Category: Album

We Love the City

Posted on by darren

Released 16th October 2000; 2CD version re-released 28th September 2009

We Love the City was Hefner’s commercial and creative peak.

Having cleared a large backlog of songs on the band’s first two albums and various B-sides, for their third Darren Hayman wrote a new set of songs, loosely themed around love in the capital city. We Love The City eschews the band’s former broken indie-folk sound in favour of a bouncy, urban, blue-eyed soul, and an expanded line up including Hammond organs, Wurlitzer pianos and brass sections.

Songs like ‘Greedy Ugly People’, ‘Good Fruit’, ‘Painting and Kissing’ and ‘The Day that Thatcher Dies’ are typical examples of the direct, infectious, intelligent style that endeared Hefner to so many. The album’s narrative is conceptual and played out by a retinue of vividly drawn characters, but at heart this is Hayman’s most personal and focussed work.

Always championed by John Peel, promotion for this album culminated in a full, real time performance show session, broadcast live from BBC Maida Vale (now available elsewhere as the album Maida Vale).

This two-disc set expands the original album to a mighty 39 songs, including all of the relevant B-sides, substantially different alternate versions and surprising remixes from Electric Sound of Joy, Piano Magic and The Wisdom of Harry.

Review of We Love the City from http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/

BY SIMON TYERS, 8 OCTOBER 2009


Hefner‘s posthumous merchandise bears the legend “Britain’s biggest small band”. With 2000′s third proper album We Love The City they nearly became Britain’s smallest big band, cracking the top 50 with the preceding single ‘Good Fruit’ and playing a good amount of big festivals. Up to this point they were self-made men who sounded like they recorded ad hoc in bedrooms after listening to too many Jonathan Richman and country records and never got round to understanding women. Darren Hayman claims in the liner notes that this is his favourite of their four albums, the first to be written towards a whole album rather than a selection of tracks plucked from his back catalogue. He’s also said it was influenced by Dexys Midnight Runners’ Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, a grand statement to make but, if it doesn’t come up to Kevin Rowland’s famously exacting standards of hard-hitting soul, the occasionally expanded musical palette tacked onto the reliably ramshackle basic indie trio template (although Hefner were a quartet by now) and raw emotional core give it a blue-eyed sheen that demonstrated why they earned themselves such a cult following bereft of major press or radio support.

Claimed at the time as a concept album about London, it’s more apparent that the lyrical theme is more of people being in love in and against the city, its boho aspirations and commuter daily grind. “This is sixth form poetry, not Keats or Yeats” Hayman cautions on the title track, but in its field his character studies and urbanity appreciations touch a nerve, albeit not the same one suggested in ‘The Day That Thatcher Dies’. While nobody would ever claim he possesses one of the great voices, it carries here as an emotional, yearning tool that benefits the likes of the querulous, Violent Femmes-ish ‘Don’t Go’ and ‘The Greedy Ugly People’, unyielding in its triumphant coda “love don’t stop no wars, don’t stop no cancer, it stops my heart”. The title track frames his appreciation of the city “that never loves us back” in a frame that specifies it’s only because “because it lets us down”, thinking big and bringing people together despite itself. It’s actually a much more solid, consistent album than memory recalls. Shining anew the best is ‘The Cure For Evil’, a piano led love song that implicitly fears mutual adoration might fall apart through either neglect or overdoing it, featuring one of six guest vocal appearances from Amelia Fletcher (Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research, Tender Trap) and a triumphant brass coda.

Hayman’s archive-clearing exercises on these reissues has been all encompassing, and this one gives us an extra 27 – count ‘em – tracks. The B-sides (sadly not including their cover of David Soul’s
‘Don’t Give Up On Us’) essentially sound like lesser versions of the sound of this and the previous album, bar the odd and not un-proficient analogue pulsing of ‘Blackhorse Road’, a sound Hefner would take up fuller on next album Dead Media with, shall we say, mixed results. The demos just sound like less produced versions of the same tracks as on the album. Boxing Hefner, the odds’n’sods compilation that preceded this record, offcuts ‘Lee Remick’ (not the Go-Betweens song of the same name, although it sounds a bit like them), about family feuding and “all my pretty friends who just grew up and failed”, and ‘The Hymn For The Things We Didn’t Do’ are worth seeking out, while the remixes give up on remodelling much of the songs and go their own direction. The Electric Sound Of Joy, big Lamacq tips at the time, offer a brass-motorik crossover, Baxendale turn ‘The Greedy Ugly People’ into warped spangly electro and the usually dreampop collective Piano Magic literally cut up ‘Good Fruit’ into something often not far from the Ibizan sound, if you can imagine such a thing.

