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The Blood: False Gestures for a Devious Public LP (1983, Noise Records)
1983’s False Gestures for a Devious Public is the first full-length record by London’s the Blood. I’ve owned this record for years, but it’s been getting a lot of play time lately, for reasons I will explain below. I should also note that we have in stock a collection called Total Megalomania on Radiation Records the features all the tracks I write about here, so if you dig ‘em, that’s a worthy pickup.
I can’t recall when I first heard the Blood, but their two singles, 1983’s Megalomania (No Future Records) and Stark Raving Normal (Noise Records) have been favorites for many, many years. If I recall correctly, I first heard “Stark Raving Normal” on some punk compilation or another, but when I heard “Megalomania,” that’s when things clicked. “Megalomania” is a monster track, from its resplendent piano intro to its blistering, Machine Gun Etiquette-esque pace, to the sublime octave chords in the song’s main instrumental hook. It’s an all-time favorite song, and if you haven’t heard it, check it out… if you don’t like it, then you can stop right here because the Blood’s output doesn’t get any better.
Once “Megalomania” got its hooks in, I starting pulling whatever threads I could latch onto, which is what I do when I find a song or a record I like. The first order of business, of course, is to get the band’s releases from the same period, and I grabbed this 1990 red vinyl reissue of False Gestures for a Devious Publicon Link Records. I remember getting it in the mail, listening to it, and thinking, “well, that’s not as good as ‘Megalomania,’” and putting it on my shelf, where it has stayed since then. That opinion got canonized in my mind, and if you asked me what I thought of False Gestures for a Devious Public, I would have told you the Blood had lost the plot by then and it wasn’t worth the trouble.
What was I thinking?
I’ve been revisiting records I haven’t played in a while, and I got curious about False Gestures and threw it on. On that listen, my opinion began to change. I noticed some of the wild Captain Sensible-esque lead guitar lines that are such a big part of the singles’ appeal, and while the vocal melodies on tracks like “Done Some Brain Cells Last Nite” and “Degenerate” felt broad, others like “Well Sick” and “Waste of Flesh and Bone” could stand next to the classic singles. Internally, I revised my opinion to “False Gestures is OK, but the production is crummy and the songwriting is uneven.”
Then, earlier this week, the album came up on shuffle while I was driving, and I listened to it again. Apparently a third listen was what I needed, because somewhere in there my opinion got revised to “this fucking rules.” I still think the production is lacking, but that’s mostly because the album suffers compared to “Megalomania.” That is such a perfectly produced single, and it’s easy to imagine how some of the clever guitar overdubs and other touches like the saxophone in “Sewer Brain” would have hit way harder on False Gestures if its recording had the same level of care and attention to detail. But, even if its not rendered in crisp hi-def, it’s all there, and the Blood is still raging on this record, which sounds good enough if you crank it real loud. If you love Machine Gun Etiquette as much as I do, “Well Sick” and the epic “Waste of Flesh and Bone” scratch that same epic / melodic / psychedelic punk itch.
Biographical details about the Blood are scant. They were from London and there’s a story, which way or may not be true, of Stinky Turner from the Cockney Rejects “discovering” them on the top level of a double-decker bus. I pulled down my copy of Burning Britain hoping to find a chapter on the band, but they only get a brief mention in the chapter on No Future Records, which confirms their reputation as hard partiers. Label boss Chris Berry relates the story of the band getting shithoused at the contract singing for the Megalomania single, after which No Future decided the band was more trouble than they were worth. After being unenthused with False Gestures on my first listen, I never bothered checking out the follow-up 12”, 1985’s Se Parare Nex, but those tracks are on the aforementioned Total Megalomania collection. The Blood carried on into the 90s and 00s, but judging by some of their song and album titles, they may have leaned further into the “shock rock” element of their sound, and unless someone confirms for me that these releases are worth investigating, I’ll carry on assuming they’re not.