THE HOUSE OF LOVE
They were ’80s indie’s great hopes, until the madness. But there was an upside: “Stadium success would have killed us all.”
1986, Camberwell. A failed pop star assembles a new outfit for another shot at glory, armed with a readymade hoard of songwriting gold, a full-tilt, orphic guitarist and a steely determination to make it. May ’88’s quicksilver debut saw them hailed as heirs to The Smiths, but the mother of all comedowns was waiting. Thirty years on, GUY CHADWICK, TERRY BICKERS and friends recall the vertiginous highs and queasy lows of an indie rock cautionary tale.
Guy Chadwick: “I’d been doing this project, Kingdoms, and I’d been dropped by RCA at the start of ’85 because it hadn’t gone anywhere. Then I split up with my first wife. It was quite a traumatic time. Just before, I’d been demoing, and a lot of stuff became House Of Love songs, like Destroy The Heart and Man To Child. When I did Christine, it crystallised everything. It was a blueprint, and I played it to Terry when we met. I was 28, 29 when I started with him.”
Terry Bickers: “I met Guy through an advert in the Melody Maker. He looked like a pop star, and his songwriting captured my imagination. It was moody, like Echo & The Bunnymen, or elements of The Cure. At that point in my life I felt very competitive with other groups. I wanted to be better than them.”
Pete Evans: “I’d first met Guy in about 1981. I thought he was very striking – a bit full of himself, but very eloquent and charismatic. He kind of had the confidence of an actor. He’d played me some 4-tracks, and they were really, really good. When he invited me down to meet the four of them at the rehearsal studio in Camberwell, we just clicked. Guy was the driving force. He’s always been ambitious.”
GC: “A friend suggested Horse Latitudes as a name for the band, which didn’t do it for me. The Doors connotation led me to The House Of Love, as in the Morrison Hotel song The Spy. So the name was because of The Doors, not the book by Anaïs Nin.”
Andrea Heukamp: “I came from Münster to work as an au pair. They first needed a backing singer. My impression was, the chemistry was very good – the creative songwriting of Guy, Terry’s innovative guitar playing, the drive of Chris and Pete. I was so motivated to play in these young years in an English independent band.”
Chris Groothuizen: “The first live gig the band ever did, and my first ever, was in the now demolished Dickie Dirts, an ex-cinema, ex-wholesale shirt warehouse in Camberwell. Patric O’Connor [of the group My White Bedroom] and I promoted the events, we hand-drew the posters, hired the generator and tried to make some money back by charging £1 on the door. The House Of Love played two or three times. The gigs were very chaotic but incredibly atmospheric – the only lighting was by candle light and battery-powered torches.” GC: “I targeted Creation because of The Jesus And Mary Chain, after I’d seen them play for 20 minutes and smash the place up. What struck me was that musically they were coming from exactly the same place that I was. I sent demos and was completely ignored until Alan McGee phoned me two or three months later. His wife Yvonne had been playing Shine On in the office. So he came and saw us, told us to shorten our songs and gave us 160 quid, for rehearsing. He was slightly pretentious, but I liked that. I thought, This guy has got front and he doesn’t give a fuck.”
PE: “The first recording of Shine On, I loved that, rough as it sounds. I went to the studio with Chris on the tube, and opposite us there was a tramp with one leg wetting himself – that was London, then. But it felt like there was something in the air, something that was going to be life-changing.”
Alan McGee (writing in The Creation Recordings sleevenote, 2001): “Danny Kelly, the first journalist to ever take notice made [May ’87 debut 45 Shine On] single of the week in NME. He described it as ‘a shiny momentous beast’ and ‘simply awesome’. Shine On sold 1,400 copies. The band went out and played a month of dates with Felt and nearly got beaten up supporting Zodiac Mindwarp in London. I thought it would be character building. Guy thought I was sick.”
PE: “We were never really liked by the indie rockers at Creation, probably because we weren’t really an indie rock band. Primal Scream didn’t like us – Bobby Gillespie really didn’t like Guy. The only band we got on with were My Bloody Valentine.” CG: “Guy spent a lot of time and energy convincing people he was younger than he was. When he went to visit Alan at Creation, he used to borrow my shoes – they were black winklepicker boots, very on-trend amongst the Creation crowd, very Nikki Sudden – as his were like old man’s shoes. The only problem being that I only had one pair of shoes, so had to wait indoors until he returned.”
Pat Collier: “My studios were doing a lot of Creation bands. The House Of Love probably got put in Greenhouse studios, in Old Street, by default. They had an absolutely dead clear idea of what they were doing. They worked in a slightly unusual way putting the guitar parts together, which amazed me. Doing a track, most people would do bass and drums and play the guitar all the way through, jingle jangle, and then add to that, but not them – on the bridge section from the verse to the chorus on one song, they did something like 16 tracks of guitar. I was thinking, Where do they dream this stuff up from?”
TB: “About my playing, what I’d say is, I maybe didn’t have the ability to speak eloquently then, so that instrument was my voice. I was putting everything I had, all the energy and emotion that was going on inside me, into it.”
GC: “Terry was always brash and exciting but he just got wilder as we developed as a group. The sound also changed when Andrea left. I found that really disappointing – she added a hell of a lot and sounded great on Christine. We were booked to do a short tour in Holland with Echo & The Bunnymen towards the end of 1987 and she said
“I DID EXPERIMENT WITH DRUGS, AND SUFFERED THE CONSEQUENCES.” Terry Bickers