1. Blister in the Sun
2. Kiss Off
3. Please Do Not Go
4. Add It Up
5. Confessions
6. Prove My Love
7. Promise
8. To the Kill
9. Gone Daddy Gone
10. Good Feeling
I write novels and screenplays. For light relief, I get into rows about politics on Twitter.
1. Revolver – The Beatles
2. Broken English – Marianne Faithfull
3. Changes daily. Yesterday it was White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground. Today it’s Hozier by Hozier.
I was talking to my friend Ben about this album the other day.
‘Did you know most of these songs were written by a kid in school?’ I asked.
He didn’t.
Like most normal people, he probably assumed that one of the best debut albums ever was written by an adult – someone who had matured and deleted all his teenage drafts. For example, when Kurt Cobain was in high school the best he could come up with was a song about Spam.
Yet Gordon Gano, future lead singer and songwriter for the Violent Femmes, somehow managed to do something incredibly rare – he created the definitive account of being a teenager, by a teenager.
Ben and I talk about this. The sheer madness of writing songs in school, sat at the back of class, or in between homework and football practice. What are the chances of that being any good? If Gano can write ‘Blister in the Sun’ at school, then how good were his English essays?
‘He must have been the most popular kid in class!’ Ben says. ‘It’s like Ferris Bueller released an album!’
I see where he’s coming from, except he’s wrong. Because everyone loves Ferris and the whole school rallies around him just because he has one bloody day off sick. They even made a film about it.
‘No, this isn’t “Ferris Bueller: The Album”,’ I reply.
Ben tries again.
‘You’re right, it’s more like an album made by his mate Cameron – the weird one.’
I don’t tell Ben he’s wrong again because, frankly, he’ll just keep going with the Ferris Bueller comparisons before probably moving on to Diary of a Wimpy Kid. So I laugh and agree.
‘Yeah, it’s as if Cameron made an album.’
But it isn’t. Because at least Cameron had Ferris and Ferris is the most popular kid in the world.
Gano, on the other hand, doesn’t have anyone, so ends up writing stuff like:
And I’m so lonely
I just don’t think I can take it any more
And I’m so lonely
I just don’t know what to do
And I’m so lonely
Feel like I’m gonna crawl away and die
And I’m so lonely
Feel like I’m gonna
Hack hack hack hack it apart
Fast forward a couple of years in the life of Gordon Gano.
It’s 1981, he’s found a couple of mates, and they’re now busking outside a Pretenders gig in Milwaukee – singing those same songs he wrote in school. It doesn’t feel like a launch pad for success but, of course, in this story, it becomes exactly that.
James Honeyman-Scott and Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders walk past the bedraggled trio and are so impressed that, rather than throwing them a couple of dollars, they offer them a slot on their show that night. Within an hour they go from the street corner to playing in front of 2,000 people.
It is, without question, the most successful piece of busking ever.
From there, they secure a record deal and, in the summer of 1982, enter the studio to record their first album – Violent Femmes. And the best part is they change nothing. It’s the same old songs, the same sound they made on the street, and the whole album is largely played out using just an acoustic guitar, an acoustic bass and a snare drum.
Only on the ninth song, ‘Gone Daddy Gone’, do they make a concession to the fact they’re now in a studio and they’re not busking anymore – they use a xylophone.
All they need now is an album cover.
Enter Billie Jo Campbell, a three-year-old who is walking down the street with her mother in California.
A stranger approaches and asks the mother whether he can photograph the girl for an album cover he’s working on and pays her $100 for the privilege. He then tells the girl to look into a derelict building where he assures her there’ll be loads of animals roaming inside. So, without posing or even really knowing what’s going on, she gets on her tiptoes and peeks through the window, trying to see what she’s been promised.
After a while, she pulls back from the window.
‘There are no animals in there,’ she says.
And she’s right, there aren’t. But by that point the photographer has already got what he wanted and moved on.
Violent Femmes is released in the summer of 1983 to minimal fanfare and poor initial sales. When it was recorded, Gordon Gano was just eighteen years old.
Fast forward to 1989, to my own life.
I’m eighteen years old and mooching about the Venue in New Cross, an indie club from a golden age before The Red Hot Chili Peppers released ‘Give It Away’ and ruined everything.
During this particular evening, a song comes on I’ve never heard before – a thin, whiny voice asking why he can’t get JUST ONE FUCK! Immediately, it cuts through the twee and gothic melodrama that I was used to and grabs my attention.
That voice again – ‘THERE’S NOTHING I CAN SAY WHEN I’M IN YOUR THIGHS.’
It was exactly what I wanted – a song about someone who couldn’t get laid and then, when it finally happens, they’re unable to talk. What eighteen-year-old wearing a second-hand cardigan can’t relate to that?