“The city has no faith if we’ve no faith in the city/But this is my home, this is where I want to be” Hayman asserts amid the whirling organs and brass flourishes of ‘The Greater London Radio’. It’s an ambitious statement that dovetails with the great leap forward into lusher arrangement and production territory that, if only for this album, Hayman and Hefner made. Strip away all that, though, and at its heart are tremendously romantic, intelligent songs that demonstrate how, from a bare bones guitar-bass-drums indie outset and beyond all stylistic ideals, Hefner found their own unique voice.

Buy We Love the City on 2CD

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Or buy the downloads from Bandcamp

 

The Fidelity Wars

Posted on by darren

Originally released 12th July 1999; 2CD released 2nd June 2008

The second in our series of re-releases, Hefner’s second album ‘The Fidelity Wars’ was the album that won them their critical acclaim and their cult audience. ‘Hymn for the Alcohol’ and ‘Hymn for the Cigarettes’ made it to numbers 2 and 3 in John Peel’s Festive 50, and the album itself was number 1 in the indie charts on its first release. This version has 40 tracks (29 extra tracks, 19 of which are previously unreleased) and also features new artwork and sleevenotes from Darren.

Review from http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/

Hefner : The Fidelity Wars 
Author: Benjamin Howarth
Published: 20/04/2008

I can remember clearly when I first listened to Hefner. At the end of 1999, five of their songs popped up in John Peel’s Festive 50, including at positions 2 and 3. Four of those came from their album, ‘The Fidelity Wars’, which I promptly bought and subsequently played to death. Eight months later, I began writing for this website. My first review was of Hefner’s next single, and my first interview was with the band’s singer and songwriter Darren Hayman.
I went off the band for a bit, probably just because I had listened to them far too much. But after Hayman begun a solo career, hearing these new albums reminded me how much I liked his old songs. Obligingly, Hayman has begun a reissue program of these albums, putting them in their proper context alongside high quality B-sides, EP tracks, live recordings and demos. The second release in this series, ‘The Fidelity Wars’, comes with the ‘Hefner Heart’ EP, as well as some excellent B-sides and is good value even to those of us with copies from the first time round.

After ‘The Fidelity Wars‘, Hefner could almost call themselves a mainstream band. They could boast video airplay on MTV2, coverage in the weekly music press and glowing reviews almost everywhere else. Most importantly, they were a favourite band of the two DJs that occupied Radio One from 8-12 every weekday evening, Peel and Steve Lamacq.

At this time, Hefner were often compared to Belle and Sebastian. Musically, that comparison barely stands up. Both were wordy “indie” bands, inclined to singing slightly off-key and disinclined to doing anything fancy with their instruments. But that‘s about as far as the comparison went.

If I had to compare Hefner to anyone at this stage of their career, it would be Elvis Costello – both wrote naked, sometimes embarrassing lyrics and played light punk with soul influences. But it’s a lazy comparison. I suspect that Hefner’s greatest appeal was that they didn’t sound much like anyone else.

Nine years on, John Peel has not been effectively replaced and Steve Lamacq is in purgatory on digital radio. Consequently, the music on ‘The Fidelity Wars’ sounds even rarer. Granted, this is partly because the production is audibly cheap, but even this has its virtues – it actually sounds like the band are in a room together playing the music you’re hearing.

Listening to it now, I’m surprised at just how varied the music is. Hefner are surely dismissed by some as throwbacks to the 80’s, but this is unfair. ‘The Fidelity Wars’ owes as much to country and soul as it does to punk. Never does it lapse into lazy, jangly indie-schmindie.

