Rocktrospectiva: The Profound And Trippy "Seventh Dream On Teenage Heaven" Turns 40

Released on 11 October 1985 "Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven" was the debut studio album by English rock band Love and Rockets. Seventh Dream was preceded by the non-album single "Ball of Confusion" on 17 May 1985, and the album's first proper single "If There's a Heaven Above" on 13 September 1985.

The band's 1985 debut album was an unashamedly psychedelic adventure, far removed from the dark, angular soundscapes of Bauhaus. Yet they had to fight hard to avoid being branded "goth". It was two years after the initial collapse of Bauhaus, after the band had gone from punk-inspired art-glam obscurity to inadvertant founders of goth rock to a final put-it-all-to-bed set of shows. 

 

Guitarist Daniel Ash had already been releasing work under the Tones On Tail name and made it a full band with drummer Kevin Haskins as well as Bauhaus roadie Glenn Campling. Meantime bassist David J had his own solo career going over two albums and a slew of singles, as well as a stint playing and recording with the Jazz Butcher. So when the three Bauhaus vets wondered about a possible restart with singer Peter Murphy. But Murphy wasn’t interested, the remaining three sensed they could work together handily still – they had already done that while recording Bauhaus’s Burning From The Inside when Murphy was sidelined by illness. So the band with a name borrowed from the already landmark US comic book series by Los Bros Hernandez, via J’s friend and music associate Alan Moore, and then Love And Rockets was born.

Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven,  was one of those slightly disorienting things. Love And Rockets  was the most successful combination of any of the four, thanks to a fluke Top 40 hit "No New Tell To Tell" followed two years later by the almost chart-topping smash ‘So Alive’. In their own way, they were one of the key bands to bring back psychedelia into rock & roll.his claim is a bit overstated, of course. The album was unique by taking the new direction they did, by placing themselves where they did, by working through the scene they’d unwittingly created and then by keeping those parts of their aesthetic they’d shown an increasing affinity for, Love And Rockets created a fusion that became more than the sum of its parts. Love And Rockets didn't create psychedelic goth, or neo-psychedelia or whatever other term might be slapped onto them, but they did do something a little different, more in the sense of contemplative rainy-day psychedelia, something that happens at home or in the studio, drifting off and meditating. And even then, sonically, they created something uniquely itself, so stamped via its creative sources it couldn’t be anything else.

The album was a starting point, not a culmination. The album's lead track and only formal single, "If There's A Heaven Above",  was almost a scene setter, demonstrating what would characterize it as a whole: extremely precise playing, subtle electronic touches – percussion loops, extra elements quietly emerging and disappearing in the mix – and a separated, almost hollow sound in the mix, something very distinct from the near-tactile punch of Bauhaus, or even the separate efforts by Ash and J. The massed vocals and spiritually-inclined lyrics also set a mood – it’s very much a sense of a group effort with the occasional solo turn, with a thread of doubt and unsureness matched with a joint exuberance. In comparison the stand-alone single that soon followed, a cover of the Temptations’ classic "Ball Of Confusion" that refracted the stirring urgency of the original into a mannered but still strong showcase, proved to be the low-key but still notable enough hit.

"A Private Future" joined as the second track, it was clear of a demonstration of continuity as anything else — Ash's acoustic guitar had started to surface in Bauhaus first as devastating accent then there and and in Tones On Tail as stirring, mystic counterpoint to his own singing. Then "The Dog-End Of A Day Gone By" – was J’s one solo lyrical contribution here, Ash’s guitar is a thick feedback haze at points accentuated by crazed but not frenetic organ, Haskins’s drumming a full-bodied rumbling punch, J singing about religious street corner fanatics and drunks outside city restaurants while pondering a slow day’s close. "The Game", was a back-and-forth nursery rhyme stretched out like a cycle of water torture. Again, its sheer deliberateness is part of the point. It is atmospheric and maddening like no tomorrow, making the occasional musical breaks in the pattern – even if it’s just another series of patterns created

The second side was pretty much the same, but there was this track "Haunted While The Minutes Drag" which was the album's high point, where with the longest song on it Love And Rockets delivers its most transcendent moment. Split, slightly unevenly, between J’s initial lyric about romantic obsession – the ‘haunted’ part, the word repeated at the end, then the start of each line like a mantra – and Ash’s detailing of specific moments and moods, as partially excerpted at the start of this piece. J’s section is generally calmer, closer, quietly tense: Haskins delivered a quick, quiet rhythm on his kit, Ash performed a compressed surf rock lick of sorts, J’s bass appeared  soon after as a steady pulsing throb. Ash joined him in the vocals when ‘haunted’ switches from line-ender to line-starter – there’s a wonderful moment when everything drops away for a second, then J and Ash jointly sing "Haunted by your soul" 

With that, all that was left was sadness on "Saudade", the word from the Portuguese suggesting something of longing, of melancholy, of a lost past, something of all three, a sense that all that's left is the memories. It started as a showcase for Ash's acoustic guitar again, a beautiful progression that indeed sounds melancholic, yearning, whatever the word might be. Electronic strings via the album's producer John Rivers appeared, distant electronic beats expand the scope of the song, and it all starts to feel like a closing them for a film as much as anything else – it’s not the post rock cliches of later times, but it’s as dramatic and emotional in its own way. David J addied a few big chords on electric guitar, pumping up the drama but not crushing the arrangement in turn. 

The album was the first by a group of performers who'd already worked with each other before, but  it had a consciously different approach from what they had tried before in various combinations, an album that did not signal what the rest of their work together would be and sounded like so much as it demonstrated a particular path that they never quite pursued again. It was like a sense of the first step taken towards a brave new world.

 

Seventh Dream On teenage Heaven Track List:  

 

1. If There's A Heaven Above

2. A Private Future

3. The Dog-End Of A Day Gone By 

4. The Game

5. Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven

6. Haunted When The Minutes Drag

7. Saudade