Jane from Occupied Europe
Coloursound

An old song from Zecchino d'Oro said that "the tall, the short, and the chubby are three good cowboys, they never use guns because the sheriff doesn't want them to."

On the other hand, the Jane from Occupied Europe, five damn smiling sons of bitches of the old rock 'n' roll made in the UK, used guns indeed!, and their guitars, in their raids across old England and our entire continent, certainly did not fire blanks.

The five, like their partying companions - The Badgeman, The Mayfields, and Mad Cow Disease, just to name a few - came from Salisbury in the southern Wiltshire region. They had a very short existence and recorded only one LP before being stopped by international police and those pigs from the United Nations organization, who, perhaps frightened by the elusive schizophrenia of Jim Harrison and Colin O'Keefe's guitars, decided to practically end the band's existence and reorganize Europe, for a few years between the eighties and nineties, a land of noise and shoegaze psychedelic raids, into a damn confederation of states that still lasts today.

The end that this confederation met is evident to all. The JFOE, who borrowed their name from an album by the Swell Maps, the second by Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks’ band, are still fugitives and wanted today. No one knows what happened to them, and we can only try to trace them by listening to “Coloursound,” their only LP from 1991, a synthesis and expression of their abilities and a manifesto of a certain type of shoegaze that was very popular during those years in Wiltshire and beyond through all of dear, old freaking mother Europe.

Balancing between the darkest and catchiest melodies of Nikki Sudden and company, the inevitable noise-shoegaze brand of My Bloody Valentine and Jesus and Mary Chain, which already conditioned and somehow indelibly marked the Anglo-Saxon alternative music, and the entire Anglo-Saxon musical tradition of the eighties from The Smiths to Spacemen 3 and finally the usual Primal Scream, “Coloursound” is an outlaw record and outside any schema and convention. It stands out here for the uniqueness of the guitar sound, here for the sophistication of never banal melodies and atmospheres, here again for the lyrics and the skewed, struggling, yet equally engaging singing.

In their own way, Jane from Occupied Europe with this record marked the end of an era and a certain way of conceiving Europe. Give this record a chance, and you will not be disappointed. On the contrary, you will keep listening to it over and over again, until you too, like the old continent in those years, will be conquered by it, and who knows, perhaps definitively annihilated. To do so, even JFOE, like the three cowboys from Zecchino d'Oro, will not need guns. A few guitar strums will suffice. Take care.