Things happened a lot faster in the 1980s. Sort of. In terms of musical scenes and tribes, the tide went in and out rapidly in some ways, and barely at all in others. Seismic shifts didn’t really happen, but the undercurrents of what was deemed fashionable by the weekly music press inevitably moved more rapidly in order to sell newspapers and create scenes that, despite what musicians of the day said, did have an effect on what Indie kids did.

The alternative nightclubs were populated by a ragtag, motley bunch of youths in, variously, cardigans, striped t shirts, black skinny jeans, black dresses – either very long or very short, kilts, chiffon extravaganzas, dungarees, winklepickers, Doc Martens, children’s shoes of various descriptions, including twee sandals and deck shoes, sometimes clogs if the New Model Army fans were in; the haircuts ranged from spiky remnants of punkiness, relatively straight new-wave side partings, crimped and lacquered bouffants, vertiginous flat tops, mop tops, bunches, plaits, and pigtails.

In a way, the sartorial choices of the kids at alternative nightclubs were basically, whatever the townies weren’t wearing. Which meant no chinos, no smart shirts, and definitely no ties.

That was how it was. Bearing in mind I didn’t set foot in one until 1988 because I was only 17 and looked about 10, it might have been different prior to that, but I wouldn’t know from personal experience. However, if you type “Spiders nightclub Hull” into Google, it looks pretty much how I described.

It was like that – a lot of different sub cultures in one place – until about winter 1989 when, as a result of the popularity of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, and numerous baggy also rans, the loose fitting Madchester – cheers – look became prevalent at the expense of a lot of the other looks, except Goths, who never changed, really. I’ve written about Spiders before, so I’m not going to go into that again.

The zeitgeist’s a funny thing, isn’t it? I tend to think of the zeitgeist as being the same sort of thing this: you know when you’re looking for something, but you don’t really know what it is, because you’ll know it when you see it, but not until then? That’s what the zeitgeist is.

In his peerless book, Adventures In The Screen Trade, William Goldman, writer of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, among other things, writes, “Nobody knows anything,” about Hollywood. It’s probably the most famous line in the whole book – to whatever extent it is famous. It’s a little bit oblique, but what he’s getting at is that Hollywood makes films, and those films need to make money, and in order to make money, they need to be popular. However, the problem with that is that everyone in Hollywood is always looking for the next big thing, so that they can make a film about it and it’ll make money. More or less.

The problem is, nobody knows what the public are going to, en mass, choose what they want.

So, what happens is that Hollywood make films about various things, some of which the public like – and go to see, which end up making a lot of money, and some of which don’t.

For an example, in 1976/7, what happened was that Star Wars, suddenly and unexpectedly blew up. It was a massive success, cinemas couldn’t cope with the demand, toys flying out of the shops, Star Wars mania, basically.

So, in 1976, Hollywood went from being clueless as to what the public wanted, to deciding that, because Star Wars blew the roof off, what the pubic wanted was adventures in space with laser beams and robots and space wizards and spaceships and all that.

The result of that realisation was that the various Hollywood studios put a load of films into production that were, basically, adventures in space with laser beams and robots and all those things in Star Wars.

Diversion – Operant Conditioning In Rats

A lot of psychological research used to be about how animals – including humans – learn. I don’t know if it still is because I’ve not kept up.

The two biggest theories are: Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning. The difference between those two things is, basically, in Classical Conditioning, the animal doesn’t have to actually do anything – they’re passive participants in a study, which is Pavlov’s Dog, basically.

For those who don’t know what that means, it’s more or less this: you get a dog and you show it a lightbulb turning on. The dog doesn’t think anything about that in particular and doesn’t really respond to it. Then, you show the dog something it wants, food, usually. The dog, naturally, thinks something about that, which is that it wants to eat it, and it starts drooling. What you then do, is keep showing the dog the light turning on, then show it the food. After a bit, the dog makes the connection that the light turning on means it’s going to get some food, so it starts drooling when the light goes on. If you’ve got a dog, you’ll have already worked that out because they can tell when they’re going to get fed or taken for a walk.

The important thing is that what they do doesn’t really make any difference. The drooling just tells us that they’re learning.

Operant Conditioning’s a bit more complicated. You get a rat, or something like that, and put it in a cage with a lever and a light. The light comes on, and the rat has to press the lever to get a food reward. Alright? The problem is that rats don’t come across levers very often in their natural lives, so you have to get into behaviour shaping, which means you have to encourage them to investigate the lever, and you do that by giving them food when they start to investigate it. Sort of encouragement, if you like.

So, the rat might sniff the lever, and the researcher releases a bit of food, which the rat eats, and hopefully, it’ll continue to investigate the lever. Then if the rat, touches the lever with its paw, you give it a bit of food, and so on, until it works out that it needs to press the lever for food, and then you can complicate it by making it press the lever when the light comes on, in order to get food.

It’s how video games work too.

Anyway, all well and good, except sometimes what happens is that the rat grooms itself and then presses the lever, and then gets its reward. The result of this conditioning is that the rat doesn’t necessarily work out exactly what it’s done to get the reward. Is it the grooming? Is it the lever pressing? Is it both of those things. What the rat does in that situation is to always groom itself before pressing the lever, then it gets its reward, and its none the wiser, but it doesn’t matter because it can do both of those things, no problem.

That’s what we call superstitious learning. You see it with sports players.

One day, a footballer has a particularly good game in which everything goes right. Naturally, the player doesn’t want that to be it – a one off – so they examine what they did, and they repeat it. The problem they have is exactly the problem that Mr Operantly Conditioned Rat has: what made the difference, and what didn’t? And that’s how we explain players who always put their left boot on first, or who always sits in the same place, or who has any sort of ritual before playing.

End of Diversion

So, from 1977, Hollywood made a point of making adventure films about space, but they didn’t know exactly what it was that made people really go for Star Wars. Was it the spaceships? Was it the Space Wizards? Was it the cute robots? Was it laser beams? Was it puppet aliens? Or what?

And the answer is, nobody knows what it was because nobody was sitting around at home, thinking, if only someone made a film with spaceships and swords made out of lasers and a gold robot who was a bit of a fussy arse, and a little blue one who beeped and chirruped and was a bit funny.

And the reason that was the case was because the public just liked Star Wars. And, once you’ve found something you like, you look for other things that are a bit like that, and hopefully you’ll like that too.

And that’s how Hollywood works. Except, it doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work because of the law of diminishing returns, which explains that, while you might have had your socks blown off by Star Wars, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’re going to feel the same way about Battlestar Galactica or Battle Beyond The Stars or Message From Space.

Message From Space. It’s bab.