Hayman’s lyrics have always set his music apart, and ‘The Fidelity Wars’ finds him at his most impressive. This is a collection of songs about the break-up of a relationship (though he is now married

to the girl in question, she insists this album had nothing to do with it). Plenty of bands have done that, but few as distinctly as Hayman.

A friend of mine explained to me recently that the reason he didn’t really trust the cinema was because only very attractive people ever seemed to have sex in films. He wouldn’t have a problem with this album, although our narrator is “disappointed that her hips are that wide” and by the “gap between Fat Kelly’s teeth.” We follow him through a few one night stands, though in between he tries to win his ex back with whisky (didn’t work) and wonders why she hasn’t called him. Eventually, the final track concludes ‘I Love Only You’.

In the media’s eyes, Hefner didn’t build on this album, though a compilation ‘Boxing Hefner‘ got the band even more attention. Neither the follow-up ‘We Love The City’ or the electronic based ‘Dead Media’ got anything like as good reviews.

Hayman himself has said that he finds this album a little difficult to listen to. He prefers ‘We Love The City’. That album is certainly better produced, and its best moments probably do outrank the songs here. But ‘The Fidelity Wars’ shows an imaginative band at their most coherent, and a songwriter at his most adventurous point. It comes together as an album with a narrative flow and an individual voice. This is the kind of album that could be cited as one of those cultish favourites for some time to come.

Buy Fidelity Wars on 2CD


Or buy the downloads from Bandcamp

 

Breaking God’s Heart

Posted on by darren

Originally released 6th July 1998. Re-issue released Autumn 2007

Hefner’s debut was originally released in 1998, but is now available as a 2 disc edition. The new version includes all the b-sides and all the singles surrounding the release, including Pull Yourself Together, the Hefner Soul EP and the original long deleted first singles on Boogie Wonderland. This release also features new artwork and sleevenotes from Darren.

Drowned in Sound Review by Patrick McNally

Hefner songwriter Darren Hayman is probably the type of fella who finds himself lying on his bed covered in sweat, unable to cum as his masturbatory fantasies twist and turn in endless expository scene setting, with accumulated irrelevant detail taking him ever further away from the vinegar stroke. That’s the impression given by the songs on this expanded reissue of Hefner’s 1998 debut album, the first in a series collecting everything they released plus extras. The contents of these two CDs are as hornily obsessed with fucking as a Lil’ Kim brag-track but also constantly worry at the real-world problems around how to get, and keep, a partner. Don’t front; you’ve been there. Hayman writes in the sleevenotes that he’d “gone about two years without a shag” when he wrote these songs and that hallucinatory quality of believing that you’re fit to lie between the knees of angels whilst simultaneously grimly hoping that the librarian stamping your books recognises your inner-beauty from them radiates from this music.

Fitting the tone of his words, Hayman’s voice is glottal stopped and conversational, the music keeping things moving swiftly underneath in a kinda choogin’ motorik — like a folksier version of (then
labelmates) Stereolab. The band themselves describe their music as “skiffle” and whilst I can see where they’re coming from, that now brings to mind the past few years’ slew of unpleasantly sloppy post-Libertines bands — instead, Hefner are running on the same rock-not-rock fuel as early Violent Femmes or The Modern Lovers, and like those groups are expert at building emotionally charged arrangements by adding or subtracting at precisely the right time. When they want to, like on ‘Love Will Destroy Us In The End’ or 7” track ‘Pull Yourself Together’, they rally a tremendous post-punk

rhythmic drive, which is even more impressive as much of this early material doesn’t have a kick-drum (coz the drummer wanted to get to gigs on the tube — though even minus kick that’s still an impossible amount to carry). At the other end of their spectrum the desolate room-sound piano and measured vocals of the grubbily sad‘Tactile’ deflates the mock-mythic kitchen sink dirtiness of the rest of the album.

From when I first heard this record, sometime not too long after its original release a decade ago, Breaking God’s Heart has been a well that has never run dry for me, that has affected me in times of break-up and new love. Hopefully this reissue programme will mean that these songs may finally get the chance to move as many people as they deserve to. 9/10

Buy Breaking God’s Heart on 2CD


We also have a limited stock of the original CD release.


Or buy the downloads from Bandcamp