To you we're not deep

March 14, 2018 9:22 PM

The Housemartins 1986 debut album London 0 Hull 4 [YT album, ~37m] mixed old rock styles and gospel and a lot of other stuff (jangle pop, anyone?) to chart strongly in the UK and in Europe. [Ed. note: it's a genuinely rewarding listen.] It also had quite a few hits: Side A: Happy Hour [video, weird artifacting but it is the full video], Get Up Off Our Knees, Flag Day (fan video), Anxious, Reverends Revenge, Sitting On A Fence

Side B: Sheep [video], Over There, Think For A Minute [video], We're Not Deep [video], Lean On Me, Freedom

Bonus: era-related single Caravan Of Love, which hit #1 in the UK and #1 on the US Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop charts back in 1986.

posted by hippybear (38 comments total)

That album is completely brilliant.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 9:26 PM on March 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

Another claim to fame is that Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim was a member of the band for a few years. Talk about a change in musical direction!

I wasn't a huge fan but a friend of mine was, so I've heard most of these songs. Oddly, as I'm listening to Happy Hour, I'm thinking that I know this song, but I didn't. Then I realized that the Barenaked Ladies had sampled a bit. Here's the whole song, cause it's worth a listen.

Hippybear, do a post on the Barenaked Ladies, the Gordon album!
posted by ashbury at 9:50 PM on March 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don't hold a monopoly on posting albums.
posted by hippybear at 9:54 PM on March 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

For some reason I've been thinking a lot about this album the last few days. I guess I know what I'll be listening to on the way to work tomorrow. Thanks!
posted by rtha at 9:55 PM on March 14, 2018

Weirdly, this morning I was thinking of the other Norman Cook-featuring hit from a few years later, Beats International's Dub Be Good To Me (which arguably set the template for Fat Boy Slim's pastiche-y dance reworking).

I encountered the Housemartins long after their fame, thanks to late-night ABC (Australia) rage specials. Glorious pop bliss that simply doesn't happen now. And their 'Caravan of Love' is absolute joy - even in the video you can see how much fun the band is having together, and with the song. Thanks, hippybear!
posted by prismatic7 at 10:07 PM on March 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

Take Jesus – Take Marx – Take Hope
posted by koavf at 10:08 PM on March 14, 2018 [5 favorites]

Classic classic classic. Think For A Minute is an instant memory-bomb of my college days. And the whole early Go! Discs roster and visual aesthetic were so inspiring to me as a young songwriter.
posted by mykescipark at 12:28 AM on March 15, 2018

I was at uni in Hull between 1985 and 1988 and Housemartins fever was rife - it was as if the city couldn't quite believe it had spawned a band that was Top Of The Pops-worthy (apart from Everything But The Girl, who were a bit too "student" for Hull, which hated students enormously). The Housemartins were a good time fun band who lived, shopped and drank locally. Fame-adjacent minor fact -the Newland pub on Newland Avenue (inspired name!) was their regular drinking haunt and I drank there once or twice too. Did I mention how much the locals hated students? Not the best place to drink.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 1:30 AM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

Nooooow you're talkin'.
posted by humboldt32 at 2:05 AM on March 15, 2018

I thought they were being forgotten, and then I'll Be Your Shelter was deployed to devastating effect in the last scene of Looking in 2016. Hurray the Housemartins!
posted by garlicsmack at 3:08 AM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was just digging up old Housemartins and Beautiful South tracks over the last week: such great pop. Witty, beautful harmonies, good playing — they’ve got it all.
posted by wenestvedt at 3:13 AM on March 15, 2018

Housemartins! We LOVES us some Housemartins around our house! Thanks hippybear.
posted by parki at 3:13 AM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

I interviewed Paul Heaton for my little zine years ago, after a Beautiful South show in Seattle. He was drunk and abrupt, and annoyed by a persistent groupie, but it wasn’t the worst interview I ever did. (Though none of them were very good.)

