By the release of The Language of Life, their fifth album, in early 1990, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn found themselves at some distance from the scratchy leftfield jazz inflections of essential 1984 debut Eden.
The NME initially positioned the duo alongside Billy Bragg and the Redskins as politically charged ‘New Realists’ and, in her great autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen, Thorn beautifully describes their approach of the time as “sounding like Astrud Gilberto but coming on like Gang of Four”.
Having drifted out to what appeared to be the middle of the road by the time of their well- intentioned 1989 cover of Rod Stewart hit I Don’t Want to Talk About It Watt and Thorn felt ”rejected, misunderstood and blameless” at becoming…
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…considered “a bit naff” on home shores. Bruised, and with a need to feel “forgiven”, they decamped to America to buy some of what producer Tommy LiPuma and his top team of arrangers and musicians were selling.
Giving themselves up to being bit parts in the making of their own album (Thorn sang and learnt to play Super Mario Bros), the result of several Stateside weeks was an expensively produced “fully realised, immaculately performed modern American soul-pop” record.
But The Language of Life’s acute glossiness did not serve its handful of the duo’s finest songs particularly well at the time – and certainly not now; a fact highlighted on this deluxe edition by the sparse demo of The Road. It’s difficult not to wonder what might have been as, solo at the piano, Watt is absolutely on message in a plaintive performance reminiscent of predecessor Idlewild’s secular hymn The Night I Heard Caruso Sing. The presence of tender moments from legendary saxophonist Stan Getz on the album version (and alternate take) lends The Road a degree of hip gravitas, but a late-1980s fizz bubbling around the essentials plays as vacuous and of-its-day distracting. Driving (a Top 40 hit six years later, in superior remixed form), the scathing Me and Bobby D – an iron fist in a velvet glove – and an economical b-side cover of Tom Waits’ Downtown Train are the pick.