A Marriage of Convenience
The June Brides may have caused few ripples in the 1980s indie scene but they meant the world to a teenage Dave Eggers. So what heinous conspiracy forced them off the musical map?
'My theory is that we're hopelessly conflicted and confused about what we want from the musicians we love' ... the June Brides in 1985
Because life is, or seems at times, ridiculously long, it allows for many improbable things to happen. One such thing happened to me this past autumn, when I met and drank with the man who wrote the songs that filled my adolescent mind. As a teenager, I used to ride my bike 20 miles to buy this man's records, and now he works as a civil servant in London, and this past summer, we sat across from each other, at an outdoor picnic table in the city, drinking dark beer and talking about the songs he did write, and those he never did. He and his wife even invited me to visit their suburban home, to stay overnight if I needed to. Does all of this sound as strange as it does to me? He was also wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Strange enough? Let me back up.
I can't remember how I heard of the June Brides. I was 14, and at the time paid very close attention to the music press, especially anything coming out of the UK - I was, in the mid-1980s, easily the most devout Anglophile in the Waspy suburbs of Chicago. Somewhere I had read a description of the music the June Brides made, and I knew that I needed this music. But no record store near me carried the June Brides or had ever heard of them, so I got on my bike.
When my friends and I wanted something like the June Brides, or, say, the Icicle Works' Love Is a Wonderful Colour picture disc, we had to ride our bicycles 22 miles, to Evanston, the closest college town, where stood Vintage Vinyl, then and now one of the great record stores of the world. The place wasn't big, but they had a great import section, and they kept their records in thick plastic sleeves, which appealed to us, because we were geek-serious about all this. So serious that we brought backpacks lined in sturdy cardboard, so we could ride the purchases safely back home, without dents or bendings to the records' corners. So serious that we kept our records wrapped doubly in plastic sleeves, and we cleaned the grooves, with the softest chamois, after each play.
Vintage Vinyl, then, is where I bought my first June Brides record, There Are Eight Million Stories. My friends and I all thought the June Brides would take over the world. We rode back to Vintage Vinyl three more times to collect their next three EPs - In the Rain, Sunday to Saturday and This Town, and unlike the other bands we knelt before, this band didn't ever disappoint us. They just made gorgeous and very personal, very literate and messy rock music, they left the rough edges rough, and the unassuming nature of the recordings made the songs so human and fragile they sounded as if they had been recorded, drunkenly, in a living room lined with books. And the horns! The viola! No one has ever used either any better, and no band meant more to me for a long while, and so forever I waited for a full-length album, and a tour, but none were forthcoming and, pretty soon, that was that.
Still, honest to God, for 15 years, every single time I went to a record store, I looked in the Js, flipping through for a new album or a compilation or some never-released lost tracks, anything. It was silly and masochistic. None of the above existed until recently, when I learned there had just been released a definitive all-inclusive CD called Every Conversation: The Story of the June Brides and Phil Wilson, and would soon be a compendium of cover versions of June Brides songs. If you ever had interest in the band, and I recommend them to anyone with ears, now is the time to step up.
This past summer, through an uninteresting chain of events, I found myself in contact with Phil Wilson, the singer-songwriter behind the June Brides, and we made plans to meet the next time I was in London. And then, impossibly, that day actually came. He was there, and he was dressed in a dark, immaculate suit, and he was accompanied by his wife, Pam, also a civil servant.
I had come with a head full of indignation about how we treat our rock'n'roll songwriters, and I advanced my theory to Phil and Pam that sunny summer day. The theory posits that we're hopelessly conflicted and confused about what we want from the musicians we love. We embrace their first albums and we say: Finally! Finally someone has said it all! And then the second album comes out and we say: Not as good as the first! And I hated the duet with that one other person! By the third album, we're highly sceptical - I do not have time for this! I have discovered a new band! And this band has described, with a cartographer's accuracy, the topography of my soul! We do not, on the whole, have a good deal of patience for songwriters who continue to write songs, and we have even less patience, oddly enough, for those who continue to do so with some success.