Love Beautiful South, love Housemartins. Thanks for this.
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 3:30 AM on March 15, 2018

Best greatest hits-album title ever: "Now That's What I Call Quite Good"
posted by Petersondub at 3:46 AM on March 15, 2018 [6 favorites]

I love the Housemartins - Hull 4 London 0 was one of the first albums which started moving me away from Dire Straits and towards the more indie side of the spectrum - and as a 16 year-old my mission was to own every track they ever recorded. It was not a particularly onerous task given they only released something like 10 singles (had to have the 12 inch version for the extra tracks) and 3 albums but nonetheless I managed it - for a grand total of 53 tracks (I think).

Sheep & Flag Day were trickier as the two pre-Happy Hour singles - I did eventually find a picture cover copy of Flag Day but I think I only ever had the plain cover version of Sheep.

If you're on Spotify, the Deluxe version of the albums have all the 12 inch b-sides - worth a listen. Even the wonderfully terrible Rap Around The Clock, which yes, is The Housemartins' attempt at a rap track..
posted by jontyjago at 4:19 AM on March 15, 2018 [4 favorites]

Oh, and keep an eye out for a young Phill Jupitus in the Happy Hour video...
posted by jontyjago at 4:22 AM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

They were The Smiths, but with soul. It's striking how soulful The Housemartins were compared to their compatriots in the 1980s alternative rock scene.

Happy Hour is one of those songs that make you all happy and make you want to dance until you actually pay attention to the lyrics. That's when you realize that it's about your boss sexually assaulting (harassing?) your female coworkers and him telling you to not believe them.
posted by NoMich at 4:27 AM on March 15, 2018 [5 favorites]

Fantastic album. I have queued it up a number of times to improve someone's mood (including my own.)
posted by Busithoth at 4:51 AM on March 15, 2018

I thought a lot of the songs sounded the same growing up, at least on this album, but man was I down with their politics. Still am.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 6:18 AM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

I love Housemartins and Beautiful South dearly and am always happy when I run across someone in America who knows who they are, because there are too damn few of us.
posted by dlugoczaj at 6:22 AM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

A local radio station plays "Happy Hour" every Friday at 5, and every time, I want to call in and shout, "DID YOU LISTEN TO ANY OF THE LYRICS BESIDES THE TITLE"
posted by foldedfish at 6:47 AM on March 15, 2018 [6 favorites]

16 songs - 17 hits!

Loved this album, and it was a great smart pop break from listening to Morrissey whinge all the time. Thanks for the post.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:56 AM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Starting with REM and the Bangles, moving backwards to The Byrds, and outward, mid '80s me was super into the Jangle Pop/Paisley Underground sound. The Housemartins, who I think I discovered through, or shortly after I discovered The Smiths, intersected not just with that moment but also with my peak collegiate Newman Club / Liberation Theology / Brideshead Revisited moment, so the "British Christian Marxism" thing had a lot of appeal. You can imagine me, sitting there in my dorm room in a cardigan, polo shirt and cords (an ensemble I still favor!) listening to "Think For A Minute" in the single version with trumpet that takes it much closer to the period Sophistipop sound.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:13 AM on March 15, 2018 [4 favorites]

Ok I suppose I really should have looked up the lyrics to Happy Hour in the last 30+ years of listening to it. Oof.
posted by Busithoth at 7:23 AM on March 15, 2018

Great album that takes me back to my high school years of rocking a cardigan with my favorite new wave concert shirt. I've probably listened to this album 100 times(on cassette & cd) and most recently on vinyl. I know they always called themselves the "fourth best band in Hull" and now 30 years later it just dawned on me that album title is a football score with Hull beating London 4 -0.

Another of the hits that doesn't get enough play these days is Me and the Farmer from the The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death album.
posted by ShakeyJake at 7:30 AM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

“So this is freedom — they must be joking.”

My college roommate bought me this tape (and Doolittle) for my birthday my first year of college, on the strength of a good newspaper review. I listened to almost nothing else the rest of the year, annoying everyone.

London 0 Hull 4 is an apex of something. I never tire of it.

Was very happy to use lines from “Sitting on a Fence” in my book (though the difficulty and expense of getting reprint rights from the company that owns the lyrics would surely have annoyed the band!)
posted by escabeche at 8:12 AM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

After I had listened to all The Smiths studio albums until I knew them backwards and forwards, somebody put in my mind that The Housemartins were of a similar vein. Ran out and got The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death and loved it.

