Song of the Day: Love and Rockets “Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven”

Two weeks ago, my filmmaker friend Matt Levin was invited to New York City to film Poptone, the touring moniker of Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, and Love and Rockets band members Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins. Accompanied by Haskins’s daughter Diva, Ash and Haskins are performing songs from their three 80s-era bands. My admitted jealousy of getting such close-quarters access to these seminal musicians has given way to a thorough re-immersion in their music — Love and Rockets, in particular — and the song of the day, “Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven.”

Two years after the acrimonious split of goth rock pioneers Bauhaus, three of the four original band members (Daniel Ash, Kevin Haskins, and David J.) reconstituted as Love and Rockets. Completely freed from the stylistic and lyrical constraints of Bauhaus, Love and Rockets were willing and able to try anything and everything in the studio. Two years prior, the trio had started pushing at their own self-imposed boundaries during the recording of the final Bauhaus album, Burning From the Inside (while lead singer Peter Murphy convalesced after a life-threatening illness), which ultimately led to the band’s dissolution. After Bauhaus, Ash and Haskins recorded as the experimental Tones on Tail while David J. recorded both as a solo artist and with the brainy, eccentric Jazz Butcher.

Love and Rockets explored psychedelia, glam rock, folk, R&B, and precise pop songcraft in equal measure on the debut album Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven. While mining the ever-rich caverns of psychedelia in the mid-80s was hardly unique — UK acts The Soft Boys, Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Cure, XTC, The Cocteau Twins, The Teardrop Explodes, and Echo And The Bunnymen, and US bands The Three O’Clock, The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate, The Lyres, Opal, The Fuzztones, and Plasticland come to mind — Love and Rockets had a unique, far-reaching approach that moved beyond the heavily-treated post-punk guitars of many of the former and the often slavish paisley revivalism of the latter. Love and Rockets reference David Bowie and Marc Bolan as much as Syd Barrett. The R&B influence became overt with a post-Dream cover of The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion.”

This fusion of disparate elements comes to full fruition on the seven original songs that make up the Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven tracklist. Ash’s crisply strummed acoustic guitars chime out while his electric guitars churn, David J.’s deceptively simple basslines are in lockstep with Haskins’s live and programmed drums, and all sorts of subtle electronic effects swell and recede within the mix. The deliberate pacing creates an expansive sonic space throughout. Like the best R&B, spirituality and sexuality co-exist as lyrical obsessions, tinged with a Bauhausian darkness and drama, but with an overt sense of humor (“A Private Future” advises “Don’t take it all too seriously”). Title track “Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven” glides along on an Ebowed guitar lead and an insistent, mechanical R&B strut. Lyrics are delivered in an oblique call-and-response, alternately purring and immediate. The song doesn’t so much inspire dancing as it does slinking.

Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven received substantial critical reassessment when it turned 30 years old in 2015, so perhaps two years on this visit doesn’t add too much of note to the discussion. But Daniel Ash himself turned 60 on July 31^st — and shows no signs of slowing down — so the seventh dream still lives.

Put all down to chemistry
Put it all down to the heat
The seminal spark of sexuality
Put it all down to the heat

There was magic in the air on a Saturday night
It was tragic, it’s there on the street
The quicksilver and the warm jets
Make your leopard-skin dream complete

Intrigued by alcove whispers
So you tore off your osgood tie
Fascination found in strangeness
And your sister’s alien sigh
Your sister’s alien sigh

Put all down to chemistry
Put it all down to the heat
The seminal spark of sexuality
Put it all down to the heat

To wake up sunday morning
With a rose and blue tattoo
So lay on the back of your skinny white hand
Suvonier of the brave and the new
Suvonier of the brave and the new

It’s the seventh dream of teenage heaven