Biography.
Shiny ringing guitars, pseudo-psychedelic melodies, and bursts of noise.
An Essay By Neil Taylor :
By September 1985, the month the Jesus & Mary Chain played the Electric Ballroom in Camden, the Creation record label was two years old. 1983 had seen the release of just one single – the Legend’s proto-rap single, ‘’73 In ‘83’, a record so badly received that Alan McGee retreated, preferring to spend the remainder of the year promoting his ever-popular club, the Living Room. 1984 had seen a clutch of releases, culminating in November with the Jesus & Mary Chain’s debut single, ‘Upside Down’.
‘Upside Down’ was game-changer for Creation – sales of 40,000 dwarfed the label’s normal performance levels of around 1,000 copies per release. It was also something of a game-changer for indie, drawing in a number of people whose thirst for the kind of shock and awe the band created hadn’t been sated since the heady days of punk. People flocked to their gig at the Ambulance Station at the Old Kent Road, turned out in even bigger numbers at an Ides of March show at North London Polytechnic (where a ‘riot’ supposedly ensued) and then made their way to the Electric Ballroom hoping for the spectacle to repeat itself. Which, of course, it did.
The Electric Ballroom had been a local patch for Guy Chadwick, having moved down to Camden from a village outside Rugby with the express intention of forming a band and, who knows, carving out some sort of legacy. Like The Jesus & Mary Chain, he too had had a record released in 1984. A band called The Kingdoms was largely built around Guy’s talents as a guitarist/singer-songwriter. Guy had been signed up to CBS publishing and The Kingdoms had landed a one-off deal with RCA, who in the summer had released the band’s one-and-only single, ‘Heartlands’.
Alas, the release of ‘Heartlands’ had not been the unqualified success hoped for. Although breezy post-punk fare of the kind then being churned out by bands like ABC, the record largely fell on deaf ears – there were a couple of plays on Radio One, one fanzine interview (conducted by a mate of the band’s publicist) and a review in NME, where Danny Baker’s most constructive comment was the assertion that the band would be better off ditching the singer (ie, Guy).
Although the experience of releasing the single had been less than fruitful, in truth Guy Chadwick at the time had no idea about what kind of music he wanted his band to play. The CBS deal showed him to be capable of being a more than competent songwriter but what kind of sound would express those songs? 1985 would go on to be something of annus horribilis for Guy – of which more later – but the night of 9 September 1985 at the Electric Ballroom (of which also more later) would help point him in the right direction.
‘My father had been in the army so we lived all over the place,’ he explains today, laying down the genesis that would eventually lead to The House Of Love. ‘I was at boarding school for seven years and then we moved back to England and settled just outside Rugby. I was a late starter and didn’t even take up the guitar until I was seventeen. In Rugby, I played in a band called Love & Kisses. We had a female vocalist and I played guitar and wrote the songs. At the time, one of my favourite bands was The Only Ones, but there were others as well. But the point is that I had absolutely no vision about the kind of music I wanted to make.’
At the star of the 1980s, Guy made the move to Camden. It took a while, but the CBS deal followed, and also the deal with RCA (who released The
Kingdoms’ single on a subsidiary called Regard). By now Guy was picking up vibes from bands like U2, The Cure and Public Image Ltd. ‘I was influenced by them,’ he says, ‘but never tried to copy them.’ Still there was no clear vision for his music. The single was duly released, sank without trace and then things took a distinct turn for the worse.
‘The label folded and the people from Regard moved on to Virgin,’ Guy remembers. At first this boded well since they were keen for Guy to follow them. But RCA dug their heels in whilst they thought about what to do with Guy, who was an obvious talent. RCA paid for studio time – by one account for up to £10,000 worth – where Guy began more finely honing his songwriting skills, presenting a number of songs that included an early version of ‘Destroy The Heart’. RCA passed on them.
