1995 – probably.
I’m sat watching the television. In my head I’m at my Nana and Grandad’s house and Top Of The Pops was on in the background (I suspect this memory is wrong but it’s mine so I’m sticking to it). There’s a song I hear a snatch of in the chart countdown – just a few seconds but I like what I hear. I either miss or forget what the song is called and the name of the band who performed it. But for some reason I have the title ‘Olympian’ in my head, and the band name ‘Gene’. I didn’t have a lot of money for spending on music in those days so I couldn’t go out and risk buying the album or single to see if I was right about it, there were no streaming services and Gene rarely appeared on MTV. So it was that it took two years for me to finally hear the song whose title had haunted my subconscious for all that time. Back then I used to read the weekly NME and Melody Maker, and sometimes those music papers came with a free CD (or even cassette!) sellotaped to the front cover. And at some point in 1997, one of those CDs had as its final song a live version of Olympian, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall. At last I got to hear it. And of course, I loved it – it’s a hard song not to love.
Off the back of that I did the totally illogical thing – instead of buying Olympian I bought a copy of Gene’s most recent album, Drawn To The Deep End on cassette. I mean, I suppose it made a kind of sense – I had a great version of ‘Olympian’ already so getting hold of the studio version became less essential. And then I bought their 1999 album Revelations on cassette. And then I went to see Gene at Hull University – my first proper gig, an 18th birthday present from my Uncle Paul who took me along. The main body of the setlist that night was drawn from…er…’Drawn’ and ‘Revelations’ and I sang along to every word from the second row (plus ‘Olympian’ of course) until the encore, in which I knew none of the songs. I left the show convinced that Rossiter had noticed this 18 year old at the front suddenly lyric-less and had smiled at me in acknowledgment at my failure to know the older songs (I am aware that there is no way in which this is true, it just felt that way at the time). I left the show on a natural high – I remember leaving the venue saying loudly ‘I have got to do that again.’ The other thing I had to do was complete my Gene album collection – which I did swiftly, getting Olympian and the b-sides and rarities album To See The Lights as a birthday present. Never again would I be lyric-less at a Gene show (sadly, never again would I go to a Gene show, but that’s another story).
Being a quiet, stay-at-home kind of teenager, Olympian didn’t hit me quite as hard as those more outgoing fans who were a few years older than me and already occupying the smoky rooms and having those nocturnal adventures that the album chronicled. There was no denying there were some great songs on it – the title track obviously, but the swaggering ‘Sleep Well Tonight’, the plaintive ‘London, Can You Wait?’, the delightfully seedy ‘You Love, It Lies’, the in-your-face gay anthem ‘Left-Handed’. I didn’t live in a city, let alone a large one, where these adventures seemed more possible, if not somehow inevitable (it was a surprise to me when I later learned that Gene’s bassist Kevin Miles is a fellow Grimbarian, making the two worlds closer than I’d thought). To me these were more like snapshots of someone else’s life than reflections of my own and I remained outside the songs rather than climbing into them.
Sometimes it takes something really minor to change your experience of an album. On the 15th of November this year (Gene singer Martin Rossiter’s 50th birthday) Olympian was the subject of one of Tim Burgess’s Twitter Listening Parties, in which he, fans and Martin Rossiter and Matt James from Gene tweeted along while listening to the album at the same time. Giving the album that kind of attention and reading the comments from the other listeners focused my attention in a new way, and I suddenly experienced it more viscerally than I ever have previously. The thing that really struck me on this listen was how young an album it is - songs about just starting out, being able to go and drink to the late hours, living in bedsit rooms, first loves turning into repeated mistakes, playing at a kind of bohemianism mixed with innocence. And a sense that just outside of these small, smoky rooms are open streets to spill out onto at chucking out time, roads leading to the possibility of sudden and unexpected encounters with new loves, new experiences, and a limitless future in a big city. Just as watching La Dolce Vita makes me want to live in Rome in the 1950s, listening to Olympian makes me wish I’d spent my late teens and early twenties in the world of London’s dive bars, early-morning cab rides home from the night-before, to have felt at home in the midst of the young wannabe bohemia in the decayed glamour of London Town – quite an effect to have on a life-long teetotaller who hates pubs and bars. But there’s an undercurrent of violence that runs through the album as well. There are upsides to living in this world, but risks too, and Rossiter is going to show them to us – ‘I’ve seen it all before,’ he tells us nonchalantly on ‘To The City’, ‘and more.’ For example, based on its title ‘Sleep Well Tonight’ could be a tender, caring song. It isn’t. Instead it’s a song about territorial violence – ‘We’ll see blood soon / When the night’s through…This is our territory / This patch belongs to me’. But Rossiter makes it sound romantic – ‘Come take my hand / And sleep well tonight / tomorrow we fight’, matched by a tune with as much swagger as the lyric.
