Only Slightly Less Then I Used To, My Love: Top 10 Falls From Grace

We all know this feeling. Most artists go through a purple patch, some are lucky enough to go through a couple, and the stuff they produce outside of this, whilst often still harbouring the ghostly flickers of genius, is somehow less essential, less earth-shatteringly brilliant, basically, less good. This isn’t what this article is about. This article is about those artists who have produced great music that you really love, but have managed to screw up so badly that you are hardly on speaking terms with them. However, for some bands, the failure becomes an integral part of the story. The old adage about the journey being as important as getting there is the key here, as many great artists come to the brink of fame and fortune, only to throw it all away in the most dramatically stupid yet incredibly endearing way possible. Rock and roll has always been about the rebel, the outsider, and things would be a lot less exciting were it not for hardened outsiders such as Kevin Rowland who simply refuse to relinquish their status as rebel. And there’s something cool about that, (providing you can forget about the dress). So, from the terrible betrayals so embarrassing you can’t look them in the eye any more to the charmingly reckless wholesale destruction of promising careers, these are pop music’s most dramatic falls from grace.

10. House Of Love

House Of Love could have had it all. In Guy Chadwick, they had a damaged vocalist with the ability to imbue even his most vacuous lyrics with a sensual and dangerous depth of feeling. In Terry Bickers they had indie pop’s first post-Johnny Marr guitar hero. In 1989, with The Smiths and Felt both out the way, and The Fall temporarily faltering for the first time in their career, the door was open. They could have been the next Great Band; hell, they WERE the next Great Band, with their stunning first album and the accompanying Creation singles achieving effortless brilliance. Then, they blew it in the most spectacularly stupid way possible. A combination of deplorable behaviour, bickering and shameless money-chasing meant that their major-label second album was delayed for years, coming out only after Chadwick had chucked Bickers simultaneously out of his band and his moving tour van, a blow from which the band never recovered. House Of Love had missed their chance, allowing the infinitely inferior likes of The Stone Roses and The La’s to take their place as the next big thing. Thus did the world loose its prime contenders for the next Felt. Well done guys.

9. Roxy Music

Roxy started life as everyone’s favourite retro-futurists and ended up as high-grade elevator music. The first four Roxy albums refuse to date. They are perhaps the ultimate fusion of pop and art – smart without being pretentious, as fun as they were clever, gloriously original yet instantly poppy and approachable. The first two Eno-assisted albums are still the best, yet Stranded and Country Life proved that RM could assuredly function without him, adapting to become leaner and slicker, yet still retaining their sense of adventure and individuality. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the abominable Siren. By this stage, Brian Ferry had lost interest in the band, launching his solo career as the king of supermarket pop, resulting in a dreary and uninspiring record. By the time of Avalon and Flesh and Blood, all aesthetic ties with early Roxy Music had been severed, leaving a highly efficient but soulless unit shifter. As the first four Roxy albums became increasingly cooler, influencing generation after generation of art-poppers, the band itself became less and less cool, an airbrushed and emasculated version of what had gone before. Your granny probably finds Avalon a bit too MOR.

8. Manic Street Preachers

There was something special about the Manics. Bursting on a lackluster music scene in a whirlwind of glam-rock decadence and confused rhetoric, they were an inspiring mix of brash arrogance, intelligence and dumb naivety. Spouting nonsense about cultural alienation, boredom and despair over anthemic rock, they managed to make people really believe in them, inspiring a rare devotion in their fans that makes them almost unbareable to be in the same room as. They then made the mistake of believing too much in their own hype, and as their personal lives spiraled out of control in the wreckage of Richey Edward’s messy demise, their music just got better and better. The Holy Bible is a great album because you sense that it was an utterly necessary act of catharsis for the group, and it’s made all the more poignant by the fact that it wasn’t enough to save Richey from himself. Whatever you said about the Manics, and whatever ill-informed, dangerous or just plain daft nonsense the Manics said themselves, you could bet your bottom dollar that they believed it. However, it couldn’t last; that kind of intensity never does. And, having experienced first hand how it burned up Richey Edwards from the inside, how could you blame the band for taking a couple of steps back? Everything Must Go and the best bits of This Is My Truth… are still deeply personal and cathartic, but the result of an older, sadder and wiser band. But then, the Manics stopped believing in themselves, and were thus robbed of their raison d’etre. The horrific mess that is Know Your Enemy reveals a band that has lost its muse, desperately trying on everything for size and failing miserably. The band that once inspired a generation of daft young people can now no longer inspire itself. Sadly, it appears that the Manics are perfectly content to go through the motions, something you imagine that four snotty youths from Wales who once claimed they were going to outsell Guns N Roses with their debut and then split up would have quite rightly had nothing but contempt for.

7. Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth used to be a force of nature; wild, untamable, indestructible. Spawned from New York’s No Wave scene, for over 25 years they have been scrawling their mark in huge letters on the face of modern music. Ragged and unpredictable, often inconsistent yet almost always worth hearing, they have mutated, changed and evolved, playing to nobody’s rules but their own. Like The Fall, they eschewed nostalgia, living in the present and continuously moving one ahead of the times. However, now that they have been recognised as an important and influential group by Rock and Roll Incorporated, they are perfectly happy to put their Daydream Nation album on a pedestal in a museum and sell records through Starbucks. I thought you guys were better then that.

6. David Bowie

You’d think that maybe David Bowie would fall into the category of people whose recent albums are simply uninspiring rather then dramatically awful, but this really is the problem. Bowie was really on a roll from 1971 to 1980, there can be few runs of albums more impressive then Hunky Dory to Scary Monsters, and if they exist, they are probably less original and less bewilderingly stylistically diverse. Each of Bowie’s albums from this classic period spawned a genre’s worth of imitators. From the glam-pop perfection of Ziggy Stardust to the icy soundscapes of Low, Bowie never stayed still for more then one album, constantly challenging himself and his audience, and having hit records at the same time. That’s why the man’s post-Scary Monsters work is so utterly disappointing: who would have thought that Bowie could become boring?

5. Ride

There was a clause in the standard Creation Record’s contract that all the bands had to sign, which stated that if your career looked like it might be taking off, then you agreed to screw it up in the most horrific and destructive way you could possibly think of. Well, there may as well have been, judging from what happened to most of Creation’s bright young hopes. But Ride surely went above and beyond the call of duty, having as they do one of the most depressing career trajectories in the whole of pop music. When they were first signed to Creation, they were tipped to be the next big thing. A couple of brilliant EPs and the all-time classic Nowhere LP and it looked like Creation had finally found a band that would make it. Their comeback single, ‘Leave Them All Behind’, despite being an eight minute prog rock epic, was Creation’s first ever top ten single. However, Ride’s second album, the under-rated Going Blank Again, came out at a bad time. My Bloody Valentine had effectively destroyed the whole shoegazing scene by releasing the era-defining Loveless, and Creation were devoting much of their time and money to their newest signing, an unknown cocky Manchester band with big eyebrows. Before you could say ‘Britpop’, shoegazing was suddenly irredeemably pretentious and uncool, and Ride were out of critical and public favour. They would spend the rest of the decade becoming more and more uninspiring as they attempted to sound more and more like Oasis. Ride’s third album, Carnival Of Light, is less-then-affectionately known as Carnival Of Shite by the band themselves. Hard feelings and fraying tempers resulted in vocalist and second guitarist Mark Gardener walking out of the band at this stage, and guitarist Andy Bell is so ashamed of their universally panned final album that he never collected the royalties from it. The public apparently concurred, as it was deleted after only a week in the shops. This would be an undignified enough ending, but, sadly it wasn’t the end. Andy Bell went on to form Hurricane #1, who spent their mercifully brief career being slagged off for being a crap Oasis, and, then in a final cruel twist of fate for a band that once promised so much, Andy Bell now plays bass for Oasis themselves. These days, you rarely if ever hear about Ride, and you never hear their songs on the radio. The decline and fall of what was briefly one of the 90s’ finest bands is tragically complete.

4. R.E.M.

Remember the good old days when R.E.M. were good? From 1983 to 1987, for a run of five fantastic albums, they were America’s answer to The Smiths, only less whiney. Their five albums for IRS still sound fresh, mysterious and inspiring today. However, then they signed to a major label and got big. Not a problem in itself you realize, but R.E.M. fell victim to quite a common major label disease, where you go ‘Hey, you know, I’m suddenly selling an awful lot of records; there are an awful lot of fans out there who want to hear my music. I have a responsibility to these fans, therefore I will make sure that my music a) says something important and inspiring to these young people and b) is liked by these people’. Big mistake. Never ever do this, because it means that the music you make will suck. R.E.M. stopped making music that was oblique, individual and magical and started making big, anthemic songs that would sound good in stadiums when the fans got their lighters out. They lost the air of mystery from their lyrics, exchanging Stipe’s oblique-speak for bland sentiment, and replacing earlier eloquent political protest songs such as ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ with much more blunt, straightforward sloganeering. This was doubly disappointing, as you’d always thought that R.E.M. would be a group intelligent enough and blessed with enough integrity not to make this amateur’s mistake. Then, after selling loads and loads of records with Automatic For The People, they stopped bothering to write tunes as well. Thus did one of America’s most original, alluring and mysterious of bands in recent times become dull, gauche and predictable.

