Music Arcades: The Room: Nemesis

This takes me right back to the summer term of 1985 and my room in Cosin Court, writing and revising with John Peel on the old Sanyo C3 (which still gets daily use in our kitchen). Some of his famous sessions jumped out and some just passed me by — this was possibly as much a function of how engaged I was by Feyerabend and Lakatos at a particular moment as it was of the quality of the music.

The Room caught my attention that way. I think it may have been partly this session, but also other records that Peel played. There's a song Things Have Learnt to Walk that Ought to Crawl that I can't have heard since 1985 (sadly it doesn't feature on this album), yet I can still remember it well enough to hum it to myself. Jackpot Jack was my favourite, then, though: "You hit the Jackpot Jack / With your new pop cack." Yeah, you tell 'em. Like a more melodic version of The Fall.

I tried to find that song, possibly as a single, at the time; but failed. It was a few years later that I came across this double album in Record Collector in Sheffield. Rather confusingly, the Nemesis is just a repackage of two previous albums, Clear! and In Evil Hour, which are now better known under their original names. To the extent that metadata repositories like MusicBrainz and Discogs remember The Room at all, they haven't yet worked out these nuances. I've taken it into my own hands to fill in Wikipedia with the lowdown, though.

I've got a feeling that when I first got the record, I found I didn't like The Room as much as I remembered. But another couple of decades on, I like them again. Partly by way of The Clientele (and also Tangents), I've been discovered areas of '80s indie pop that passed me by at the time: The Television Personalities and Felt, that kind of thing. And The Room seem to fit alongside that, while not being quite the same.

I'm very glad to have the excuse, and the prompt, to listen to this again.