But then what happens is that nobody goes to see Message From Space because it’s crap, even though it’s about the same sort of thing that Star Wars was, and even though it’s got spaceships and cute robots and all that, nobody likes it.

As a result of the increasingly crappy Star Wars inspired films, people get sick of fucking Star Wars films about space wizards and all that shit, and they stop going to see them, and Hollywood says, “What’s going on? We thought everyone lapped that shit up?”

And then some little film about French people who work in a cake shop and rescue kittens that nobody thought would get anywhere because it didn’t have a load of aliens from Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop playing space jazz music takes off, and then Hollywood starts making loads of films about French people in cake shops with cats, and on it goes.

When William Goldman wrote “Nobody knows anything“, he was talking about Hollywood, but it’s not just about Hollywood, because it’s about everything. Basically, it’s what fashion is.

The public don’t know what they want, and the people who make films, clothes, records, books, television series, and everything else don’t either. While the public might not know much about films, clothes, records, books, television series, or anything else, they know what they like when they see it.

And that’s how it goes, basically.

In short, it’s the same thing for music. In the 1980s, Indie music was bumbling along, selling a couple of thousand records of most releases, and the major record labels didn’t really give a shit. 2000 records? Pffft. Then The Smiths happened, and all of a sudden, they were getting in the proper charts and the major labels wanted a piece of the action. They didn’t know anything, and then they saw The Smiths selling hundreds of thousands of records, and then they did know something; they knew that there was a market for awkward, bookish young men in cardigans complaining about feeling sad, accompanied by jingly jangly guitars. Which is why Lloyd Cole & The Commotions happened when they did.

It wasn’t even just The Smiths in the 80s though, because there was also Echo & The Bunnymen who also did pretty well, which meant that the major labels realised that something was happening in the mid 80s, and it wasn’t all about shoulder pads, synthesisers and leg warmers. A lot of it was a bit miserable, and a lot of it had something to do with jingling guitars and serious, sad looking, northern young men in cardigans with fringes.

Meaning, if you were in a band, you had a better chance of making it – getting signed – if you too were a group of miserable looking, serious northern young men with fringes who played jingling, jangling guitars.

Until, of course, the independent musical equivalent of Message From Space came along, got given millions of pounds by the record companies and sold bugger all, and then people get sick of it and decide that at least The Stone Roses said you were allowed to have a good time, some of the time..

Bearing in mind that 1988 was the point at which The Smiths and The Bunnymen stopped, the music industry was still under the impression that it knew something, and that something was the same thing that it knew in 1985 – jingly guitars, miserable young men, fringes, etc, etc.

Hence, The House of Love being lauded as the next big thing in 1988, in the same way that Message From Space was going to be the next big thing at the pictures in 1978, until The Stone Roses came along, and then miserable young northern men with jingly jangly guitars and cardigans were out, and happier young northern men on ecstasy with jingly jangly guitars and flared trousers were in. The House of Love didn’t go for that, but they did go for the big guitar band thing, and they weren’t that either, really.

It’s a shit business, isn’t it? But that’s the zeitgeist for you.

By the time I was allowed into Spiders, or Silhouette, or Welly, the biggest deal of the 80s, as far as Indie music went – The Smiths – had split up, but there were still plenty of kids who clearly didn’t see any reason why they ought to flatten their quiffs, drop their NHS glasses, or buy jeans or women’s blouses that actually fitted them because Morrissey was a very big deal for some years to come in that environment. Baggy didn’t quite scorch the earth in terms of The Smiths’ influence, but Britpop pretty much did because, by 1995, Pulp were The New Smiths, both in terms of their charity shop chic, deliberately chosen to emphasise how they weren’t mainstream, and in terms of their depictions of parochial, northern outsiderdom. Mind you, prior to that Suede were exactly the same thing, including with a focus on Glam Rock. A bigger focus on Glam Rock, realistically. But Southern.

But that’s to get ahead of myself because this little series is about Indie as I understood it in about 1988.

Having not realised that there was an alternative to the mainstream at all until I was about 13 or 14 when I saw The Smiths on Top of The Pops, I was into them, then The Bunnymen, then The Primitives and The House of Love.

As usual, I wasn’t exactly straight off the blocks in those days. I got the music press, but I didn’t understand a lot of the references or jokes, and that put me off reading them from cover to cover, although I did from time to time. If I’m being totally honest, I was pretty infantile when I was about 17. Realistically, I was fairly infantile until I was about 30, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue too vehemently that anything’s ever changed that radically in terms of my relative maturity.

Also, to be frank, I was still hanging onto The Smiths’ legacy too, even though I’ve never had a quiff, owned a cardigan or a pair of glasses, NHS or otherwise. I’ve got cheap reading glasses now, but they don’t count. In 1988, I was mainly digging The Smiths, The Bunnymen, The Housemartins, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, The Velvet Underground, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Love, Donovan, and Rubble and Pebbles compilations. At least, that was what I told anyone who asked. None of those things were ongoing in 1988 but, like I say, I’ve always been behind the times, really. On the quiet, I enjoyed some older Madonna and Duran Duran records, and the odd bit of whatever was in the charts at the time. I liked S’Express’s first few singles and had their album, which I enjoyed; some Terence Trent D’Arby stuff was pretty good, Joe Le Taxi by Vanessa Paradis, I’m Not Scared by Eighth Wonder – Patsy Kensit, basically, Alphabet Street by Prince, Somewhere In My Heart by Aztec Camera, I Don’t Want To Talk About It by Everything But The Girl, Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald, things like that. I even had a soft spot for We Call It Acieed by D-Mob, She Makes My Day by Robert Palmer and Loco In Acapulco by The Four Tops. I liked The Pet Shop Boys, but not much by them in 1988. Maybe Left To My Own Devices. None of those records would have been played at Spiders, and I wouldn’t have admitted to liking them in public because being an Indie kid was a bit like being a member of Communist Folk Clubs in the 1960s, meaning there were strict, unspoken rules about what you were and weren’t allowed to wear, listen to and, in all likelihood, think.

Plenty of kids were into Creation bands at Spiders, where they’d play Velocity Girl and Ivy Ivy Ivy. I was into Velocity Girl and I didn’t mind Ivy. I wasn’t prepared to countenance leather trousers though, and there were a few kids who wore those, which I was sniffy about. I was – and realistically still am – prepared to judge people based on their trousers.

Despite being an Indie Kid, I never listened to or liked John Peel. I gather he was Mister Indie, sort of, and now that we’ve decided we’re going to retrospectively apply 21st century ideals to the past, he’s come up short, but not to the extent that the Glastonbury stage named after him is going to be called something else just yet. It makes no difference to me anyway. I think it’s pretty short sighted, this retrospective sanctimony, myself, and I’ve been through that before too.