There are many opinions about how old rock'n'roll practitioners should be. Around the time I met Phil Wilson, there was a lot of hand-wringing in the British press about Live8, and much name-calling of Bob Geldof and Bono; I'm sure I saw the word "geezer" used a few thousand times. And of course every time the Rolling Stones decide to do anything, there are the always-indignant stories about whether or not we should allow them to do this. The columnists muse: Can we stop them? How? Laws to be passed? Mead to be poisoned?
But my concern on that day with Phil was that a more modestly successful artist like himself should be encouraged and enabled to keep writing. Phil's last recording was in 1987, after all, and I imagined that he had hundreds of songs, all of them perfect, all unrecorded. What if, I wondered, the Phil Wilsons, the Lloyd Coles, Dave Wakelings, Jazz Butchers of the world could join together and, with some kind of record label and touring apparatus, solidify a common audience and inoculate themselves against the fickleness of the record companies?
I got a head of steam going about this, and Phil watched me with amusement. When I'd finished demonstrating my utter lack of understanding of the music business and of him, he smiled.
He had, he said, long ago written and recorded all the songs he planned to. I was dumbfounded. Really? Yes, he said. After the last record, he simply felt he was finished. Were there occasional feelings that he had a few songs left in him? Sure, he said, and named a few very personal and harrowing memories that he thought might make interesting fodder for a song or two. But those few unwritten songs didn't seem to be eating him up. Did I want another beer? he asked. He was buying.
There is a very misunderstood and, anyway, completely untrue line from The Great Gatsby that says there are no second acts in American life. No less accurate thing has ever been uttered, of course, for America has always been a place where personal resurrection is not just possible, but ubiquitous, almost obligatory. And now that England and America have all but fused themselves as one, culturally and militarily, it makes sense that part of your inheritance, along with ill-planned wars and KFC, will be our knack for reinvention.
The second life of Phil Wilson is as a member of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs department, working on tax policy. He is busy and is content, but is always happy to hear about those who bought the records way back when, and about the many musicians - Belle and Sebastian and Manic Street Preachers among them - who have been influenced by his songs. I told him my bicycle story, and he liked that, too. After two beers, it was time to go. He and Pam were catching a train home. "Lovely place," he said. "We have a garden."
· Every Conversation: The Story of the June Brides is out now. Dave Eggers is an author and the editor of McSweeney's.
I can't remember how I heard of the June Brides. I was 14, and at the time paid very close attention to the music press, especially anything coming out of the UK - I was, in the mid-1980s, easily the most devout Anglophile in the Waspy suburbs of Chicago. Somewhere I had read a description of the music the June Brides made, and I knew that I needed this music. But no record store near me carried the June Brides or had ever heard of them, so I got on my bike.
When my friends and I wanted something like the June Brides, or, say, the Icicle Works' Love Is a Wonderful Colour picture disc, we had to ride our bicycles 22 miles, to Evanston, the closest college town, where stood Vintage Vinyl, then and now one of the great record stores of the world. The place wasn't big, but they had a great import section, and they kept their records in thick plastic sleeves, which appealed to us, because we were geek-serious about all this. So serious that we brought backpacks lined in sturdy cardboard, so we could ride the purchases safely back home, without dents or bendings to the records' corners. So serious that we kept our records wrapped doubly in plastic sleeves, and we cleaned the grooves, with the softest chamois, after each play.
Vintage Vinyl, then, is where I bought my first June Brides record, There Are Eight Million Stories. My friends and I all thought the June Brides would take over the world. We rode back to Vintage Vinyl three more times to collect their next three EPs - In the Rain, Sunday to Saturday and This Town, and unlike the other bands we knelt before, this band didn't ever disappoint us. They just made gorgeous and very personal, very literate and messy rock music, they left the rough edges rough, and the unassuming nature of the recordings made the songs so human and fragile they sounded as if they had been recorded, drunkenly, in a living room lined with books. And the horns! The viola! No one has ever used either any better, and no band meant more to me for a long while, and so forever I waited for a full-length album, and a tour, but none were forthcoming and, pretty soon, that was that.
