It was interesting -- for a long, very long time, I thought it was Strange Free World which I liked more, and which I still do like very much indeed. But then I pulled this album out again and realized friend Brian was right -- this was the keeper of them all. Funny how sometimes a little distance can be of help in such situations, even over something so simple as a record.
Here, really, it was about fusion -- the lushness of Strange (Hugh Jones produced again, and given how he had produced stuff by Echo in early days, he would know about lush) with the more straightforward spike of Love is Hell. Add to that Patrick Fitzgerald finding poetry in the most mundane of situations, or alternately reminding us of the essential mundaneness of some of our most important concepts (thus "When in Heaven," imagining Marilyn Monroe awake in the afterlife, feeling a shiver standing before a deity, and contemplating on everyone drinking down below) and, but of course, Julian Swales playing guitar as if every time he picked it up he went, "Hm. Wonder why nobody tried quite playing it like this before?"
That Fitzgerald was openly gay was both perfectly irrelevant -- if you couldn't love the music here otherwise because of it, you were a dork and not worth the talking to -- and utterly, totally central to the proceedings. Somehow homophobia never felt so tawdry and so cruel, evil, vicious as when Fitzgerald ripped on "Breathing Fear," "You breathe in this fear, just once every year. We suffocate every day." A way with words, Mr. Fitzgerald, and sometimes in the simplest of ways, just talking about his "John of Arc" in "On Tooting Broadway Station," and bewailing his absence just so.
If it was just Fitzgerald to enjoy, I'd be happy. Dan Goodwin's a pretty good drummer too, sure. But Swales, my heavens, Swales. You just sit back and you listen to the long ones on the record -- "Gone World Gone" and "Mad as Snow," both talking about late night scenes with the one you love, with differing but equal emotional impact, and just listen to the way he underplays first, fills out with the quietest of touches, then sweetly builds, chimes, plays around, supports the lyric and captures your ear separately at once. Or consider the way "Blue Pedal" has these odd buried riffs and shades, this thundercloud of tension creeping up on you, and how when it lets go it's not silver rain but silver rain buffeting at you in several directions, beautiful and terrible at once. Or I could just talk about the way "Smiling" is a neat little attempt at something more straightforward and still has him creating the right sort of music for the lyric at all points, right down to the middle part of the chorus when he suddenly lets go with this cascading rush.
They broke up in the mid-decade. I saw their LA date for their last American tour -- it's where I got my case of slight tinnitus. I almost don't regret it, really.