Brilliant Mind is one of the most perfectly brilliant songs of the 1980s. I fell in love with it instantly when heard on the radio in 1986 at the age of 13. And then I heard nothing more from the band that created this brilliance, Furniture. Sadly, very few people did, since their record company went bust, and the album that housed this single (their only charting release) The Wrong People wasn’t reissued by ZTT – who’d bought the catalogue and contracts from the bankrupt Stiff Records – despite its 30,000 copies selling out. I have one of those LPs. I also have this, a copy of their first ever release, the EP When The Boom Was On. I picked it up for a couple of Euros from a record fair. It was only when it came up on the randometer for review that I discovered on Discogs that due to its rarity, it’s now worth about £100. Its value to me, however, is in the quality of the music: all youthful exuberance tempered with just the right amount of taking themselves too seriously. What I like best about Brilliant Mind is Jim Irvin’s voice, the originality of the lyrics, and the inventive musicality of their arrangements. Though this track features frequently on ‘Best of 80s’ compilations, it’s far from the standard synth new wave fare. The Guardian, on the occasion of the re-release of their first album in 2010, wrote that the band “fused new wave, jazz, blues, post-punk, alt-rock, and about a dozen other genres with some of the most poetic lyrics ever written.” This is particularly true here on the evocative opening track, Transatlantic Cable, Why Are We In Love and A Letter To Myself. But what’s been best about relistening to this record is the Internet wormhole it sent me down in discovering what happened to Jim Irvin after the band broke up, broken by the bad luck of their record company. In 2015 he published A Book Of Wildflowers: Sandy Denny, Joni Mitchell & Kate Bush, in which the writing is as lovely as the subjects, and I’m currently reading with flowering delight. #furniture #brilliantmind #whentheboomwason #recordcollection #vinyl @jimirvinmusic #nowlistening #randomrecordreview https://www.instagram.com/p/CHIyfHjJ6cw/?igshid=1huhf1okl3vba