— Dave Rimmer
He's back. BACK! With seventeen prior goes at reviewing the singles, Dave Rimmer is to date easily the most prolific Smash Hits critic. You'd be hard pressed to find many pop stars of the time who'd released that many singles over the previous five years (I suppose Prince must have done about that many but who else?). Still, he's slowed down of late with just three write ups over the past year but he was no longer a Hits staffer and was doing this for freelance purposes (and possibly because no one else in the office could be bothered) Having heard David Hepworth bemoan the task of handling the new singles, it's nice to see that there was at least one hack who kept coming back for more.
They're back. BACK! Uh, he's back. BACK! Like The Fall and Lambchop, The The are in that gray area between band and solo artist. In the time since he/they last nabbed a SOTF with "Uncertain Smile", the holdovers have amounted to Matt Johnson and appearances from the Zimbabwe-born Zeke Manyika, late of Orange Juice and another guest spot with The Style Council. Johnson has never pretended that his "group" was anything but a solo project in disguise (to the extent that he would eventually have his 1981 solo album Burning Blue Soul re-credited to The The in the early nineties) but it still makes choosing an appropriate pronoun difficult. But let's move on before I get all Jordan Peterson.
At some point in the nineties, Channel 4's Without Walls did a piece about the effect of Thatcherism on the arts. It wasn't so much on how her policies may or may not have decimated theatres, museums, art schools and symphony orchestras (though they surely did) but on how the arts reacted to this new brand of Conservatism. Theatre critic and future right wing blowhard Mark Steyn felt that the failure of artists to make the most creatively of their opposition to her rule exposed the emptiness of their leftist beliefs (or something to that effect; I'm going by memory from something I watched on YouTube a dozen years ago that has long since been deleted). This may well be true for some in the arts but it leaves out UK pop music which flourished in its rejection of everything Thatcher stood for.
"Ghost Town" was one of the first anti-Thatcher numbers and it was joined by many, many more — and, indeed, their top notch cover of Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" was adapted to fit around the current climate in Britain. Elvis Costello's "You'll Never Be a Man", "Shipbuilding" and "Tramp the Dirt Down", The Style Council's "The Lodgers" and "Welcome to Milton Keynes", Billy Bragg's "Between the Wars", The Housemartins' "Flag Day" and "Think for a Minute", The Beat's "Stand Down Margaret", Hue & Cry's "Labour of Love": all dealt with the ill-effects of Thatcherism. Even Morrissey, who probably agreed with the old hag on a few issues, included "Margaret on the Guillotine" on his debut album Bona Drag. The famed Red Wedge tours were formed with the goal of getting her voted out of office.
Like all of the above, Matt Johnson was sensitive to this and the result was The The's second album Infected (third if you count Burning Blue Soul). It covers a broad range of issues from the AIDS crisis to the situation in the Middle East but the whole thing comes down to Mrs. Thatcher and the wasteland of Britain — and "Heartland" is its centrepiece. The misery of being English during this era of football hooligans, troubles in Ulster, lousy summers, strikes and being told that "there's no such thing as society" is captured here.
It's nice of Rimmer to compare it favourably to "Ghost Town" (even though it would have been an easier task back then given that hardly anyone remembered it; today it is one of the UK's favourite chart toppers and is rightly regarded as a classic) but it just doesn't quite measure up. Johnson was fond of the song and said that he wanted to "write a classic song which is basically representative of its time, a record that in 1999 people will put on and it will remind them exactly of this period of time". He probably succeeded but that's precisely where it falters: it's too much of a period piece to be relevant at other times. "Ghost Town" no doubt reminds listeners who were there of riots and crumbling towns but it's as relevant to people who've lived through any form of strife and urban decay; even those of us privileged not to have experienced it first hand may still be able to identify with it via the TV news. But "Heartland" is too welded to its time to be truly captivating.
It is, however, an ambitious song and a grower. Perhaps a wee bit too ambitious as it doesn't quite merit its five minute running time, another element that makes it look weak held up next to "Ghost Town". There's something a bit off about the repeated "this is the fifty-first state of the U.S.A" line that closes the song. Johnson would later relocate to New York so it clearly hasn't aged well but there's more to it than that. It feels tacked on, as if he had a line at the back of his head that he'd been singing to himself that he just had to use and, bloody hell, it would be a great way to cap this opus. But with the song building from "piss stinking shopping centres" to "pensioners are raped" and on to the walls of power, it's an unsatisfying conclusion. "So, it's all the fault of the Yanks, huh?" or "Well, aren't we pathetic for becoming American": either way I don't think becoming the fifty-first state was the main reason Britain in the eighties sucked. (And anyway, surely Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would all have been granted statehood of their own; I wonder how the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man would've figured in this takeover...)
They're back. BACK! Uh, he's back. BACK! Like The Fall and Lambchop, The The are in that gray area between band and solo artist. In the time since he/they last nabbed a SOTF with "Uncertain Smile", the holdovers have amounted to Matt Johnson and appearances from the Zimbabwe-born Zeke Manyika, late of Orange Juice and another guest spot with The Style Council. Johnson has never pretended that his "group" was anything but a solo project in disguise (to the extent that he would eventually have his 1981 solo album Burning Blue Soul re-credited to The The in the early nineties) but it still makes choosing an appropriate pronoun difficult. But let's move on before I get all Jordan Peterson.
