It’s inevitable that in a media environment cosseted by nostalgia and pastsickness Bristol’s relentlessly foppish Beat-Poets, the Blue Aeroplanes should find themselves slipping loquaciously through a wormhole into a cold, hard new century, hurdy-gurdying around with a handful of daffodils like it was only yesterday, and bursting out of the archive in a flowery, firework display of lilting folk romance and a very earnest demonstration of love. Remember that 1984 Argos Catalogue you placed a bid against on Ebay? Or that classmate you hadn’t seen since you last scabbed his Chewbacca and his Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi action figures from his Showaddywaddy sports bag on your way to swimming that day in the 70s but met up with at a Brewers Fair Steakhouse in the Cotswolds last Summer? Well it’s a bit like that. Only slightly more embarrassing.
Now signed to EMI after a ten-year absence, the Blue Aeroplanes re-release what is arguably their most memorable and successful valiant disc. Originally released after the band’s shockingly well-received support slot with REM on their ‘Green’ tour of 1989, ‘Swagger’ is a flapping, bright canvass of lofty poetics and jostling, jangly indie abandon. Take ‘World View Blue’. Weird, off kilter title, freeform lyrics that an eighteenth Romantic Poet would be proud of and a camp, conscientious delivery courtesy of the amusingly fey and verbose blue boss pilot, Gerard Langley – a feat matched in no small part by the swelling pomp of the utterly lovely ‘Weightless’.
Part Waterboys, part Velvet Underground, part REM, part Oscar Wilde, part shite, the angry, the sad and the beautiful Blue Aeroplanes never really quite made the mainstream. Whether it was the bagpipes, the turntables, the poetry, the groovy, bonkers dancing or the sheer quantity of band members, nobody really knows, but one thing does stand out for contention: there’s an undeniable vein of light rock running through this album’s veins and it’s not pretty. Certainly they were unwilling to follow the rules and the first rule they flouted was to estrange even their most sympathetic audience with an often pugnacious lyricism and a tendency to offer interludes of protracted free-form busking with a cast of thousands.
When it works, as it does with the sweet, spellbinding romance of major bed-sit anthem ‘Your Ages’ and the spangling ‘What It Is’ featuring Michael Stipe on backing vocals, it’s satisfying stuff. But more often than not, the faintly uncomfortable posturing and the saturated effects on the swarm of guitars the band features reminds me that there are some things about the eighties that are just worth forgetting.