Meanwhile, one of Guy’s heroes – Lou Reed – came to the UK to play a couple of shows at the Bixton Fair Deal (later renamed the Brixton Academy). Guy watched the show on the first night and managed to slip a demo tape to Lou Reed’s manager. The tape included ‘Destroy The Heart’. Amazingly, the manager called Guy the following day and asked if he wanted to come to that night’s show, where he could meet Lou. Lou had listened to the tape and was impressed. Guy’s hopes soared. And then an hour later, he received a phone call from RCA informing him that the label had decided to drop him. He never went to the second night at the Fair Deal. He never got to meet Lou Reed.
Which brings us in a roundabout way to September when Guy, along with others, turned up to the Electric Ballroom to watch The Jesus & Mary Chain. ‘I’d read about the band in the music press,’ he recalls. ‘ I could see immediately where the band was coming from. I picked up, of course, on the Velvet Underground influence and it was that aspect that made me think that I should be following a similar direction. I made a decision to form a new version of the Velvet Underground, and that was that…’
Guy then took stock of what to do. He was 29. He knew plenty of musicians he could call up to assist if need be. But he decided instead that the new vision needed new people. The RCA money had helped him develop his songwriting, Indeed, along with Destroy The Heart, he also had early versions written of ‘Shine On’ and ‘Christine’. He had also spent time developing his guitar skills, experimenting with effects such as Echo and Chorus. Unsurprisingly then, he decided that the first recruit he needed was another guitarist. He took out an advert in Melody Maker. He also came up with a name for the band.
‘The inspiration for the name of the band came from The Doors song, “The Spy”.’ Guy recalls. ‘I was a big Jim Morrison fan and he had been inspired by Anais Nin’s novel, A Spy In The House Of Love, to write “The Spy”. So, although the novel is where the name derives from it was filtered through The Doors song. At one point someone suggested calling the band Horse Latitudes (another Doors song, from the second album) but it was The House Of Love that stuck.’
The carefully worded advert in Melody Maker, complete with references to the Velvet Underground struck home, and 19-year-old Terry Bickers responded. Guy Chadwick had a clutch of impressive songs to play him, including, of course, the gems that were ‘Destroy The Heart’, ‘Christine’ and ‘Shine On’. ‘Terry and I connected straightaway,’ according to Guy. ‘For the first few weeks it was just the two of us. I had already decided that the type of band I wanted would have a Sixties sound. I was listening to a lot of Sixties music at the time: The Velvets, Love, The Doors, The Beatles. I just went back to my childhood, to the music I loved when I was ten years younger.’
Punk, of course, had rounded on the 1960s – ‘no Beatles, no Stones’ etc – but from the start of the 1980s many looked back to the decade for inspiration. Some attempted to fuse the bubble-wheel optimism of the period with the energy of the punk explosion that followed on after. Creation was named after a ‘60s cult band and had taken a lead from The Television Personalities, arch practitioners on the neo-60s sound. In 1985, the same year that Chadwick began writing songs that would eventually turn into House Of Love material, Bobby Gillespie was helping set-up Glasgow’s Splash One club (which borrowed its name from a Roky Erikson song and claimed to be a ‘Psychedelic Punk Rock Soundtrack’). On a less lysergic note, 1985 saw the release of ‘VU’, the so-called lost Velvet Underground album, which reanimated the band’s popularity in Britain.
‘Terry knew Chris Groothhuizen and Andrea Heukamp,’ says Guy. ‘Chris came in on bass and Andrea played guitar and did some vocals. For a while we played along with a drum machine and then I managed to get an old friend of mine, Pete Evans, to come in on drums. At first, Andrea had wanted to play bass – and she should have played bass – but just as things started getting going she went back to Germany for a while and so Chris sort of fell into the role. Andrea always begged me to play bass… I always saw a bigger role for Andrea in the band but it was hard working out what that might be. Eventually she became a third guitarist, when in truth one wasn’t needed, even although she was a very good rhythm guitarist, especially since we were so shambolic.’
Adding to the band’s international constituency, Chris Groothuizen came from New Zealand, where he’d worked at Progressive Recording Studios in Auckland helping a number of the Flying Nun label bands to record. ‘Guy had a pretty clear vision for the group’s sound,’ he remembers. ‘I liked the songs and the sound of his demos so I wanted to be involved from the first time I heard Terry playing the tracks. My audition was to play basslines to the track on a cassette I had been given by Terry. ‘Christine’ was a complicated arrangement and easy to miss the changes as they were quite subtle, so Terry coached me through it and during the audition counted in the choruses while Guy wasn’t looking, so I didn’t get lost. The bass parts were already written for the most part so it was really a case of learning the song structures and not messing up live – but that still happened a lot in the early gigs!’
