Most of the abandoned KGB listening posts masquerading as obscure petrol stations I tended to discover along the East Anglian coast (Suffolk slightly more so than Norfolk) but highways travelled for long enough time turn into dreams and it was in one of those not-quite-lucid dreams that I first heard "Ghosts Of American Astronauts," late at night, semi-asleep on a cassette copy of the So Good It Hurts album towards the end of the eighties, somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle of the M6 (Kendal? Lancaster? Preston? Who can tell when all I saw was a darkness with the odd ray of yellow from a nocturnally burning haystack?); blue lights melting into yellow settling into occasional startle blasts of sound, mostly from Sally Timms' authoritative vocal. Some months later I saw the video which Viv Albertine of the Slits directed for the record, an isolated space-filler on late night/early morning weekend ITV, and those dreams dissolved double.
"Ghosts Of American Astronauts" is one of the ten greatest singles of its decade, and maybe of any decade, because the listener (and viewer?) has to work hard at its tangibility, but when you reach there it becomes a song which appears to be about something more important than life and death; it is country-derived but its steely angularity is entrenched in post-punk; it is slowly and patiently angry, a microscope sufficiently focused to make it a missing link between "It's Grim Up North" and "America No More" - "Up in the hills above Bradford/Outside the napalm factory (they're floating above us)," Timms intones (and the backing ghost voices respond), and it gradually becomes apparent that what appears to be a post-psychedelic elegy (the 1967-8 phasing in the record's last 90 seconds underlines that lineage) hides a fairly brutal attack on notions of pre-postmodern imperialism: "It's just a small step for him/It's a nice break from Vietnam/Out on the back lot in Houston/Who says the world isn't flat?" Timms sings marginally short of sweetly, and later "John Glenn drinks cocktails with God/In a cafe in downtown Saigon" topped by "Nixon sucks a dry Martini."
So the message gradually settles under the quasi-bristling skin and the music is everything that Nixon's America couldn't be, wouldn't be or refuted; idyllic, icily lush guitars, the great Gram cosmos, but a voice unmistakeably Northern British. It persuades where most of its contemporaries battered into premature and unjustified exhaustion. But it also represents the aesthetic peak of this scattered group of people from Leeds who a decade earlier had no money and couldn't really play their instruments properly but had a vision of the world they wanted to make and went about creating it with what they had, both internally and externally, until they had such power that they showed (or should have showed) the Pogues the door, such delicacy that the Cowboy Junkies perhaps ought to be paying them a residual. Finally, Candlestick Park blends with Brontë, and new unions are forged; maybe not too far from the one involving the Californian girl and the Scotsman...staying with us in our reality as well as in our dreams.
"Ghosts Of American Astronauts" is one of the ten greatest singles of its decade, and maybe of any decade, because the listener (and viewer?) has to work hard at its tangibility, but when you reach there it becomes a song which appears to be about something more important than life and death; it is country-derived but its steely angularity is entrenched in post-punk; it is slowly and patiently angry, a microscope sufficiently focused to make it a missing link between "It's Grim Up North" and "America No More" - "Up in the hills above Bradford/Outside the napalm factory (they're floating above us)," Timms intones (and the backing ghost voices respond), and it gradually becomes apparent that what appears to be a post-psychedelic elegy (the 1967-8 phasing in the record's last 90 seconds underlines that lineage) hides a fairly brutal attack on notions of pre-postmodern imperialism: "It's just a small step for him/It's a nice break from Vietnam/Out on the back lot in Houston/Who says the world isn't flat?" Timms sings marginally short of sweetly, and later "John Glenn drinks cocktails with God/In a cafe in downtown Saigon" topped by "Nixon sucks a dry Martini."
So the message gradually settles under the quasi-bristling skin and the music is everything that Nixon's America couldn't be, wouldn't be or refuted; idyllic, icily lush guitars, the great Gram cosmos, but a voice unmistakeably Northern British. It persuades where most of its contemporaries battered into premature and unjustified exhaustion. But it also represents the aesthetic peak of this scattered group of people from Leeds who a decade earlier had no money and couldn't really play their instruments properly but had a vision of the world they wanted to make and went about creating it with what they had, both internally and externally, until they had such power that they showed (or should have showed) the Pogues the door, such delicacy that the Cowboy Junkies perhaps ought to be paying them a residual. Finally, Candlestick Park blends with Brontë, and new unions are forged; maybe not too far from the one involving the Californian girl and the Scotsman...staying with us in our reality as well as in our dreams.
