1. KITTENS
2. I SHALL BE A DITCHDIGGER
3. SWEETHEART
4. CINNAMON BABY
5. THROWING WORDS
6. I JUST WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND
7. BLIND DRUNK
8. MARIE AGAIN
9. SUSAN RODE THE CYCLONE
10. AMERICAN BOOM
All songs written by David Tattersall
Performed by David Tattersall, Jonny Helm and Franic Rozycki
With Darren Hayman, Nina Garthwaite, Rebecca Taylor and Simon Trought
Recorded by Simon Trought at Soup Studio, Hanbury Street , London
Photographs by Clemence Freschard
Released on April 13th 2010, in Spain on Acuarela Records, Germany by Little Teddy Records and Italy
Catalogue number: IBR002
The WP’s finest hour? Susan Rode The Cyclone is their 2010, Euro-only, vinyl-only, killer-material-only follow-up to If You Leave It Alone. I’m still stunned this record didn’t get released in their home country and believe Moshi Moshi missed a trick by passing it up. Instead, a bastardised version, shorn of almost half its tracks, came out as the Sweetheart EP. I’m sure the record company could make a case for this course of action – not wanting to flood the market with material etc, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a mistake. SRTC is a wonderful record, in my opinion their best, and probably captures the different facets of the group better than any of the others. Anyone who has seen the band live knows a huge part of their sound is the scorching solos which Tattersall wrenches out of his FX-less guitar and these are finally caught in all their Crazy Horse glory on this record. Both the opener Kittens and Cinnamon Baby explode out of the speakers with an intensity which previous albums find hard to match. This is not at the cost of great melodies and sweet tunes though – I always swoon to the “Already yellow teeth” line in Throwing Words and the placement of Sweetheart on the soundtrack of a Hugh Grant movie is perhaps all that lies between the band as they are today and the success we know they deserve.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there’s the second side, five of the most perfect songs in pop music for decades. The title of this blog comes from I Just Want To Be Your Friend, a great, funny track which is my favourite song in the world every time I listen to it. If the fact that the lp didn’t even get released isn’t galling enough, the fact that this song didn’t even make the cut of the 6 track EP is BEYOND ABSURD! Blind Drunk is beautiful, Marie Again has an awesome surfy guitar break and the musical section halfway through the title track is heavenly. It all ends with American Boom, another top ten tune which houses some of their most evocative lyrics and one of Franic’s best Peter Hook-esque bass lines.
I love this record, and of course all my complaints above about it not being released properly are balanced out by the record collector in me who loves his limited edition vinyl copy. I think they are on different colours in different countries. I have the Little Teddy version which is black and has a altered cover to the one above – the same shot but in a kind of negative-effect monochrome. I think the Spanish version on Acuarela is white vinyl, but I could be wrong.
In years to come, people will offer me great sums for this record. And there’s no way I will sell it….
P.S. I didn’t mention I Shall Be A Ditch Digger which brings the Violent Femmes back to life. Great tune, terrific recording, and one day you’ll watch a certain film and realise where most of the lyrics came from. Bizarrely, I watched this film for the first time in a decade about 2 days after hearing this record. It was a coincidence of Austerian proportions.