquestionably a case of right band wrong time but the Soho Roses were definitely one of the unjustly forgotten diamonds of the '80s Soho glam scene.