| Hellfire Sermons | ||||
 
I
first wrote about the Hellfire Sermons many years ago in a fanzine
called Pantry For The World. It
was a touchy, celebratory piece of the ‘I know better but the world
won't listen’ variety; naturally it was over the top, full of
underlining, and relied heavily on letting the dots do the talking...
I was sore at what I chose to see as the Hellfires being
deliberately overlooked. In
true outsider style, I took issue with music press hype and abused the
top dogs of that moment in time, the Stone Roses.
Here's a taster: I
am sure you are all deeply convinced of the Stone Roses’ worth.
I know press interest has not swayed you in any way other than
alerting you as to their existence.
I am sure that you love them for their sweep of guitar, the
anarchy of their words, all those qualities which push them far above
mere 500 7" selling groups like... Liverpool’s
Hellfire Sermons. I had a point, even though I myself used what were and still
are music press techniques of persuasion.
That is, the Hellfires were the best (along with all the other
groups that were the best), and anyone that didn’t think so was a
fool. The
world never had to learn to live with - or without - the Hellfire
Sermons. While they
continued in productive obscurity, travelling from perfect Scouse pop to
barbed-wire guitar and bloodcurdling vocals, the Stone Roses did almost
nothing for five years; still people bought what they eventually came up
with, loyal to the memory of all the ‘Fools gold’ that had gone
before. During those five
years, my generation of pop fanatics learnt to live with the world, some
of us recognising that it was probably better that the Hellfire Sermons
were household names in only a very few households.
Ironically enough, the Roses were part of a movement in sound
that allowed choreographically-challenged pop addicts to seek out new
worlds of rhythm. Along
came A Tribe Called Quest and Massive Attack, and we couldn’t wait
forever for Liverpool’s finest, or more accurately, for someone in a
position to feel able to take a risk with them.
There were too many extremes in existence for all the extremists
to unite behind just one. The
Mo’ Waxers were off headz-hunting, junglists were at the edge on other
fronts, guitar innovators were as few and far between as ever, and it
was techno-technicians as much six-string purists who were holed up in
bedsits, the odd one producing astonishing sounds instead of astonishing
songs. It
isn’t possible to carry on living in bitter defiance of the world and
its tastes for long. The
exuberance and torment of the time when it was possible fades, it
isn’t sustainable. I
prefer to be sidetracked by new musical challenges and explorations than
to worry much or for long about the injustice of it all; most would
agree, though with less passion than is utilised for dismissing the
likes of, say, Radiohead, that there are greater injustices to worry
over. So we glory in the
promiscuous nature of music, going both forwards and backwards in time,
following as many of the new crossbreeds as possible, tracking down the
roots of this species or that. And
while it’s best to remain open-eared as to where the next seismic
musical shift will come from, we don’t forget to be hugely
underwhelmed when we finally get around to hearing the latest
favourites, the latest crown princes or princesses of the old tradition.
And we know - so why did they keep contending the opposite? -
that there will never be another Smiths, just as there has never been
another Beatles. The
Hellfires fairly rang with optimism, whatever the lyrical content of
their songs. The records,
live performances, what we wrote about them to each other and in our
fanzines, the not infrequent reviews; the future was as bright as it was
supposed to be. What
happened? What didn’t
happen? They had songs
enough for as many as three LPs, which will never now be recorded; their
musical path is charted only by the occasional single, at an average of
less than one a year. The
same old story of a group too bold, and, though it pains me to believe
this was a part of their problem, not handsome enough for this world.
Too demanding. Too
challenging. Not pushy
enough, too unconcerned about making it.
And yet so melodically gifted, so primal.
A story shared in differing respects and to varying degrees by
all the groups who recorded for or were connected with Kevin Pearce’s
always inspiring and often magical Esurient label.
Emily, the Claim, the Jasmine Minks, the passage of a few people
through a rather brief moment of time.
Only the Manic Street Preachers, the most unoriginal and
traditional of the lot, politicised Iggy Pops, only they made it, if you
can call riding on the coat-tails of canonisation success.
And yet even they had something, energy and passion in vast
supply. This
sounds like an obituary - I don’t mean it to.
The Hellfires are alive and well and occasionally they even come
together as old friends to create melodic uproar Sermons-style.
With the one evident exception, all the stars of the Esurient
firmament are busy shining away in the post-pop group lives they have
created for themselves. As
their young admirer, I used to find it hard to believe that there could
be anything for these gifted individuals After Pop.
I couldn’t help imposing my own urge and drive onto groups who
were all the while coming a little closer to having had enough of
unjustly languishing in obscurity.
When they realise their number’s up, where do all the unwanted,
frustrated stars go? The
last I heard of Emily’s Oliver Jackson was that he’d become an
architect. David Read of
the Claim is a fireman. Phil
Wilson, scarred by his experience as a June Bride and solo artist,
became a civil servant, firm in his disassociation from the music
business - until 1995, that is, when the group briefly resurfaced to
promote a compilation of their output.
So the wounds do fade, while the satisfaction and pride in the
songs and the sound remain. And
if, as is now inevitable, the Hellfires remain great unknowns, they will
only be another of many, even from the late ’80s alone.
Go-Between Grant McLennan once said something along these lines: It
doesn’t matter that there are three thousand books out there that I
haven’t got time to read. What
matters is that they do exist, that I could read them if I chose to. What
matters is that, say, the Wolfhounds or the Stars Of Heaven did exist,
and were witnessed and respected by a not insignificant number of people
who spent considerable amounts of time looking for peaks of perfection
in the depths of pop. Gradually
these and the Esurient groups are having their recordings reissued, and
perhaps this proves that a younger generation of pop
obsessive-compulsives is as keen as we were to unearth nonconformist,
lyrical spirits - groups like the Hellfire Sermons, whose trajectory had
more to do with expression, need and adventure than career opportunity. I hear the Coral are the latest crown princes on Merseyside. They combine quirky time signatures and Scouse psychedelia with a Hellfiresque sense of social, folk and pop histories. I hope they don’t suffer the same fate as the Hellfires. If they do, let it result from being out of sync, and ultimately unfancied in today’s pop marketplace rather than as a consequence of bloated bank accounts, narcotic derailments, or both. However, at this early stage, the Coral would appear to have everything they need on their side to succeed on whatever terms they choose. And like the Hellfire Sermons, they won’t be the new this or the new that, they will just be themselves, and in that they will be no smaller and no bigger than the Beatles. - Daniel Williams, December 2001 This is a revised version of an article originally written for Tangents (www.tangents.co.uk) Discography
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