Pulsing Through My Brain

There he goes. Only the other day Lisa wrote a post singing the praises of the musical era best known for its T shirts - 1989-1991 - and, surprised by their omission from the tracklistings, I posted a comment about the group whose T Shirt I was wearing in the summer 1990.

Well on cue, in a seven days later kind of way, today's Film and Music Weekly section of the Guardian carries a snapshot of the La's from 1987. Granted the photo accompanying the piece doesn't date from Lisa's era but, as the article explains, Lee Mavers had issues with deadlines even back then, and the album and the acclaim didn't arrive on the scene until 1990. I just know that I played the album over and over again, to the point where the cassette committed hari-kari on me within months of its release, resulting in me having to replace it with a CD version of the album.

As the opening line from article states: "Rarely has such fresh-faced vitality given way to such disenchantment", and sadly it all ended in tears: Mavers, in his search for musical perfection*, never could properly follow up an album that he always dismissed anyway as a Steve Lillywhite (the producer) hack job; I played the album far too often, to the point where I wanted the track 'Timeless Melody' to be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act; and the other bloke in the photo, John Power, went on to form Cast, arguably** the worst guitar band of the 1990s, and who then proceeded to inflict FOUR albums of shite music on a public labouring under the misapprehension that 'cos he was in a brilliant band for a couple of years, the musical gold would somehow rub off on his own compositions. He was the bass player for fucks sake. It doesn't work like that, 'la.

Now, when is the world going to get round to rediscovering that other misunderstood sixties fixated scouse musical genius from the same period, Edgar Summertyme?

*A quote from Mavers from the article, from an earlier interview, seeks to explain his seeming creative paralysis: "The closer you get to perfection the closer you get to imperfection. Simple as." I'm the same with this blog.

**I say "arguably", 'cos somedays I reserve that special contempt for John Squire's band, the Seahorses.