When your band forms in a town called Paisley, a jangle-pop, neo-psychedelic future is all but preordained, and such was the case with Scotland’s Close Lobsters. Unfortunately for so promising a band, worldwide fame was not equally in the cards. The quintet consisting of brothers Andrew and Robert Burnett on vocals and bass, Tom Donnelly and Graeme Wilmington on guitars, and drummer Stewart McFaydon burned brightly, if briefly, during the late ’80s UK indie scene, releasing two records and an EP before calling it quits. In an era when such diverse and adventurous UK pop bands as Housemartins, Aztec Camera, and Prefab Sprout were spinning college radio airplay into mild commercial success in America, it is surprising that Close Lobsters failed to gain similar traction. They certainly had the right sound and musical chops for the time, but, perhaps were seen as too derivative to rise above the mass.
Fire Records continues in their quest to become the UK’s answer to America’s Rhino Records in their commitment to resurrecting the work of so many influential or just-plain-good-but-overlooked artists of the 1980s and 90s. Firestation Towers: 1986 – 1989 brings back into print the band’s three previously released cds, the albums Foxheads Stalk This Land, Headache Rhetoric, and the compilation, Forever, Until Victory!: The Singles Collection in disc, digital, and vinyl formats, 39 cuts in all.
The Foxheads album offers a suitable late ’80s debut reminiscent of similarly timed UK bands sharing lyrical influences equal parts Morrisey and Robyn Hitchcock and sonic impressions gleaned from the indie-pop scenes taking place on three continents simultaneously. There are ample common elements of Australia’s The Church and New Zealand’s the Clean, America’s R.E.M. and the Connells, or the already mentioned UK bands of the time on hand here. Follow-up Headache Rhetoric takes a darker turn, more Séance than Of Skins and Heart to play the Church card. The singles collection contains the brief, brilliant “Firestation Towers,” from which the compilation takes its name, and a couple of revelatory covers. That the band would choose to cover “Paper Thin Hotel” from Leonard Cohen’s much-maligned, Phil Spector-produced Death of a Ladies Man album reflects the deep catalog re-discovery spirit of the time while their reworking of Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My” offers a stubborn staking of loyalty with the then present generation as they declare their allegiance to a usurper king: “this is the story of Nikki Sudden.” Easy enough to pledge allegiance to that, in my book.
But at the end of the day, this collection is not going to make anyone throw away their Smiths records. The shadow of that band colors all that is to be heard here. Listening to Close Lobsters today, one can hear a collection of their influences, but for anyone who has enjoyed the work of those influences and of that late ’80s period of indie-pop, this is an enjoyable anthology and worth attention. Either as a reminder of what was or as an introduction to what was missed at the time, Firestation Towers offers some fine music from a band that never recorded a sour note and could have turned into something bigger had they the time to develop beyond their excellent influences on display.