9/10/1983 Sounds
THE GLOVE 'Blue Sunshine' (Polydor She LP2) **
There is too much music around. It is written about too much,
televised too much and heard on the radio far too easily.
The most basic idea of difficulty in rock music (viz it is difficult to hear because some find it threatening) is almost totally lacking. The Glove are a small reminder of this fact.
It seems almost appalingly obvious to say it, but it is the truth that if the Glove weren't those two, Mssrs (real messers!) Severin and Smith, then this album's worth of abject baloney would not have seen the light of day.
There, I said it; and it is the sadly predictable truth!
Siouxsie has produced an unhealthy fetishism around herself: it has been the only reason she's hung around so long. Her side-kick Severin, of course, bathes in this reflected 'glory' while Robert Smith could be said to have become a latterday male Siouxsie. He sells large amounts of records, largely because of his image it would seem (a kind of bed- sit glam rock).
Thus revealing the worst excess of fan worship, 'Blue Sunshine' is the work of privilege rather than of a hardly containable creative desire.
The Glove project reminds me of Yes solo splinters of days gone past, particularly those of Steve Howe and Chris Squires. At least they had the good sense not to include lyrics on their awful solo outpourings - they just rambled on.
The Glove ramble on, but they also have an anonymous girl vocalist, one Landray, screaming away on top. What she screams are presumably young Smith's words, and they are pretty dreadful. Smith has either lost his mind, is having a privileged joke at his fans' expense, or drug abuse of the headier kind really has come into mode again.
The songs on 'Blue Sunshine' are chiefly about marmalade, goldfish and white mice, it is like Tiny Tim meets Magnus Pike:
"The umbrella man is shouting/we take his paper hands/There's mirrors down beneath our feet so/'Let's shake down the street..."
Rubbish, Robert, complete rubbish.
The attempt to emulate bits of Traffic, Family and New Order (wasn't that last Cure 45 a New Order lift?), while providing, especially early on in the proceedings, an intersting backing-track, never finds the cohesion necessary to take it out of the realms of mere privilege.
For instance, Ms Landray's vocalising is far too formal and English for that determinedly way out backing-track, and those incomprehensible lyrics surely must have given the poor girl nightmares!
I'm all for letting go, breaking new territory, allowing Severin and Smith to adventure. But in this case, a good opportunity has been self- indulgently wasted.
The Glove are well named; one glove is useless without a pair. It is something to be thrown away and forgotten about.