Still, honest to God, for 15 years, every single time I went to a record store, I looked in the Js, flipping through for a new album or a compilation or some never-released lost tracks, anything. It was silly and masochistic. None of the above existed until recently, when I learned there had just been released a definitive all-inclusive CD called Every Conversation: The Story of the June Brides and Phil Wilson, and would soon be a compendium of cover versions of June Brides songs. If you ever had interest in the band, and I recommend them to anyone with ears, now is the time to step up.
This past summer, through an uninteresting chain of events, I found myself in contact with Phil Wilson, the singer-songwriter behind the June Brides, and we made plans to meet the next time I was in London. And then, impossibly, that day actually came. He was there, and he was dressed in a dark, immaculate suit, and he was accompanied by his wife, Pam, also a civil servant.
I had come with a head full of indignation about how we treat our rock'n'roll songwriters, and I advanced my theory to Phil and Pam that sunny summer day. The theory posits that we're hopelessly conflicted and confused about what we want from the musicians we love. We embrace their first albums and we say: Finally! Finally someone has said it all! And then the second album comes out and we say: Not as good as the first! And I hated the duet with that one other person! By the third album, we're highly sceptical - I do not have time for this! I have discovered a new band! And this band has described, with a cartographer's accuracy, the topography of my soul! We do not, on the whole, have a good deal of patience for songwriters who continue to write songs, and we have even less patience, oddly enough, for those who continue to do so with some success.
There are many opinions about how old rock'n'roll practitioners should be. Around the time I met Phil Wilson, there was a lot of hand-wringing in the British press about Live8, and much name-calling of Bob Geldof and Bono; I'm sure I saw the word "geezer" used a few thousand times. And of course every time the Rolling Stones decide to do anything, there are the always-indignant stories about whether or not we should allow them to do this. The columnists muse: Can we stop them? How? Laws to be passed? Mead to be poisoned?
But my concern on that day with Phil was that a more modestly successful artist like himself should be encouraged and enabled to keep writing. Phil's last recording was in 1987, after all, and I imagined that he had hundreds of songs, all of them perfect, all unrecorded. What if, I wondered, the Phil Wilsons, the Lloyd Coles, Dave Wakelings, Jazz Butchers of the world could join together and, with some kind of record label and touring apparatus, solidify a common audience and inoculate themselves against the fickleness of the record companies?
I got a head of steam going about this, and Phil watched me with amusement. When I'd finished demonstrating my utter lack of understanding of the music business and of him, he smiled.
He had, he said, long ago written and recorded all the songs he planned to. I was dumbfounded. Really? Yes, he said. After the last record, he simply felt he was finished. Were there occasional feelings that he had a few songs left in him? Sure, he said, and named a few very personal and harrowing memories that he thought might make interesting fodder for a song or two. But those few unwritten songs didn't seem to be eating him up. Did I want another beer? he asked. He was buying.
There is a very misunderstood and, anyway, completely untrue line from The Great Gatsby that says there are no second acts in American life. No less accurate thing has ever been uttered, of course, for America has always been a place where personal resurrection is not just possible, but ubiquitous, almost obligatory. And now that England and America have all but fused themselves as one, culturally and militarily, it makes sense that part of your inheritance, along with ill-planned wars and KFC, will be our knack for reinvention.
The second life of Phil Wilson is as a member of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs department, working on tax policy. He is busy and is content, but is always happy to hear about those who bought the records way back when, and about the many musicians - Belle and Sebastian and Manic Street Preachers among them - who have been influenced by his songs. I told him my bicycle story, and he liked that, too. After two beers, it was time to go. He and Pam were catching a train home. "Lovely place," he said. "We have a garden."
· Every Conversation: The Story of the June Brides is out now. Dave Eggers is an author and the editor of McSweeney's.
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