I’ve never attempted to disguise my adamantine disgust with most new wave music or any of its horrifying offshoots. I think the Cars suck and Squeeze blow, and I could go on naming new wave bands I despise until the cows wearing skinny keyboard neckties come home. So imagine my surprise when I heard Liverpool’s Yachts’ 1979 eponymous debut (it was called S.O.S. in England) and actually found I liked it. Caused me to hate myself, it did. And made me wonder whether I was mutating, yes mutating, and would continue to do so until I found myself a bona fide new waver, which was a frightening and disheartening thought indeed.
I like Yachts for two reasons—first, they were funny and clever lads who liked a cynical larf above all, and second, they preferred a big guitar and Farfisa organ approach to the synthesizers that rendered much new wave anathema to me. As they sing in the great “Love You, Love You,” which comes at you like a great early Elvis Costello number, “I wouldn’t climb any mountain for you/Ford any stream that’s a daft thing to do/’Cos I’m cynical, cynical, cynical through and through” and you get the point. Then there’s the wonderful bash and romp that is “Box 202,” in which the singer loses his girlfriend in a plane crash and seeks to find a suitable replacement by placing a classified ad in the trade papers. To these lads, callousness comes naturally, and I like it. I also like the way “Box 202”comes with a powerful guitar riff, which is not something I associate with the kind of new wave I find so horrifying.
The band on the debut LP (Bob Bellis, drums and vocals; John Campbell, vocals; Martin Dempsey, bass and vocals; Henry Christian Priestman, keyboards and vocals; and Martin Watson, guitar and vocals) played their first gig opening for Elvis Costello, and stuck around the offices of Stiff Records long enough to record the irrepressibly clever and Farfisa-fueled “Suffice to Say,” which when it isn’t spelling out its own shortcomings (“I never wrote a middle eight/So we’ll have to do without/But there is an instrumental break/Right after this”) as a song gets to the point: “Suffice to say you love me/Can’t say that I blame you.” Talk about your chutzpah.
They then moved to Radar Records where they recorded this LP, which isn’t all shits and giggles, as the band demonstrates on the perky and hard-hitting “I’ll Be Leaving You” and the very catchy power pop tune “Easy to Please,” with its group harmonies and blazing guitar. “I Can’t Stay Long,” which also boasts some great group harmonies plays it straight as well, while “In a Second” features a plucky Farfisa, one broken heart, and a melody that will never let you down.
But it’s the funny ones I like best. Like “Mantovani’s Hits,” a vision of a frightening alternative universe in which Elvis flopped while Mantovani rose to rule the pop charts. It opens with a neo-classical organ riff that segues into a fast-paced tune in which the singer asks, “But what if back in ‘56/No one had bought those Elvis hits?/Mantovani’s hits/All you ever hear” before moving into some mock neo-prog terrain, after which he sings, “77 has come and gone/This isn’t my idea of fun,” after which he complains about having waited hopefully for “a nuclear bomb that never came.”
Or opener “Yachting Type,” which is more synthpop-sounding than I’m comfortable with but makes up for that shortcoming by way of lyrics that concern a guy who has lost his girl to “a yachting type.” What a horror! And it’s followed by the guitar- and Farfisa-heavy “Semaphore Love,” which keeps the yachting theme going and features a great chorus that goes, “I’ve tried semaphore love/I’ve tried to salvage our love.” He hopes his semaphore of love will win out in the end but he doesn’t sound optimistic, and if you get tired of listening to the words the song is tremendous, sort of like the Cars but better because the Cars make me sick.
“Tantamount to Bribery” is a blast of fresh air, what with its cool melody and big guitars and straightforward lyrics about, well, I’m not sure what. I simply know that the singer’s girl’s actions are “tantamount to bribery,” and that the swirling Farfisa organ brings it all home. “Then and Now” is a so-so number, neither funny nor particularly catchy, while “Heads Will Turn” at least boasts some big sonic thrust, although like “Then and Now” I find it nothing to write home about.
Good smart-ass rock is harder to find than you’d think, and it’s a pity Yachts only released one subsequent studio LP, 1980’s Without Radar, which includes a great cover of R. Dean Taylor’s “Ghost in My House” and “Out of Luck,” with its wonderful lines, “Life’s just a show/To fret about such mundane subjects/It’s Friday night/I wonder why/My date’s so suspect.” There’s also another cool tune about a lush, and a great hard rocker called “Don’t Call Us” that includes the great lines, “Why tell the truth?/It’s so uncouth/And uncalled for.” Why, they could be the sires of Oscar Wilde.
As for their debut LP, I will enjoy it for the rest of my days, new wave notwithstanding. I’ll simply wear headphones, and atone for my sin by following it with some Grand Funk Railroad, or Bachman Turner Overdrive. You can’t help what you like. It’s written into your DNA the same way your tolerance for cauliflower is. Me, I didn’t think I liked cauliflower, until my vegetarian girlfriend snuck it into a dish that I actually enjoyed, and I’ll just have to accept that the same goes for new wave. I may occasionally like it, but I don’t have to like that I like it. Personally, I don’t think God likes it either, which means we have at least one thing in common besides infallibility.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
