#wreckless eric

[barbequebarf]

more girl stiffs i cry out into the echo chamber

[musickickztoo]

Wreckless Eric *May 18, 1954

[flamememeago]

Average Live Stiffs tour experience

[bandcampsnoop]

3/6/26.

As long as we're on a power pop jag (recent Softjaw post and dozens of references to The Lemon Twigs) we might as well post The Rubs "Impossible Dream" (HoZac Records, 2017). I absolutely revere HoZac for their new music and reissues, but I find it nearly impossible to keep up with the label as evidenced by my 9-year delay on this classic.

The Rubs (Chicago, Illinois) is really mainly the work of Joey Rubbish (Joey Montanaro) whose style of power pop reminds me of The Toms, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric. More recently, he's released work as Flesh Panthers and recorded music for The Whiffs. Rubbish isn't a one trick pony by any means - listen to "Too Young For Me" - it's got the swagger and sound of The Rolling Stones.

[dustedmagazine]

Wreckless Eric — England Screaming (Tapete)

Wreckless Eric Goulden wrote these songs in the early 1980s, just after getting dropped by Stiff Records and in the midst of a turn from the jagged power pop of cuts like “Whole Wide World” towards acerbic social commentary.  They were originally recorded by a short-lived, Goulden-led band called Captains of Industry, an outfit which included Ian Drury’s keyboard player Mickey Gallagher, who can be heard on the original release tootling away on organ.

As originally realized, the songs were an odd mix of biting satire and giddy Beatles pop, sung with a trebly enthusiasm that undercut an often subversive message. It was a commercial and critical disaster. Explained Goulden in a 2008 interview in Turn It Down, “The whole thing was a disaster because no one knew who or what Captains of Industry was and we got really bad reviews. It was the 80s and everyone was having a great big cocaine party — all except me, drunk and disgusted in my corner. I tried to make an album about the state of the country, real life under the Thatcher regime, but no one wanted to know. I think the production lets it down — I particularly don't like the vocals or the vocal sound. When Different Class by Pulp came out it all became clear, that was the album I'd wanted to make but I wasn't up to it.”

Now, after a lifetime’s worth of lyrics tweaking capitalism, striverism and the middle class, Goulden has decided to revisit the material with his current band (you can hear Amy Rigby in the choruses).  “The original recordings were released 40 years ago on an album nobody liked, least of all me,” he admits in a note scrawled in marker on the album cover. “It’s always been a regret to me because I think these songs mark my ‘coming of age’ as a songwriter. I decided to re-record them just to see if I could and to lay to rest the ghastliness of the original release.”

The thing is, he’s got a point. The songs on England Screaming sound very much in line with Wreckless Eric’s recent output, brash and tuneful, the words barked out in the artist’s clanging, faintly tremulous tenor, the choruses exploding in swaggering hooks. And they are very good songs, not a real dud in the bunch, and a couple that rank with the artist’s very best. Listen, for instance, to how “Land of the Faint at Heart” gathers steam, toiling disgustedly though conformist Thatcherite England (“raise a cheer for the Nobel Prize for ignorance”), but breaking out in an all-hands, instantly memorable refrain. The song is a searing indictment, but also kind of a bop, and you’ll be humming it to yourself before too many plays have gone by.

Same goes for “Food Factory,” a preening, blustering ode to dead end jobs, or the sharp guitared “Playtime Is Over.” “Lady of the Manor” is the best of the lot, to my ears, a cutting-satire of homeowner pride. It’s so closely drawn that you can’t entirely dismiss the woman’s fixation on garden beds and washing machines and genteel lemonade in the garden; you feel, as in all really great parody, the strength of the argument that’s punctured.

This material comes from a stretch when Wreckless Eric gave up on his boy-band, pop star aspirations and began to mine a darker, more complicated vein. It’s not surprising that listeners and critics missed the turn, especially since the first iteration still sounded very pop. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can see the beginnings of Goulden’s evolution into the bitterly funny (but still hooky) songwriter he’s become now. And beyond that, the songs are excellent and well worth saving.

Jennifer Kelly

[beetnelson]

when i make a playlist you know it's over

[musicmags]

[gregorygalloway]

Wreckless Eric (born Eric Goulden, 18 May 1954)