Rossiter’s lyrics, especially in the early days, defy easy interpretation. Listening to the album as a whole is like watching a highlights reel of hard-boiled black and white 1950s British films, each song creating a sense of atmosphere but never revealing its story fully – a concept that was played out in the film stills used as album and single covers, and the high-contrast black & white band photographs in the album booklet. The confessional ‘London, Can You Wait?’ for example, with its narrator who has ‘sinned – the alarm rang loud / the lights were on, I didn’t see a thing / My kith and kin, death just walked in, again’. What exactly has just happened is never made clear – a robbery gone wrong? Is the title a plea from a friend who ended up in prison for a crime which resulted in the death of one of the gang? Is this a kind of noir gangster film sketched in just a few lines? A similar feeling is created on ‘Truth, Rest Your Head’, which involves the narrator addressing someone who has spent ‘Six months inside / Wandsworth’s finest landmark’. What they did to end up there is again never explained, although it’s something that ‘Every M.P.’ apparently believes them to be innocent of, although the narrator knows them to be wrong – ‘“He can’t be guilty” / But you and I both know / Truth, rest your head / There is more than a life at stake here / For me you died tonight.’ There’s a lot to unpick there – it must have been a much publicised crime, and the fact that the narrator says their former friend died for them ‘tonight’ suggests they had also believed them to be innocent of the crime, or perhaps it’s the subject’s plan to benefit from ‘the chat shows’ that has ended their friendship. Still, there is no suggestion that the narrator will reveal the secrets they hold – they’ll keep their mouth shut. Guitarist Steve Mason matches the narrator’s disgust and disappointment with a lengthy solo outro that is as controlled as their anger.
Prison and the threat of it is a recurring theme on the album, and crops up again in the bold, almost punk statement of ‘Left-Handed’. ‘Take cover’ Rossiter warns, ‘I am coming out today’, defiantly stating that while it is ‘hard to be left-handed’ (slang for gay) ‘I will be here tomorrow’ while Steve Mason plays a guitar solo that sounds like a call to revolution. The song’s final verse is the album’s most straight-forward political statement – ‘Evil, I’ve seen your face…You Victorian descendent / It’s illegal, that my clan just aren’t seen as people’. But even then there’s the suggestion that maybe he won’t be there tomorrow after all – ‘On the Isle Of Man / I’ll serve my time.’
Also worth examining is the contemporary b-side ‘This Is Not My Crime’, which involves the narrator agreeing to testify against someone in court against someone who has committed a traumatising offense against them (‘This is not my crime / and the years have not flown by / But every time I try / he’s inside me’) only to see the guilty party get away with it (‘Next time he’ll surely do time’). The offence isn’t specified but the line about the offender being ‘inside’ the victim, while possibly simply a metaphor to show how the narrator has been affected mentally, does also suggest that this could be a rape victim we are listening to, which would tie in to the poor conviction rate in rape cases– the narrator ignores ‘the best advice of the time’ when deciding to give evidence, perhaps that advice being that they would be exposing themselves in court for no good result. Funnily enough, I recently re-read Robert Tressell’s classic socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and was surprised to find that the sixth chapter of the book is called ‘This is not my crime’ – the title coming from a newspaper article the book’s lead character reads about a man who kills his wife and child and then himself because of the abject poverty they were living in. The man leaves a note which reads, ‘This is not my crime, but society’s.’ I don’t know if this had any influence on the writing of the song, but given his political leanings it is entirely possible that Rossiter may have read the novel and noted the phrase (consciously or not).
