Something about this album reminds of the time I spent in a bedsit in Agden Road in 1986. It was only three months, but it was probably the grimmest place I've ever lived. Let's not overstate this: it wasn't really very grim, but for a Surrey boy up in the North for the first time ever, it was bound to be a culture shock: no central heating, shared bathroom with a window that didn't close and hot water tank that couldn't deliver two baths in a row. £64 a month plus share of the water heating bill, to my landlords, the Bajowskis, whom I still saw a decade or so later when I moved into a yuppie flat nearby. The Old Sheffield was still very much in evidence, a factory where Sheffield Hallam University's IT Department would later be built at the corner of Summerfield St and Napier St (they've sine moved), a faded department store on the plot since razed for Gateway/Somerfield/Waitrose, Wards still a brewery, and Sharrowvale Road a long way from either gentrification or the student economy. I was part of the student economy, but I don't think my veggie convenience meals and second-hand movie directories did much to regenerate the area. I moved out to a rented room in bourgeois Crookesmoor as soon as I could, but I'll never forget those cold nights.
Maybe I had a tape of this album that I played on the Sanyo C3 radio cassette player in that bedsit. I probably didn't record the whole album; just the three 'proper'/major songs that are really Talking Heads by another name (so much so that one of them, What A Day That Was, features on Stop Making Sense). That was my abridged version. Inevitably there's now an expanded version, significantly longer than my LP.
Listening to the mix of song fragments and instrumentals, the comparison that first hit me was to Another Green World. The connection to Eno is blindingly obvious since the two must have seen a lot of each other in the control room around the time this album came out, with Bush of Ghosts and Remain in Light also coming out in '80/'81. Eno is also credited with bass, keyboard and writing on a few of the Catherine Wheel tracks. It's the bass sound, on tracks like Two Soldiers and Eggs in a Briar Patch, that reminds me specifically of Another Green World, as though this album were the missing link between that one and Nerve Net.
Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open) was my favourite track in 1986. Back then I didn't know about the American usage of screen door, so when DB sang of having the screen door open, I heard it as an multivalent reference that conjured an open door to a cinema — images and sounds tumbling into the surrounding environment — and also as a cipher for his eyes ("eyes wide open"). When he sang that he also had the back door open, that naturally referred to his fundament. So the song ("I got both doors open!") became a meditation on the human body as a just a channel between eyes and arse, driven by a kind of polymorphous, all-devouring scopophilia. I still kind of like that reading. As for the Plymouth, I could never figure that out: presumably the car, rather than any of the towns of that name, but there still isn't any way to make it fit. Never mind.
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