3. Morrissey

Being a British indie band between 1984 and 1987 really would have sucked, because however good you were, you were always going to come in second. The Smiths stole the hearts of the nation’s students, loners and outcasts for a period of four years and as many albums and, while they continue to polarize opinion today, they remain one of the most loved bands of all time. Johnny Marr’s sparkling guitar work provided the stunning music, but it was Morrissey’s tragicomic lyrics that often won the youth’s hearts and minds. With his dour wit, unique singing voice and canny talent for self-promotion, Morrissey was the face of indie music for years. After The Smiths split, Mozza went off on his solo career, and has today just as many hopelessly devoted followers. Except the problem is, Morrissey is no musician. Not playing an instrument, he is forced into the role of eternal collaborator, and, since his separation from Marr, he has never found anyone else whose artistic vision fits so well with his own. Marr’s music seemed to complement the eccentric flow of the Moz’s lyrics and every twist and turn, but these days, his collaborators are unable to offer him anything as magical or as sympathetic to his work. As a result, all of Morrissey’s solo albums are unable to hold a candle to his work with The Smiths, the last couple in particular being particularly turgid pub-rock affairs. But also, if you just look at the man’s lyrics, Morrissey got less funny and less touching after he left The Smiths. His Smiths lyrics always had a sharp sense of humour which belied his reputation as king of the mope, and a deep-felt sensitivity that buoyed the music at its very bleakest. However, Mozza is now pettier, nastier and less amusing. I reckon that he basically got trapped playing this miserable wallflower persona. He did it so well in The Smiths because songs like ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ are done with a sense of irony and humour, but there days, as Morrissey goes through middle age still playing the miserable teenager, the irony has drained away and all that’s left is a man who has become a shallow and nasty parody of himself.

2. Genesis

Stop laughing. Genesis used to be one of Britain’s finest bands. Between 1970 and 1976, during their progressive rock years, they were one of the most original and forward thinking bands around. The classic line-up of Peter Gabriel (vocals, flute), Steve Hackett (guitar), Tony Banks (keyboards), Mike Rutherford (bass) and (sighs, yes) Phil Collins (drums) made some of the most intoxicatingly brilliant progressive rock, from the sinister whimsy of Nursery Cryme to the surreal concept album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Driven by stunning musicianship and innovative songwriting, they explored a peculiarly English form of psychedelic rock music. Even after Peter Gabriel left for his own (excellent) solo career, the remaining members continued for two more albums of proggy goodness. Then Steve Hackett left, and it all went to pot. I really wish they’d changed their name at this point. Genesis, now led by Phil Collins, became one of the wankiest pop groups ever to stalk the earth for far too long, with diabolical hit singles like ‘Invisible Touch’ bringing out the very worst in pop music and selling it to your mum. Then came Phil Collins’ fetid solo career, making him one of the most notorious villains in pop music (and sadly obscuring the fact that he is a talented drummer who has drummed on numerous worthwhile albums by the likes of Brian Eno and John Martyn). And that’s not to mention the damage Mr. Rutherford did with Mike and the Mechanics. It’s no wonder you can’t mention Genesis without howls of derision. I prefer to remember them as the great band they used to be, but it’s hard when the radio keeps their dreadful MOR stuff on frequent rotation. Fun fact: in BBC’s recent and somewhat incredibly uninspiring ‘Seven Ages of Rock’ series, for the prog section they interviewed everyone in the classic line-up of Genesis apart from Steve Hackett. Poor show.

1. Paul McCartney

After so many years, poor old Macca is still one of pop music’s most ridiculed characters. You’d think that it would be time for us to give him a break. Or maybe those crazy historical revisionists will run out of stuff to listen to and start claiming that he’s cool for a change. But no such luck. It was footage of this man at a recent festival performing the execrable ‘Jet’ that inspired this entire article. Unfortunately, this is just one of the cases where received wisdom is spot on. The Beatles are still one of the greatest and most important pop groups ever, despite what you sniveling hipsters say. Bold, original and fun, their music stands the dual tests of time and of everyone ripping them off for approaching fifty years now. And poor old Paul often gets a short shrift in the Beatles, with everyone saying John had the talent, so let it be said: Paul’s Beatles stuff is awesome. Songs like ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘For No One’ are beautifully melodic, innovative, original, and richly emotional without descending into trite sentiment. So how did it all go so wrong? For some reason, once left to his own devices, Macca just wasn’t able to hack it. Bland sentimentality was the order of the day, and someone who was once one of the four coolest people on the planet became irredeemably naff forever more. Today, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the poor old guy. Until you hear something by Wings.