Like all bands, as soon as the structure fell in to place, The House Of Love were keen to get out there and play live. They were the usual affairs initially – playing the local Camberwell scene to about ten people and playing, where the chance arose, at parties – before things began to build slowly. They used to play the squat gig Dickie Dirts – an old disused cinema (later turned into a jeans warehouse) that was part of an anarchist network in mid-1980s London that included venues like the Burn It Down Ballroom in Kilburn and the Ambulance Station in the Old Kent Road (scene of a notorious early Jesus & Mary Chain gig).
‘Dickie Dirts to us was really just another place to play,’ says Guy. ‘It was pitch black inside, so we used to hire a generator and play this enormous ballroom for around 100 people. It was completely dark apart from whatever lights we could bring into the place. We played the place a few times and it was really quite fun.’
Ambitious to progress, the band went to a studio and recorded some demos which, when sent out, elicited absolutely zero response. According to Guy, one of the tracks recorded was ‘Christine’, but ‘it didn’t sound at all like the released version ending up sounding, although it was OK…’ Then the band had a bit of luck and the hard work began to pay off: ‘We’d got in with the booker at the Marquee,’ continues Guy, ‘and he really liked us. He began giving us support slots and then, eventually, he offered us the chance to headline. This would have been around spring 1986. In the end we just invited as many people as we could – probably about 200-300 and they were all on the guest list! I believe that was when Alan McGee came to see us. The label folk from Virgin also came and they then paid for us to go into the studios. We recorded three or four songs, including ‘Shine On’. The Virgin people passed on the material, so I sent the demos to Creation.’ That would have been the first time that the label properly picked up on them.
McGee’s initial impression was typically idiosyncratic and not entirely helpful: according to him at the time, the band ‘don’t even have a bass player’ and all the songs were ‘played at 33RPM and lasted seven-and-a-half minutes’. But McGee’s then-wife, Yvonne, fell wholly for the charms of ‘Shine On’ and in time McGee also fell under its spell. ‘Personally, I didn’t want to release “Shine On”: I would have preferred to see “Christine” as our first single,’ says Guy today. ‘The reason I didn’t want to release it was because I thought it was our best song.’ This was, of course, the exact reason why McGee wanted to release it. ‘It wasn’t really discussed, and from the record company’s point of view… well, I guess Alan just wanted to find the best song and put it out.’
Just as 1985 had been transformative for Guy Chadwick, so too for Creation. The year had started with the cataclysm of The Jesus & Mary Chain but by Christmas the label was having a clear out, attempting to find its own focus. Out went bands like The Pastels, Meat Whiplash, The Membranes and The X Men, as label boss Alan McGee began concentrating on a roster whose core acts were Primal Scream, The Weather Prophets and Felt. In time, The Weather Prophets and Primal Scream would sign to McGee’s hybrid label Elevation (before quickly returning to Creation), whilst Felt’s majestic Forever Breathes The Lonely Word work mark the release of the label’s first fully-realised album when it appeared in October 1986.
This then was the state of the label when Guy Chadwick began pitching the idea of his band to Alan McGee, although the one Creation band that Guy did aesthetically connect with – The Jesus & Mary Chain – had departed the label in spring 1985. ‘We didn’t exactly feel any affinity with the other Creation bands, or indeed with any other bands really,’ recalls Guy. ‘
‘Shine On’ was released in May 1987, hitting the Indie Top 20 and staying in the charts for 8 weeks – it was an impressive opening salvo. It made Single Of The Week in NME (one of 5 records to receive the accolade that week!) where Danny Kelly claimed the song had ‘rocket boosters and wings’ and was an astonishing ‘transformation of tired, base elements into something that achieves soaring, noble flight..’
