Garbage Days Revisited #94: The Wanderers - "Only Lovers Left Alive" (1981)

 

"Living in a rats' maze in a high rise concrete cell/Gonna do some damage 'cos it's worth my time in hell" - The Wanderers - Ready To Snap

The Wanderers were a bit of a supergroup albeit one that circumstances sadly prevented from really reaching its full potential. The group were formed in 1980 upon the dissolution of yobbo-punks Sham 69. I've sort of touched on Sham a little bit in a few columns but they're not honestly the sort of band I'd do a Garbage Days Revisited on for the simple reason that I've always regarded them as a great singles band who, unlike those who came after them like the Cockney Rejects and the Angelic Upstarts, never quite managed an all killer no filler album. Their ultra-raw 1978 debut Tell Us The Truth is probably their strongest effort with its mix of big Slade-style gang chant choruses and hoolie aggression. That's Life, which surfaced later the same year, was an attempt at a punk concept which had a few good moments (Hurry Up Harry and Sunday Morning Nightmare are both great slices of no-brainer boozed up punk) but overall came across as just a bit too contrived for its own good.

By 1979, things were rapidly unravelling for Sham - the group had retired from playing live after their fanbase had been infiltrated by right wing boneheads and gigs were perpetually getting smashed up. They would put out a further two albums, 1979's Adventures Of The Hersham Boys (which would ironically enough give them their biggest hit in the title track but it would all be downhill from there) and 1980's The Game before frontman Jimmy Pursey would leave the band. Supposedly Pursey had his sights set on joining up with Steve Jones and Paul Cook to form a group called the Sham Pistols but this never came to pass (Jones and Cook would instead go on to form the Professionals), not least as he allegedly told Mensi from the Upstarts that the outspoken Mackem firebrand would leave his band and replace him in Sham and unsurprisingly Mensi told him where he could shove that idea!

When Pursey finally did do the off from Sham, the remaining three members (guitarist Dave Parsons, bassist Dave Tregunna and drummer Ricky Goldstein) would find a replacement from a bit of an unlikely source - former Dead Boys singer Stiv Bators. We'll deal with the Dead Boys in a future GDR I'm sure but basically they were, in this writer's opinion, the nearest thing the States produced to its own Sex Pistols, a viciously nihilistic bunch of ne'er-do-wells from Cleveland via New York who genuinely didn't give a fuck who they upset and came up with two absolutely brilliant albums which, for me, are up there with the best stuff to come out of the whole CBGB's scene. After that group fell apart in 1979, Stiv would cut a straight up power-pop album called Disconnected which is well worth a listen, showing a very different side to his output - largely inspired by stripped back '60s Nuggets style garage rock.

Polydor, Sham's old label, would keep the Wanderers signed and let them take over Sham's old deal. Presumably they thought they would get a snarling spitting album of punk hellcat fury that they could market to the early '80s punk fans who were propelling the Cockney Rejects into the Top 40 and would soon be doing the same for the Exploited. Inevitably, what they got was something very very different.

I'm really not sure how you'd describe Only Lovers Left Alive - musically, it's pretty much a straight continuation from the power-pop of Stiv's Disconnected album complete with synths but lyrically, this almost feels like a Lords of the New Church album that landed a year or two early with Stiv letting his conspiracy theory ideas go full flow for arguably the first time in his career. The album is a concept album of sorts about a teenager who, after reading the works of notorious conspiracy theorist Dr Peter Beter, sets out to change the system but ultimately becomes subsumed by it. I mean, if Polydor were expecting Sonic Reducer meets If The Kids Are United, their jaws must have dropped halfway to Australia when the Wanderers gave them this to market.

Inevitably, this album got minimal promotion from Polydor and sank like a stone but I think it's brilliant, not just because of how depressingly nail on the head a lot of Stiv's observations were and depressingly seem to be even more so in this era of the likes of Sunak, Starmer, Sturgeon, Truss, Johnson, Trump and Biden. Songs like Take Them And Break Them, Ready To Snap, Dr Beter and Sold Your Soul For Fame could just as easily have been written in 2022 as they were in 1980 and they pack in killer choruses and hooks to ensure that you'll stay hooked until the end.

The other point is that this turned out to be a hell of an influential album - Mike Monroe would subsequently cover Take Them And Break Them as a single in the '90s and more recently, the Black Halos would cover Ready To Snap (again, featuring Mr Monroe on vocals) on their recent triumphant comeback How The Darkness Doubled). So ultimately, Stiv won, he just didn't get to see it in his lifetime sadly.

The Wanderers would break up towards the end of 1981 after being dropped by Polydor and Dave Parsons (the group's other main songwriter after Stiv) contracting hepatitis which would force him to put his music career on hold for half a decade. Soon after that, Stiv would link up with former Damned guitarist Brian James to form the Lords of the New Church. After their original line-up featuring former Generation X bassist Tony James and former Clash drummer Terry Chimes didn't work out, Bators would bring Tregunna, along with Barracudas drummer Nicky Turner, in to put the classic Lords line-up together and...well, the rest is history. Goldstein, on the other hand, would go on to become Ringo in the Bootleg Beatles tribute band. Ah well, can't win 'em all.

Although the Wanderers are pretty much a footnote in the careers of Bators, Parsons and Tregunna (the latter two of whom are now back in Sham 69 where they started out), Only Lovers Left Alive is a great album that was arguably always doomed to failure because of its angrily confrontational status. I mean, just a cursory listen will tell you that this very much WASN'T the Police or the Boomtown Rats and thank fuck for that. If you're one of those people who looks at the political landscape today and your first instinct is to throw your hands up in sheer despair at the lack of anyone out there who seems to have any sort of inclination to make the sort of decisions that would genuinely change things for the better by giving some power back to the ordinary people and breaking the stranglehold that the rich and priveleged have and if that means treading on the toes of the leeches at the top then so be it then this might at least give you some consolation that you're not alone out there. Who knows, maybe one of these days we'll get a genuine transformative force in politics, both here in the UK and elsewhere, that's got the guts to rip up the old order that hasn't worked for years but until then...well it ain't much but we've always got this album. Give it a listen and get yerself educated.