Graham Reid | | 3 min read
Blanket Over the Sky
In a recent interview Graeme Downes of the Verlaines – for these past four years retired from music and academic life while recovering from a cancer operation – spoke proudly of their 1993 album Way Out Where.
He'd written all 12 songs while under considerable pressures: a deadline from the American label Slash, while completing his master's thesis, and knowing this was going to the band's last gasp at what he jokingly called “world domination”.
After releases on Flying Nun they'd signed to Slash in a seven album deal but after the comparative failure of the Slash debut Ready to Fly – despite favourable reviews and a reasonably successful tour in the US with Buffalo Tom – Downes knew the next album could be their last for that company.
And Way Out Where did prove their farewell to Slash.
Although the band and Downes soldiered on touring and recording, the rock'n'roll world had changed (Nirvana and megabucks poured into the grunge phenomena) and the Verlaines' music – sometimes complex, difficult, literary – was pushed to the margins.
Way Out Where was therefore met with some indifference and having a bizarre cover which Downes says he couldn't be bothered fighting over didn't help.
Yet, looked at afresh in its first appearance on vinyl (remastered at Abbey Road and in a more appropriate cover) it stands as one of the Verlaines' finest albums.
It bristles with barely contained rage, great songs and pointed socio-political comment on the title track which speaks of climate change (“the ocean is rising up, the rivers are drying up”) and “we all depend on the status quo”.
“You have to remember this was 1993,” he told me, “and global warming was, in terms of popular consciousness a political and social football. Greta Thunberg was not even born.
“[The Verlaines] were just greenhorns from Dunedin touring America but seeing it was not sustainable and we're just way down at the bottom of the earth.
“I wasn't standing on a soapbox and protesting in a nauseating way -- because most protest songs are nauseating – but also had to acknowledge my own complicity, or our own complicity.
“Driving the car in New Zealand is exactly the same as driving one on the freeway in LA, we're all contributing.
“We can't hide behind the argument that my carbon footprint isn't as big as yours, it doesn't rate that way. And the lines are in there: 'PC singer, oil rigger, no-good lawyer'. The PC singer is me, we're all locked in.”
Elsewhere on the album are songs about the pains of love (the desperate intensity of Blanket Over the Sky which opens with “you know any fool can do this, only a fool would want to”) and Aches in Whisper which he tells me is based on Goethe's 1774 novel of doomed love The Sorrows of Young Werther (“she tells him to get out of her life and eventually he blows his head off. It caused such a stir when he wrote it and there were copycat suicides around Europe”.
Incarceration is about the legacy of disillusion and disappointment at what you might have been.
Lucky in My Dreams sounds like a great pop-rock song deserving of re-discovery.
The damage that love does and the hovering wings of mortality or finality are everywhere and the power of the album comes from the musicianship of drummer Darren Stedman (who has been behind the current issue of Verlaines albums on vinyl), guitarist Paul Winders and bassist Mike Stoodley alongside Downes who is in exceptional voice (check the passionate intensity of Blanket Over the Sky).
There is an edge of desperation and tension about the album, in part because it was written under pressure and recorded in Los Angeles with Joe Ciccarelli which was “arduous, nothing was left to chance and [American producers] tie down every detail which is why it sounds as slick as it does”.
Downes also notes that Frank Arkwright at Abbey Road who did the remastering of the vinyl edition (“he did the first Joy Division”) had a good feel for what they had wanted.
And so Way Out Where – new sound, new and more appropriate cover, songs which probably comes fresh to even longtime Verlaines' fans who skipped the album first time round – arrives as an album freighted with meaning.
And, as Graeme Downes – who is his own harshest critic – says, it would be hard to find another album with 12 such diverse songs.
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The remastered Way Out Where is available on vinyl from selected record stores. The original version is available at bandcamp here and soon the remastered version will appear at digital outlets.
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