With hindsight it is easy to overstate the impact the single had but it certainly stood out as the fresh, bright thing it was at a time when the naysayers were growing particularly gloomy over the state of indie. All through the late spring and summer rumours were rife that The Smiths were about to split up. As it happened, the Manchester band limped on to the early autumn, but the same kind of panic began to infect the media as that that had sprung up during the autumn of 1982 when The Jam had announced and then followed through an intention to split: Where do we go from here?
It was an unsettling time generally. Youth unemployment had continued to rise all through the spring of 1987 and the economic policies of the
Government led to ever-greater recession. The Labour leadership, under Neil Kinnock, had offered so much promise and, over the previous couple of years, via organisations such as Red Wedge, had reached out to and received acres of coverage in the music press, yet at the General Election in
June, Margaret Thatcher was returned to power with a landslide victory.
Shortly after, the Stock Market collapsed. In August, a lone gunman in Hungerford (Michael Ryan) went on a rampage, leaving fourteen dead.
August was also the month that saw the release of the second House Of Love single, ‘Real Animal’. ‘Real Animal’ was a pacier affair than ‘Shine On’, and should have consolidated the band’s position, but it was largely passed over. The Hungerford massacre may also have played its part. The record received five spins (according to Guy) on Radio One before being dropped, allegedly because someone in Hungerford had objected to the songs lyrics, which imagined ‘a thug on the street’ who will ‘shoot you cold where you stood’. The record failed to make the indie charts and had a disorienting effect on Guy Chadwick.
The release was all but stillborn, prompting Guy to ring up Alan McGee and ask directly whether the label would be putting out further records by the band. ‘I asked the question and he answered that Creation would be doing another single. The conversation was to the point and quickly over. Then, about five minutes later he rang me back to tell me how much he loved the band. Of course, Creation would be doing another single, etc, etc… I think he possibly realised how cold he could come across. To me, Creation was always about him, not about the bands. I respect that, that’s just the way he is and always was. The label was his way of becoming a rock star. And to be fair, he did have the front and the charisma to carry it off…’
1987 had got off to a flying start with the magisterial ‘Shine On’ before dipping with ‘Real Animal’. Alas, things went from bad to worse shortly after when Andrea decided to leave the band, just before Christmas 1987. ‘It was a huge blow,’ says Guy, still regretful to this day. ‘She was my favourite member – I really felt that, as a band, we could develop a lot. But she was under-used, and she felt under-used musically. She also got homesick for Germany. With hindsight, it may not sound as if she contributed that much to the House Of Love sound but I just loved her voice. At one point, I tried having the three of us singing – myself, Terry and Andrea – but it didn’t work. So I took Terry out of the vocals, which didn’t go down well with him. Andrea sang on ‘The Hill’, a track on the ‘Christine’ EP, and that was the direction we could have gone. I just knew there was another lead vocalist in the band. I never had a thing about being the lead vocalist, I just ended up singing lead because I never found a singer who was good enough and who wanted to do my songs. So, it was exciting to finally find someone I wanted to write for… Then she announced she was leaving. Alan McGee phoned me up and said that we couldn’t let her leave the band and that she was so important. He made out that it was over if we let her go but there was nothing I could do. I pleaded with her to stay. She wasn’t someone you could replace, really.’
Despite setbacks, progress was made, however, during the back end of 1987. An extensive tour with The Mighty Lemon Drops (then signed to Chrysalis subsidiary Blue Guitar) helped turn the band into a formidable live act, the moment when, in the words of Guy, they ‘became the band that we’d set out to be’. Alan McGee had watched the show at the Town & Country Club, when the band were third on the bill, and come away ‘devastated’ by their power. At that point he invited the band to make an album, upping the ante and setting the next bar for the band to aim for.
Spring 1988 saw the release of the band’s third single and what might have been their crowning glory to that point, but again the process was slightly dogged by bad luck: ‘We recorded “Christine” with Pat Collier but it never really gelled as a mix. I think we then had a go at it. Alan might also have got involved, but that wasn’t very good. The problem wasn’t to do with the sonics, but with the balancing. Eventually, Ian O’Higgins – one of the engineers at the studio – did the best job. In the end the record didn’t quite rock as much as it should have done so we lost something. Having said that, I really like the record now, although looking back, it was never going to get on Radio One.’