I can’t remember whether I heard Christine or Destroy The Heart first. Whichever one it was, it was downstairs at Spiders. Which would have been around about summer 1988, at which point the only really new records I was buying were by The Primitives, and I wanted to be current, so I got hold of Destroy The Heart, and I thought it was great. Exciting, you know?

Part of the reason I thought it was exciting was because I didn’t know anything about them and, a bit like when you see someone you fancy when you’re a kid, you construct a vague idea of what they’re like beyond just what’s on the surface so that when you finally get to know them, they disappoint you because you’re a juvenile moron who lives in a fantasy world. And when I say “you“, I mean “I“.

Destroy The Heart

It wasn’t their first single by any stretch. they’d already had three singles out by then: Christine, and Shine On which I also liked when I heard them, and Real Animal, which I didn’t.

The House of Love were on Creation, and that didn’t necessarily mean they were cool as far as I was concerned because, despite Creation having some cool bands on their roster, they also had plenty of crap. They put too much stuff out to be the sort of label to have a very high level of quality. Some kids bought everything on it, like some kids bought everything on Sarah Records – who were too pansyfied even for the likes of me, who was pretty fucking pansified. I quite liked a couple of Felt and Razorcuts records – neither of whom were on Sarah – which were similarly limp but acceptable nonetheless. They weren’t Sydney Youngblood, so that was something, at least.

Still, Destroy The Heart wasn’t very much like The Smiths at all. It was more modern sounding than theirs were, a bit more psychedelic too, which appealed to me as most of the old records I was into were from the psychedelic era too, although, naturally, The House of Love sounded enormously 80s as opposed to 60s. Which was great at the time, because I was a kid, and it felt like a bit of validation that the old records I was digging were considered cool by cool new, young bands who were making cool, new, young sounding records.

Or so I thought, because what I didn’t realise was that Guy Chadwick was neither cool, new, nor young. At the point prior to my finding anything out about THoL, I was ignorant of that though, and it therefore it didn’t bother me. In fairness to me, it didn’t bother me that much once I did know that, although, having seen and heard him on telly, I found him a bit creepy. A bit goblinesque. Cold in the eyes. It wouldn’t have made any difference what trousers Guy Chadwick had worn; that’s how creepy he looked. I mean leather trousers would have made it even worse, and I bet he had a pair, but they’d be a mere drop in the ocean.

In the sixties, psychedelia manifested itself through both lyrics – which might have been about space – like Jimi Hendrix records sometimes were, or just a slightly skewed view of something, like Penny Lane was, or with Alice In Wonderland sort of imagery, like White Rabbit, or Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, or just describing colours and shapes – like Green Circles by The Small Faces. And through the music and production too. What that meant was fuzzed, phased, flanged and Leslied guitars and organs, all with plenty of reverb and echo liberally applied.

Psychedelia fell from favour through the 1970s and early 80s, although inevitably, there was the odd exception. Hilly Fields (1892) by Nick Nicely from 1982, things like that. Psychedelic records were few and far between for a good fifteen years. In America there’d been the Paisley Underground scene with (The) Bangles, The Rain Parade, The Three O’ Clock and The Dream Syndicate, and in Britain, XTC had morphed from a quirky, twitchy, new wave band, into a quirky, psychedelic band, sometimes totally overtly. Their guise as The Dukes of Stratosphear, who aimed to sound as close as possible to the original 1960s psychedelic records. The Paisley Underground bands were more loosely influenced by the 60s bands, certainly in terms of their sounds, which were pretty much dead up to date for 1985, which I struggle with a bit.

Diversion – The La’s

I can’t make my mind up about The La’s. Half the time, I think Lee Mavers is a genius, the other half I just think he’s a skiffle twat who’s pulled the wool over the eyes of slightly gullible people who just desperately want someone a bit interesting and Syd Barrett-esque for their own era. Or maybe he believes it. Maybe he is it. I don’t know, I change my mind regularly.

However, the reason I’m bringing him up here – because he’s not psychedelic in terms of his music at least. In terms of personality, it sounds like it. Possibly. Sort of – is because one of the things he said about his failure to record a good enough version of The La’s album was that recording studios of the mid 80s just weren’t set up to record guitar bands because they were all about sterility and synthesisers. And that’s what I mean about the Paisley Underground bands – and to a slightly lesser extent The Dukes of Stratosphear – the music was fighting against the technology, and that doesn’t really work. Psychedelia worked in the mid-late 60s because it was the modern sound, and because the modern studios modern sounds just worked with psychedelia. The 80s version of the modern sound just didn’t. All that stuff about him having “sixties dust” that he sprinkled on the valves of the amplifiers wasn’t true, but it sounded good, and it shows what people wanted to see – the mad genius. Because people lap that shit up.

John Power and Lee Mavers. I love this picture. It’s the least professional band photo I can imagine because they look so sweet. Like their mams have told them to smile nicely for the camera, but they don’t really mind anyway.

It’s the same with reggae, as far as I’m concerned. The best sounding reggae and ska records are from the 60s to the mid 70s, they sound a bit wooly, slightly shonky, and all the better for it. Then they got a load of money that they invested into their studios and the new equipment just didn’t suit the music anymore. Clean and sterile again.

End of Diversion

The House of Love weren’t particularly retro-psychedelic like The Dukes or The Paisley Underground bands, which worked in their favour. I suppose you could argue that they were a bit because the guitars had a fair bit of processing going on, but it was 80s processing, going for something new and exciting, as opposed to raking up the past like Lee Mavers was, and coming up short because the sounds weren’t there anymore.

Lyrically, they didn’t really start off psychedelic, although later on, Chadwick incorporated some traditionally psychedelic imagery into his songs a little bit, but he never really went the whole hog.

And maybe that was because what The House of Love were all about, sort of, was The Velvet Underground. The Velvets aren’t traditionally considered to be psychedelic, and I dig it, but I’m also not really convinced. I’ve written at length about them, so won’t repeat myself except to say that, just because they were the opposite of peace and love and flowers and colours, does that mean they weren’t psychedelic? I suppose it depends on what constitutes psychedelia to you. As far as I’m concerned, The Church of Psychedelia is a broad one. A lot of the garage bands of the sixties, such as those on Nuggets and the Pebbles compilations were a bit punk and a bit psychedelic. Sometimes a bit of both. I mean, take Love. Love are pretty psychedelic, I don’t think there’s much argument about that: Forever Changes is possibly the ultimate psychedelic album. But does that mean that 7 & 7 is, is psychedelic or not? It’s not peace and love – love were almost never about peace and love. One of their contemporaries said that Love were misnamed and should have been called Hate instead. What about The Count Five’s Psychotic Reaction? Who’s going to argue that that’s not psychedelic? Yet there’s no love beads and meditative cosmic grooviness going on at any point there.

