PhilPaine.com

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.