Sometimes Heaven Helps The Wicked

You changed our palace to a scene from “Dallas”

When Blood Runs Cold

Songs about eating babies, murder, Satan, heartache, Aleister Crowley and narcotics, welcome to the New Church. The lesson will begin once the Lords arise.

Welcome to The Lords Of The New Church The Method To Our Madness, one of my favourites from the year of our Lords, 1984.

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We are not Lords Of The New Church virgins here at 1537 and so I’ll take your knowledge of their superhero origin story as read*, they were unfocused but mighty and were only vulnerable to the element Sobernite.

By the time of their third LP, label IRS were getting a touch twitchy and teamed them with Chris Tsangarides** as producer, which worked really well. Rather unpredictably The Method To Our Madness also featured no fewer than two members of Manfred Mann and French jazz/classical pianist Jacques Loussier. Reader, it worked.

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It’s all frock coats, frilly cuffs, leopard skin print and leather as far as the ear can see for the opener and title track. A none-more-80’s drum sound kicks the LP underway, like an underpowered motorbike, but that’s okay because Stiv’s sneer and James’ guitar riff could power a medium-sized city and these boys have a fiendish way with a chorus.

It gets way better on ‘I Never Believed’, where the chaps sound like Teardrop Explodes loaded up on cleaning products. It’s all doomed and romantic, all frock coated and floppy-armed, with some gorgeous lyrical guitar playing by Brian James, which then gets all vicious. This is very much vampire music, ‘Sometimes heaven helps the wicked … I slash my eyes out in a Bunuel mood’. This really was something new and old.

The Lords Of The New Church were very keen on putting the amp hire into vampire, witness the rest of the first side of The Method To Our Madness. The next three tracks are ‘Pretty Baby Scream’, ‘Fresh Flesh’ and ‘When Blood Runs Cold’. The first is a great cruiser of a track, the middle is just as rabid as it should be and the latter is elegiac and rather beautifully lost, featuring some gorgeous vocals from Bators.

Then we get decidedly funky with ‘Murder Style’, which is propelled by Dave Tregunna in a very non-Sham 69 manner. This is exactly what the world needed, a loose-limbed Stonesy stoned strut with a slight edge of hysteria. When I am eventually elected God emperor of the universe it will feature rather heavily at my coronation/ascension. True story.

Next track ‘The Seducer’ sounds more like an attempt at burglary than persuasion – sleaze run through a Jim Steinman filter, backing vox and guitar spirals all over the show. Following that ‘Kiss of Death’ with its Ramonesonic beat and expostulating is pure Dead Boys braggadocio, bet it was killer live.

The Method To My Madness finishes with two clever beasts. We get all holey-Moley Crowley on ‘Do What Thou Wilt’, which tickles my gothic erogenous zones and features some glorious piano flourishes. Then we exit the crypt via the gift shop to the strains of ‘My Kingdom Come’, widescreen and mean.

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And that’s all she wrote for The Lords Of The New Church, practically. Money (lack of), drugs (surplus of), squabbles (ditto) and record company withdrawal did for them, it all ground to a halt live on stage at the London Astoria and Stiv Bators died when he was hit by a car the following year. I get it, fires don’t last, so enjoy the blaze.

What a blaze The Method To Our Madness is, some minor 80’s sonic quirks aside. If you have ever thrilled to a certain brand of punk-informed sleazy rock in the later 80’s you can be sure that there was a strand of the Lords DNA^ tainting it.

Live for the nightime
Sleeping all day
Nightime is the right time
Murder style...its the way I talk/walk
Leather and black lace/Boys all wearing make-up.

I’m sold.

1226 Down.

PS: This is great – Method and Murder:

*quick version: Dead Boys, Sham 69, Damned and Barracudas chaps huddle together for warmth after punk, quickly invent a strange gothic perversely romantic sleaze rock which still permeated a certain piss-sodden, degenerate London sound up to the late 90’s.

**veteran of Thin Lizzy, Gary Moore and Tygers Of Pan Tang albums.

^DNA = Drugs N’ Alcohol, not Deoxyribonucleic acid.