And if The Count Five and Love are psychedelic, is Here She Comes Now any less psychedelic than anything that either of those bands did?

I don’t know. I suppose labels are debatable, and some things cover more than one base at a time. People like nothing better than a black and white world, and maybe there’s a degree of oversimplification going on here.

As far as I’m concerned, The Velvet Underground might have set themselves against the cynical and cliquey Brotherhood of Eternal Love that was the psychedelic hippy world, and I don’t blame them. But there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s an element of psychedelia in The Velvet Underground’s albums.

And it’s a bit like that with all the bands who were influenced by The Velvets, and when I say that in an essay about The House of Love, I mean Echo and The Bunnymen and I mean The Jesus and Mary Chain. They might have been mainly on speed as opposed to acid, but that’s not to say there was never any acid, even if there wasn’t any acieed, so to speak.

I don’t know if anybody else suggests that either of them are especially psychedelic either, but I do. In the same way that The Velvets have a psychedelic streak. and that means The House of Love inevitably do too.

Either way, The House of Love made no attempt at replicating the sounds of the psychedelic 60s on their records, apart from a bit of tremolo on the guitars now and then, Fuzz here and there, and quite a lot of reverb, until John Squire used all the reverb that existed in the world at that time on the first Stone Roses album. There was a bit of flanging – although not like Squire used on Made of Stone – the aeroplane taking off sound, more like The Cure used, bordering on chorus – the sound of the 80s guitar, more or less.

Bearing that in mind, my suggesting that THoL were, basically Echo and The Bunnymen isn’t an original statement – at least I very much doubt it is. What I would be surprised at would be if anyone had suggested that THoL were the Indie Police. I don’t mean they were enforcing the rigid parameters of what indie kids were supposed to be listening to, I mean they were a bit like Sting’s new wave band.

Obviously, THoL weren’t anywhere near the players that The Police, who toned down their chops to fit in with the punk aesthetic, in the same way that The Stranglers did, but that’s indie, isn’t it? You’re not looking for musical virtuosos in the indie world. THoL weren’t bad – they were a lot better than most, especially Bickers, the lead guitar player but I’d be surprised to hear that any of them started off in Jazz-Funk outfits.

Mainly, it’s Bickers who sounds a bit like Andy Summers on The Police records. Tastefully plucked arpeggios, played fairly clean through an early Boss Chorus pedal.

I think you could forgive The House of Love for not being especially psychedelic though, because that’s what we do, isn’t it? We follow the zeitgeist until the wheels fall off when Message From Space goes down like the proverbial turd in the swimming pool. In 1985 or 6, when THoL started, you could understand why they thought that being Echo & The Bunnymen was a good idea, even if they accidentally became the Indie Police on a bummer with Gollum on lead vocals, probably in leather trousers. And they were equally further away from the psychedelic zeitgeist, because what was coming was The Stone Roses and a profound sense that it was high time to lighten up and have a good time, especially if there’d always been a dance element to their music. Fucking zeitgeist, eh? Pffft. The House of Love were psychedelic, they just weren’t psychedelic enough.

I mean, were The House of Love psychedelic? The best I can manage is that they sort of sounded psychedelic in a modern sort of way but, ultimately, not really. Were The Stone Roses psychedelic? Yes, basically. And that’s partly why The Roses made it, then blew it, whereas THoL didn’t really make it because they blew it at the planning stage. By late 1988, the indie world had dragged itself out of Morrissey’s forlorn and bitter ocean of tea and biscuits onto a shore made of marijuana, ecstasy and acid and it was ready for that. It wasn’t quite ready for cocaine yet because that was what the mainstream was in 1988, and it wouldn’t be until Britpop that Twat Powder would be fully embraced by kids who, had they been on the scene ten years earlier, would have turned their noses up at it, as opposed to shoving them right into a bag of it.

Anyway, Destroy The Heart, eh? If you’d been into The Bunnymen, it wasn’t a million miles away from that. It wasn’t really very much like The Smiths lyrically, but to the untrained eye, was Terry Bickers’ big red semi acoustic all that different from Johnny Marr’s big red acoustic? He had black hair, he was reasonably good looking and cool. He played jangly guitar lines. He played through a chorus pedal. What’s the difference? I don’t know, what’s the difference between Star Wars and Message From Space? Nothing much, eh?

To someone like me, who had some idea about playing the guitar, I could tell the difference, but it was going to be a big ask for people who didn’t care about the technicalities very much to spot the difference, but that allows clever twat indie kids like I was yet another opportunity to be sanctimonious. Perfect. Everybody’s happy. Sort of. you don’t want to be too happy when you’re an indie kid in 1988, do you?

Not that THoL were really Message From Space because they were pretty good. They weren’t The Bunnymen, and they sure as hell weren’t The Smiths, but then they also weren’t The Railway Children. Or Lloyd Cole and The Commotions.

Destroy The Heart‘s a great indie single, fading in from Chadwick’s and Bickers’ arpeggiated, Andy Summers inspired guitar line, played in unison – it’s dead simple – an open A chord, but you don’t pick the e note as you do it, the interesting bit is when you go to a d note, which makes it a suspended A chord. There’s fairly quiet xylophone in there doing the same thing for a bit of texture. The drumsticks click together, keeping time, before a third, distorted and vibratoed-with-a-Bigsby guitar punctuates the chord changes and the drums enter, sounding a lot better than most indie productions of the era. The bass isn’t doing anything exciting, but this is pre-baggy indie, and how many bands had an Andy Rourke? Well, The House of Love didn’t, but fair enough.

The lyrics are a bit garbled and impressionistic. It’s a reported conversation between the narrator and a girl, well, the narrator repeating things that the girl said about him, which is a a bit wank. A bit Donald Trump, you know? “People say I’m great. People say I’m an intellectual.” Crap like that. I mean, it’s not quite as bad as telling people what you think about yourself, but it’s not a million miles away from that either, is it? I appreciate that the 21st century seems to have a slightly different attitude towards self-identification than the late 20th century, which was, basically, you can think whatever you like about yourself, but self-praise is no praise at all. That’s what I was brought up with, and it’s hard to accept that, suddenly, I ought to accept whatever people tell me about themselves. Why would you? Who’s got perspective on themselves? Self-deprecation seems a bit of an alien concept too. I suppose its incompatible with self-affirmation, which I saw Black Francis do in a Pixies documentary and my respect for him plummeted.

