Despite going for over 35 years, first as Last Party and since 1996 as The Bitter Springs, I was completely unaware of any of this band’s work until hearing Barbecued on this 30/1/93 Peel show. If it’s in any way representative of their output, I have a lot of catching up to do.
Barbecued is a fascinating track which manages to somehow combine emotional honesty with moral ambiguity and personal melancholy with unfettered expression as the protagonist runs the gamut of committing himself to cleaning up his act while making open threats against a society which he feels has sucked him into damaging cycles of behaviour by seducing him with empty promises and treats. To listen to Simon Rivers’s hectoringly weary vocal is to hear someone who had what he thought he wanted, namely status and status symbols, but who now sees the dinner party drinks set as a straitjacket that he’s ready to burn down and walk away from.
In a sense, Barbecued shows Rivers at the end of a journey which Jarvis Cocker was in the early stages of in the thematically similar Pulp song, I Spy, recorded 3 years after Barbecued. A society interloper, drinking heavily, screwing indiscriminately behind the net curtains and trimmed hedges of suburbia. Cocker wanted to dominate that landscape, not only to supplant the husbands whose wives he was shagging, but to let the golf sweater wearing husbands find out what he had taken from them.
By contrast, Rivers’s eyes are red-rimmed and his mind is heavy with regret at how he has wasted his life in this environment. He’s cleaning up his act and moving on, but the final verse, underscored by a bassline which bespeaks the swirling sense of resentment and disgust that churn in Rivers’s heart suggest that he is going to walk away leaving many shattered lives behind him. That all sounds heavy when written down, but it is part of the song’s triumph that having touched rock bottom, it ends with a euphoric flourish.
Video courtesy of indiepop88.
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