This is quite simply a brilliant album. Pat Fish (or the Jazz Butcher as he is known on this release) came up with melodic, melancholic, beuatiful rock/pop songs that are jammed full of emotion. Although Fish has stated he is unhappy with the overall production, John a Rivers created a sound with these songs utilizing the tight band put together for this album. There are a number of highlights, but the album is worth buying just for the wonderful "The Word I Was Looking For," which is lyrically very clever and has a tune that stays with you long after the album is over. This album is a brilliant example British guitar pop/rock souond from the late '80s.
The Butcher Says...
This was a real "band" album by a touring unit which had become really quite ferocious. In choosing to work with John A. Rivers again we felt that we were sufficiently noisy and fierce to cope with any over- tidy production strokes he might pull. "Clean *that* up, then, ya bastard" was out declared policy in the group.
Of course, we under-rated him.I wanted to start to mess with the pretty traditional song structures we were using. We were all aware that music was changing, and, more out of interest than out of any spurious "career" concern, we wanted to see where we could take our pop songs using things like breakdowns, the mixing in of "found" voices (which we first heard NOT from Steinski or the Bryne/Brian Eno collaboration, but from John Stapleton, a DJ who scratched things in at early The Blue Aeroplanes, radical and unexpected changes of sounds - a series of sonic events rather than plain old verse/chorus structure. I probably did too much pre-production on my (new) 4-track at home, and the whole thing sounds a bit stillborn