Kevin Rowlands apparently started this album as an antidote to all of the synth-pop songs of the time, complaining that they all sound the same. For which I can't help but agree. Well, not all exactly the same, there is surprising variety there, but it's not a sound that really appeals to me.
So what Rowlands and co. give us instead are monster-length bits of prog-soul such as This Is What She’s Like, that veers between infectious musical passages linked by a bit of Pete & Dud / Smith & Jones dialogue finding comedy in the banal. We get Knowledge Of Beauty, a slow track with steel guitars that sounds vaguely like a Hollies number with Satellite Of Love “bum-bum-bum" backing. One Of These Things uses Werewolves Of London as a base over which Rowland and Billy Adams continue their Smith & Jones rambling about nothing. The TV show Alas Smith & Jones started in 1984, but I don’t recall if Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones did the talking heads characters earlier in Not the Nine O' Clock News. Either way, there's also the element of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's dialogue pieces about it too. Reminisces Pt 2 is an entirely spoken word piece, with Rowland talking about the link between music and memories over the top of a mellow arrangement, and is really sweet.
The album flopped on release, partly perhaps because they didn’t release a single – Listen To This could have easily been one, though. It’s the closest track on the album to the Dexys sound from prior albums, a bit of Northern Soul flecked with Helen O’Hara’s gypsy violin, and an exuberant love song. But, really, it’s a crying shame because to me this is one of the more interesting and enjoyable albums of 1985 so far. And I didn’t think I particularly liked Dexys thanks to the saturation of Come On Eileen.
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