The Comedy of Errors: Freefall - Love in Idleness/Our Eyes [Peel Session] (16 May 1992)

Note - my two picks run from 7:00 to 14:18 on the video.

This is a bit of an odd one. Freefall popped up in a couple of Peel programmes through early 1992 and recorded a session for him which was first broadcast on 4/4/92.  Up until 22 July 2018, nothing from them was shareable, but the redoubtable YouTube uploader, FruitierThanThou turned up trumps again.  Their channel is a treasure trove of sessions not just from Peel shows but a number of BBC disc jockeys up to the present day.

Freefall’s session was repeated on 16/5/92.  I only caught one track, Our Eyes, but as the whole session is available I’ve selected a bonus inclusion for this blog.  Regardless of the contortions that I put myself through in terms of citing tracks that would go on the mixtape, the whole session remains a good example of the wave of contradictory feelings that I have towards Freefall.

In the past, I mentioned that their sound was “like 1984 never ended” or that they “sounded like The Cure fronted by a teenage bingo caller.”  Oddly, while I gave a thumbs up to a previously unavailable studio version of Shine, I find that the session version of the same track makes it sound, to borrow from David Nobbs’s description of a politician’s voice, like the musical equivalent of a foggy day.  I found I could also live without the wannabe epic, 7 minute opening track, Green and Blue because, once again, the singer sounds like he’s got a cold and that aural snot ends up dragging the track into the realms of tedium.

And yet when it does come together, Freefall are a delight.  Rather than aping The Cure or trying to do restrained shoegaze, they sound at their best when they mine similar ground to that dug by The House of Love around the time of their seminal debut album from four years earlier.  Love in Idleness blends acoustics and delicately picked electric guitar around a lyric of such beauty that one has to wonder whether Guy Chadwick mentally projected it straight to them:
“In the pupil of an ugly eye.
Entranced on a bed of a heather.
An oasis of pebbles stuck on a fern (sic?)
Entangled by weeds and parasites”

From this somewhat unpromising pitch, the track goes on to set out an enchanting natural sanctuary for young lovers to escape and worship each other:

“Your white hot mind seduces me (sic?)
I fall forever to your kiss.
I feel the leaves, I can see the sky.
In the clear blue light of loving (sic?)”. (And if those aren’t the lyrics, then they jolly well should be!)

It’s so beautifully put together, I feel like petitioning the BBC to use it as a theme tune for Gardeners’ Question Time.

Our Eyes, by contrast, is a little more obviously shooting for mainstream success hampered by the extended opening and thin vocals in the verses. , However, I like the harmonies and chorus line and the fact that it’s about kissing.
For Freefall, a kiss off was about to come from the music industry.  Despite the presence of Boo Radley, Martin Carr in the producer’s chair, the Dehydrate EP, featuring both of the songs selected here, was their sole release.  A monument to a band who could sound simultaneously dated and timeless often within the same verse.

Video courtesy of FruitierThanThou.
Lyrics are copyright of their authors.