Skip to main content

The Lotus Eaters – The First Picture of You

Liverpool in 1983 was a wilfully contrarian place. On the one hand here was a crumbling post-industrial empire still scarred by the Liverpool 8 riots two years before and in the throes of civic and political unrest that would see the hard-left city council come into direct confrontation with Margaret Thatcher's Tory government. Yosser Hughes, the moustachioed anti-hero of Alan Bleasdale's TV drama Boys From the Blackstuff, had entered mass consciousness the year before as a tragicomic icon of a working-class community having its heart and soul ripped out, while a new wave of tripped-out dole queue dreamers had already claimed the city's primary-coloured post-punk landscape as its own.

But when the debut single by a band who'd yet to play a gig made the charts in July to define that year's summer, you can see why more barricade-manning lyricists openly mocked the song's images of flowers screaming their joy. In truth, from the pastoral exotica of a band calling themselves The Lotus Eaters to the breathless wide-eyed idyll of the song itself, The First Picture of You was a necessary soft-focus flipside to gritty realism.

Formed by an ad hoc alliance based around Jass Babies vocalist Peter Coyle and Wild Swans guitarist Jeri Kelly, The Lotus Eaters' part charity shop Famous Five, part shaved-back-n'-sides 1930s austerity chic image similarly captured the conflicting moods of the times. With the duo caught in the crossfire of a record label bidding war following an October '82 John Peel session, the eventual first fruits of this coupling was a lushly produced version of the Peel session's highlight.

Ushered in by piano flourishes played by Kelly's fellow Wild Swan Ged Quinn and driven by Kelly's itchy guitar patterns, The First Picture of You was a sublime evocation of innocence and yearned-for experience that seemed to offer an escape into the pure joy of post-adolescent erotic promise. As another Scouse sage, poet Roger McGough, once wrote in Summer With Monika, his extended poetic yarn that charted a heady affair that ran from love's first fever to its plague, they don't make summers like they used to.

http://www.mtv.co.uk/lotus-eaters/videos/the-first-picture-of-you   

Written as part of Here Comes The Sun, various writers selections of their favourite summer songs, and published in Product, July 2015.     


ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...