After it finished, I approached the DJ.
‘What was that song you just played mate?’
‘“Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes.’
Obviously, should a situation like this happen today I could have mainlined Spotify on the way home and listened to it on repeat. But this was 1989, you couldn’t just listen to a song whenever you wanted to. So, faced with the prospect of waiting a whole week for the possibility of hearing it again, I decided to take the only sensible course of action open to me – I went to a record shop the next day and handed over £10.99 for an album on the strength of one song.
It looked amazing, but it sounded even better. The whole thing, from start to finish, blew my head off. That voice, the simplicity of the lyrics and the way it seemed, in places, like a rough draft scattered with annotations and unfinished thoughts.
‘Third verse, same as the first.’
‘Eight, I forget what eight was for.’
Who cares what eight is for? I didn’t.
Yet for all its angst and triviality, there was something else that I admired. It seems weird to focus on it now, but Violent Femmes was released at a time when albums had sides that couldn’t be shuffled or disorganised. You had to get the order right and I’ve always thought (well, since 1989) that no one has ever done it better than them – two sides of five songs where the first two are fast, the third slows you down, the fourth picks you up, and the fifth provides a finale.
Put simply – you can’t put these ten songs in any other order and make them better than this.
It became a staple, an album I haven’t gone six months without listening to since I discovered it in 1989. And, during Ruth and Martin’s 2016 summer break, I was horrified to realise that we hadn’t even done it!
If it wasn’t for J. K. Rowling I’d probably still be repeatedly punching myself in the face.
Fast forward, one last time, to 1997.
Billie Jo Campbell, the girl on the cover, is now eighteen and the Violent Femmes have slowly made it. In various times, in different places, people have found this album that was quietly released in 1983 and it’s now sold millions of copies. At the end of the film Grosse Pointe Blank its credits roll to ‘Blister in the Sun’ while Minnie Driver and John Cusack drive off into the distance.
The songs have reached a new audience. They’re being played at college parties and Billie Jo Campbell is hearing them for the first time.
How does she feel to be reminded of her three-year-old self and the photograph that she was tricked into? How does she feel when it came back to her as an eighteen-year-old?
It’s tempting to think that she would have been like any other teenager – simultaneously energetic and anxious about what the future holds. If that’s true, then maybe she identified with the same qualities in the album that I did when I was eighteen, the same sentiments that drove Gordon Gano to write it when he was in high school.
Who knows? What I do know is that Billie Jo Campbell decided to pursue the best option open to her.
She became a massive fan of the Violent Femmes.
She framed the album cover and put it on her wall.
She used the fact that she was the girl on the cover to help boost her confidence and meet boys.
And in 2008, she married one of them.
Roll credits.
I’m not quite sure how the Violent Femmes passed me by. I turned eighteen the year this album came out, but I was obsessed with The Beatles at the time. Of contemporary bands I really loved, the standouts were The Smiths and The Psychedelic Furs. I loved any band with a great guitarist. I played guitar myself, mostly alone in my bedroom.
It’s possible that I heard the Violent Femmes but I’ve forgotten. They could easily have been part of the informal seminars on alternative music I received from the muso I dated in my late teens. His parents were Dutch and we hung out mostly at his house, because we were allowed to smoke in his attic bedroom. I’ve got happy memories of sunlit wooden rafters and smoke rings and walls covered in black and white pictures he’d clipped out of NME, while The Dead Kennedys, Jah Wobble or The Birthday Party blasted out of the speakers. Setting aside the fact that I had a pair of very long-lived goldfish named after Guggi and Gavin of the Virgin Prunes, I never became a whole-hearted convert to his favourite bands. Much as I adored him, I didn’t share Muso Boyfriend’s attitude to music: his scorn for the accessible and tuneful, the baffling mixture of irony and obsession with which he regarded his favourites, and his conviction that if the herd hates something, it’s almost certainly brilliant.
The NME was Muso Boyfriend’s bible and it took a hard line on nearly anything commercial or popular, talking about bands in the top ten with the kind of contempt most people reserve for child abusers. A few real gods could be forgiven commercial success, obviously – people like Bowie or the Stones – but the likes of Nik Kershaw might as well have been Thatcher herself as far as NME were concerned.
When The Stranglers released Feline and it went to number four in the album charts, an NME journo went into meltdown, ranting about the fact that people who’d never heard Rattus Norvegicus were now calling themselves Stranglers fans. You could almost see the flecks of spittle on the page. (I’d bought Feline. I didn’t own Rattus Norvegicus.) And I still vividly remember an NME interview with Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet, a band I never liked, though I admired Gary’s chutzpah in agreeing to talk to them. The interviewer’s disapproval of Gary and everything he stood for reached a glorious peak with the phrase ‘this whorehouse called success’. I never made much headway arguing about this sort of thing with Muso Boyfriend, though, so after a bit of snogging I’d cycle home and listen to Rubber Soul.