The Beautiful South's "Don't Marry Her" (NSFW) is one of my all-time favorites. (Sadly, the album it's on - Blue is the Colour - is completely absent from streaming services, so it's unlikely many people are going to stumble on it in all its glory - nor can I put it on playlists I share with my friends via Spotify. Sad.)

Thanks for putting this bug in my ear today. Been a while since I put The Housemartins or Beautiful South on.
posted by jzb at 8:36 AM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

These posts... it's like you're going through my cassette box one by one and it's starting to weird me out...

in a good way.
posted by Mchelly at 10:52 AM on March 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

octobersurprise: ...my peak collegiate Newman Club / Liberation Theology / Brideshead Revisited moment, so the "British Christian Marxism" thing had a lot of appeal.

I.... I think that 1989 me might love you?

My older, cool sister introduced me to the Housemartins. We swapped a lot of tapes back then: reggae and pop and ska and R.E.M. and Squeeze and all sorts of stuff. I bought a CD single in London of "Cool For Cats" in this cat-shaped case that I *think* I forgot to give to her like 30 years ago.

I just might make her a mix CD tonight for old time's sake!
posted by wenestvedt at 10:59 AM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

More than any other album that I can think of (with the exception of "Back to Basics" by Billy Bragg), this album provided the most lines and ideas that shaped my political identity. The main one that comes to mind is from "Sitting on a Fence":

Sitting on a fence is a man who sees both sides of both sides

Which effectively catapulted me out of political apathy and into making some choices about what I actually believed. Nearly every song on this album, to one extent or another, made a powerful impression on me.
posted by vverse23 at 11:08 AM on March 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

A friend of mine pushed the Housemartins on me with the words “What if the Smiths were happy?” This wasn’t quite correct, but drove home the point for me. On reflection, what NoMich said re: soulfulness.
posted by Eikonaut at 1:37 PM on March 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

I had London 0 Hull 4 on cassette (long gone), probably around 25 years ago, and I've been listening to the Housemartins on Spotify a lot lately. I really like the song ShakeyJake mentioned above -- "Me and the Farmer" -- because it's so fun to sing to, for one.
posted by trillian at 1:42 PM on March 15, 2018

The "soulfulness" is very much a thing of their moment, I think, and a quality that they share with a lot of their British blue-eyed soul peers—Style Council-era Paul Weller, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels-era Dexy's, Cupid & Psyche 85-era Scritti Politti, even The Pet Shop Boys. You could think of The Housemartins as a band sort of halfway between C86 and Sophistipop.
posted by octobersurprise at 2:05 PM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

A+. I was just listening to this album in the car yesterday. :)

I dimly recall that when my older sister bought the People Who Grinned Themselves to Death LP home, there was a second album of a capella (?) Housemartins work that came with it. Am I imagining things?
posted by introp at 6:26 PM on March 15, 2018

I dimly recall that when my older sister bought the People Who Grinned Themselves to Death LP home, there was a second album of a capella (?) Housemartins work that came with it. Am I imagining things?

Almost: there was an Australian edition of London 0 Hull 4 which included a mini-album with a handful of a cappella tracks, including When I First Met Jesus and Heaven Help Us All, among others.
posted by mykescipark at 9:54 PM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

Oh, and keep an eye out for a young Phill Jupitus in the Happy Hour video...

Yeah, he was their manager at the time, if my memory serves me well. He appears two or three times in the video – most noticeably as the bloke with the newspaper they pass on their way into the pub – but he is easy to overlook because he seems like he is about fourteen.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:26 AM on March 16, 2018

Somehow I never listened to The Housemartins. I've had The Lucksmiths on repeat for the past few years, so this is right up my alley!
posted by Drab_Parts at 12:46 PM on March 16, 2018

Oh, man. I'd completely forgotten about these guys. Thank you, hippybear. (And thanks for your recent Howard Jones post, too. So great to see so many comments from folks who also love his stuff!)
posted by TEA at 9:15 PM on March 17, 2018