Okay so I'm cheating slightly here. I suspect most people my age know the Wonder Stuff - those happy bouncy Brummie lads who charmed the nation with "Size Of A Cow" and "Welcome To The Cheap Seats". What this particular instalment of "Flashback Friday" is about is a reappraisal of possibly their most under-rated album. And yeah, I'll say it, my favourite Wonder Stuff album.
We're all familiar, I assume, with the concept of break-up albums. Those collections of songs you sit in your room listening to moodily for days when the girl/boy you lost your head over has upped and left you for reasons as yet unexplained. When you're questioning whether it's all fucking worth it and where the hell you're supposed to go next. Those albums where the songs seem to speak to you and make some sort of sense in the darkest of hours.
"Construction For The Modern Idiot" is a distant cousin of that sort of album in that it's a band break-up album. Bitter and angry odes to when that group of lads who got together as teenagers has reached the point where they can't stand the sight of each other, where dreams have been soured, friendships twisted apart. Where you realise that the whole "last gang in town" mentality that the Clash sung of is unfortunately complete and total bullshit when you've all been stuck in studios and tour vans with no escape for several years. Where you realise that you're basically slaves to a record company wage that's dependant on you sticking with something you've long since lost the enthusiasm for but you're not sure you actually know how to function without. You know it's all unravelling, you can see the crash coming miles off but are powerless (even unwilling) to stop it and you're scared as hell as to what's going to happen next.
I'll be honest, I've never been anywhere near the levels of success that the Wonder Stuff enjoyed but even as someone who's only ever been in bands playing local gigs and maybe very occasionally opening up for a band that a few people might have heard of at 7pm in front of an audience of about ten while every other bugger's still in the bar, I've still been in the situation where you come to the horrible realisation that the ship has sailed. When the optimism of when it started and it felt as if you had the world at your feet and it was just a question of when, rather than if, your big break came gives way to the sinking feeling two years later that you're still stuck at the same level as you were, going round and round in circles with no way out in sight, eventually coming to the conclusion that it's probably best to just end the whole thing with no hard feelings.
Those sentiments are scattered all over "Construction..." and indeed, the Wonder Stuff would split within a year of it being released. From the panicky opening riff of "Change Every Lightbulb", you can hear frontman Miles Hunt's disillusionment with the situation he's in - the general gist of the song is that you can do everything you can to change your surroundings but when you know the game's up, it makes no difference. There's the odd diversion off with the ferocious anti-paedophile fury of "I Wish Them All Dead" and odes to Diana Dors ("Hot Love Now") and Mickey Rourke ("Full Of Life (Happy Now)") but for the most part, this is the sound of a band who are opening the musical equivalent of Pandora's Box.
"Cabin Fever" is self-explanatory as is first single "On The Ropes" and its tale of trying to reconcile the ideals you had when you first started out on this road with what you've become ("Take this time to lie about everything/About who you are and who you've been, don't let the world get in..."). The truth is, the Wonder Stuff had had these sort of sentiments slipping into their songs for years (even big hits such as "Caught In My Shadow" and "Size Of A Cow"'s line about "These should be the best years of my life/But life is not what I thought it was" drop some pretty big hints that the band weren't happy) but here they're really laid out in a quite brutally raw fashion.
"Hush" is a ferocious tirade about the compromises of fame ("If this is a prize, it feels like a threat/It hangs like a fist over my head") while "A Great Drinker" and "Storm Drain" (probably my favourite track on the album as the lyrics are uncomfortably similar to the fate of at least one of my old bands) see Hunt voice his sadness about how easy it is to fall into a self-destructive cycle over booze and hash to try and forget about things when life is going against you.
The mournful "Sing The Absurd" which closes the album sums it all up perfectly - "And I can reflect on the days when respect had nothing to do with behaviour/And I can recall a time when we'd all just laugh in the face of our failure/But I'm old enough to know, old enough to know.../And guess who just threw up when he learned that he grew up/And guess what he learned when his fingers got burned/That we'd all sing the absurd".
I loved "Construction For The Modern Idiot" when it first came out but it seems that as I grow older and wiser (and possibly more weary and bitter) that it seems to resonate more each year. It was swiftly disowned by the band and only "On The Ropes" still survives in their live set nowadays (though they've been known to play "Sing The Absurd" on occasion and the excellent B-side from this era "Room 512 (All The News That's Fit To Print)" is still played regularly by Miles at his acoustic shows). Personally, I think they're being way too hard on it - I very nearly interviewed the Stuffies in Hertford a few years ago (unfortunately I couldn't get the afternoon off work and ended up just going to the gig instead) and was planning to ask Miles about his thoughts on the album. I guess maybe it's that when an album had a difficult genesis (as that one obviously did) that people maybe prefer not to talk about them. I guess if I ever do meet the guy I'll ask him - we shall see...
As for me? Well, I'm still out there and still trying to get a band working even though I'm well into my late thirties by now. Once the music bug bites you it's a bugger to get rid of. Suffice to say that my expectations these days are quite a bit lower than they used to be - just getting it together to the point where we're a regular fixture on the local scene and hopefully getting an EP or two out would do nicely - anything above that would be a bonus really. Watch this space. In the meantime, as I said at the start, I think it's high time "Construction For The Modern Idiot" got the critical reappraisal it deserves. Give it a listen and see for yourself, you might just be pleasantly surprised...
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