The Loft - Ghosts Trains & Country Lanes; Studio, Stage & Sessions 1984 - 2015

 

I wish I'd seen The Loft play. I did see The Weather Prophets, the band that Pete Astor formed after they split in fairly ignominious and low key notoriety in 1985. The Weather Prophets were good, but I'd say The Loft were considerably better. Their's is one of the big What if..? stories of Eighties British guitar Rock. Not a much thumbed book I imagine, but still one that matters to some people. Myself included.

The Loft were one of the great early hopes of Creation Records. Alan McGee pinned a lot of early hopes onto Astor as some kind of boy wonder prodigy songwriter in the Roddy Frame vein. Astor never really realised his early promise as he might have done and you need to look no further than The Loft's recordings to work out why. He should have stuck with them, patched up whatever the reasons were for their sudden and abrupt split, (enacted at Hammersmith Palais of all places, in an onstage support slot with The Colourfield), and perhaps he might have gone somewhere towards fulfilling it.

We'll never know. All of that stuff is thirty five years or so down the line now and what we've got essentially is this. Ghosts Trains & Country Lanes, a comprehensive complilation of their short career which at once pinpoints how much better they were than The Weather Prophets and what they might have achieved had they hung around for a bit longer.

The Loft never got round to releasing an album during their short time together. More's the pity, listening to this. It would have been very good, judging by the songs on display here. They have something that The Weather Prophets never had I'd say. A brittleness. A tension. A genuine reach and scope. While predicated by the same basic aproach. Guitar, bass, drums, the players here add something specific I'd say. They are a genuine band rather than Pete Astor and his supporting players. The songs sound more alive than almost everything The Weather Prophets ever recorded.

Plenty of good songs here that with proper production could have been knocked into a fine debut album in 1985 on Creation had stayed the course. Winter, Your Door Shines Like Gold, Model Village, Rickety Frame, Mad Old Woman Man Old Man are all sturdy, well constructed songs that would have stayed the course better than many of what ended up on Mayflower, the Weather Prophets' debut which sounds wet and limp by comparison.

Ghosts Trains & Country Lanes also contains two of the three songs that Astor is best known for (Almost Prayed, The Weather Prophets debut ingle and best song, being the third). The two Loft sngles. Why Does The Rain, which has Astor pondering on both the rain and the morning train and why people bother to catch it. Also Up The Hill and Down the Slope which seemes to concern itself with ambition for an alternative path, a musical career ambition mainly. Both songs are underpinned by a musical framework that seems to draw mostly on three primary influences; The Byrds, Television and Orange Juice. In addition, poetry and books. Astor is certainly a bookish type and here and on the other songs he's more lyrically engaged than he often seemed to be during his period at the helm with The Weather Prophets. The friction, which the other three players, Bill Prince, Andy Strickland and Dave Morgan keep the songs taught and alive. It's a shame these clutch of poised. literate and tense songs were never released within a conventional album context.

 Much else on this, a double, which collects pretty much everything the band ever recorded, session and poorly recorded live tracks, are merely curios for completists. But the rest stands as testament to the band The Loft might have been had they kept their tempers which got fraught in their early youth, at bay and regrouped.