Anyway, this girl apparently told Chadders – cheers – things like, he’s going to “suffer and sweat“, and want to “smash his head in“, and that he’s “no fun“, and “numb above the waist” – or possibly “dumb“, but she also told him, apparently, that he had “more to say than the usual boys“, which is nice, but it’d probably work better if he actually sang about something that the usual boys didn’t sing about. It’s fine and dandy, if you like that sort of thing. Like the song with the best title in world says: Love Hurts, and Chadders sounds like he feels that way too.

In between the singing, Bickers gets to show off his unhinged side ever so slightly, with a couple of bends and a spot of choppy wah-wah, while the drums pound out a fairly rapid tattoo, in contrast to their relatively restrained verse accompaniment.

As far as indie records from 1988 go, it’s pretty good. As far as The House of Love records go, it’s one of their best. Chadders’ singing’s pretty low – not a million miles away from The Jesus & Mary Chain’s or the Bunnymen’s vocals, but with an undertone of the officer class about them. Clear enunciation. Chin up. Jolly good. That sort of thing, which isn’t very common in both senses of the word, in indie records. Well, it wasn’t then. The poshos would try to hide it back then. Nowadays – 2020s – being a posho in the music world seems almost de rigueur.

It was a big indie hit, but it stalled at 76 in the proper charts. What that meant was that, basically, The House of Love weren’t The Smiths, who were big fish in the indie pond, but also did reasonable business in the grown up charts. Nothing in the Top Ten when they existed, but regularly getting into the top 20, even if only for a couple of weeks. Meaning, The Smiths, like The Cure and New Order, had a big fanbase who’d buy new singles on the day of release, get into the charts for a week or two, possibly with a noteworthy Top of The Pops appearance, and then they’d drop out again. Their albums tended to go top ten though.

The House of Love weren’t quite there yet, but it looked like it was on the cards. Probably.

Their first proper album, called, like almost all of their albums, “The House of Love” came out on Creation in early summer 1988 and went to the top of the indie charts but didn’t make a mark on the proper ones, which would have been a bit of a blow.

However, it’s a good album. In a lot of ways, it’s the best House of Love album. It’s resolutely indie, which suited them better than what followed. The songs are all good, it’s got a sound, it hangs together nicely as an album. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to see many of the songs as potential hit singles, unlike say, The Stone Roses on their debut, or like a good few songs on The Smiths’ albums but, as starts go, it was promising.

And then, naturally, it all went to shit in every way imaginable.

Perhaps the main way it went down the toilet was due to Chadders’ insistence on signing to Fontana, a major label. Well, a subsidiary of Phonogram, but it meant their records wouldn’t be eligible for the indie charts anymore. What that meant was that they were going to have to step up. Meaning, get a bigger audience.

However, it wasn’t solely down to Chadwick, although he has to take the lion’s share of responsibility, Alan McGee – manager of the band and owner of Creation Records – also had a vested interest in that particularly poor decision.

Dave Bates had been given the Fontana label to do with as he pleased, following Phonogram’s epiphany that he must have golden ears, following the worldwide success of Tears For Fears, who he signed to Phonogram, and nurtured through their difficult rise and recording difficulties.

Chadders wanted to sign with the label that gave the biggest advance, and that was Fontana. With hindsight, I dare say he regrets it. Alan McGee did nothing to dissuade him from this path, because it was also in his best interests to do so too.

There’s a fantastic book on Creation Records, called My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize by the much missed David Cavanagh. These days, if Creation are mentioned, it tends to be in terms of Oasis and Alan McGee, because that’s what it became famous for, even though Oasis were never signed to Creation. They were licensed to Creation after Alan McGee saw them live, but Oasis’ management – Ignition – didn’t want Creation to run the show, and they had them sign to Sony. Alan McGee doesn’t mention that very much. He did enormously well out licensing them, but he was seen as a liability in terms of running a business, albeit a liability with golden ears. Like Dave Bates, perhaps, although in totally different ways.

Anyway, the reason My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize is so good is because of the stories about Lawrence from Felt, the recording of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and, especially, the ones about Guy Chadwick and The House of Love.

I’m not going to recycle the stories here – you ought to read it yourself because it’s hilarious in a tragic sort of way – but basically, Guy Chadwick, when he loses the plot, it doesn’t just drop out of his pocket and go down the back of the settee, he wilfully smears it in his own shit and sends it to the far corners of the cosmos. Chadders went crackers, started believing his own hype, got into ecstasy – which had the unfortunate effect on him of making him take all his clothes off in public – and he turned into “a monster“. His words.

But Chadders wasn’t the only one who lost the plot because Bickers, if anything, lost it in the opposite way. Unimpressed by Chadwick’s decision to follow the money and sign to Fontana, he found himself suffering too, mentally and emotionally.

The recording of their first major label album, also called The House of Love, but known as “Fontana” because that’s what it said on the spine of the sleeve, or “The Butterfly album” because that’s what the picture on the cover was, went badly.

In itself, that’s not unusual for bands under the watchful eye of Dave Bates. Tears For Fears’ third album took four and a half years. On the other hand, he also signed The Lilac Time and James to Fontana, and neither of those seemed to have the problems that The House of Love had, even if The Lilac Time were about as successful, commercially.

Creation were perpetually on the brink of financial collapse until Oasis filled their coffers to breaking point, literally as well as metaphorically, and McGee’s first priority was keeping his label afloat.

Generally, what he’d do would be to sign bands to Creation and then sell them onto American labels, the money of which would go straight to Creation’s creditors.

An American manager, Tom Atencio, also had his eye on The House of Love, and contacted Alan McGee to suggest he could manage them, and get them a big American deal, while remaining on Creation in the UK, meaning they could stay on Creation and remain eligible for the UK indie charts.

However, what this would mean for McGee that he would forfeit his 20% of whatever advance The House of Love would get at a British major, so he froze Atencio out, not informing Chadwick of his offer. Which isn’t really what managers should do for their bands.

Yeah, Chadwick was looking out for number one, but so was McGee.

Holed up in the Waldorf Hotel in London, McGee held court in front of the major labels’ representatives, showing them around The House of Love’s deceptively spacious, well appointed, desirable property.

Bates didn’t get involved in this, but the price was going up. Starting at £80,000 for at least two albums, a few dropped out, but after a fortnight of being schmoozed, McGee was considering offers of £200,000 and over.

Bates made his move by cutting McGee out in the first place. Turning up at the studio while the band were recording Safe, their mooted next single, Pete Evans, the drummer recognised him and, on his departure, warned the rest of the band to “watch him, he’s trouble“.

He’d been successful with Def Leppard, Julian Cope, Wet Wet Wet and Curiosity Killed The Cat as well as the aforementioned Tears For Fears, he was also running a label with Dire Straits, Elton John and Status Quo on it. Bates was, in short, a big deal.

