Just been sent the excellent double-CD Cherry Red compilation of The June Brides and Phil Wilson - to celebrate, I thought I’d share my sleeve notes to the forthcoming June Brides tribute album, due out some time whenever.

(1985) It’s about time! In this current climate of depressed and depressing music, where the word “pop” has become synonymous with drab grey colourless tinsel-town glamour children making three-minute worthless video-exercises in how low modern music can sink, The June Brides produce an eight-track mini-album (produced by John O-Neill, ex-Undertones) to blast away the dullness. They sav(i)our pop for the side of COLOUR! LAUGHTER! JOY! with their spiky sublime intoxicating tunes; following that long and luminary lineage of Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, Fire Engines et al down the cottage way.

(2005) Mostly, I recall the walks home along dark, dismal, intimidating, intoxicating South London streets with the sound of Jon Hunter’s trumpet blaring in my ears. Mostly, I recall frantic dancing and gay abandon, pirouetting to the sound of Simon and Phil’s guitars, feeling that such euphoria should not go unnoticed. I’d queued outside the Rock Garden in ’81, waiting for Josef K and their chilled blue groove. Now it was ’84 and we suddenly were on first name terms with our pop stars. They were human, shy and painfully insecure…people like us. Did this make them any less special? Are you joking?

(1985) The first side starts off with a cracking, animated instrumental – which will make you wish you’d never dyed your hair black and started looking sullen – and SLAMS straight into “I Fall”, a tumultuous impetuous expression of joy; fragile, soaring, forever bewitching. The guitars rush headlong through a tumbling waterfall of viola and vocals: “I fall, and you drag me down, no one is listening, but let’s shout out loud to prove that we’re alive.”

(2005) I tried to recapture that feeling for years, the simple pleasure of shouting out loud to prove my own existence…I’d reference June Brides on the oddest occasions: in Melbourne 2000 trying to get to grips with grazed knees, in Pittsburgh 1993 in front of 20,000 people, none of whom knew my name…but such nostalgia is not part of my brief. My friend Ian instructed me never to call him up once our shared interests ceased – why would I? Should we talk about the past? Why? June Brides were a celebration of the present, with its endless waits in dole offices and miners’ rights being trampled into the ground. These songs are not made for these times.

(1985) (ASIDE: The production does seem a trifle wimpish in places, the cover’s not exactly riveting and the ghost of Young Scotland occasionally raises a bleary eyebrow, still…)

(2005) One time in 1996, I bumped into Phil Wilson in a pub around the corner from King’s Reach Tower: not only was he now a civil servant – and don’t you wish ALL pop stars would take a cue from his declaration to retire from making music past the age of 30 (or whatever it was) – but he now worked along the same corridor as my brother Mick, without knowing it. Odd, because both men clearly had shared bills at Alan’s Living Room in the dim mists of…

(1985) …the pace continues with “Sunday To Saturday”, that class(ic) first single of theirs, now impossible to find, and ends in an exhausting exhaustive exhorting extreme exhibition of (barely) un-extolled evocative exhilaration – “Sick, Tired And Drunk”, an anthemic paean to all those moments when you’re swaying sullenly sideways. Orgasmic! Ooh, I could lie here forever, but…

(2005) The NME compared them to Holden Caulfield. I can see their point now. Then, I never bothered reading music press interviews: too many imaginary barricades to man, too much dancing to partake in. The June Brides began with the perfectly understandable motivation of wanting to be a guitar band that didn’t sound like U2 or Echo & the bleedin’ Bunnymen and finished way before they had the chance to turn boring. Anyone worth their stripy pop socks in the early 80s loved Buzzcocks and Jonathan Richman. The Smiths were a momentary abhorrence that ruined everything.

(1985) Side two: rapture! Unfettered by any commercial restraints, The June Brides jangle straight for the jugular and BITE every time.
1! The heart! “Every Conversation” shining chiming ringing singing – a remix of their other single, more finely honed incisive streamlined – the chorus melting in your mouth like week-old Anchor.
2! The throat! “Comfort” – it’s those guitars again. Biting, bold, brash, harsh – nearly too cutting in their determination to shatter the nerves.
3! The neck! “Heard You Whisper” – enchanting, empathetically fresh, enraptured: guitars and voices and instruments weaving and interweaving around a passionate acquisition of an enchanting tune. Spicy, bright, wholesome.
4! The wrist! “Enemies” – jubilant massed ranks, invigorating vivid sparkling – a fitting climax for such a magnificent album. The legs finally give way as you find yourself swept along on a tide of exultation.
For its sense of vision alone this must be the most essential album released in the last two years. The choice is yours.

(2005) Never one to resort to barely constructed hyperbole, I only ever let myself be carried away by the tides of my enthusiasm…and if that’s a crime then I’m guilty, guilty of loving you.

The Legend! (NME) 1985
The Legend! (Plan B) 2005

Posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006by Everett True