By his own admission, Alan McGee’s attempt at mixing ‘Christine’ had been ‘chainsaw hoovermatic’. Yet the difficulties aside, the final, settled-upon version of the song certainly helped restore the band’s status, Melody Maker describing the record as ‘shimmering with reverbed romance… Guy Chadwick at his parched-out best’. It was an ‘heroic anthem to doomed and incandescent love’. In a series of interviews shortly after the single’s release, journalist Jonh Wilde compared the song to ‘the kind of record Spencer Davis was making in 1965’ – high praise indeed – while Simon Reynolds, perhaps hooked by the subtle shift in the song from major to minor, noted that ‘there are cadences and changes here that don’t just trigger, they sound like the shiver down the spine’. The public agreed, sending the single for a three-month stay in the indie charts where it climbed to Number 4.
Work progressed in earnest on the album. It was hoped that Pat Collier might produce, having worked with the band on ‘Real Animal’ and ‘Christine’, but he was otherwise engaged with The Weather Prophets. Studio engineer Steve Nunn did the first mixes but the verdict was not good, and eventually Pat Collier came in to oversee as Guy and the band added in their tuppence-worth. ‘The album was recorded in one week,’ recalls Chris Groothuizen, three days to record and two to mix. ‘The songs were wellgigged so it was just a matter of getting them on tape. There was the odd hiccup with some tracks getting the overdub balances right and we spent a few extra days getting the mixes right, Alan having rejected our first attempt.’
The age-old indie problem of a lack of money and even less experience came to the fore, as Guy notes: ‘I put everything into making as great a record as I could. I don’t think the album was great but it was the best we could do. We didn’t have much time. We didn’t work with a producer. We were a small band on an indie label. There were no big bands on Creation and they just didn’t have very much money. And we weren’t the label’s priority – which I didn’t have a problem with.’
The self-titled album, when it arrived shortly after the release of ‘Christine’, delivered on the promise of the single. One undeniable charm was the contrast between the overloaded layering of guitars and the ‘gravelly voice of calm’ (to quote Len Brown in the NME) that lay at the centre. ‘The guitar sound is spring, the melody and lyrics autumn,’ agreed Simon Reynolds, referring to ‘Christine’ but making a comment that applied equally to the whole of the record. The record stood out, not least according to Danny Kelly, because it was birthed in an era of ‘instant-impact, minimal-retention pop’.
But, of course, there was more to it than even that. For many, the post-C86 sound of indie was as doppelganger – built upon a close reading and amalgamation of the spirit and sound of the mid-to-late-1960s bands such as The Velvet Underground and Love and the energy of punk pioneers like Television. This was music lit up by a distant star, one that was inevitably fading. Just occasionally, as in the case for instance of The Jesus & Mary Chain’s ‘Psychocandy,’ a kind of solar flare-up took place, re-energising.
Exactly such a scenario presented itself to the critics in June 1987. For Simon Reynolds, the arrival of The House Of Love represented ‘the sun gone in to supernova’ and fellow journalist Jonh Wilde viewed the band in a similarly cosmic fashion – the album was’ unnervingly big and entirely everything’. In other words, the sound they had found wasn’t the usual epigonic fare but something new: reverberation rather than retro.
The reverberation in the House Of Love sound was quite literally visceral.