And Evans wasn’t the only one who was wary of him. In Cavanagh’s book, an unnamed source describes him, “going off on egotistical rants with no basis in reality. His staff were terrified of him…an obnoxious bully.“

Evans’ dislike of him came from personal experience. He’d been in a band called The Escape and had suffered the ignominy of having Bates listen to the recording of their first material and announce, “Get rid of the drummer, he’s useless.” Furthermore, Evans’ baldly stated, “He was amazing at knocking any confidence out of you…most musicians are a little bit damaged anyway, and he took advantage of that. He was just a horrible man.”

As far as being prescient goes, Evans’ analysis should probably have been listened to. Bickers was definitely “damaged”, and Chadwick wasn’t much better. Evans was ignored.

Tom Atencio, having had his phone calls ignored by McGee, turned up to a gig in Rotterdam to find he also wasn’t allowed backstage, where the naked Chadwick was destroying everything tangible backstage, screaming. Bickers, under the impression that Chadwick must be having a brain haemorrhage, joined in with the screaming.

In the meantime, McGee had discovered ecstasy and acid house a more than fitting replacement for speed and scuzzy guitars, even if he hadn’t quite found universal love quite as appealing as keeping Creation afloat with money he could make from selling The House of Love to the highest bidder.

Which, inevitably, would be Alan Bates, whose newest offer was £400,000. A ludicrous sum for a band at their level, one which would increase the pressure on them to fill stadiums and, basically, turn into U2, which was never going to happen.

Ludicrous as £400,000 in 1988 for The House of Love was, CBS stepped in with £600,000, although this would include recording and promotion costs, whereas Bates’ didn’t.

Money like that isn’t about breaking into the British Top three, it’s about breaking America. And The House of Love hadn’t even broken through in Britain yet and, realistically, never would. At the time of this bidding war, if they were playing to 500 people in a night, that was doing well.

Still, they took Fontana’s £400,000, and McGee took his 20%.

Bates was, to his credit, keen on music and he had eclectic taste. As the head of fontana, and the A&R man, he wanted it all – music that appealed to him personally, and music that would more than recoup his near half million pounds in 1988.

Bates’ thing was to let the artist get on with it, let them record it, mix it and, when they delivered it, that was when the problems began. “No, fuck off. Not good enough.”

Bickers, always a fairly fragile soul, was worried. He knew what the enormous signing on fee meant. It meant that The House of Love had better deliver, and deliver big.

At a party held in honour of THoL at Fontana, a drunk Chadwick cornered Bickers, pointed at Bates and said, “He wants a death. And I’m going to give it to him.” Which probably wasn’t exactly what Bickers needed to hear at that point in time.

The first fruits of The House of Love’s post Creation recording was Safe, which Bates had witnessed.

Bates rejected it. Not good enough. Which is a shame, because it’s a big step up. It sounds bigger. Lyrically, it’s sort of getting there – nice hook line in “Safe, when you have a girl“, but otherwise, he’s on about the importance of money – never a great look for a guitar band.

In short, it was a step up, but also a step sideways in some ways. Not going to set the world on fire. Not £400,000 worth of steps up.

Bates suggested THoL be produced by Merrick, as in “Marco, Merrick, Terry-Lee, Gary Tibbs and yours truly” from Adam and The Ants. Merrick, actually Chris Hughes, had been a big success as the producer of Tears For Fears’ biggest hits. The band balked, preferring Tim Friese-Greene, who’d produced Talk Talk’s immense Spirit of Eden album that year. Which hadn’t sold, but don’t let that put you off because it’s fucking ace. Bates allowed it, but Friese-Greene turned them down as, in his opinion, Chadwick hadn’t finished writing the songs yet.

I don’t know what I think about that. I mean, I wasn’t there, I don’t know. What I will say is that the songs on Spirit of Eden were hardly what you’d call “written” prior to their going into the studio, which took several years. Maybe that was the point – he’d done that and it was an expensive nightmare and maybe he didn’t fancy it again. Even though he did do it again. With Talk Talk.

By the new year of 1989, they were put with the producer of Texas’ I Don’t Want A Lover to work on an album that would be ready for release that summer.

Beginning recording at a studio with a day rate of £850, the first thing the producer did was hire a session drummer to tune Evans’ drums. Any Indie sanctioned sloppiness had been jettisoned at the same time the cheque had been deposited in the band’s bank account. This was a different world.

A different world from the indie one they’d taken off from in the spaceship Fontana. An indie world that Bates had no understanding of, fundamentally. To a major world that The House of Love had no understanding or liking of, except in terms of the money and – hopefully – glory and success they would find there…

The demands of the recording pressed down on Bickers, who was told to come up with a melodic solo on Shine On, as opposed to the nebulous, stratospheric wail he’d emitted on the Creation version of it. He did alright, doing most of it, then gave up. The producer had to play the last three notes himself when Bickers walked out, disheartened.

By this time, The Stone Roses were starting to be a big deal, and Bates was looking like he’d back the wrong horse. Made of Stone didn’t make it into the proper charts in early 1989, but it sounded enormous, and it sounded like 1989 at the same time as it sounded like 1967.

Meanwhile, The House of Love were starting to sound like 1982 with Never.

It doesn’t sound great, does it? I mean, it sounds less amateurish than their Creation recordings, but it’s like shining a huge spotlight onto something that you saw out of the corner of your eye for a moment, and all the light does is amplify its flaws.

The drums are a pounding tattoo, but the bass isn’t really doing anything. The guitars gleam and shine (on – cheers), whereas once they enveloped you in a sort of ethereal fogginess. Chadwick’s vocal is clearer, but obviously had neither the power of Ian MacCulloch in the Bunnymen nor the insouciance of Jim Reid in The Mary Chain. The harmonies were good, but the songwriting hadn’t really come on very far.

In the same sort of way that The Stone Roses’ I Am The Resurrection would become the Indie I Will Survive, Never appeared to have based its lyrical message on Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up – a list of things that the narrator would never do.

Naturally, it’s easier to say what you’re not, as opposed to what you actually are, but as statements of intent go, it’s not great, is it?

Still, if it could get them on Top of The Pops, that’d be a start.

Unfortunately, Top of The Pops only really considered broadcasting performances from bands who had singles in the Top 40. The House of Love had never (cheers) been anywhere near that, but that was when they’d been on an indie label.

It hit number 41. A touch galling. So near, yet so far. No Top of The Pops performance meant no boost in sales, which meant no expansion of the fanbase, which meant not breaking Britain. Yet.

Mentally and emotionally, Bickers was struggling. Suddenly flush with money, he didn’t know how to deal with it and had no support from either the band or the label.