At some point in the nineties, Channel 4's Without Walls did a piece about the effect of Thatcherism on the arts. It wasn't so much on how her policies may or may not have decimated theatres, museums, art schools and symphony orchestras (though they surely did) but on how the arts reacted to this new brand of Conservatism. Theatre critic and future right wing blowhard Mark Steyn felt that the failure of artists to make the most creatively of their opposition to her rule exposed the emptiness of their leftist beliefs (or something to that effect; I'm going by memory from something I watched on YouTube a dozen years ago that has long since been deleted). This may well be true for some in the arts but it leaves out UK pop music which flourished in its rejection of everything Thatcher stood for.
"Ghost Town" was one of the first anti-Thatcher numbers and it was joined by many, many more — and, indeed, their top notch cover of Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" was adapted to fit around the current climate in Britain. Elvis Costello's "You'll Never Be a Man", "Shipbuilding" and "Tramp the Dirt Down", The Style Council's "The Lodgers" and "Welcome to Milton Keynes", Billy Bragg's "Between the Wars", The Housemartins' "Flag Day" and "Think for a Minute", The Beat's "Stand Down Margaret", Hue & Cry's "Labour of Love": all dealt with the ill-effects of Thatcherism. Even Morrissey, who probably agreed with the old hag on a few issues, included "Margaret on the Guillotine" on his debut album Bona Drag. The famed Red Wedge tours were formed with the goal of getting her voted out of office.
Like all of the above, Matt Johnson was sensitive to this and the result was The The's second album Infected (third if you count Burning Blue Soul). It covers a broad range of issues from the AIDS crisis to the situation in the Middle East but the whole thing comes down to Mrs. Thatcher and the wasteland of Britain — and "Heartland" is its centrepiece. The misery of being English during this era of football hooligans, troubles in Ulster, lousy summers, strikes and being told that "there's no such thing as society" is captured here.
It's nice of Rimmer to compare it favourably to "Ghost Town" (even though it would have been an easier task back then given that hardly anyone remembered it; today it is one of the UK's favourite chart toppers and is rightly regarded as a classic) but it just doesn't quite measure up. Johnson was fond of the song and said that he wanted to "write a classic song which is basically representative of its time, a record that in 1999 people will put on and it will remind them exactly of this period of time". He probably succeeded but that's precisely where it falters: it's too much of a period piece to be relevant at other times. "Ghost Town" no doubt reminds listeners who were there of riots and crumbling towns but it's as relevant to people who've lived through any form of strife and urban decay; even those of us privileged not to have experienced it first hand may still be able to identify with it via the TV news. But "Heartland" is too welded to its time to be truly captivating.
It is, however, an ambitious song and a grower. Perhaps a wee bit too ambitious as it doesn't quite merit its five minute running time, another element that makes it look weak held up next to "Ghost Town". There's something a bit off about the repeated "this is the fifty-first state of the U.S.A" line that closes the song. Johnson would later relocate to New York so it clearly hasn't aged well but there's more to it than that. It feels tacked on, as if he had a line at the back of his head that he'd been singing to himself that he just had to use and, bloody hell, it would be a great way to cap this opus. But with the song building from "piss stinking shopping centres" to "pensioners are raped" and on to the walls of power, it's an unsatisfying conclusion. "So, it's all the fault of the Yanks, huh?" or "Well, aren't we pathetic for becoming American": either way I don't think becoming the fifty-first state was the main reason Britain in the eighties sucked. (And anyway, surely Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would all have been granted statehood of their own; I wonder how the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man would've figured in this takeover...)
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
The Psychedelic Furs: "Pretty in Pink"
They still here. HERE! Of all the "major" post-punk acts, ver Furs were always the most forgettable and unremarkable. As Rimmer says, the original wasn't all that good and neither is this. Actually, this spruced up, from-the-film-of-the-same-name version is probably a bit of an improvement: Richard Butler's vocal is easier on the ear and the whole thing feels like more of an effort has been put in. Still, it's not particularly good, likely the weakest track on the still excellent soundtrack-of-the-same-name. (Take a bow, Belouis Some and Danny Hutton Hitters!) The lazy sods couldn't even be bothered to change 'Caroline' to 'Andie' for this remake — or 'Iona' if you reckon Annie Potts' character is the one who really "buttons your shirt".
They still here. HERE! Of all the "major" post-punk acts, ver Furs were always the most forgettable and unremarkable. As Rimmer says, the original wasn't all that good and neither is this. Actually, this spruced up, from-the-film-of-the-same-name version is probably a bit of an improvement: Richard Butler's vocal is easier on the ear and the whole thing feels like more of an effort has been put in. Still, it's not particularly good, likely the weakest track on the still excellent soundtrack-of-the-same-name. (Take a bow, Belouis Some and Danny Hutton Hitters!) The lazy sods couldn't even be bothered to change 'Caroline' to 'Andie' for this remake — or 'Iona' if you reckon Annie Potts' character is the one who really "buttons your shirt".
No comments:
Post a Comment