111 for 30 #004 - Helen Love 'Does Your Heart Go Boom?'

They’re the best thing to come out of Swansea since Badfinger, so therefore The Greatest Welsh Band of my period in office.

London’s an infuriating warren of paradoxes. When I was a kid, my mum and dad took us to the Natural History Museum. Even taking the birth of my daughter into account, and being awestruck by my partner on first meeting, I think that was the greatest day of my life. Everything that effervesced in my seven year old imagination was there: dinosaurs, skellingtons, echoing halls filled with treasure; a cafe selling cake almost as good as my grandma Halliwell’s; more dinosaurs and - most thrillingly - endless galleries filled with glittering minerals.

I was obsessed with crystals, minerals and semi precious stones, and gazed into the display cases - at the amethyst, tourmaline, topaz, citrine, rhodochrosite, aventurine, garnets and peridot - in rapt wonder.

Every other trip to London (bar my flying visit to interview Elliott Smith in 2000) has been a dispiriting anti-climax in comparison. Especially when I dragged my best mate Rich to see The Stone Roses at Alexandra Palace in November 1989. He must have been expecting a transcendental religious experience the way I had been banging on about them since they changed my world in Blackpool earlier that year. But what Rich got was one of the worst sounds I have ever heard at a venue; a gnarly crowd; Ian Brown on his worst foghorn form; and someone trying to force their way into our Muswell Hill B&B in the middle of the night.

Maybe it was John Squire coming to apologise?

So, London… a bit meh and up its own dusty chute for my liking.

It was with some trepidation that I hauled myself up the endless slow hill from Euston Station to the Lexington, weighed down by my guitar and a bag full of my (own) record. It was hot, too. Just that couple of degrees nearer the equator than my hilly home, bringing a perspiring redness to my face that made me look like one of Roger Hargreaves’ discarded creations: Mr Very Beetroot.

It was June 2022 and I was excited to be in town, hick ambivalence aside. I was going to be supporting one of my favourite bands of all time; a band who I’d been playing on the radio since my earliest radio shows in 1993; a band who’d been serially ignored by the Welsh music industry and media, but who - very correctly - didn’t care for back garden plaudits and cliquey glad-handing.

They were one of Peel’s favourite bands and were mates with **JOEY RAMONE**.

The patronage of the Welsh Music Prize hardly competes, right?

And there they are, I think, sat around that table, smoking fags, having a pint and laughing.

“Helen Love?”

My next door neighbour - Paul Beaumont - had the first games console I ever saw. It was one of the early Ataris. We were all obsessed with spaceys. When we went swimming to Holywell swimming baths, the highlight wasn’t mouthfuls of chlorine, terrifying bushes of pubes in the communal changing rooms, or collecting ferrukas… veruccas… verruccas… foot warts, it was the frantic wet-haired run upstairs to the cafe, ten pences jangling in corduroy pockets, desperate to be the first to the Asteroids cabinet.

The crushing disappointment if one of the Big Kids was there, flicking ash all over the display, is still tangible. We only had minutes while mums and dads sprinted a Nescaf and a Breakaway.

Sometimes it was fun to watch the spotty giants play, if they let you and didn’t elbow you in the face to impress a permed girlfriend; picking up tips as the monochrome display lasered itself into our consciousness, those increasingly frantic chip tune pulses synching with, and displacing, our heartbeats.

We were shaped by the sounds and colours from these games - and from the Ataris, Spectrums, BBC Micros (posh swat), Commodore 64’s (posh posh), Electrons and - if you had parents who despised you - Dragon 32’s that followed in the early-mid 80’s,

All those games - and the pop music of our day: Blondie, Dexys’, The Jam, Adam and the Ants, The Jam, Madness, Duran Duran, Kelly Marie - made us as surely as gametes.

Helen Love were the only band I’d heard - in 1993 - who sounded like a scrapbook amalgamation of all of these things, and more besides (I hadn’t heard The Ramones at that stage). They were a distillation of the things I’d grown up with, followed by a rites of passage that hadn’t been celebrated in Hollywood: Top of the Pops Thursdays, youth club broken hearts, taping the songs you liked off the Top 40, 10p fag rebellion, underage disco snogs… all somehow crammed through a Casio keyboard having a meltdown due to the wrong voltage from an arsonist’s wet dream multi-adaptor.

Their songs sounded like the kind of things we’d made up in the playground, kiss-chasing each other in a frenzy of e-numbers and superbastard colas, before anyone had twigged the connection between hyperactivity / attention disorders and additives… white dwarf singularities of sugar and colourings you could see from the depths of space… The Wham Bar Nebula…

Helen Love’s songs pogoed along, fuelled by this energy, a sugar rush like Christmas Day every day, and presented in sleeves that looked like the illegitimate offspring of our favourite comics and TV series opening titles… Smash Hits for punk kids.

And, like all the best phases of the greatest bands, there’s no point in talking about individual songs because they all sound exactly the same, enlivened and distinguished by perfect shout along choruses…

I interviewed Helen in the first year on air. I asked one question and she laughed for ten minutes pretty much unbroken. I might be mis-remembering this or exaggerating, but there’s at least a germ of truth here. Maybe nine minutes?

Over the last three decades Helen Love have sharpened their wit and honed their tunes and production so that they are completely gristle free. Each song is a Bonsai Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory of colours, ideas, perfectly aimed pop culture references and borrowings from pop’s canon that are more ram-raid heists than officially cleared samples.

They supercharge Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s working class 80’s MIDI Motown and - in an ideal world - their songs would fill dancefloors all over the UK. However we don’t live in an ideal world. Which, paradoxically, is one of the reasons Helen Love remain so damn special.

They’re also punk as fuck, awkward buggers who do exactly what they want to do regardless of The Industry.

What else could we expect from Cardiff City fans from Swansea, who don’t keep quiet about it?

They’re the best thing to come out of Swansea since Badfinger, so therefore The Greatest Welsh Band of my period in office.

I reserve the right to retool the preceding sentence when I write about The Pooh Sticks / Swansea Sound, as I surely will in due course. You have been warned.

Then we get to last year’s ‘This Is My World’ album. Somehow this album manages to combine the quintessence of The H. Love with songs about grief, heartbreak, politics and getting older that don’t remotely sound like The National or Radiohead.

Every time I play them on air, social media - our tiny fractal corner of it - lights up with joy because people, the music-savvy people of Wales, know even if The Taffia don’t.

After what was a heady and brilliant night at The Lexington where - beer-addled - I was convinced I was watching The Ramones being backed by Atari Teenage Riot and Vince Clarke - I asked Helen if they’d do an interview on my show about the new album.

Helen laughed for a full eight minutes, then said:

“No fucking chance.”