FELT
Once more around the fair for Lawrence’s intricate, lovely pop songs.
Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty 7/10 The Splendour Of Fear 8/10 The Strange Idols Pattern And Other Short Stories 8/10 Ignite The Seven Cannons 9/10 The Seventeenth Century (aka let The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads To Death) 7/10 CHERRY RED
There are a lot of great stories about Felt, one of the most mysterious and idiosyncratic indie groups of the 1980s. Much of this is due to their lead singer and arch-conceptualist Lawrence, and his long game for Felt: 10 singles and 10 albums across 10 years; each song needs a guitar solo; mess with the formula and give the fans both what they want and what they’d never expect. Then there are the myths about Lawrence’s cleanliness, his obsessive, ordered existence in his Birmingham flat; his drollness, and his resignation to the stuff of daily life, all of which has led to a micro-industry of books and a film (Paul Kelly’s excellent Lawrence Of Belgravia) around the man and this most peculiar of pop groups. It’s pretty good going for someone who caught T.rex on TV and decided he wanted some of what Marc Bolan was having.
Like a lot of the great, lasting groups of their era, Felt ultimately were born of two things: punk’s DIY spirit, and the tedium of living in a backwater. For Lawrence, that meant Water Orton, “a village on the outskirts of Birmingham”, he recalls. “You can’t even say it, it’s a ridiculous name. It’s like the last bit of Birmingham before it becomes Warwickshire.” Born in edgbaston and growing up on an estate, the move to Water Orton was a downer for the teenage Lawrence, with one exception: “The saving grace of it all was, there was Maurice [Deebank], growing up right next to me.”
Deebank was a classically trained guitarist with a feather-light touch, whose playing very quickly became fundamental to Felt. For one thing, he never seemed to stop: those guitar lines just kept on keeping on. It was worlds away from the home-recorded noise of the first Felt single, “Index” – notably not included in this reissue series. Instead, now there were long mood pieces
like “Templeroy”, and the lovely, chiming protojangle of “Birdmen”, both from Felt’s first album,
Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty (1982). Always planning for posterity, Lawrence’s ambition was to make the “best english album ever”; unfortunately, their plans to work with Adrian Borland of post-punk group The Sound were scuppered at the last minute.
Borland would probably have given the album a clarity and focus that it lacks. The songs are good, sometimes great, but Crumbling… suffers from its cavernous production; the tunes get lost in the mire. It could have used a more crystalline tone, to really tease out the intricacies of Deebank’s guitar and Lawrence’s lovely melodies. Two years later, Felt had seemingly figured out how to work together, and with a producer, in the studio, and The Splendour Of Fear is a massive stride forward, Deebank’s guitar a hypnotic carousel of notes, sending splinters of light out into the blue night: the slow-motion sigh of “The World Is As Soft As Lace”, for example, is one of Felt’s most lasting, beautiful songs. elsewhere, “The Stagnant Pool”, with its six-minute instrumental coda, is one long exhale, a gorgeous breath out, with Deebank at his astral finest; “A Preacher In New england” is like Vini reilly of The Durutti Column writing a simple hymn (Felt always had a good grasp on what made for a compelling instrumental). Also from 1984, The Strange Idols Pattern And Other Stories feels lighter, breezier, with some of Lawrence’s strongest pop – “Spanish house”, “Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow”, “Dismantled King Is Off The Throne”, “Crystal Ball”.
But if there’s any song that sums up the magic of this first phase of Felt, the Cherry red years, it’s the six-minute indie chart-topper “Primitive Painters”. The album it’s from, 1985’s Ignite The
Seven Cannons, has, until now, been a bit of a curate’s egg: produced by robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins, it’s always felt a bit of a blur, the songs lost in Guthrie’s reverb-heavy production. It didn’t quite work, so it’s great to hear Lawrence’s remixes of the other vocal tracks on the album – it’s as though a veil has been lifted. Deebank’s guitars are up front where they belong, and songs like “The Day The rain Came Down” and “I Don’t Know Which Way To Turn” are allowed to breathe.
Towering above them all, though, the original “Primitive Painters”, Lawrence’s one-and-only epic, with Cocteau Twin Liz Fraser’s flighty, birdlike singing swooping over the song. The other big change in these reissues is the title of the fifth album: their first for Creation, and their first after Deebank left, its brief and shiny testcard, daytimeradio instrumentals are as charming as they’ve always been, and thankfully they no longer have to suffer the ignominy of being collected under the banner Let The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads To Death – instead, they’re today The Seventeenth
Century. Maybe now, with everything as close to perfect as possible, Lawrence can finally close the door on this first phase of Felt.
Extras: 8/10. each CD comes in a boxset with a bonus seven-inch single, and extra ephemera.