But Gene were never just ‘bovver boys’ or an issues band, and there’s an innocence that runs through these early songs, and often a tenderness too. On early non-album single ‘Be My Light Be My Guide’ Rossiter pretends to be an experienced libertine to a taxi-driver but his bravado isn’t fooling anyone – ‘Take me back to the thrills of town / And tell me more about women / Oh, I had four last night’. Of course you did, Martin. ‘Your Love, It Lies’ is another short-story about not getting the libertine lifestyle you’ve been wanting – ‘I’ve tried to ask’ the Rossiter tells us, but after a failed amorous encounter he is ‘left wanting more.’ It’s a lyric of beautiful details – Rossiter tweeted that the line ‘I’ll take you in my arms and tend you like a vine’ was the first time he felt he’d written something a proper writer would come up with but my favourite detail is in the first verse in which his ‘room is dark / the wardrobe sees you sleep’. The personification of the wardrobe, the idea of it watching over the sleeping figure in the ‘cheap dark room’, conjures a atmosphere as strong as the image. The song ends with the narrator telling the object of their attentions that ‘Just for one night / No need to buy.’ The language could be mistaken for a reference to prostitution, but I suspect it’s a reassurance that if they go to bed it doesn’t mean there are any further obligations between them as a result – but the previous verses are too tender to convince that the narrator really sees this as an entirely throw-away experience. ‘Still Can’t Find The Phone’ is a song of innocent longing (‘I’m at my lowest ebb / so please don’t take that tone’) but it’s the final two songs on which the tenderness really takes over. ‘Olympian’ is the album’s first straight-forward love song, a song of pure need – ‘Give me something I can hold / With that something I will grow / Make me crazy with your arms’. But the narrator isn’t in the best shape – ‘It’s all gone hazy, it’s all gone wrong’ and perhaps feels unworthy of the affection they are seeking, warning the object of their affection that while they are ‘flattered that you thought / I make a good reward’ he needs to understand ‘How can you survive my blatant lies?’ Luckily he manages to pull himself out of this self-sabotaging mood, inviting them to ‘come taste my good reward’. The song ends with the repeated refrain of ‘I wanted to be here with you / For I can only be normal with you.’ Vulnerability, doubt, lust, longing and the courage to leap – all in the one song. It’s quite an achievement. Wait, did I say this was a straight-forward love song? You’d think so, but there’s one final line – ‘I’m taking your life for you’. What’s this? Has the narrator been some kind of obsessive the whole time, just waiting for the opportunity to kill the object of their affections to somehow save them? Or does ‘taking your life’ mean something more innocent – taking it in hand, combining it with theirs? As so often on Olympian, the ambiguous phrase is almost thrown away and never explained.
Most albums would end there with the grandstand finish, but ‘Olympian’ has one more trick up its sleeve. In the Twitter listening party drummer Matt James commented that ‘We’ll Find Our Own Way’ is a kind of ‘extra’ after the album ends with the title-track. Probably the most straight-forward song on the album finds Rossiter gently reassuring a loved one over a softly-strummed backing that ‘your pain will die’ and that he can help them through the difficult times because ‘my heart is strong’. The album ends with the suggestion that you can only live in the world the album chronicles for so long before you have enough of ‘life’s cruel twisted daze’ and must together ‘find our own way’. It’s a fitting end as Olympian is the kind of album you can make once, the youth it chronicles flees rapidly and sooner rather than later you have to decide what you do next, which way you will find - like the ending of a film in which the protagonists emerge blinking into the sunlight and walk away from their old lives hand-in-hand, into an uncertain but hopefully bright future.
