Felt
The Splendour Of Fear

Birmingham, with its industrial chimneys, cheeks puffed out with smoke that billows into the sky a thick pitch black
that saturates the air, the breath, and the lives moving beneath it with the frenzy, sometimes indolence,
of everyday life. A beating heart, a strategic hub that once represented the city's goldmine but
after the steel crisis, it became a diseased lung, crumbling into hundreds of disused dilapidated structures.
In this ghostly topography of overcrowded suburbs, of industry and proletariat (an indissoluble pair
that feeds each other) and love-hate, profit and necessity face each other in the game of roles that pits
greedy and unscrupulous capitalism against a working class reduced to the bone, subjugated to the master,
to the toxins and, before long, drained by Thatcher's reckless policies, culminating in the dramatic,
bloody miners' strike of 1984-1985 in London.

In this context, on these streets, in the early 80s, bands like Swell Maps,
Dexys Midnight Runners, Au Pairs, Lawrence Hayward, and his Felt live on ambitions and hopes. New York doesn't seem so far away
from rainy, gray Birmingham when "Marquee Moon" spins and takes on the features of a forbidden oasis,
the musical mecca, the promised land with its Television, Lou Reed, and Talking Heads.
Tom Verlaine holds a strong influence over the psyche of Lawrence Hayward, a shy and alienated young man
with the daring project of producing ten albums in ten years.
After a fairly promising debut (Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty) in February 1984,
produced by the historic London label Cherry Red Records, "The Splendour of Fear" comes to light,
which already hits with its visual presentation with the ambiguous cover depicting the poster of the film
"Chelsea Girls" by Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol.

This work is much more than an album; it's a vividly painted canvas where dreams and desires for redemption fight
against the frustrations of daily life, in other strokes the disillusionments take on the features of absolute certainties,
highlighting a profile sometimes inflexible and provocative but, for the most part, resigned and submissive. The lyrics of
"The World Is As Soft As Lace" are illuminating and revealing in this sense:
"If I could I would change the world, but you know my visions they're absurd..." ; bitter words sweetened,
in a surreal atmosphere, by the conciliatory and clean jangle-pop fabric of the valid Maurice Deebank.
A potpourri of strumming, riffs, and solos perfectly placed in a slot devised with care and ingenuity,
constitutes the sumptuous musical section of the album, predominantly instrumental. "The Stagnant Pool" raises the stakes,
"The stagnant pool, like a drowned coffin, still as a deceased heart, haunting the ghost of the noble crusader..."
a hypnotic mantra that hovers over eight minutes of pure delight, finely embroidered by the masterful execution
of Deebank, an absolute must of the entire British musical production. The brief and radiant "Red Indians",
a psycho-mystic flash in a territory on the verge of nothingness, "Mexican Bandits", akin to The Cult's "Love", the commendable
"The Optimist And The Poet" and the gentle "A Preacher In New England" with a Guthrie-style sound package
complete the masterpiece.

Even Felt, like many other brilliant meteors, despite a more than deserved business class ticket,
remained in the waiting room with a suitcase full of emotions waiting for a train
that never came or maybe, upon further reflection, they intentionally missed.