Jimmy Pursey
Animals Have More Fun

THE REVIEW

Two guys from Surrey meet and record a single. It's not the start of a joke, but what actually happened to Jimmy Pursey and the only Archangel I would love to visit me in a dream: Peter Gabriel. The result is "Animals Have More Fun", released by Epic.

This unusual collaboration sees Peter as both producer and composer.

Jimmy Pursey is the founder and frontman of the street-punk band Sham 69, with whom he released, in 2015, the band's latest album to date, "It'll End in Tears". Pursey is also a record producer, having supported the early works of the Cockney Rejects and the Angelic Upstarts. It is during this period of promoting other artists that he meets Peter, in the year of "Melt", and the light of creativity immediately ignites (not that it ever dimmed in artists like them!).

"Animals Have More Fun", the A-side, despite its funny title and good dose of melodic humor, has a certain ambiguous, cynical nature, which might remind one of Gabriel’s "Games Without Frontiers". You can hear his voice in a small part, along with Pursey and someone else’s (probably a child).

"SUS" occupies the B-side of the 7-inch. Probably inspired by the movie "The Shining" by Stanley Kubrick, "SUS" is an eerie soundscape incorporating the nervous voice of Pursey. This is where the blend between the two genres, seemingly distant, of these “fellow countrymen” becomes evident: punk laced with the dark tones of an urgent, horrific new wave, and an electronic sound that is not so much “in fieri,” but already accomplished, sharp, determined.

The "commercial suicide" that Atlantic Records accused Peter of, regarding the experimental and claustrophobic sounds of "Melt" and which, in fact, led to the label's rejection, can also be found in this single - very creepy! -.