Love & Rockets Be This Perversity?

Love & Rockets Be This Perversity?

FEATURES

by Moira McCormick

Love & Rockets spend a lot of time singing about heaven. Their first album was called Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven, and an early single bore the title “If There’s A Heaven Above.” Their new album, Earth Sun Moon, refers to that great fuzzbox in the sky in no less than three songs, one of which is called “Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven.”

Yet ask Daniel Ash, guitarist/vocalist/songwriter for the postnuclear hoppers, if he really thinks there’s a heaven, and he replies, “I haven’t got a clue. None whatsoever.” He does believe there’s a God, though his conception of the big guy isn’t exactly PTL-approved: “I’ve got the notion that maybe God itself is pure science—a consciousness, not pure science out of the computer, but just very connected to nature itself.” As for organized religion, Ash says, “I think basically all religions are bastards of the truth.”

Moving on to less frivolous subjects, Ash really gets down to business. “Music is something quite surreal,” he opines. “The idea of a soft brick, if you like; something that really doesn’t connect as it’s first perceived, something that’s the complete opposite...”

At this juncture, the soft-spoken singer is sitting in Las Vegas, where the Rockets (or should that be the Loves?) are briefly bivouacked while touring the U.S. They’re sitting mighty pretty, too: Earth Sun Moon and its first single/video, the psychedelic/anthemic “No New Tale To Tell,” are busily scooting up various charts, soon to take over the world in all likelihood.

Ash and partners David J. (vocals, bass, songwriting) and Kevin Haskins (drums, vocals) aren’t terribly thrilled to be out on the road, however. “We get fed up with touring,” says Ash. “It’s very repetitive. Ideally, we’d like to do five good gigs rather than 20 mediocre ones.” Ash says he dislikes the trappings of rock ’n’ rolldom, and hints that if commercial success gets any more stultifying than it is now, Love & Rockets might pack it in.

As did L&R’s venerable precursor, Bauhaus, the grandpappy of Britain’s socalled gloom ’n’ doom movement. All three Loves (or should that be Rockets?) were members of Bauhaus, though they tended to be overshadowed by the histrionics of lead singer Peter Murphy. When Bauhaus split in 1983, Ash and Haskins formed Tones On Tail and J. hooked up with the Jazz Butcher, before the three reunited to create Love & Rockets. (According to their bio, the name came from “a California comic strip”; somehow, you’d rather not ask Ash.)

L&R surfaced in England in 1984, had a hit with their terrific remake of the Temptations’ rhythm ’n’ protest classic “Ball Of Confusion,” and released Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven. In, 1986, Love & Rockets put out their U.S. debut, Express, on indie Big Time Records.

Yet compared to Bauhaus, Love & Rockets were positively spritely, as attested to by the cheery metalplated rowdiness of another Express dancefloor fave “Kundalini Express.” Express melded psychedelipop, post-punk grunge, bigbeat rhythms, and the tension between acoustic and fuzzball guitars into one great dense pulsating whole, to just about everybody’s approbation. Critics scurried to their comparison files and tossed out names like Pink Floyd, AC/DC, and those old standbys, the Beatles and the Velvet Underground. Regular folks snapped up the record and flocked to the shows.

A truly auspicious start, one would think, but according to Ash, “We got really fed up with the whole rock ’n’ roll circus, the cliches that happen when you do a long tour, when you do that type of record—which is basically electric guitaroriented. We considered Express a rock ’n’ roll record,” Ash says with a trace of disdain, “and this (new) one, not so much.”

Earth Sun Moon is certainly not as overtly aggressive an album as Express, featuring an acoustic side, some midtempo stuff, and even a couple of bluesy numbers. “I wanted to do a track that was basically 12-bar,” says Ash of “Welcome Tomorrow,” “which that is—a 12-bar with funny minor chords. The idea was just to do a sort of rock ’n’ roll song, but it didn’t really turn out that way.”

Lyrically, Earth Sun Moon is about as bereft of cheer as vintage Bauhaus (exceptions: “The Sun,” the chorus of “Youth,” maybe “Mirror People”). “Melancholy is a very necessary emotion,” insists Ash, whose view of beauty echoes that of both Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas Mallory. “There is a power in it. That’s the whole thing of what romance is—almost like something you can’t quite have.

“Happy endings are also valid and necessary,” Ash concedes. “The human personality is quite diverse. [But] having a romance with melancholy can be a very beautiful state of mind. I think you’ve got to have a lot of courage to face that, to wallow in it. That kind of music can be very uplifting.

“If human beings get everything they want, they become very discontent anyway,” Ash philosophizes. “It’s quite perverse in a way; it makes you think the human condition is quite hopeless.” With the sort of romantic melancholy explored by Love & Rockets, you never do get what you want, “but you can fantasize about it for the rest of your life.”