This song suddenly came into my head a few days back. I can't have thought about it, or heard it really since it first came out as a single in the mid-Eighties in the UK, got maybe a couple of radio plays and went precisely nowhere. I think I had the single once. I certainly don't anymore.
There were a lot of American guitar bands that sounded a little bit like this at the time. Guadalcanal Diary, Swimming Pool Qs, Miracle Legion, Rank & File, 10,000 Maniacs. All of them closer in spirit to R.E.M. than Husker Du or The Replacements. Nice kids. Nice songs. All going against the grain of Reaganite, mainstream American culture which was brash and vulgar. It wasn't even really necessary to explain why. Just watch the television and the films and the MTV videos from the time. The shallowness was utterly in your face.
Going against all that mattered at the time. As it did over here. Zeitgeist, (their name fittingly roughly translates as 'spirit of the age'), had to change to The Reivers to fend off a lawsuit. They had other songs of course but this is the only one I know. It's two minutes and twenty eight seconds long and cuts out suddenly like it's a studio outtake. Perfect. It carries off the neat trick of seeming to start right in the actual middle of the story as well as the song and never telling you what it was that actually happened in the freight train rain. It's about a feeling. Momentum. Like lost youth and not knowing thirty five years on what happened to the first person you really fell in love with but having the photos in your bottom drawer to prove that you did anyhow.
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