Gun Club - Fire Of Love 1981

Operating in a musical space almost all their own, (Although Nick Cave’s Birthday Party were in the neighbourhood) with Pierce adopting the mantle of a deranged Baptist preacher, the band proceeded to hone their claustrophobic 12 bar chassis into a formidable weapon, complemented by the singer's down-home hollers, yowls, and screeches. The crepuscular results are wide eyed and adrenaline spiked, like a midnight ride in the backwoods being chased by deranged Creole lois.

"Sex Beat" opens, all uptempo slide inflected scuzz-country with Pierce getting right to his lustful subject matter, his rhymes (more like spells and incantations), sometimes instinct and often beyond language. The amphetamine inspired redrawing of Tommy Johnson’s "Preach The Blues" is a coruscating punk shower with St.Vitus shaking his bones in the backyard, but it’s when the atmosphere is less demonic that the minimalist production puts you right in the studio/front parlour with them. The bare bones sound on the cover of the equally soul selling Robert Johnson’s "Cool Drink of Water" and the Cajun violin on "Promise Me" help to entrench you in the band's mummified but reverential interpretation of a much plagiarized genre, one who's folklore lies at the heart of the American psyche.

Live, depending on Pierce’s state of lucidity, the band were either a parody of themselves or a vital affirmation, a fiery baptism into the church of a maniac, speaking in tongues Jeffrey Lee. As with all religions, sex and sacrifice are never far beneath the surface, here explored with salacious glee on the then to be classic "Jack On Fire", whilst the record’s centre piece "For The Love of Ivy" is a tortuous story of psycho sexual obsession and the fomentation of murder. Pierce was a narrator par excellence and his lachrymose but chilling words chart a descent into jealous adolescent madness framed by swampy slide guitars, screeching tempo changes, and nerve jangling passages of cadaverous silence. Supposedly inspired by The Cramps “Poison” Ivy Rorschach, it also contains the inspired closing sobriquet, “I was all dressed up like an Elvis from Hell”. (Caution: it also contains other less than politically correct lyrics)

1 Sex Beat 2:45
2 Preaching the Blues 3:58
3 Promise Me 2:35
4 She's Like Heroin to Me 2:33
5 For the Love of Ivy 5:31
6 Fire Spirit 2:52
7 Ghost on the Highway 2:43
8 Jack on Fire 4:40
9 Black Train 2:11
10 Cool Drink of Water 6:10
11 Goodbye Johnny 3:41