If The Principle Dies, You Don't Have A Chance

There can be few groups more thoroughly, remorselessly forgotten than Easterhouse. This is especially ironic given that the title of their debut album was Contenders, although at the time of its release this name was far from anomalous. Having been endorsed by Morrissey, a dubious honour even back then, Contenders was released by Rough Trade in the same week in 1986 as The Queen Is Dead, and only The Smiths' release held it off the top of the independent charts. It was a record that embodied the band's deep contradictions, which were reflected in both their towering strengths and chronic weaknesses.

Easterhouse were as musically conservative as they were politically radical, their outspoken revolutionary socialism framed by what initially sounded like the most pedestrian strumming imaginable, like The Smiths without the cutting-edge effeminacy. On Contenders this was further immersed in multiple layers of production lacquer, such that you could almost smell the varnish when you cupped an ear to it. However, the record also showcased Easterhouse's tremendous strengths. The first of these was that although even at the time their politics verged on the anachronistic, their world-historical vision had an epic grandeur, such that their apparent muscial ordinariness could nonetheless evoke colossal vistas of torment and resolution. Perhaps the group's greatest boon was singer Andy Perry's voice, which I personally think was the finest male voice of the Eighties. Finally, their songs were just really, really, good, being ambitiously structured and featuring memorable and penetrating lyrics. Lenin in Zurich is, quite simply, a great, great song:

Easterhouse's weltanschauung hinged on two of the great revolutions that had convulsed the early part of the 20th Century, and their consequent impact on the British working class. The first of these was obviously the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, whose tenets the Perry brothers were still openly loyal to. Indeed, Get Back To Russia, the band's anthemic paean to the land of the Revolution, is remarkable in hindsight mainly for demonstrating just how much confidence the Western left still had in the USSR, just a few years before its demise:

The other land of revolution revered by Andy and Ivor Perry was Ireland, and Contenders was replete with Irish Republican folk songs and hymns to the Easter Rising. Perhaps the best song on the album that dealt with the travails of 20th Century Ireland was 1969, their chronicle of the genesis of the Troubles in the North, this again adopting an unashamedly pro-Republican standpoint:

However, these sentiments would also date quickly, as even at this time the fire within Irish Republicanism was starting to abate, as the movement inevitably became domesticated by moving further towards practical, pragmatic electoral politics. Furthermore, Easterhouse had strongly backed the recently defeated Miners' Strike, and had even featured Arthur Scargill on one of their record sleeves, so if the intention of Contenders had been to raise consciousness and inspire action, it instead resembled a lament for a worldview that was fully in retreat.

Nevertheless, if the revolutionary socialism that Easterhouse espoused is unlikely to again be the engine of global change that it had been at the beginning of the 20th Century, it has at least endured, and is in many ways in a healthier state than the various unlovely models of liberal capitalism that once threatened its complete annihilation. And, as the wheel has turned (almost) full circle, so too has Contenders aged surprisingly well, its incongruity to its era having been its greatest strength of all.