This was less the time-honoured reintroduction of the guitar into the Rock n Roll milieu, in a decade that had been in all senses up until this point largely synthetic, and more a deification of the instrument. Both Guy Chadwick and Terry Bickers were first and foremost guitarists, creating a texture onto which Guy Chadwick’s songs were laid. Guy Chadwick had a vision of the sound and Terry Bickers went a long way to helping him realise it. ‘There’s something about his guitar playing, about his reasons for doing it…’ Guy told Melody Maker. ‘Sometimes, watching him in the studio, he has to turn the lights out, and the INTENSITY – it sends shivers down your spine just watching it. You cannot believe the way he exorcises himself through the instrument. I can’t feel that way about the guitar. To me it is just an instrument, something to be dealt with mechanically. But when Terry plays. it’s as though he’s trying to tear it to pieces, find the answer in the wood…’
The overall effect of the music was the aural equivalent of looking at a tapestry, one with a story to be found in that previously quoted ‘gravelly voice of calm’. Guy Chadwick was ten years older than some of the other members of the band and over thirty when, after seven or so years of trying, he found himself and his band an overnight success. There was plenty of experience to draw upon when it came to constructing songs. There were songs on the album about his ‘wrecked’ first marriage (‘Hope’, ‘Sulphur’), ‘the songs being the only positive things that came out of it’, as he later claimed. ‘The Road’ deals with his journey (in every sense) from Rugby to Camden, while ‘Man To Child’, supposedly Alan McGee’s favourite House Of Love song, is about ‘a man waking up one day and realising he’s a child’.
Journalist Steve Lamacq thought the overall effect of the House Of Love songs was as ‘pop-up psychedelic scripts for mood… spikey in their execution.’ And Guy told Jonh Wilde: ‘I like strong images – religion, God, Jesus, the sea, blood, death, tears, love, sex…’ Many journalists picked up on the sex theme in the song ‘Love In A Car’. According to Guy at the time: ‘My favourite sex imagery is European cinema sex. That voyeuristic approach. Whether it is a matter of concealing, I don’t know. I think of it as erotic and it appeals to me. Death In A French Garden was definitely erotic. I hope our songs are seductions. The leading up… Metaphorical.’
Ironically, the 1985 French erotic thriller Death In A French Garden featured a guitar teacher and some healthy doses of celluloid seduction.
One of the characters is a voyeur. Seduction also features in Anais Nin’s A Spy In The House Of Love novel, where a sexually-liberated woman sets out to seduce a number of men. Referring to the novel and its connection to the band, Guy once said: ‘Her house of love is very much a house of pain.’ The pain and the dislocation in Guy Chadwick’s lyrics is ever present, but one of Art’s purposes surely is to conquer? And in Guy’s writing ‘the general theme is, “please be positive”’, as he explained to Simon Reynolds in July 1988.
The first pressing of the album sold out within weeks. At this point much of the press coverage/hysteria was in the immediate future and Guy Chadwick was still unsure as to what the future might hold. ‘I wasn’t at all sure that we’d come out with anything special,’ he recalls. ‘In fact, I told myself that if nothing happened with the album then I would end the band. You could have knocked me down with a feather when it began to take off. I think they pressed 3,000 to begin within with, and then it was 5,000 and then 10,000 and then Rough Trade got behind it and put a bit of welly into it.’ On 30 July 1988 the band were honoured with almost-unheard-of simultaneous front cover appearances on both the NME and Melody Maker.
The House Of Love toured to promote the album. ‘In 1988, we were going anywhere in the country and playing to 1,500 people per night. We did a full European tour. We were pretty much happening everywhere in Europe as we were in Britain, particularly in France and Germany. We were going to go to America. We’d booked a a ten-date tour at the end of the year but then cancelled it.’ The German market had been especially receptive to the band.
‘Shine On’ had done particularly well and shortly after the release of ‘Real
Animal’ a request came through for a mini-album to be released there (colloquially known as ‘the German album’ since it followed the band’s trend of not explicitly titling their records/sleeves), combining the six tracks from the first two singles and two extra tracks (‘The Hedonist’ and ‘Welt’). The album was imported into the UK in sufficient enough quantities to make the Indie charts. Meanwhile, the debut album proper reached Number 1 in the Indie charts in the UK (and across Europe) and within a year had sold 60,000 copies and been awarded a silver disc.