My first live gig and my first music festival were both with Muso Boyfriend. We saw Big Country at Dingwalls in Bristol (supporting act: John Cooper Clarke, the punk poet). We spent my eighteenth birthday at the Elephant Fayre in Cornwall, hitching there from South Wales. I’d told my parents some whopping lie about how we were getting there, probably that Muso Boyfriend’s older brother was driving us. Half an hour of unsuccessful hitching later, it suddenly occurred to me that my parents had said they were going shopping later. This meant they might soon be driving past us, so I kept diving for cover every time a Honda Civic came into view.
We finally got a lift, thank God, so I survived to enjoy my birthday at the Elephant Fayre. We pitched the two-person tent by a marquee full of Rastas selling tea and hot knives and saw The Cure, who Muso Boyfriend was weirdly keen to hear, in spite of the fact that they’d actually been on Top of the Pops. The only other act I remember well from the Elephant Fayre is Benjamin Zephaniah. He did a poem about having the shit kicked out of him by a policeman. Twenty-odd years later, I was on a team with him at a kids’ book quiz at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
I didn’t Google the band or the album before listening, because that felt like cheating, so I knew virtually nothing about them except that this came out in 1983. When I told my friend Euan which album I was going to review he assured me I’d like it, but his favourite album’s by The Cramps, so that wasn’t entirely reassuring.
Wanting to concentrate, I go outside to my writing room in the garden, which has a wooden ceiling. This, unlikely as it may seem, is relevant information.
So I put on Violent Femmes and hear a catchy acoustic guitar riff and I think, this is great! I’m going to love them! I’ll get a Violent Femmes T-shirt, buy the entire back catalogue and bore everyone rigid with my new obsession!
But then the vocalist kicks in and I have an immediate, visceral response of ‘no, scratch everything, I hate this’. The change of mood is so abrupt my mind goes blank. I try to analyse why I moved from appreciation to intense dislike in a matter of seconds, but the best I can do is ‘I’ve heard voices like that before.’
By the time I reach track seven, all I can think about is the Toy Dolls’ cover of ‘Nelly the Elephant’. I’m not proud. I know this says more about me than about the Violent Femmes.
After I’ve listened to the whole album once, I look down at the place where I was supposed to be making notes and all I’ve written is: ‘his upper register sounds like a bee in a plastic cup’, which the professional writer in me recognises as ‘not 500 words’. Feeling glum, I postpone a second listen to the following day.
It’s raining next morning and I can’t be bothered to go and find shoes, so I don’t take the album into the writing room, but stay in the kitchen. With minimal enthusiasm, I put on the album again.
This is weird. The vocalist is actually, um… good. Where did the bloke I heard yesterday go? Now I’m not busy hating him, I notice all the great hooks and how they sometimes sound like a manic skiffle band. There’s a nice bit of bluesy slide guitar and an actual xylophone on ‘Gone Daddy Gone’. Plus, when he half talks, half sings, Gordon Gano (I checked the album credits) sounds a bit Lou Reed, and I love Lou Reed. Apart from being the vocalist, Gano also happens to be the guitarist I fell for yesterday.
I can’t understand why he grated on me so much first time round. Beneath my wooden ceiling, he was the Ur-voice of all those NME-approved punky bands I never liked: nasal, whiny and brash. Today, sitting beside my kettle, he’s raw, catchy and soulful.
Only then, staring into a mug of tea, do I have the little epiphany that you, clever reader, saw coming a mile off. Listening to an album that reeks of 1983, in a room that bears a passing resemblance to that attic of long ago, was a mistake. It wasn’t Gordon Gano who was the problem: it was me. I was listening with a ghostly eighteen-year-old ex-boyfriend at my shoulder, and behind him, a chorus of snarling early eighties NME journalists, all ready to jeer, because even if I like the Violent Femmes, I’ll like them in the wrong way.
So the sun came out and I took the Violent Femmes back across the wet lawn into the writing room, telling myself that it’s not 1983 anymore, and this is between me and the Violent Femmes, nobody else. On the third listen, I realised that I loved the album. Before I knew it, I was listening to it over and over again. Only then did I let myself look at their Wikipedia page.
The Violent Femmes, I read, were ‘one of the most successful alternative rock bands of the 1980s, selling over 9 million albums by 2005’. Yes, the Violent Femmes ended up in that whorehouse called success, and you know what? It only makes me love them more.
Yes.
8.5/10.