This album, along with volume two released a couple of years later, contains almost everything recorded by the mysterious Eleanor Rigby. We can’t really dive straight into the music without talking a bit about the background and story of Eleanor.
The first thing to say is that the hyperbole is rife where Eleanor Rigby is concerned, and a musical success story has been propagated by her manager and ex husband, Russell C. Brennan, for years. Having lived through and been a part of the mod revival scene I can say with some conviction that she didn’t make any kind of impact that I or my peers were aware of, and I only came across her many years later. She was never really accepted by or felt part of the mod scene back then and reading comments in various forums and reviews it doesn’t sound like that has changed much. However, the truth is probably somewhere in between, and I have actually grown quite fond of Eleanor Rigby and at times have found I am quite happy to accept the legend as fact. It has a certain charm.
After an initial bout of singles in the mid 80s, she was, reputedly, attracting the attention of various record labels in the early 90s who (maybe conveniently) wanted her to drop her mod image before they signed her (it was well past the height of the mod revival) and concentrate on a more ‘pop’ career. For reasons only known to herself and presumably Brennan, she refused. She also turned down half a million pounds to pose nude for a Japanese magazine. If that’s true, then good for her, but she did release her own nude spread with her one and only album Censorship.
Not long after that, she disappeared. Simply vanished, left the music industry, and nobody has seen or heard of her since. It has been so long that I guess the mind unfortunately turns to fearing the worse when thinking about what happened to her, but nothing like that has been confirmed. In fact there is surprisingly little known about the disappearance itself, or any attempts to find out what happened to her.
Former Tenpole Tudor member Dick Crippen became Eleanor’s new manager after Brennan was encouraged to step aside after a post office farce where fan club newsletters were sent out unfranked, asking the recipients to foot the bill. The story is that issue made fans boycott the record, which seems a little unlikely, but is an explanation put forward for bad sales.
Crippen becoming manager was the beginning of the end for Rigby. The band he bought in were druggies and very soon involved Eleanor in their misuse. She became withdrawn, schizophrenic, and her marriage to Brennan broke down. Rigby left for Florida to get away from it all forcing the new manager to get a replacement singer for the new band, now collectively called Eleanor Rigby. After a while Eleanor phoned Crippen from Miami saying she will be visiting friends in the Caribbean and will return to the UK once well enough. That was the last time anybody heard from her.
Eleanor Rigby and her album Censorship apparently influenced classic Britpop acts such as Garbage and Blur. I say apparently because we only have that from her ex-husband and record label (which he started and ran). I have looked very hard but can find no reference to that anywhere. I have read the history of Britpop and extensively researched this claim, and I have always come up blank. I’m not saying it isn’t true, I am just saying that I have no corroborating evidence.
So it’s a bit of a strange story, and perhaps Eleanor Rigby is slowly becoming a cult figure of interest. Or perhaps she is not. Either way her music still gets played by me every now and then and I day dream about where she may be and what happened to Eleanor Rigby.
Let’s get into the record.
Starting with I Want To Sleep With You, the music itself is well written with nods to bands that have come before throughout and an almost USA garage band baseline, albeit muted. It is obvious that whoever wrote the melody is very familiar with mod bands of the time. The singing comes complete with exaggerated London accent and starts off well enough, but the chorus suffers a little from Rigby’s lack of power and it feels a little laboured. I like this track and it’s probably the best original song on the album and of her singles. For a debut it does show potential.
Take Another Shot Of My Heart, however, is more forgettable and I really find it quite hard to listen to with the vocals missing key notes and that understated lack of power again. The music and melody can’t even save this one. Not so for 1995, because the band inject a bit more energy and it sounds really good, especially heavy on the drums used almost as a lead instrument at times. Again the singing feels stilted but it is easier to listen to, even with the flat notes. Mad Xmas has more in common with Another Shot than the other two thus far. I am not sure if band members rotated or how many were used, but it really sounds like a different group was used here. When we get to Over And Over for example the band sound on top form again, the riffs and lead guitar solos feel right even though the drums are distant.
Easily the best structured song on the album is the cover of The Kinks’ See My Friend. That speaks volumes I guess, I mean it’s a classic but even so Eleanor Rigby does her best to make it mediocre. Then we come to a cover of You Only Live Twice which all of a sudden gives us a lovely vocal performance, in tune, it has a breathy gravitas. Where was this for the opening 9 tracks? This continues with Think For Yourself – it’s almost like Rigby is a different person, although you can easily tell it is still her singing. This isn’t a Beatles cover by the way, which I was sort of hoping it would be. The album finishes with Up The Junction and is another good performance. It’s maybe no coincidence that the best vocal performances come on later songs/covers that I wouldn’t necessarily class as mod revival tracks, hinting at maybe some affectation in the earlier music?
I’m glad I have this limited edition LP in spite of some of my criticisms – as I say above I enjoy getting the record out and playing it every now and then, it belongs in the story of mod revival if not for all the right reasons. There is maybe one or at a push two tracks here that I would include in a mod revival retrospective though, the others are curiosities, much like Eleanor Rigby herself.