Bickers was impulsive – simultaneously his strength and weakness, like Romeo Montague. He’d throw his weekly wage away on Monday, buying dinner for his friends at fancy restaurants, and then ask if they could give him the money he’d spent back by Thursday.

Having mental health issues is hard work for the person themselves, but what’s not mentioned so much is how draining it is for those around them. Harsh? Possibly, but why be unrealistic? It’s noble to devote yourself to someone who’ll cry on your shoulder one minute, then hurl abuse at you the next, but it’s hard going. It’s probably especially hard going when the pressure’s on all of you from signing a £400,000 deal, and the rest of you are a bit fragile and, frankly, off your tits on LSD, cocaine and the rest of it. And that’s what was happening.

Bickers wasn’t very well, and was sent to a Harley Street psychologist, paid for by Fontana. He was prescribed tranquillisers, and then he stopped going altogether.

Bickers went AWOL, before turning up at Chadwick’s house with his parents, in front of whom Chadwick wept. The performance of Safe I’ve linked to above, was recorded the day after this upsetting event.

Never had been released on 7 inch and 12 inch only, and the thought was that, perhaps taking advantage of multi formatting might have made the difference in terms of breaking into the Top 40, and getting onto Top of The Pops.

At the same time, no chances were taken. Stephen Hague, who’d had major success with New Order and Pet Shop Boys was brought in, and they moved to a studio with a day rate of £1200.

I Don’t Know Why I Love You was slated as the next single, as produced by Hague, due that summer, by which time The Stone Roses’ album had been released. That wasn’t a huge success in terms of chart positions initially, but it was everywhere and everyone knew it was the next big thing. The House of Love had begun to look like yesterday’s men, what with their O levels in Echo & The Bunnymen and their guitars that sounded like The Police.

Bickers’ fragility wasn’t improving and, while everybody knew they couldn’t replace him, his unreliability – his impetuousness perhaps – was leaving the band exposed. Whilst on Creation, a third guitarist – Andrea Heukamp – had bolstered their sound. Bill Carey, an American guitar player was mooted to stabilise the wobbling foundations of The House of Love. On his arrival at Abbey Road, he was bewildered by the power trips that Guy Chadwick was engaging in with their new producer.

Paul O’Duffy had had hits with Swing Out Sister, Curiosity Killed The Cat and Was Not Was – the latter two being for Bates. A safe pair of hands with an ear for the charts. Chadwick threw sandwiches at him.

McGee, still the manager, had no relationship with Bates and felt that Chadwick had sold his soul for money. Which is slightly unfair, bearing in mind that McGee was mainly interested in McGee’s wallet after the first Creation album came out.

Unlike Bickers, Chadwick was taking to money like the proverbial duck to water. The Creation album cost less than £10,000. The House of Love spent more than that on taxis in the six months they’d been on Fontana. Chadwick had a nanny and a cleaner. Rumour had it that he’d employed a valet.

The Abbey Road recordings were mixed by O’Duffy and presented to Bates who, not for the first time in his life, responded with, “Not good enough.”

Six months of recording had resulted in four acceptable recordings of songs. Shine On and I Don’t Know Why I Love You were not among them, unless they could be remixed to Bates’ satisfaction.

On the plus side, Bickers seemed to be doing better. So much better, in fact, that Bill Carey’s services were deemed unnecessary.

Summer came with no further releases from them. Glastonbury and Reading weren’t the big deals they would become, but they were a relatively big deal in the indie world. Glastonbury was hippy indie, Reading was was metal, but looking to move into indie.

The House of Love were booked to play Reading, third on the bill, behind The Sugarcubes and New Order.

They went down well, Bickers was happy. “Reborn” were his words.

Back to the studio. New producer Dave Meegan, who’d engineered U2’s Joshua Tree, was at the reins. Meegan’s work with them would be, mainly, what appeared on the album. “He rescued it,” announced Bickers.

The Stone Roses’ star was on the ascendant. Not only that, but Creation had put out the first EPs by Ride, who were more traditionally noisy indie, but notably more energetic and less Echo and The Bunnymen than The House of Love. And they were young kids.

The album was in the can, but had cost – various estimates – between £500,000 and £800,000. Meaning, The House of Love were looking at shifting 600,000 copies just to break even. Their previous album on Creation had sold perhaps 100,000. It was a big ask. The likelihood would be that the next album would be begun by a band in serious debt to their record company.

I Don’t Know Why I Love You reached number 41. Again. No Top of The Pops. Again. The week after it limped to that position, Fools Gold by The Stone Roses went in at number 13, on three formats: 12″, 7″ and cassette single. The same week, Happy Mondays went in the top twenty. Both bands went on Top of The Pops, both singles went up the next week, and the tide was seen as having turned at that precise moment. The House of Love were left floundering.

At the time, the weekly music press would write about The House of Love, but they were second division fodder now. The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays were the big deal. Madchester was happening. Baggy was in. Whatever it was that The House of Love were, it sure as hell wasn’t baggy. Baggy was cool and The House of Love weren’t.

Meanwhile, the 70 date tour dragged on. Bickers, despite his “rebirth” at Reading late that August, was having a difficult second childhood. Magic Mushrooms were his drug of choice, which resulted in him managing to fall out with Pete Evans, whom he accused of not donating enough money to charity. As if to emphasise his point, Bickers took – depending on who you believe – either a £50 or £10 note and set fire to it in the back of the tourbus in front of the rest of them.

Dave Francolini, guitarist in the support band says it was £50. Bickers said, “Dave could live on this for a week,” Francolini told Dave Cavanagh, “I’m thinking: well, hand it over then.“

Bickers, apparently, saw no issue with his actions at this point.

End of story – Evans thumped him six times in the face, which Bickers failed to register, and the band abandoned him at a service station in Gloucestershire, about ten miles north of Bristol.

The band got in Simon Walker as a replacement, which resulted in my personal favourite piece of House of Love television.

This features Bickers saying that, “Simon Walker, a fantastic guitarist, a brilliant guitarist, joined, and Chadwick took me to dinner at this fancy restaurant and he asked me to come rejoin the band and he said (Walker’s) guitar playing was like a disease.“

I mean, I don’t know if that’s true, or if it happened, or what, but the vitriol between Chadwick and Bickers continued for some time.

Bickers’ exit had been interpreted by the music papers as being the final nail in their coffin. He was the mercurial one, he was the psychedelic one, and Chadwick was a bit creepy and out of touch.

Shine On was remixed and released on ten formats, and finally got into the top 20 following their debut on Top of The Pops.

The album finally came out on the back of this and went in at number 8 on the proper charts. Perhaps they’d pulled it out of the bag.

The next single, The Beatles & The Stones, came out on twelve formats over three weeks, the video cost £80,000. Bates was aiming for heavy MTV rotation and American success.

