Walter Mitty's Little White Lies - Brave New England (Hip Records)

One of my biggest reasons for abandoning my old blog "Left and to the Back" was the fact that focusing on genuine obscurities - singles which hadn't been made available online before in any form - was becoming a tougher and tougher mission. We live in an age where even if Spotify hasn't hoovered up the goodies, some brat on YouTube will inevitably have uploaded something for everyone's pleasure, and even if they've failed, Cherry Red are there in the sidelines waiting for something surprising for their next "150 New Wave Obscurities" box set.

I honestly didn't expect to begin this blog, focusing on indie chart entries which almost all received some airplay and press coverage, and unearth anything which might have been worthy of a place on the old site. There it was in the 1981 Indie Charts, though - "Brave New England", which despite eventually peaking at number 17 and even being reissued by RCA later that year, had left no audio trace behind online.

As a dog that returneth to his vomit, so is a fool that repeateth his folly, and inevitably I ended up buying a second hand copy of this purely to satisfy my curiosity about who the group were and what it sounded like, and also to upload it online for the benefit of you good people.

It looks as if Walter Mitty's Little White Lies - henceforth known as WMLWL - were a Liverpool based act with Gary McGuinness on guitar and vocals, Jon Rupert Holt on keyboards, Colin Walker on guitar, Paul Williams on bass, Colin Ventre on drums and Gerry Garland on saxophone. 

"Brave New England" is very much the kind of New Wave single which feels as if it has some "pub rock heritage" about it, being closer in style and feel to Tom Robinson than XTC or Talking Heads. There are no hard angles or unexpected discords; instead, the group deliver a fluent pop/rock song whose cult level sales combined with radio appeal must have made the band catnip to RCA, who swept in to reissue it later on in 1981.

Copies of the RCA single seem even more scarce than the original on the tiny Hip Records, though, and the group weren't given any other chances to record for a major (or indeed any other) label. This is what we've been left with, and while it's not clear to me what promotion it received to manage a mid-placed indie chart position - I can find no signs that the music press reviewed it first time out or John Peel played it, for example - enough people cared to get it there. 

6. Birthday Party - Release The Bats (4AD)

 

Number one for three weeks from 5th September 1981

While many interviews have revealed his uniquely dry sense of humour, Nick Cave isn’t particularly renowned for his way with a catchphrase or punchline. In the mid-nineties, you could shove Jarvis Cocker – a man who isn’t averse to a bit of spite and darkness himself - on a panel show and be assured of a few cheeky giggles, but it’s safe to say that nobody called Nick Cave’s manager about putting him on Pop Quiz.

So it's strange to listen to “Release The Bats” afresh for the first time in decades, years after it last pummelled my ears during Friday nights at the Rayleigh Pink Toothbrush (goths welcome), and notice both how camply brilliant it is and how indebted to simple sloganeering. For a track which is largely regarded as spearheading the gothic movement, it owes a far bigger debt to Joe Meek and Screaming Lord Sutch than Joy Division or Bauhaus, taking the ketchup and cleavage gore of a thousand cheap Hammer spin-offs as its source text.

“Bite! Bite!” demands Cave at the start, before asking loudly but almost incoherently “Tell me that it doesn’t hurt/ a hundred fluttering in your skirt?” an image which is immediately ludicrous rather than disgusting.

The track, like many Birthday Party singles, starts as it means to continue, like an unchallenged steamroller slowly crumpling up the edge of the street where the parked cars live. There’s no discernable chorus, just a continued barrage of stabbed guitar lines, catchphrases (which as the song progresses descend into excited gibberish such as “sex horror sex bat sex sex horror sex vampire”) and Cave ripping himself into a state of either ecstasy or fury. He seems conflicted about the bats, wanting to destroy them (or “explode” them) as much as he wants to celebrate them, like a wildlife preservation officer who happens to have some living in his attic.

The drumming is also worthy of mention here; in common with a lot of the indie chart entries I’ve been listening to for this period of 1981, the near complete aversion to a cymbal or a hi-hat is both notable and strangely typical. Martin Hannett famously got the ball rolling on this percussive style with Joy Division, but it also became adopted by acts whose debt to Joy Division was less immediately obvious – Felt, for example, were also adding bottom-heavy percussion to their otherwise airy indie-pop compositions at this point. In The Birthday Party’s case, it anchors the sound down with those jazzy basslines, making “Release The Bats” bit-part punk racket with a strange unwieldy swing on top.