This Weekend I’ll Mostly Be Listening to… The House of Love January 11, 2014
Posted by irishelectionliterature in This Weekend I'll Mostly Be Listening to....trackback
Starting listening to The House of Love again recently having had a bit of a CD/Tape/Record search over The Christmas. It was the song ‘Christine’ that originally tempted me to listen to The House of Love and it was ‘Christine’ again that made me put the record on the turntable again. They had some brilliant tunes, although the quality of the later albums wasn’t as good. Like many a band, they were a band that in the late 80’s were poised to become huge….. They left Creation Records, signed a deal with Fontana records, members left, albums and singles didn’t sell as many as expected …. and they broke up.
There seems to have been a lot of bands at the time that all of a sudden became unfashionable as The Stone Roses and grunge became popular.
They reformed in 2003 and are still going.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s they were a brilliant band, saw them once in Dublin and they were fantastic. They did that awful thing of having no names on a couple of their albums, so you ended up describing the album not by name but by cover.
I later got one of Guy Chadwicks solo albums and it was a bit of a let down.
An interview in The Guardian with them from last year
Their facebook page
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
I love their second album proper, always a very interesting band and much better than the secondstringers and no hopers of indie that they’re sometimes unfairly roped in with. The later stuff is flawed but interesting. I still find stuff on Babe Rainbow which is worth listening to and the guitar sound is pristine.
Christine is a stone classic. But they had a real knack for writing singles, Destory The Heart, I Don’t Know Why I Love you, etc.
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My favourite of their songs which also functions as a description of the appeal of bands like the House of Love. They were caught at the wrong moment in history, intelligent and subtle and sensitive at a time when a kind of ropy hard chaw chic was about to become all the rage and lead eventually to the scourge of Britpop and the virtual death of wit and beauty in mainstream rock music. The Sundays, who came along at the same time, also suffered from arriving a few years too late. I used to see them knocking around Camberwell when I lived there.
And a few other things in the same vein from the same time as all that was fey, pretentious and lovely prepared to be swept away.
and
and
But, no, everyone had to go and play pretend football hooligan instead. Are ye happy now?
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Always thought their most interesting album was Spy in the House of Love – a collection of B-sides and outtakes. Some of the stuff they threw away is better than what they put out on proper releases IMHO.
For a perfect example of a British band who were just a few years too late see Strangelove.
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Yeah, they were good. Mansun too in a way.
Britpop, couldn’t agree more EC. It was the first genuinely big retrospective movement in ‘indie’ alternative and all the worse for it. The groups you reference were still experimenting and moving forward, but that all came to a shuddering halt and the last embers of post-punk burned out.
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