Novelty

I think I have a reasonable amount of loyalty to the bands I like. I’m not a raving completist, but I do like to have all of a band’s worthwhile albums, and will generally give overlooked or underrated albums at least a couple of spins. I have rushed down to the record shop the day an album has been released, and have counted the days to various release dates. I generally give albums multiple listens before passing ultimate judgement, (I have even done this with bands I do not like just because I feel I ought to have given their music a chance), and I enjoy coming back to records and hearing them in a new light. In short, I think I have reasonable grounds for saying that I’m an open-minded music fan with a fair degree of loyalty to bands I like. Hell, due to (perhaps foolish) undying devotion to certain pop groups, I have listened to Tales From Topographic Oceans, Earthbound and Cerebral Caustic on numerous occasions just in case I was missing something (the short answer is, I wasn’t). So, it is with a heavy heart that I write this article about two bands whose recent dreadful albums have caused my love for them to cool to the point of apathy. And yes, I am talking about indie-pop’s most universally adored heroes, The Arcade Fire and Interpol.
There are similarities. When Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights appeared in 2002, it felt like a genuine breath of fresh air and a rebirth of potential for a tired and hackneyed genre, as did The Arcade Fire’s Funeral in 2004. Although neither band could claim to be original, both drew from familiar sources to produce music that stood out from the glut of contemporary indie releases by the same two virtues – songwriting talent and emotional impact. The records initially caught your ear because of the (then) novelty of their reference points – Interpol drew on post-punk heroes such as Joy Division and Echo and The Bunnymen and then brought it up to date with a vaguely post-rock sheen, The Arcade Fire mixed up the more standard Bowie and Roxy Music fixations with a love of Neutral Milk Hotel – but the more you listened to them, the more you realized that both albums were very much a product of modern times, each dealing gracefully and touchingly with the angst and confusion of the modern world without slipping into the glib sentimentality and gauche generalizations characteristic of the many post-Radiohead bands who have tried the same thing. Both album’s stark emotional honesty and fresh musical approach reaffirmed faith in a genre that was drowning in its own slick ennui and dearth of ideas. Turn On The Bright Lights and Funeral are, ultimately, great albums that this decade will be remembered for and judged by.
All this, of course, puts huge and unreasonable pressure on the band for the follow up. Both bands took a long time with their next album, during which time expectations soared and musical landscapes changed. When Interpol returned with Antics in 2004, a horde of bands had sprung up drawing from similar musical influences, and their thunder as the biggest post-punk revivalists had been stolen by Franz Ferdinand’s meteoric rise. By the time The Arcade Fire released Neon Bible in 2007, The Arctic Monkeys had become the biggest thing since sliced Oasis thanks to the internet, and The Arcade Fire’s
similar word-of-mouth success had risen to the point where they were greeted as returning heroes in the press, with wide-scale media coverage that would have been unthinkable for Funeral. Interpol return this month to the same environment with their third album, Our Love To Admire. It is a truism that this leads to an unfavourable environment for the second album to be released into, and often results in the album being unable to live up to the expectations of the first, causing a backlash amongst the press and hardcore fans. Indeed, greater bands then The Arcade Fire and Interpol have fallen victim to Second Album Syndrome, and these albums are often slated unfairly for being unable to live up to the promise of the debut. Interestingly enough, in both The Arcade Fire’s and Interpol’s cases, there has been no such backlash – in fact both bands’ stock in trade has increased recently if anything. But it is my personal and ever so humble opinion that Neon Bible and Antics and Our Love To Admire are awful awful albums. And, as usual, I’m right.
Before I start on the warpath, I would like to stress again that TOTBL and Funeral are fantastic albums which I will always love greatly, and anyone who disagrees is wrong. Again, there are a number of interesting similarities in Interpol’s and Arcade Fire’s flawed follow-ups. Both of the groups’ debut albums were individual and mysterious. Neither band is perfect, but on their first album they played their flaws to their advantage. On their sophomore albums, the groups both opt for a more direct approach, and the brilliant shroud of illusion that made their debuts so special is roughly pulled away to reveal both groups as considerably less compelling then they at first seemed. It didn’t matter that both groups’ lyrics were not up to much – on the first albums they were delivered with a conviction, desperation and simple honesty that imbued them with a real emotional punch that