yes, indeed i am aware, look you see, that the Manics have a new (number one) record out, and i have yet to pass comment. well, not doing that there here for now, but will, "soon". i thought i may pause on it, reflect, and try and do a decent bit of writing. which, presumably, shall be an interesting and unusual thing for any regular readers.
instead, then, a wander back to a curious incident (or episode) in music from the past. rather than, say, the future. and it stems from a rather surprising, although maybe not happy, find in a charity shop. for those unaware, or curious, it is so that these days, here in the UK one can walk into a charity shop and find, so much have we devalued music, offers where you can get 3, four or yes, even 5 CDs for £1. usually i can find ample to meet the pricing structure.
for some reason, of late, a lot of the charity shops i go digging in have had stacks of CD singles. this is a format which the world fell out of love with, or what certain bands now abuse, for on the rare instances one gets issued, normally it is a limited edition, one track thing. before, once, you got two or three extra tracks, or some remixes, or live things.
with some surprise, then, i found the not particularly rare, and not really fondly recalled, debut and biggest selling single off of (ahem) The Seahorses, with that single being Love Is The Law. as many shall know, The Seahorses (which just happens to be an anagram of "he hates roses") was the band what John Squire unleashed rather conveniently quickly after his departure from The Stone Roses.
as was always the case with the British music press, apparently the guitarist is always going to move on to better and bigger things. when The Smiths split, Johnny Marr was going from strength to strength whilst Morrissey would vanish, when Bernard Butler quit Suede he would be massive and the band was over, and of course it would be Squire who rose to greater heights from the (absolute) f*****g mess what was the end of the Roses. it didn't happen.
strangely, though, Love Is The Law is a decent song. an above average slice of what gets labelled Britpop, for convenience if not fact. produced, as it is, by music aristocracy in the form of a certain Tony Visconti. this record held up really, really well until Ian Brown (that one) revealed it, and virtually all Seahorses songs, had been heard and rejected by the Roses as not being good enough. which is quite the statement to be making in the naked light of what eventually did get deemed to be acceptable to release on Second Coming.
regarding the music, and the two b-sides are tunes that i had not heard, for they didn't make the cut for the one and only album, the pure average Do It Yourself. an album on which Liam Gallagher (that one) was allowed to write a song for, long before he was allowed to do so for his day job band. anyway, the first b-side is Dreamer, written by the busker. how to describe it? well, if Noel Gallagher heard it, he would have immediately put down whatever wad of cash he was counting, do a brief applause and lament that he, himself, had never done such an audacious (yet rudimentary) re-write of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds himself. for a second b-side, Sale of The Century, ahem. no.
my cost, or investment, in this single will be somewhere between 20p and 33p, going to one good cause or another. to that, yes, full value i got. mostly, mind, this is a value stemmed from memories being jogged by it existing.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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