successor to Shock and Awe whose feed no longer seems to be working properly - original blog + archive remains here: http://shockandawesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ the blog of the Simon Reynolds book about glam and artpop of the 1970s and its aftershocks and reflections to this day
Friday, June 26, 2026
Goth goes Glam
What tarts!
Gene Loves Jezebel must have seen Love and Rockets enjoying Stateside sucksess with the T. Rexy "So Alive" and they thought "we'll ave summathat, eh boyo?"
That said, I do really enjoy "Motion of Love" as sound + vision in all its effrontery and fakery
The phasing on the backing vocals...
It's less "going glam" in the '70s T. Rexy sense and more glam as in glam metal, hair metal...
I suppose this is prime Bad Music Era, but the ShitBrit is definitely improved by the attempt to conquer Billboard rather than just scale the summit of the UK independent chart.
The missus is quite fond of Gene Love Jezebel's early stuff when they have a sort of neo-psych / Cult circa "She Sells Sanctuary" vibe.... but I prefer this would-be sell-out phase.
Tragic story, though - the Aston brothers fell out terribly, and there are now two versions of Gene Loves Jezebel touring different sectors of the world. I forget which brother has North America.
Checking Wikipedia, it says they fell out twice:
"The brothers reconciled in the mid-1990s, wrote some new songs together, and shared a house in Los Angeles"
But that detente didn't last, resulting in a permanent ruction and the ongoing rival Gene Loves Jezebels.
And then this happened
"In September 2018, Jay Aston, James Stevenson, and Peter Rizzo were named as defendants in a lawsuit brought by Michael Aston for infringement of his trademark at the end of Jay Aston's Gene Loves Jezebel's first US tour in ten years. Jay Aston's band argued that they had complied with the agreement with Michael Aston to the best of their ability. At the hearing on 7 January 2019 in Santa Ana, California, before the judge The Hon James Selna, the judge found in favour of the defendants on all of the five counts that Michael Aston had brought and ordered him to pay the defendants' legal fees."
So many of these Goths ended up living in Los Angeles... Peter Murphy for instance.
Lol Tolhurst also (met him at the Hay Festival in Mexico last year, at a lunch organized by the British Ambassador for all the U.K. authors... educated fellow, we had a good chat)
I suppose many British pop stars and cult stars end up here... and why not... it's where the Biz is... the weather is better
There's also a big Goth scene (industrial too) in LA, a kind of spiritual dissidence against sun and outdoors-iness and tans and health. The commitment it takes to wear all black heavy clothing head to foot all year round in Southern California...
If they didn't literally move to LA, Brit Goth groups often tried to move there sonically /career-orientation-ly
Tempting to say Flesh For Lulu are the dreggiest dregs of the Bad Music Era, but then there's Balaam and the Angel, there's The Bolshoi, there's Sex Gang Children
Thing I never knew - Julianne Regan was the bassist in Gene Loves Jezebel at one point, prior to forming All About Eve.
Oh my God, there is Wiki Fear and Wiki Fizzle, but sometimes there is Wiki Manna - just a pure gift of brightness and joy irradiating one's life
So... I learn that The Mountain Goats, as in John Darnielle, did a whole album called Goths, and one of the songs tells the saga of Gene Love Jezebel (it sounds a bit like Jackson Browne's "The Pretender")
Robert Smith is secure at his villa in France
Any child knows how to do the spiderweb dance
Siouxsie has enough hits to keep the bills paid
Every New Year's in Los Angeles, you can still see Richard Blade
But the world forgot about Gene Loves Jezebel
Yeah, the world forgot about Gene Loves Jezebel
They charted once or twice
They were on a major label
When the singer went solo
He left money on the table
The two main guys are related
They're at war with each other
Now there's two Genes loving Jezebel
One for each brother
But the world came to agree
What you see is what you get
And what you get is what you see
Whether you're The March Violets or The Bolshoi
Bands who had to leave the darkness for the sun
Red Lorry Yellow Lorry were on Cherry Red, I think
Gene Loves Jezebel toured America with Echo & The Bunnymen and New Order in 1987. I was a little too young to attend the local stops in LA and Irvine but I recall a lot of buzz about them at school. I cared only for the headliners, though. I couldn't understand the GLJ interest. They seemed much more aligned with hair metal, as you said, straddling the surprisingly thin line dividing punk/goth and hair metal in the Los Angeles scene (a fact which maybe wasn't lost on Penelope Spheeris?).
Anyway, that tour speaks to something interesting about the Bad Music Era. If the indie scene was a barren wasteland full of weak young contenders, as you've described, there were older bands whose roots extended to post-punk in the 1970s hitting commercial and artistic peaks in the mid-80s, two of which were New Order and Echo & The Bunnymen. Others were The Cure, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, and of course the biggest of them all, U2.
