This is a 12″ packaged in one of those thin sleeves without a spine. I never much liked this kind of sleeve, it always seemed too insubstantial for a record of this size, as if it wasn’t giving enough kudos to its contents, or something. Give me a 12″ with a spine and I’m predisposed to like the music more, no question. Irrational perhaps, but that’s psychology, I guess. These thin sleeves make the record seem pointlessly not 7″ in size – pointlessly large for no good reason. Maybe they were a bizarre offshoot of the more more more ethos that saturated the 1980s? More size, less style, equal content. Dunno.
What looking at this record has reminded me of, however, are two very good things:
- The Weather Prophets are the band that followed The Loft. The Loft were outstandingly good. ‘Up The Hill And Down The Slope’, if you’ve never heard it, is getting on for a perfect song in terms of structure, brevity and accessibility.
- The Weather Prophets/The Loft have a very interesting and exciting history – all kinds of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll feature in there. You wouldn’t think it from their music but this band were quite the psychotic monsters for a time. That seemed par for the course for a Creation Records band for a time (in case you’re confused, Elevation was a second-tier indie label run, I believe, by Creation’s Alan McGee).
My copy of this has a small chunk missing from the vinyl near the lead-in grooves, as if someone took a tiny bite from it. This has a cover of You Upset The Grace of Living When You Lie by Tim Hardin on the B side, and I think it’s actually a better song than the A side. I have to say I never really rated Peter Astor that highly, always seemed vaguely second-division, which was at odds with McGee’s breathless hyperbole about him.
There’s a good account of McGee’s adventures with Elevation in David Cavanagh’s My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize (the title taken from a Peter Astor lyric, fact fans).