The B-side.
But the eleven tracks of the album are not the end of it. Like many bands of the time, Gene’s singles were accompanied by extra tracks, or ‘b-sides’. Olympian has more than most if you include the tracks on the two singles that were released before the album but not included on it – 11 in total, a whole second album’s worth. And some of those songs can consider themselves very unlucky not to have made the album cut. Martin Rossiter commented in the Listening Party that he wasn’t sure why the indie classic singles ‘For The Dead’ and ‘Be My Light Be My Guide’ were left off the album and that their omission probably hurt the album’s sales but among the b-sides are tracks that Gene would keep in their live sets right up until their final shows ten years later – the razor-sharp ‘Sick, Sober & Sorry (‘Please don’t stop me from drinking…’), the beautiful, piano-led ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, the court-room drama to rock of ‘This Is Not My Crime’. Many bands release b-sides and rarities albums but Gene had enough material to justify one after only one studio LP – the eleven original studio tracks on To See The Lights justifies the price of admission alone before you even get to the beautiful, stripped-down piano version of ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, or the live powerhouse performances of ‘Sleep Well Tonight’ and ‘Olympian’.
Sometimes I wonder what the perfect Olympian track-listing actually is. Surely their classic debut single ‘For The Dead’ should have been on it? And most bands would have killed to have written ‘I Can’t Help Myself’ and would never have tossed it away on a b-side. But ultimately it doesn’t matter – Olympian stands as an album that is complete in itself, and the substitution of even superior tracks runs the risk of ruining its cohesion. The album is a portal to a time and a place, to a youth now faded, to places now gone and streets no longer walked. Olympian is the way back to that youth, at least for 40 minutes or so.
Oh…and was the song I heard on Top Of The Pops actually ‘Olympian’? Honestly, by the time I finally heard it, I couldn’t possibly remember.
(c) Philip Marsh.
I’m sat watching the television. In my head I’m at my Nana and Grandad’s house and Top Of The Pops was on in the background (I suspect this memory is wrong but it’s mine so I’m sticking to it). There’s a song I hear a snatch of in the chart countdown – just a few seconds but I like what I hear. I either miss or forget what the song is called and the name of the band who performed it. But for some reason I have the title ‘Olympian’ in my head, and the band name ‘Gene’. I didn’t have a lot of money for spending on music in those days so I couldn’t go out and risk buying the album or single to see if I was right about it, there were no streaming services and Gene rarely appeared on MTV. So it was that it took two years for me to finally hear the song whose title had haunted my subconscious for all that time. Back then I used to read the weekly NME and Melody Maker, and sometimes those music papers came with a free CD (or even cassette!) sellotaped to the front cover. And at some point in 1997, one of those CDs had as its final song a live version of Olympian, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall. At last I got to hear it. And of course, I loved it – it’s a hard song not to love.
Off the back of that I did the totally illogical thing – instead of buying Olympian I bought a copy of Gene’s most recent album, Drawn To The Deep End on cassette. I mean, I suppose it made a kind of sense – I had a great version of ‘Olympian’ already so getting hold of the studio version became less essential. And then I bought their 1999 album Revelations on cassette. And then I went to see Gene at Hull University – my first proper gig, an 18th birthday present from my Uncle Paul who took me along. The main body of the setlist that night was drawn from…er…’Drawn’ and ‘Revelations’ and I sang along to every word from the second row (plus ‘Olympian’ of course) until the encore, in which I knew none of the songs. I left the show convinced that Rossiter had noticed this 18 year old at the front suddenly lyric-less and had smiled at me in acknowledgment at my failure to know the older songs (I am aware that there is no way in which this is true, it just felt that way at the time). I left the show on a natural high – I remember leaving the venue saying loudly ‘I have got to do that again.’ The other thing I had to do was complete my Gene album collection – which I did swiftly, getting Olympian and the b-sides and rarities album To See The Lights as a birthday present. Never again would I be lyric-less at a Gene show (sadly, never again would I go to a Gene show, but that’s another story).