One person who attended a gig on the UK tour was John Peel, turning up at the Irish Centre in Leeds in May with David Gedge from The Wedding Present. ‘He came to see us,’ remembers Guy, ‘and then wrote a fantastic review of the gig in the Observer.’ The performance clearly knocked Peel for six. ‘The House Of Love showed within seconds that they have that inner tension that makes for a great rather than a merely good band. This was one of those performances that I wished I could have taken away with me.’ Such was the band’s impact that night that almost nine years later to the day (in
1997), the DJ recalled the event on the British Forces Broadcasting Service: ‘One of the great gigs, actually. They were magnificent. I thought, ‘This band is going to dominate the world’. Well. They made a good go of it, you know, but didn’t quite get as far as that, obviously…’
According to Guy, ‘Peel had practically ignored us up to this point but then began playing a track from the album almost every night. He was key to our success that year. It was once he got behind it that the album started selling.’ As a result of Peel’s interest, three House Of Love singles made the DJ’s end of year Festive Fifty – ‘Love In A Car’ was voted in at 18, ‘Christine’ at 9, whilst ‘Destroy The Heart’ carried off the coveted Number 1 slot (as well as topping a number of the NME Readers Polls that Christmas). The band recorded two sessions for John Peel that year, the first (broadcast on 7 June 1988) featured ‘Destroy The Heart’, ‘Nothing To Me’, ‘Plastic’ and ‘Blind’, the second (broadcast on 26 August 1988) featured ‘The Hedonist’, ‘Don’t Turn Blue’, ‘Safe’ and ‘Love In A Car’. There were four further Peel sessions (two in 1989, one in 1991 and one in 1992). The band also later played the DJ’s 50th birthday party (in 1989), standing in for The Undertones who had to pull out of the event at the last moment.
A whirlwind three months (since the release of Christine) culminated in
August with an appearance on the Creation compilation, Doing It For The Kids (‘Christine’) and a headlining performance at the Town & Country Club for a Creation special (‘Creation Records Are Doing It For The Kids’). The show also featured Felt, Biff Bang Pow!, Heidi Berry, Primal Scream, The Jasmine Minks, The Jazz Butcher and My Bloody Valentine, but The House Of Love stole the show.
The start of August also saw the arrival of the band’s third and final single for Creation. ‘Destroy The Heart’ was one of the earliest Guy Chadwick compositions, and had started out life as something far slower than the finished release suggested it to be. On an early demo a drum machine was used. It was also, according to Chris Groothuizen, ‘one of the first songs we recorded as part of the album sessions. The initial recording wasn’t happening the way Guy wanted it and it was built up from scratch several times until he was happy with the arrangement.’
Once again, the song discourses on melancholy, with the doomed narrator noting of his lover, ‘I need her more than I need air’. ‘It’s a very selfdestructive idea… about being completely blinded by a relationship,’ Guy told Melody Maker at the time. Everything chimes musically as the song reaches its apex before collapsing in on itself. The B side, ‘Blind’, an acoustic song written about Guy’s girlfriend and the band’s photographer Suzie Gibbons, is couched in a series of negatives – ‘I’m not an eagle/I’m not a saint’, etc – yet is ultimately intended as affirmation of the narrator’s stability. Today, Guy Chadwick – ever the seeker of perfection – reflects on the song as interesting failure: ‘“Destroy The Heart” didn’t quite make the grade the way it could have done. It just wasn’t driving enough. I was disappointed with the way it ended up sounding, to be honest.’
‘Destroy The Heart’ inevitably made its way towards the top of the Indie Charts but proved to be the final Creation single (save for an acoustic, flexiversion of ‘Shine On’ given away at a gig). A further release was planned – the majestic song ‘Safe’, but, once again, the fates deemed the production job not quite there and the record was temporarily shelved (later resurfacing as the B side of the band’s first Fontana release, ‘Never’). Safe had been produced by Daniel Miller, the founder of Mute. In the pecking order of independent record labels Mute, along with Factory and Rough Trade, were arguably above Creation, a potential home for The House Of Love should they decide to jump ship and take the time honoured route of finding safe berth at a larger indie. The band would move on in time, but not to another indie label.
In fact, the band ended 1988 with celebration rather than any kind of dissolution, honoured with an invite by the prestigious South Bank Show to perform the song ‘Christine’ on the programme’s Review Of The Year broadcast. This was added to those garlands – top slots in Peel’s Festive Fifty and the NME Readers’ Poll – already received, as the year wound down. But once again, things didn’t quite go to plan. ‘Melvyn Bragg liked the song and my thinking is that the choice was between us and The Wonder Stuff who were having a similar kind of impact at the same time. It was an amazing thing to do since it was recorded before all these famous people. But it turned into a disaster. When we began the live recording in front of the audience we didn’t realise that Terry’s amp and my amp were both on stand-by, so the song started with no guitars. In the end, they used the rehearsal take with bits of live material dubbed on to it.’
