Sealed LP: Steve Harley: The Psychomodo

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Steve Harley: The Psychomodo FACTORY SEALED LP Format: Sealed LP Record Company/Release Number: EMI: ST-1133 Bar Code: NONE Original release date: 1975 Country: U.S.A. Condition of the cover: Mint Condition of the record: Sealed - Assumed Mint Shipping Weight: 1 pounds, 2 ounces Buy it now price: 24.99 Inventory number: 209064 Notes: Die cut cover. Please contact me if you have any difficulty viewing the photos. Songs: Sweet Dreams Psychomodo Mr. Soft Singular Band Ritz Cavaliers Bed in the Corner Sling It! Tumbling Down Credits: John Middleton: Engineer Milton Reame James: Keyboards Alan Clayson: Liner Notes Alan Parsons: Producer Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel: Performer Mick Rock: Design, Photography Peter Flanagan: Engineer Andrew Powell: Strings, Arranger Chris Blair: Mastering Jean Paul Crocker: Violin Richard Dodd: Engineer Stuart Elliot: Percussion, Drums Stuart Elliott: Drums Geoff Emerick: Engineer Steve Harley: Vocals, Producer, Main Performer Paul Jeffreys: Bass Album Review: If The Human Menagerie, Cockney Rebel's debut album, was a journey into the bowels of decadent cabaret, The Psychomodo, their second, is like a trip to the circus. Except the clowns were more sickly perverted than clowns normally are, and the funhouse was filled with rattlesnakes and spiders. Such twists on innocent childhood imagery have transfixed authors from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, but Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel were the first band to set that same dread to music, and the only ones to make it work. The Psychomodo was also the band's breakthrough album. The Human Menagerie drew wild reviews and curious sales, but it existed as a cult even after "Judy Teen" swung out of now to give the band a hit single in spring 1974. Then "Mr Soft" rode his bloodied big top themes into town and Rebelmania erupted. The Psychomodo, still possessing one of the most elegantly threatening jackets of any album ever, had no alternative but to clean up. Steve Harley's themes remained essentially the same as last time out -- fey, fractured alienation; studied, splintered melancholia, and shattered shards of imagery which mean more in the mind than they ever could on paper. Both the swirling "Ritz" and the ponderous "Cavaliers" are little more than litanies of one-liners, pregnant with disconnected symbolism ("blow-job blues and boogaloos"... "morgue-like lips and waitress tips"), but they are mesmerising nevertheless. Reversing the nature of The Human Menagerie, the crucial songs are not those extended epics. Rather, it is the paranoid vignette of "Sweet Dreams," surely written in the numbing first light of that precipitous fame; the panicked brainstorm of the title track; and the stuttering, chopping, hysterical nightmare of "Beautiful Dream" (absent from the original LP, but restored as a CD bonus track) which stake out the album's parameters. The hopelessly romantic "Bed in the Corner" opens another door entirely -- relatively straightforward, astoundingly melodic, it was (though nobody realized it at the time) the closest thing in sight to the music Harley would be making later in the decade. , however, it swerves in another direction entirely, the dawn of a closing triptych -- completed by "Sling It" and "Tumbling Down" -- which encompasses ten of the most heartstoppingly breathless, and emotionally draining minutes in '7s rock. Indeed, though the latter's final refrain was reduced to pitifully parodic singalong the moment it got out on stage, on record it retains both its potency and its purpose. "Oh dear!" Harley intones, "look what they've done to the blues." The fact is, he did it all himself -- and people have been trying to undo it ever since. ~ Dave Thompson, All Music Guide Biography: Steve Harley biography by Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide British rocker Steve Harley was born Steven Nice in London on February 27, 1951; the son of a jazz singer, he was stricken with polio at age two and spent the better part of his adolescence in and out of hospitals. After trying his ... read more

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