This band was named after a short story by Frederik Pohl (“The Day the Icicle Works Closed”, Galaxy, February 1960). I read the story when I was a kid, in Pohl’s wonderful collection The Man Who Ate the World. There was a revival of “psychedelic” rock in liverpool in the early 1980’s, and this band was part of that movement. The frontman was Ian McNabb, who remains today a veteran craftsman in British rock, but isn’t well known in North America. Drummer Chris Sharrock and bassist Chris Layhe formed the other two legs of the tripod. The band stuck around for quite awhile, but it never made it big, perhaps because the “neo-psychedelic” formula really didn’t suit them. Despite a few trappings of that genre, it sounds to me like they really wanted to do good solid rock with clean, crisp arrangements. The only album I possess is the eponymous first (1984), which contains their biggest hit “Love is a Wonderful Colour”. But I prefer “Whisper To a Scream (Birds Fly)”, which was a bigger hit here in Canada, and I remember it getting considerable airplay on Toronto stations. Sharrock’s drumwork is fine in this one, lifting them out of the potential wimpiness of the psychedelic formula (the cut preceding it, “In the Cauldron of Love” sounds too much like recycled Moody Blues).
Addendum: A friend informs me that the Canadian release was quite different from the U.S. release, and reached much higher in the Canadian charts than in either the U.K. or U.S. ones, confirming my impression. Unfortunately, I don’t have the variations to compare. Mine is the Canadian.
