Bury Your Head

Gene Love Jezebel are pretty tough to defend, I'll admit it. They started off as a Welsh post-punk band in the mid-80s, led by the enigmatic Astons, an androgynous pair of identical twin brothers. Finding a strange sonic middle-ground between Aerosmith and Adam the Ants, Gene Love Jezebel was initially embraced by the Goth community, before the band morphed into an arguably more marketable incarnation as an ersatz hair-metal ensemble. That messy transformation was followed by a schism between the Aston twins, finding brother Michael cast from the fold, only to fleetingly return over the ensuing years.

I'd first heard them courtesy of their singles, "Heartache" and "Desire" (featuring that signature sneeze-like effect in the chorus, "Shugh-Shugh"). Both of those tracks came from the album, Discover, which I'd picked up in the Summer of 1986, along with other great records from that period like Gun Shy by the Screaming Blue Messiahs, The Ghost of Cain by New Model Army and the first record by The Fine Young Cannibals. GLJ may have been a bit embarrassing in their tonsorial/sartorial approach. In a nutshell, the band looked like a bedraggled gaggle of Beduin transvestite hairdressers. While it was indeed the 80s, these mincing Welsh peacocks made Nick Rhodes at his campiest seem positively butch by comparison. But I warmed to Gene Loves Jezebel's high-piped vocal acrobatics, chiming guitars and needlessly histrionic sensibility. At the time, having become largely bored by the hardcore I'd been lapping up for the previous few years, I started getting into a largely Anglophilic phase and seeking out records by bands like The Mission, The March Violets, The Specimen, Love & Rockets and the like. My passport picture at the time finds me sporting a somewhat ridiculously foppy fringe and a Bauhaus t-shirt, for cryin' out loud (see below). Give me a break, again -- it was the 80's.

There was a freshman kid down my hall that year named Pete who was a sizably bigger devotee of the Jezebels than I. I was perfectly happy just owning Discover, but Pete snatched up every bit of GLJ ephemera he could find, including 7" singles and 12" club mixes, etc. I'd frequently come in from class hearing their signature yodel echoing down the hall. One afternoon, this robust guitar romp came blaring out of Pete's room. I knew it had to be Gene Loves Jezebel, but it certainly wasn't on the one album of theirs I possessed. I had to find out more.

The track in question, "Psycho 2," was one of the b-sides appended to the 12" single of "Sweetest Thing," another track from the Discover album (although never one of my favorites). Despite its title, "Psycho 2" had nothing to do with the abortive 1983 film of the same name (wherein director Richard Franklin dared to sully one of Hitchcock's masterpieces with a needless follow-up). It's is actually a re-recording of a song called "Psychological Problems" from the band's 1983 album, Promise. Where the original version is a bizarrely disjointed and slightly anaemic track (sounding a bit like retarded ska), the revisited version is a adrenalized sprint, augmented with some much needed punky urgency. To my mind, it's one of the best things the band ever recorded (which, of course, to many minds is not saying very much).

I dutifully taped Pete's copy of the track from that 12" single onto a mixtape that became slavishly overplayed down at our end of the hall. The track even managed to infiltrate the battlements of my long-suffering roommate Dave's tastes, becoming a favorite for late night drunken airings and perilous drives to nearby Newark, Ohio (where the Taco Bell was). I can't hear this track without a myriad images of that year of college filling my head. Being a b-side, however, "Psycho 2" was a very hard track to get ahold of. I never managed to procure a copy of the 12" single and upon the advent of the compact disc, I feared I'd never hear the urgent strains of the song ever again outside of that long-stored-away mixtape.

As I mentioned earlier, later Gene Loves Jezebel material found the band inching closer to the big haired, slack-jawed pop-metal of the Sunset Strip (attempting to mimic the crossover success of their peers in The Cult), largely forsaking their earlier penchant for oddball Baroque flourish. While their 1987 album, The House of Dolls, did feature the stylish single, "Suspicion", it all went swiftly south after that. I lost interest and moved on. The Aston twins split, undermining the band's gimmick. Both brothers attempted to soldier on with the name, which eventually resulted in lots of nasty litigation.

In 2005, however, Beggars Banquet saw fit to re-release the Discover album as a deluxe two CD set, appended with era-appropriate b-sides, extended mixes, demos, etc. I snatched it up in seconds and thrilled once more to the manic sprint of "Psycho 2". In celebration of same, I started a discussion thread on the ILX boards about the re-masters, and Michael Aston himself weighed in, much to my surprise (scroll to the the bottom, if you care).

In any event, despite Gene Loves Jezebel's myriad eccentricities, I think this track still delivers the goods. You, of course, may beg to differ.