The recent flurry of stuff relating to Still In A Dream (which I'm keen to read) has gotten me thinking about how I experienced the music of that period. Simply because of the year I was born, and the usual manner in which people discovered bands in those pre-internet days, I became fixated on the above-named bands in their imperial phases and basically blinded myself not only to the crap but also the good bands emerging in the period your new book covers. For me it was a golden era. Just about every one of my favorite records was released between, say, 1983 and 1989. I'm guessing you found a lot of those records boringly commercial, maybe even an outright betrayal of post-punk, but again that maybe speaks to differences in how and when new listeners form their tastes.
By the way, Mick Farren ended up on Los Angeles too. I did get my hands on a copy of his memoirs-- absolutely superb, a must-read. For me it really helps bridge a gap in counter-cultural history between the hippies and the punks.
Well I guess one person's Bad Music Era is another Golden Age!
In the new book I dredge up this term bandied around at Melody Maker, "post-punk dinosaurs", meaning bands like The Cure New Order Echo + Bunnymen Siouxsie Simple Minds Psychedelic Furs who were active and indeed bigger than ever in the mid-80s but created a feeling of staleness for the young and impatient. Often they were at that point where they were trying to break America so commercializing the sound.
I think of "Lips Like Sugar" as an archetypal example of the once-loved postpunk band going through the motions. I wouldn't have said the mid-80s was Echo's imperial phase / artistic peak although Ocean Rain has some grand tunes and they were very exciting when I saw them live at the Oxford Apollo.
The thing about "dinosaur" as a tag was that it was describing people often only in their late twenties.
I wouldn't put U2 in their category as they were rising to their peak in 1987 and made sense at that sort of scale of success. New Order still made some good tunes and Depeche Mode were rising to unexpected artistic maturity and risk levels. Even Siouxsie and the B's could come up with a "Peek-A-Boo" although Tinderbox is awfully thin sounding and Through the Looking Glass is just a bit sad.
I suppose the Cure, objectively, were strong throughout the period - I never quite loved them, although "A Forest" is immense and their likeable moments thereafter.
I associate the kind of thing you are talking about - British (also Australian often) bands trying to get big in America - with the "modern rock' format in radio. And also with the MTV show 120 Minutes, which was hosted by a Brit and had a pronounced Anglophile slanting. It was a show that might give airtime to a Peter Murphy solo single.
I'm old enough to remember the glasnost period at the end of the Cold War. Once a week, it seemed, I'd see another Western TV crew reporting from an obscure corner of the Soviet bloc with a story about the liberating power of rock 'n' roll. Western music was sneaking in, shattering chains, freeing minds, bringing the world closer to peace, etc. "Right on!" you'd think. Then they'd interview these liberated people and it turns out the "radical free-world rock" they'd been listening to was Eddie Money or Girlschool or whoever.
In the same vein, imagine watching a 1987 TV interview with some poor benighted soul like me in suburban southern California. I'd have gushed about the new, "underground", "cutting-edge", "modern" rock 'n' roll etc etc-- and cited "Lips Like Sugar" as an example!
I was definitely the target of 'modern rock' programming like "120 Minutes". It worked for awhile, too. The MTV ecosystem was fun but it was also a corporate-curated, fish-bowled selection of songs. As I learned when I discovered the UK weeklies, later, there were incredible differences between what we were being sold and what was actually going on across the Atlantic.
The Bunnymen are a perfect example. In '87, as you said, they were a once-loved postpunk band going through the motions. To me and a lot of other Americans they appeared to be a cool band from England just hitting their stride. They'd had songs on hit recent soundtracks ("Pretty In Pink", "The Lost Boys"), were playing larger venues (in places like Los Angeles anyway), and seemed poised for a breakthrough with their self-titled 1987 LP. That one was given a heavier promotional push by Warners, which seemed to have high hopes; the cover even featured a moody Anton Corbijn photo of the band reminiscent of the shot on U2's "Joshua Tree" sleeve a few months earlier. "Lips Like Sugar" got the 'modern rock' hit treatment. They toured with New Order and GLJ, then solo where I saw them play to 6,000 fans in 1988.
Only when I bought their older albums, and started reading press originating from the UK, did I find out that that the self-titled LP was their weakest effort. They were dinosaurs by then-- even the Bunnymen thought so, really. My thinking completely changed.
That's one of the big reasons I'm looking forward to "Still In A Dream". It's kind of a new story for me. I feel like there was so much I missed out on, at the time, because of that 'modern rock' programming. I mean, a quick search through the "120 Minutes" database at altmusictv.com shows they didn't even play My Bloody Valentine until 1992.
Gene Loves Jezebel toured America with Echo & The Bunnymen and New Order in 1987. I was a little too young to attend the local stops in LA and Irvine but I recall a lot of buzz about them at school. I cared only for the headliners, though. I couldn't understand the GLJ interest. They seemed much more aligned with hair metal, as you said, straddling the surprisingly thin line dividing punk/goth and hair metal in the Los Angeles scene (a fact which maybe wasn't lost on Penelope Spheeris?).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, that tour speaks to something interesting about the Bad Music Era. If the indie scene was a barren wasteland full of weak young contenders, as you've described, there were older bands whose roots extended to post-punk in the 1970s hitting commercial and artistic peaks in the mid-80s, two of which were New Order and Echo & The Bunnymen. Others were The Cure, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, and of course the biggest of them all, U2.
