The The - This is The Day

    I was reminded of this when it appeared on an episode of Fresh Meat recently. As much as the first Smiths album, Prefab Sprout's Swoon and Postcard-era Orange Juice, Soul Mining by The The was part of my teenage vinyl-pantheon, laconic anthems for bedroomed youth that seemed to vindicate and feed my sociophobic introspection.
     And as with Morrissey, McAloon and Collins, it was the lyrics that seized my interest as much as the music. Where Matt Johnson diverged from the wittier, more tongue-in-cheek tristesses of the others - and in this allying him to another of my favourite lyricists, Ian Curtis of Joy Division - was in an approach seemingly grounded in the gloomy, no doubt self-obsessive existentialism I had begun to explore in my early reading. I remember the thrill of connectivity I felt when I came across a line from another single from Soul Mining, 'Perfect Day', in Sartre's Nausea: "What is there to fear from such a regular world?"  Johnson's lines had the feel of diary-jottings from a soul in crisis: what a brilliant opening couplet "You didn't wake up this morning cos you didn't go to bed/You were watching the whites of your eyes turn red" is. The incongruity of pairing such angst with catchy, jaunty melodies played on instruments like accordion, harmonica and acoustic guitar was no doubt the secret of Soul Mining's unique - and continuing - appeal.
    (Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, whose appeal didn't last beyond those teenage, bedroomed years.)

I Too Was a Shoe-Gazer

 

 Bemused this week to discover that this year's winner of the Turner Prize, the video-artist Elizabeth Price, was a founding member of the 80s indie band Tallulah Gosh. Like Alex Petridis of The Guardian, who wrote an appreciation on Tuesday, I must admit to having been quite a fan as a callow undergraduate, drawn to the band's tweely ramshackle guitar-jangle and alluringly retro-styled female members, although by the time I saw them live in '87 I think Price had already left the band and Eithne Farry had taken over as second vocalist (Amelia Fletcher, now of Tender Trap, was the other).
    In fact on that dimly-recalled occasion, attended with my best friend Rob at some forgotten London dive, our drunken enthusiasm saw us accost the band after their performance and fervently entreat them to give our own fey guitar-duo (entitled The Chattertons after the legendary suicided teenager-poet) a support slot at their next gig...
    Needless to say we never heard back from them - nor indeed did The Chattertons ever get to the stage of playing a gig - but that's (as they say) another story...
    What's also interesting about Petridis' article is how he reveals that most of the other Gosh members have gone on to dayjob careers as successful as Elizabeth Price's - Fletcher, for example, is Chief Economist at the Office of Fair Trading.
    From the perspective of those shoe-gazing, C86 days, when shambolic unworldliness and child-like naivete were often counted as virtues, who'd have thought it?