At the start of 1989 The House Of Love were still technically speaking a Creation Records band. They, along with The Darling Buds and The Wonder Stuff were being widely hailed as the Next Big Thing. All three were deemed to be ‘the flower of a nation’, according to one music paper punning on the Darling Buds’ name at the time. By spring The Darling Buds would be signed to Epic and The House Of Love would be signed to Fontana. The Wonder Stuff had long been signed to a major, having joined forces with Polydor in 1987 before releasing their epic ‘Eight-Legged Groove Machine’ album. The shift to major label reflected a wider shift of aspiration in indie – indeed, 1989 would see The Fall sign to Phonogram and The Wedding Present ink a deal with RCA.
‘I didn’t like being on Creation,’ says Guy today. ‘It wasn’t exactly that they were amateur, but neither were they big time and the certainly didn’t have any money. They didn’t have the experience and Alan McGee was learning. He was more concerned about the reputation of the music than actually trying to technically make records that would get played on the radio in the way that they eventually did – Primal Scream and Oasis. In the early days the records were just so cheaply made.’
Guy Chadwick had approached Alan McGee and told him that he wanted to leave Creation. ‘I wanted to work with decent producers and I wanted some clout, so I made that decision,’ he says today. ‘I told Alan that I didn’t feel confident that Creation could realise my ambitions for future records.
The arrangement that fell into place made Alan McGee the House Of Love’s manager and he then shopped the band a deal. This wasn’t dissimilar from the way The Jesus & Mary Chain moved on from Creation, or the way The Weather Prophets and Primal Scream shifted across to Elevation. It predictably turned out that all the major labels were interested in signing the band, hardly surprising since the music press had dubbed them ‘a band to rival U2’. The band eventually settled on Fontana, signing for a fee of around £400,000.
‘I didn’t want to sign to Fontana. I didn’t like Dave Bates when I first met him,’ says Guy. ‘The biggest deal we got offered was EMI – getting on for a million quid. But we had to pay for our own record. Basically, the Phonogram deal was net – before recording costs, before anything. And Alan McGee was going to get the most money, which is why he pushed for the deal, not that I blame him. He courted that label. The most impressive person I met was Muff Winwood at CBS. He was someone I respected, an exmusician who talked in the right way: what do you want to do, who do you want to work with? Dave Bates was like, I’m going to make this happen for you in America. He was really aggressive and riding off the back of the success of Tears For Fears and Def Leppard. But it was such a mistake… And now I feel that we might have been better off staying at Creation, sticking with the devil we knew.’
Of course, hindsight always comes with 20/20 vision and the story of The House Of Love’s Phonogram days is for another day, and perhaps it is even another story. For nothing really compares to the meteoric rise of the band during that earlier Creation period, when the vista before them was wide and awesome, and the future possibilities seemed limitless. Playing Shine On two days before Christmas Day 1988, John Peel made the following remark: ‘Are they destined for greatness, or have they already been left behind? It’s difficult to say. We’ll find out next year.’
Writing in 2007, Alan McGee – an outsider arguably closer to the epicentre than anyone else – said the following: ‘House Of Love were a great Creation band…. I loved them and was gutted they never stayed on Creation. For one year they could have taken anyone on live. Terry was a true genius, Guy a master songwriter, the recipe for bigtime success still to this day. They were a one-off.’
McGee’s fondness for the isolated period of 1987/8 when they became allconquering, when mistakes couldn’t be made and when disappointments couldn’t materialise surely reflects the ephemeral nature of pop brilliance, which burns brightly for a while before inevitably fading. The critic Simon Reynolds – he who had described the band as ‘the sun gone into supernova’ – also spoke of the group’s ‘radiant immediacy’, suggesting perhaps that such a wondrous thing can only last for a moment.