The recent flurry of stuff relating to Still In A Dream (which I'm keen to read) has gotten me thinking about how I experienced the music of that period. Simply because of the year I was born, and the usual manner in which people discovered bands in those pre-internet days, I became fixated on the above-named bands in their imperial phases and basically blinded myself not only to the crap but also the good bands emerging in the period your new book covers. For me it was a golden era. Just about every one of my favorite records was released between, say, 1983 and 1989. I'm guessing you found a lot of those records boringly commercial, maybe even an outright betrayal of post-punk, but again that maybe speaks to differences in how and when new listeners form their tastes.
By the way, Mick Farren ended up on Los Angeles too. I did get my hands on a copy of his memoirs-- absolutely superb, a must-read. For me it really helps bridge a gap in counter-cultural history between the hippies and the punks.
Well I guess one person's Bad Music Era is another Golden Age!
DeleteIn the new book I dredge up this term bandied around at Melody Maker, "post-punk dinosaurs", meaning bands like The Cure New Order Echo + Bunnymen Siouxsie Simple Minds Psychedelic Furs who were active and indeed bigger than ever in the mid-80s but created a feeling of staleness for the young and impatient. Often they were at that point where they were trying to break America so commercializing the sound.
I think of "Lips Like Sugar" as an archetypal example of the once-loved postpunk band going through the motions. I wouldn't have said the mid-80s was Echo's imperial phase / artistic peak although Ocean Rain has some grand tunes and they were very exciting when I saw them live at the Oxford Apollo.
The thing about "dinosaur" as a tag was that it was describing people often only in their late twenties.
I wouldn't put U2 in their category as they were rising to their peak in 1987 and made sense at that sort of scale of success. New Order still made some good tunes and Depeche Mode were rising to unexpected artistic maturity and risk levels. Even Siouxsie and the B's could come up with a "Peek-A-Boo" although Tinderbox is awfully thin sounding and Through the Looking Glass is just a bit sad.
I suppose the Cure, objectively, were strong throughout the period - I never quite loved them, although "A Forest" is immense and their likeable moments thereafter.
I associate the kind of thing you are talking about - British (also Australian often) bands trying to get big in America - with the "modern rock' format in radio. And also with the MTV show 120 Minutes, which was hosted by a Brit and had a pronounced Anglophile slanting. It was a show that might give airtime to a Peter Murphy solo single.
I'm old enough to remember the glasnost period at the end of the Cold War. Once a week, it seemed, I'd see another Western TV crew reporting from an obscure corner of the Soviet bloc with a story about the liberating power of rock 'n' roll. Western music was sneaking in, shattering chains, freeing minds, bringing the world closer to peace, etc. "Right on!" you'd think. Then they'd interview these liberated people and it turns out the "radical free-world rock" they'd been listening to was Eddie Money or Girlschool or whoever.
DeleteIn the same vein, imagine watching a 1987 TV interview with some poor benighted soul like me in suburban southern California. I'd have gushed about the new, "underground", "cutting-edge", "modern" rock 'n' roll etc etc-- and cited "Lips Like Sugar" as an example!
I was definitely the target of 'modern rock' programming like "120 Minutes". It worked for awhile, too. The MTV ecosystem was fun but it was also a corporate-curated, fish-bowled selection of songs. As I learned when I discovered the UK weeklies, later, there were incredible differences between what we were being sold and what was actually going on across the Atlantic.
The Bunnymen are a perfect example. In '87, as you said, they were a once-loved postpunk band going through the motions. To me and a lot of other Americans they appeared to be a cool band from England just hitting their stride. They'd had songs on hit recent soundtracks ("Pretty In Pink", "The Lost Boys"), were playing larger venues (in places like Los Angeles anyway), and seemed poised for a breakthrough with their self-titled 1987 LP. That one was given a heavier promotional push by Warners, which seemed to have high hopes; the cover even featured a moody Anton Corbijn photo of the band reminiscent of the shot on U2's "Joshua Tree" sleeve a few months earlier. "Lips Like Sugar" got the 'modern rock' hit treatment. They toured with New Order and GLJ, then solo where I saw them play to 6,000 fans in 1988.
Only when I bought their older albums, and started reading press originating from the UK, did I find out that that the self-titled LP was their weakest effort. They were dinosaurs by then-- even the Bunnymen thought so, really. My thinking completely changed.
That's one of the big reasons I'm looking forward to "Still In A Dream". It's kind of a new story for me. I feel like there was so much I missed out on, at the time, because of that 'modern rock' programming. I mean, a quick search through the "120 Minutes" database at altmusictv.com shows they didn't even play My Bloody Valentine until 1992.