Being a quiet, stay-at-home kind of teenager, Olympian didn’t hit me quite as hard as those more outgoing fans who were a few years older than me and already occupying the smoky rooms and having those nocturnal adventures that the album chronicled. There was no denying there were some great songs on it – the title track obviously, but the swaggering ‘Sleep Well Tonight’, the plaintive ‘London, Can You Wait?’, the delightfully seedy ‘You Love, It Lies’, the in-your-face gay anthem ‘Left-Handed’. I didn’t live in a city, let alone a large one, where these adventures seemed more possible, if not somehow inevitable (it was a surprise to me when I later learned that Gene’s bassist Kevin Miles is a fellow Grimbarian, making the two worlds closer than I’d thought). To me these were more like snapshots of someone else’s life than reflections of my own and I remained outside the songs rather than climbing into them.
Sometimes it takes something really minor to change your experience of an album. On the 15th of November this year (Gene singer Martin Rossiter’s 50th birthday) Olympian was the subject of one of Tim Burgess’s Twitter Listening Parties, in which he, fans and Martin Rossiter and Matt James from Gene tweeted along while listening to the album at the same time. Giving the album that kind of attention and reading the comments from the other listeners focused my attention in a new way, and I suddenly experienced it more viscerally than I ever have previously. The thing that really struck me on this listen was how young an album it is - songs about just starting out, being able to go and drink to the late hours, living in bedsit rooms, first loves turning into repeated mistakes, playing at a kind of bohemianism mixed with innocence. And a sense that just outside of these small, smoky rooms are open streets to spill out onto at chucking out time, roads leading to the possibility of sudden and unexpected encounters with new loves, new experiences, and a limitless future in a big city. Just as watching La Dolce Vita makes me want to live in Rome in the 1950s, listening to Olympian makes me wish I’d spent my late teens and early twenties in the world of London’s dive bars, early-morning cab rides home from the night-before, to have felt at home in the midst of the young wannabe bohemia in the decayed glamour of London Town – quite an effect to have on a life-long teetotaller who hates pubs and bars. But there’s an undercurrent of violence that runs through the album as well. There are upsides to living in this world, but risks too, and Rossiter is going to show them to us – ‘I’ve seen it all before,’ he tells us nonchalantly on ‘To The City’, ‘and more.’ For example, based on its title ‘Sleep Well Tonight’ could be a tender, caring song. It isn’t. Instead it’s a song about territorial violence – ‘We’ll see blood soon / When the night’s through…This is our territory / This patch belongs to me’. But Rossiter makes it sound romantic – ‘Come take my hand / And sleep well tonight / tomorrow we fight’, matched by a tune with as much swagger as the lyric.
Rossiter’s lyrics, especially in the early days, defy easy interpretation. Listening to the album as a whole is like watching a highlights reel of hard-boiled black and white 1950s British films, each song creating a sense of atmosphere but never revealing its story fully – a concept that was played out in the film stills used as album and single covers, and the high-contrast black & white band photographs in the album booklet. The confessional ‘London, Can You Wait?’ for example, with its narrator who has ‘sinned – the alarm rang loud / the lights were on, I didn’t see a thing / My kith and kin, death just walked in, again’. What exactly has just happened is never made clear – a robbery gone wrong? Is the title a plea from a friend who ended up in prison for a crime which resulted in the death of one of the gang? Is this a kind of noir gangster film sketched in just a few lines? A similar feeling is created on ‘Truth, Rest Your Head’, which involves the narrator addressing someone who has spent ‘Six months inside / Wandsworth’s finest landmark’. What they did to end up there is again never explained, although it’s something that ‘Every M.P.’ apparently believes them to be innocent of, although the narrator knows them to be wrong – ‘“He can’t be guilty” / But you and I both know / Truth, rest your head / There is more than a life at stake here / For me you died tonight.’ There’s a lot to unpick there – it must have been a much publicised crime, and the fact that the narrator says their former friend died for them ‘tonight’ suggests they had also believed them to be innocent of the crime, or perhaps it’s the subject’s plan to benefit from ‘the chat shows’ that has ended their friendship. Still, there is no suggestion that the narrator will reveal the secrets they hold – they’ll keep their mouth shut. Guitarist Steve Mason matches the narrator’s disgust and disappointment with a lengthy solo outro that is as controlled as their anger.
