by Simon Veaney
It was 1994, and I was a lost teenage soul wandering the streets of Guildford.
I had traded in my Beano subscription for a subscription to Q Magazine and was in the process of becoming someone new. I was searching for something. Somewhere to belong. Something to believe in. A cover mounted CD in my new Q magazine contained a startling song called Time for the Rest of Your Life by a band named Strangelove. It was my map.
In the inlay booklet lay a photo of the singer Patrick Duff quoted as saying “this song sounds like the inside of my head.” The singer looked like me. Rather, the singer looked like me refracted in the beautiful light of rock and roll. He had my pale skin, my skinny frame, my messy hair, a boylike expression of angst and bafflement. But. He carried all these features like a Dionysian poet, not like a awkward schoolboy. In that one tiny photo, his bony, shaking hand clutching at the tumbling wreckage of his 90s haircut, he was Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and he was the key to Scott Walker’s monastery. He was Bowie’s comedian, Corinthian and caricature. His rich, dark baritone rolling like Syd Barrett’s lost marbles, declaiming in no uncertain terms that ‘no one will love you in a thousand years.’ Surrounded by spiralling, jagged guitars plunging down into a shapeless abyss in his mind. “And it feels like I’m falling, but I can’t let go.” I was a pale fish on his hook.
He was a vision of my inner self in excelsis, then through his voice he was my panic.
Little did I know, as I tentatively picked up the headphones at the town’s HMV’s listening station – money was hard to come by, and one hit wonders were a constant, shysterish menace – that this shriek from the soul, this siren call to the dark side, had been recently recorded in a studio less than a mile away. Though the band were from Bristol, this was suburban, Guildford drama.
Any trepidation I had around the album was banished by the first glimpse at the cover. A bruised, charred 90s doll, tangled in black hair sat still and lifeless in a landscape of ashes and petals. On the back cover blood red roses gathered in anguish. There was no picture of the band. Only titles. ‘I Will Burn.’ ‘Is There a Place for Me?’ ‘Low Life’. Each song was a passport into a willo o’ the wisp world. A nocturnal land of shifting focus, hazy colours and embers burning through cracks in the surface. The music lived up to the promise. Guitars chimed, washed, shimmered and shattered. Farfisa organs drifted by like rising mist in morning orchards. Vocals rattled, crooned, pleaded and promised and during the terrifying ‘Hope, (Show me Light)’ chanted like Gregorian monks.
And the lyrics.
Find me an album that starts with more urgent terror than: “I find it difficult to speak, when I’m shaking this much.”
Patrick Duff’s words were a world spilling out, all the drugs, the sleep deprived visions, the hunger, the burning. Allegedly never written down and composed spontaneously, the prose was as purple as a bruise, as purple as the drink he puts down to weep as things shatter all around him in ‘Quiet Day’. Messages of hope “You can do anything!” Messages of despair “No you can’t, no you can’t, no you can’t!” and messages of love from a “minstrel wandering through your garden.” The world already had Suede. The world already had Radiohead. But in this cold, crisp afternoon in Guildford, solid black headphones creating a warm cocoon, blocking out the crowded, europop filled record shop, I had Strangelove. And they were everything.
As a postscript, after witnessing the band tear themselves apart during a stage invasion at the now departed Astoria in London (their final gig), I found myself at university in Birmingham, unmoored and alone. Strangelove had ended at the same time as my school years, and I was adrift. However I was to hear that siren call me one last time. From an imposing, Bryonic student, plucking the intricate, swirling chords of ‘I Will Burn’ in his overcoat, at our halls of residence. The song that introduced me, for the first time, to the voice of Charles Castell. Strangelove’s parting gift to me.
by Simon Veaney
@SighVeaney
http://aportatdusk.tumblr.com
VIDEO LINKS:
Time for the Rest of Your Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQh25SbNnAg
The Return of the Real Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3gZNmoirvY