All About Eve Again

So - is anyone else going to come out?

I went to see AAE last year for one of their weird unplugged reunion things. Despite the distraction of several paunchy, balding goths in the audience, I actually really enjoyed the music.

The first album is unlikely to get spun at home, but I still listen to the Mice CD every now and then. To liken it to the mediocre Sleeper is a huge insult.

Can't help wishing that the Julianne and Bernard Butler thing had happened though.

I like their arrangement of "She Moves Through The Fair" a lot too.

I thought the AAE was 1988? It is in MM's 1980s round-up - delivered in 1989!!

Viva Hate is c. April 88.

What's the AAE LP called anyway? Is it AAE or - 'Flowers In Our Hair'?

I like that song, + the harmony on 'Moved Through The Fair' / the chorus of 'What Kind of Fool' etc

We have not even mentioned 'In The Clouds' and 'Martha's Harbour' (have we?).

"CNN/XC-NN"

Hur, I remember them. I quite liked the early/original version of 'Looking Forward', it sounded to me like a Chris Morris parody of NIN: "I... I cryyyy / twice a week...".
The X-CNN version (and album) was dire. Apart from, maybe, 'Young, Stupid and White'(if I remember rightly) which was apparently directed at Jay Kay (the poster/cover art was a pisstake of the Jamiroquai silhouette symbol of the time)

Julianne Regan says

she likes The Thorn Birds

she likes the advert with Mr [J.R.] Hartley in it, but can't remember much about it: still, it makes her flood with tears

also:

"smell is the most evocative sense; it carries a nostalgic force. White Musk from the Body Shop is my personal fave, girls, but anything can remind you of some wonderful moment or perfect experience. It brings it all rushing gently back. Newly-cut grass. Wet soil."

She is thinking of moving to Oxford, where she might meet 'a nice college boy among the greenery and rivers'.

'rushing gently' is not bad.

But I am not telling who it is.

I heard one of her Mice records. it is distinctly not that good... weirdly it sounds like a band influenced by Sleeper, and not in a good way.

AAEve's Ultraviolet LP: C/D?

(C)

Of course, the obvious answer is: so Regan's nicked her style from Denny.

Yet it doesn't feel quite as simple as that, for ... Denny doesn't always sing that way (eg. on the Fairport records I know), and Regan does always sing the way I'm thinking of, like it's natural to her, her voice, accent, timbre, not merely a style ripped from a favourite precursor.

It's as though Denny occasionally accidentally sang in the voice that Julianne Regan would anyway turn out to have!

'Pieces Of Our Heart': delicate - I like it.

'December' mentions a telephone! How incongruous.

challop: Touched By Jesus is one of the best janglepop albums of the early '90s and compares favorably to The Church and The Sundays and The Innocence Mission's efforts from that era. I'm not really a fan of Tim Bricheno's overwrought solo style on their first two albums, and imho Marty Wilson-Piper's playing was a much better complement to Julianne's vocals. too bad they were just about commercially dead by that point. also lol at the band popping up on usenet a decade later to defend themselves against accusations of bible-thumping

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P1q2Pf0c-s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg7OTXIDgLk

"white-dressed, moon-blessed, milk-breast flower" could be the most Cocteausy lyric not written by Liz Fraser. David Gilmour's original solo for this song wasn't up to Julianne's standards, so she asked him to re-record it:

[David] said that the two tracks he felt he’d had an affinity with were ’Wishing The Hours Away’ and ‘Are You Lonely?’ and that he’d be happy to have those tracks run at him and he’d improvise over them. And that’s exactly what happened. He set up in the studio space downstairs, while we sat upstairs in the galleried control room and took peeks through the sliding glass doors at him. We couldn’t help ourselves. We were fans!

As he got into his stride, and that only took a matter of minutes, he seemed to have such an intuitive handle on the tracks and just dovetailed himself into them.

I deeply cringe when I look back, I truly do, when I remember that after one take he said ‘How was that? Was that alright?’, and I had the gauche audacity to say, ‘Yes, that was brilliant, but could you do one that’s maybe a bit more, erm, just a bit more... erm...’? And, gentleman that he was, he put me out of my agony by finishing the sentence I’d left hanging in the air, with ‘a bit more David Gilmour? Yes, sure, no problem.’