belied their clumsiness. However, on Neon Bible, Win Butler suddenly realizes that loads of disaffected teenagers are listening to him, and decides he has to earnestly deal with Big Issues, to which his sledgehammer-like subtlety is not best suited. The end result is that, before you can say U2, his simple directness which allowed him to deal so well with emotional situations is grossly misused, resulting in an overbearing and preachy record. I don’t really need to remind anyone of how dreadful Interpol’s lyrics always are, but on Antics Paul Banks’ vocals are put right up to the top of the mix, so instead of nervously mumbling his clumsy non-sequitors, which gave the songs an endearing emotional openness, he bellows them over the top of the music, directing attention to Interpol’s weakest aspect.
However, shoddy lyrics are not the only problem on these albums. Antics reveals that Interpol have also been taking unnecessary cues from U2, as their music becomes more overbearing and anthemic, and at the same time, less interesting. One of the things that made TOTBL a great record and bucked the Joy Division rip-off claims of Interpol’s detractors is the rhythm section of Carlos D and Sam Fogarino. The complex interplay of the bass and drums led the songs, providing an exciting and unconventional contrast to the mumbled lyrics and atmospheric guitars. On Antics, the rhythm section are pushed more and more to the background, allowing Daniel Kessler’s increasingly mundane guitar lines and Paul Banks’ week vocals centre stage, which makes for much duller listening. Another side effect of this is that the songs become more conventional, no longer taking the eccentric twists and turn that made ‘Obstacle 1’ and ‘Leif Erikson’ so compelling. The music suffers, and Antics’ two standout moments appear on Evil, where some of the old bass-and-drums interplay is allowed to return, and Take You On A Cruise, where Kessler actually bothers to write an interesting guitar line and the band deviate slightly from standard verse-chorus-verse song structure. Sadly, Antics has not made Interpol aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and Our Love To Admire sees their continued descent into blandness and irrelevance, replete with anthemic choruses and extended guitar solos. Ironically, although Interpol’s initial musical strengths and oblique songwriting made them much more then the talentless post-punk rip-offs they are so often derided for being, their attempts to court mainstream popularity have turned them into a poor man’s version of early U2.
Neon Bible presents a similar case of a band ironically becoming everything they were initially wrongly accused of being. Those not held in thrall to Funeral accused The Arcade Fire of being overbearing and unnecessarily bombastic, with limited harmonic range and poor vocals. However, Funeral contrasted its moments of bombast and orchestral overkill with moments of quiet tenderness, and the limitations of the band’s musical and vocal ability were used to their best advantage to produce adventurously written and intensely performed songs. Neon Bible is a different beast. In an interview with Mojo magazine last year, Win Butler admitted to suffering from writer’s block before being able to write the album, which, combined with the fact that a song from one of the band’s early EPs is used to flesh out the record, does not bode well. The simple fact here is that the songs are just not as good. Thoroughly prosaic and unimaginative chord sequences and song structures replace the imaginative writing of the debut – whereas Funeral’s wide palette was able to produce such exotic songs as ‘Une année sans lumière’’s reimagining of French chanson and ‘In The Backseat’’s outBjorking of Bjork, Neon Bible sounds like Arcade Fire by numbers. The album in general suffers from what I like to call Be Here Now Syndrome, where a band tries to compensate for a lack of musical ideas by overlaying songs with unneccesary instrumental parts that do not add anything musically different to the song. Neon Bible features loads of organs, string quartets, you name it, all of which enter the song to play the same line as the main melody, which itself is confined to blindly following the lead notes of the chords. This is in stark contrast to Funeral’s imaginitive yet simple arrangements and strong individual melodies. Hard as it may be to believe, Neon Bible sounds like The Arcade Fire have run out of musical ideas.
And yet despite this, Neon Bible and Our Love To Admire seem poised to send Interpol and The Arcade Fire further into full-blown mainstream success. Both groups are merely a shadow of the revolutionary force they once were, reduced to vicious and satirical caricatures of their former selves. I will always love both bands’ first albums, but I cannot bring myself to listen to Neon Bible, Antics or Our Love To Admire. And, coming from someone who has put up with bands through thick and thin in the vain hope that they might recapture some of their former glory, that’s saying something. I await with a mixture of trepidation and blind hope both groups’ next album, longing for them to realize all they have lost and somehow manage to recapture it. But I’m not holding my breath.