Album Review # 31 House of Love - House of Love

 

An anecdote. A small club in Hampton on Wick some time in 1987. I'm there with my sister. We live across Bushy Park in Teddington and we've come here to see Primal Scream. Not many people have joined us. Enough to give the feel of a small crowd but the sense of anticipation is hardly feverish.

 

Those here sport the indie look of the time. Frizzy hair, black, hooped, polka-dotted and paisley shirts, skirts and pointy boots. It later becomes a cliché, makes it across the Atlantic and colonises a fair portion of the indie/ college scene there, catered for by countless shops and stalls. At this point it still seems quite authentic, chosen by those who wear it. Hardly Punk, but definitely a scene, and one of the few I flirted with during my lifetime. I still very much love a lot of the records associated with those times. You can read all about it in the recently published book A Scene in Between.

 

 

Amongst the scrum of people around the low stage for the support band are the posse of Creation Records main-players themselves. Label owner Alan Magee, Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie, other members of the band, and their entourage. The Primals are here to play in support of their debut album Sonic Flower Groove which doesn't walk the walk and is not selling. The support are a somewhat less hip outfit than they themselves, clean cut, their haircuts and clothing neat, their playing likewise. Primal Scream meanwhile have swallowed the whole Rock and Roll lexicon and are living the dream inside their heads: Love, The Doors, The Byrds, The Stooges, MC5. However, at this point it is very much just within their own heads. This bunch don't pass muster in their eyes,

 

 

They come to the end of their frankly non-descript set and announce that they'll do one more. The lead singer says, 'This is a song by The Byrds, called 'Feel a Whole Lot Better'. This causes an outbreak of superior, snobby mirth from the Creation contingent behind us. It is clear the support are not cool. The fact that they announce it this way casts them into the abyss. That they choose this well-known track from The Byrds early period rather than some obscurer, more psychedelisied selection from a year or two later probably seals their fate. The Creation inner-circle in these early days were impossibly hipper than thou and unnervingly assured in their own sense of destiny. Yet they still sold no records.

 

 

The House of Love arrived on the label at round about this time and probably occupied a similar space in the minds of the Creation elite as the support band we saw. They lacked the required inner-city urban cool. They lacked the record collections Their reference list was a little too obvious, The Doors, most obviously but also Leonard Cohen who has fingerprints all over half of Guy Chadwick's lyrics without the sense that Chadwick has plumbed the emotional and literary depths that brought forward Cohen's masterpieces. But what Chadwick and The House of Love indisputably had, which no-one else on the label at this point of time had, was the songs. This album their debut, is brimming with them and they still stand up all these years later.

 

 

From the bruising, brilliant guitar of Christine. Chadwick throws lines around like 'chaos and the big sea' and 'the whole world drags us down' and they don't really stick but the band are clearly surfing their wave. That pretty much holds for the length of the record. Five songs each side. Lean, spare and effective. It's all pretty much a suburban view of existential existence with the templates clearly being the debut albums by The Doors and The Velvet Underground plus the obvious writers. They take their name from an Anais Nin novel or a Doors song also named after it  Take your pick. But it's a very British take on all this decadence.

 

The House of Love's secret weapon is Terry Bickers who stands brooding behind Chadwick on the record's excellent sleeve, the bassist and drummer are relegated to the back cover. Bickers is an enormously versatile dark presence (he had something of Keith Richard's swagger, high-praise indeed), probably the best British guitarist at this point in time after Johnny Marr and his playing makes the record a joy to listen to. Hope, Road and Sulphur follow Christine. Faultless pop songs all. One word titles. Man to Child ends the side, Chadwick rifling through his Cohen songbook. Jesus, Mother, Father, God and Love all get a mention. Frankly too Sixth Form to pass muster but the band have build up good credit by this stage and on the second side they ride their wave again.

 

 

First song, Salome is a great Rock and Roll heroine and song title and 'I love the way she cries...' a class opening line. Chadwick is at his best when he keeps it simple and doesn't nourish his inner poet too much. He keeps it very lean here. The song is come and gone within two minutes and is all the better for it. Blistering.

 

'I love the way she cries
Skin is red and muscles stretch
And loose in love, oh happy death
I love the way she cries

I'm walking on the street
In a crowd but not alone
Cool and sharp, I've really grown
I'm walking on the street
Like someone

Peel away your dream
Take a finger, use a tongue
You're not alone, you're not alone
Just blow away those darker dreams

I'm walking on the sea
Salome is dead, the king is free
Oh not a man without greed
I'm sailing on the sea, back to me'

 

 

And so to Love in a Car where the album probably reaches its high watermark . This is assured, clinical song writing and playing of the first rank. The band know exactly what they're doing and come within touching distance of their heroes' work. If House of Love were to get castigated as thin, generic, white indie, (and they're undoubtedly very white, there's not an ounce of funk or black soul on here), I'd put Love in a Car, as first case for the defence. One of their very best songs and as good as anyone in this particular field was producing at this point in time.

 

From this point on the band just need to maintain a certain standard and the record's status is assured. They do so pretty effortlessly. Happy and Fisherman's Tale keep the pot boiling without bringing anything particularly new to the feast. The ingredients are well-established by now. Touch Me polishes things off. It's a well judged, enclosed, cleanly produced,  'Outsiders' Independent Rock album.

 

 

The record was sufficiently good, (though it didn't sell enormously), to start an industry fire around the band. When they followed it up with the one off single Destroy the Heart, (their genius moment), a few months later, it was clear they were on the cusp of breaking big, but more importantly of realising Chadwick's dream of teenage, bookshelf existentialism taking shape in a fiery, melodic, vaguely dangerous English Rock and Roll band.

 

It never happened. They were swallowed up by the machine. They left Creation for Fontana and ate up a huge budget for their second album. Gobbled up on drugs for the most part. They didn't sell enough or make good enough records to justify the excess. For the full, sordid, slightly Spinal Tap-ish story read My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize. Most crucially, Bickers and Chadwick fell out and the former left the band. They were not The House of Love without him. He had provided the spark and heart that made them a genuine prospect. Without him, Chadwick and his poetry were exposed. They were yesterday's papers.

 

This is their best record. I've been spinning it for the last couple of hours while writing this and it still stands up. It evokes the feel of being 17 and having a raft full of conflicting emotions, a shelf of Penguin paperbacks, a stack of records, certain clothes, and looking for a band and a record to soundtrack those intense, yearning, rebellious, angry, in retrospect slightly foolish, but nevertheless real teenage emotions. Those are very pure feelings, which those of us who have experienced them never quite lose regardless of what life does to us with the passing years. The first House of Love record soundtracks all that as well as any other record. Remember them this way.

 

'Steal a car, the highway calls
Stick some pins in your toes
Suck your cheeks
Dance, boy, down the road '