The Beatles & The Stones reached number 40 for one week and dropped out of the charts the next week. The video didn’t get heavily rotated on MTV and they never made it in America.

I appreciate that I’ve barely mentioned the music since talking about Destroy The Heart, but I say fair dos. The story’s far more entertaining than the records and, as I say, I’ve only sketched it out really. If you dig it, you really ought to read My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize.

Still, I was disappointed by The Butterfly album. It was what you’d expect from an indie band who signed to a major – all the downsides of having an expensive production with none of the upsides.

I Don’t Know Why I Love You had been around for a while, and its relative failure was a surprise. It’s alright, isn’t it? But no more than that. It should sound frenetic, like someone hurling themselves at the walls through frustration and confusion, but it doesn’t. It sounds like a wry shake of the head in an officers’ mess tent on the river Kwai.

Shine On had been a big indie hit, and the polished version was clearer and sharper, but there was no mystery to it. People had been waiting for it – it was their calling card, really – and its appearance at 20, despite being a relative success, was still seen as a failure, bearing in mind The Stone Roses’ recent top ten hit. Ride’s second EP went in at 32 the week that The Beatles & The Stones limped to number 40, and they were on Creation, currently supporting THoL on tour.

The Beatles & The Stones is pleasant. I like it. The guitars chime indolently and the brushed drums patter nonchalantly. The vocal is hushed and wistful. But hushed, wistful vocals, backed by indolently chiming guitars and nonchalantly pattering drums – and anonymous bass – isn’t going to set the world on fire. You couldn’t dance to it, and dancing was what Indie was all about at that point in time. Baggy. Madchester. You know? Even The Farm were doing better than The House of Love. Even Primal Scream were getting into the proper charts now. Every band with guitars on indie labels were falling over themselves to announce that “there’s always been a dance element to our music.” It was bandwagon hopping and, to their artistic credit, if not financial, The House of Love had nothing to do with it.

The House of Love set out sounding like a snarling (real) animal, and signing to a major label had the result of taming and neutering them into a house trained pet. And not even an impressive pet. A gerbil. A goldfish. An unfunky, artistically pure gerbil or goldfish, but so what?

A b sides compilation came out, as a result of having had so many songs on so many multi-formatted b sides – A Spy In The House of Love, and that was a lot better than The Butterfly album.

The next album, Babe Rainbow, came out when I was in my third year at university, and I was still interested enough to buy it. And, to be fair, it’s a lot better than The Butterfly album.

I couldn’t go so far as to suggest that they’d grown back their grillocks, but it was a step in the right direction, unusually.

The singles stood out – The Girl With The Loneliest Eyes was pretty, if slight, but at least Chadders’ wistfulness had a touch of grit around the edges, even if the indolent guitars and nonchalant drums remained. They too were pretty, but by now Nirvana were the big boys, and The House of Love were never going to compete with their mountainous records.

You Don’t Understand and Crush Me followed as singles. YDU was more muscular in comparison to what had been, but while it should have sounded unhinged and raging through frustration, it merely sounded a bit cross. Po-faced. Crush Me, in fairness, sounded like its title, which wasn’t a stretch.

Still, as an album, Babe Rainbow was an improvement. Even though it was slightly limp, it wasn’t overcooked like the Butterfly album had been. It reached 34 in the British charts. Simon Walker left before the recording and was replaced by the guitar player out of The Woodentops, C86 no-hopers. He left after the tour supporting it, and Chadwick was the sole guitarist for the final album, Audience With The Mind.

I bought Audience With The Mind, as I’d bought all of their albums, but if the previous albums had all been a bit polite, a touch mannered – this was a wet lettuce. It scraped into the top 40 for a week and that was it. I don’t know what happened to it. I’ve still got their other records, but I must have given it away. No recollection of it at all.

As their popularity faded, Chadwick’s desperation increased. He was offered a cover of one of the weekly papers only if he’d appear back to back with Bickers, each of them holding duelling pistols. I can’t remember if it happened, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. I can’t find any evidence of it happening, so maybe it didn’t.

They made friends, Bickers and Chadwick, enough to put out a couple of House of Love albums in the early 2000s, but I couldn’t be bothered. I’d heard enough.

It’s often the best time to get into a band, when they’re just building momentum, when the possibilities are endless. And that’s how it felt with The House of Love in early 1988. Christine, Destroy The Heart, Shine On, and their lovely Creation album were all promising. You were left with the thought that they were just getting going, but they weren’t. This would be as good as they’d ever get, and that’s usually the way with bands, isn’t it? It’s rare that they go on and get much better than their initial ideas. In some ways, The House of Love did improve, but the zeitgeist left them behind.

Following The Smiths, they were an exciting new prospect. One foot in the 80s, slightly miserablist camp, and another foot stepping into the potentially slightlydelic world of the 90s, but ultimately, not really either of them.

I said they sounded like the indie Police, and they sort of did for a bit, but they didn’t have the songs and they didn’t have the musical heft to run with that. What they were was fine. A good little band. But good little bands aren’t going to set the world on fire, not in terms of the big boys.

Alan McGee has been a bit sanctimonious about how Chadwick was a breadhead, and Bickers ran with that idea too. It’s probably true to an extent, but I don’t think Alan McGee’s necessarily one to talk, bearing in mind what happened with both The House of Love and Oasis.

Bickers couldn’t cope with the big money, but neither could McGee or Chadwick when it came down to it.

My adolescence in corduroy, carried out in indie clubs and venues, was pretty sanctimonious itself but, like all people who go down that road, it tends to be rooted in fear and self-preservation. Indie couldn’t and didn’t survive having money thrown at it. The same thing happened to The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Nirvana. Possibly even Oasis.

The long term effect was that the money killed off indie, literally and metaphorically. maybe it wouldn’t have lasted anyway. It had a bit of a rebirth with Britpop, by which time The House of Love were dead in the water, but it wouldn’t have suited them anyway. They were hardly laddish, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but what they were was never going to appeal to a majority.

A pity, but if you’re looking for a big deal, The House of Love will always let you down. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a little band that pootles along gently and sensitively, albeit slightly delicately, they’re great.

A ferocious guitar band? Not a cat in hell’s chance. They were mismarketed. They should have gone down the folk road, possibly with a bit of a breakbeat behind them. They wouldn’t have been any more popular, I daresay, but it would have suited their talents, and it’d have had more legs than what they turned into.

Brave, but misguided. Alan McGee had good ears and a cool label, no doubt about it. On the other hand, he was a one trick pony. Loud, raucous guitar bands that are exciting? He knew what to do with them. The House of Love were never that, certainly not on record, but he kept pushing them in that direction, when Radio 2 would have been a far better fit.