Prison and the threat of it is a recurring theme on the album, and crops up again in the bold, almost punk statement of ‘Left-Handed’. ‘Take cover’ Rossiter warns, ‘I am coming out today’, defiantly stating that while it is ‘hard to be left-handed’ (slang for gay) ‘I will be here tomorrow’ while Steve Mason plays a guitar solo that sounds like a call to revolution. The song’s final verse is the album’s most straight-forward political statement – ‘Evil, I’ve seen your face…You Victorian descendent / It’s illegal, that my clan just aren’t seen as people’. But even then there’s the suggestion that maybe he won’t be there tomorrow after all – ‘On the Isle Of Man / I’ll serve my time.’
Also worth examining is the contemporary b-side ‘This Is Not My Crime’, which involves the narrator agreeing to testify against someone in court against someone who has committed a traumatising offense against them (‘This is not my crime / and the years have not flown by / But every time I try / he’s inside me’) only to see the guilty party get away with it (‘Next time he’ll surely do time’). The offence isn’t specified but the line about the offender being ‘inside’ the victim, while possibly simply a metaphor to show how the narrator has been affected mentally, does also suggest that this could be a rape victim we are listening to, which would tie in to the poor conviction rate in rape cases– the narrator ignores ‘the best advice of the time’ when deciding to give evidence, perhaps that advice being that they would be exposing themselves in court for no good result. Funnily enough, I recently re-read Robert Tressell’s classic socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and was surprised to find that the sixth chapter of the book is called ‘This is not my crime’ – the title coming from a newspaper article the book’s lead character reads about a man who kills his wife and child and then himself because of the abject poverty they were living in. The man leaves a note which reads, ‘This is not my crime, but society’s.’ I don’t know if this had any influence on the writing of the song, but given his political leanings it is entirely possible that Rossiter may have read the novel and noted the phrase (consciously or not).
But Gene were never just ‘bovver boys’ or an issues band, and there’s an innocence that runs through these early songs, and often a tenderness too. On early non-album single ‘Be My Light Be My Guide’ Rossiter pretends to be an experienced libertine to a taxi-driver but his bravado isn’t fooling anyone – ‘Take me back to the thrills of town / And tell me more about women / Oh, I had four last night’. Of course you did, Martin. ‘Your Love, It Lies’ is another short-story about not getting the libertine lifestyle you’ve been wanting – ‘I’ve tried to ask’ the Rossiter tells us, but after a failed amorous encounter he is ‘left wanting more.’ It’s a lyric of beautiful details – Rossiter tweeted that the line ‘I’ll take you in my arms and tend you like a vine’ was the first time he felt he’d written something a proper writer would come up with but my favourite detail is in the first verse in which his ‘room is dark / the wardrobe sees you sleep’. The personification of the wardrobe, the idea of it watching over the sleeping figure in the ‘cheap dark room’, conjures a atmosphere as strong as the image. The song ends with the narrator telling the object of their attentions that ‘Just for one night / No need to buy.’ The language could be mistaken for a reference to prostitution, but I suspect it’s a reassurance that if they go to bed it doesn’t mean there are any further obligations between them as a result – but the previous verses are too tender to convince that the narrator really sees this as an entirely throw-away experience. ‘Still Can’t Find The Phone’ is a song of innocent longing (‘I’m at my lowest ebb / so please don’t take that tone’) but it’s the final two songs on which the tenderness really takes over. ‘Olympian’ is the album’s first straight-forward love song, a song of pure need – ‘Give me something I can hold / With that something I will grow / Make me crazy with your arms’. But the narrator isn’t in the best shape – ‘It’s all gone hazy, it’s all gone wrong’ and perhaps feels unworthy of the affection they are seeking, warning the object of their affection that while they are ‘flattered that you thought / I make a good reward’ he needs to understand ‘How can you survive my blatant lies?’ Luckily he manages to pull himself out of this self-sabotaging mood, inviting them to ‘come taste my good reward’. The song ends with the repeated refrain of ‘I wanted to be here with you / For I can only be normal with you.’ Vulnerability, doubt, lust, longing and the courage to leap – all in the one song. It’s quite an achievement. Wait, did I say this was a straight-forward love song? You’d think so, but there’s one final line – ‘I’m taking your life for you’. What’s this? Has the narrator been some kind of obsessive the whole time, just waiting for the opportunity to kill the object of their affections to somehow save them? Or does ‘taking your life’ mean something more innocent – taking it in hand, combining it with theirs? As so often on Olympian, the ambiguous phrase is almost thrown away and never explained.
Most albums would end there with the grandstand finish, but ‘Olympian’ has one more trick up its sleeve. In the Twitter listening party drummer Matt James commented that ‘We’ll Find Our Own Way’ is a kind of ‘extra’ after the album ends with the title-track. Probably the most straight-forward song on the album finds Rossiter gently reassuring a loved one over a softly-strummed backing that ‘your pain will die’ and that he can help them through the difficult times because ‘my heart is strong’. The album ends with the suggestion that you can only live in the world the album chronicles for so long before you have enough of ‘life’s cruel twisted daze’ and must together ‘find our own way’. It’s a fitting end as Olympian is the kind of album you can make once, the youth it chronicles flees rapidly and sooner rather than later you have to decide what you do next, which way you will find - like the ending of a film in which the protagonists emerge blinking into the sunlight and walk away from their old lives hand-in-hand, into an uncertain but hopefully bright future.
The B-side.
But the eleven tracks of the album are not the end of it. Like many bands of the time, Gene’s singles were accompanied by extra tracks, or ‘b-sides’. Olympian has more than most if you include the tracks on the two singles that were released before the album but not included on it – 11 in total, a whole second album’s worth. And some of those songs can consider themselves very unlucky not to have made the album cut. Martin Rossiter commented in the Listening Party that he wasn’t sure why the indie classic singles ‘For The Dead’ and ‘Be My Light Be My Guide’ were left off the album and that their omission probably hurt the album’s sales but among the b-sides are tracks that Gene would keep in their live sets right up until their final shows ten years later – the razor-sharp ‘Sick, Sober & Sorry (‘Please don’t stop me from drinking…’), the beautiful, piano-led ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, the court-room drama to rock of ‘This Is Not My Crime’. Many bands release b-sides and rarities albums but Gene had enough material to justify one after only one studio LP – the eleven original studio tracks on To See The Lights justifies the price of admission alone before you even get to the beautiful, stripped-down piano version of ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, or the live powerhouse performances of ‘Sleep Well Tonight’ and ‘Olympian’.
Sometimes I wonder what the perfect Olympian track-listing actually is. Surely their classic debut single ‘For The Dead’ should have been on it? And most bands would have killed to have written ‘I Can’t Help Myself’ and would never have tossed it away on a b-side. But ultimately it doesn’t matter – Olympian stands as an album that is complete in itself, and the substitution of even superior tracks runs the risk of ruining its cohesion. The album is a portal to a time and a place, to a youth now faded, to places now gone and streets no longer walked. Olympian is the way back to that youth, at least for 40 minutes or so.
Oh…and was the song I heard on Top Of The Pops actually ‘Olympian’? Honestly, by the time I finally heard it, I couldn’t possibly remember.
(c) Philip Marsh.
No comments:
Post a Comment