Three from the Vault

Since I have just a bit of spare time remaining before I begin a new semester of teaching at my colleges, I figured this would be a good chance to post another blog entry, to help tide my blog over until the arrival of summer break, when I’ll have more opportunities to attend to such things. This is also an ideal way to share my enthusiasm about three pop music rarities that I’ve been obsessing over for the past two months now: Lovelife by The Painted Word, Shoebox Full of Secrets by Andy Pawlak, and 24 Years of Hunger by Eg and Alice.

In each instance this was the only studio album officially released by each musical act. Therefore, the above title of this blog post, “Three from the Vault,” doesn’t really describe the albums accurately. Despite maintaining a small but vocal underground cult following for over twenty years since their arrival, these three albums have all been retrieved from the deep, deep vault of British pop music, and together they’re about as pristine, emotive, and rapturous a trio of pop albums as one could hope to find just about anywhere, from any era.

Before delving into these records from the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’d like to say a few words first about the idea of nostalgia, especially as it’s applied to pop music. One reason why these three quirky, far left-of-center albums sound so perfect to me is, no doubt, because I came of age in exactly the time period during which they were recorded and released. (I graduated from high school in 1991.) My ears gravitate naturally to these sounds, half-electronic, half-acoustic, untainted by the cynicism that would come to dominate mainstream pop by the mid-’90s. I think these albums still sound fairly timeless, regardless of my personal associations with the music of my youth.

The problem is that what’s typically referred to, and quite often unfairly condescended to, as nostalgic — allowing ourselves to over-sentimentalize our earlier years, while whitewashing their perhaps harsher realities — doesn’t truly apply in this case. Music is created both inside of time and outside of time; it necessarily reflects the trappings and technology of its era, and in the very best instances, it also transcends them. A recording of the pure sound of a voice and an instrument can tap into something much “older” within us, and it can simultaneously project itself well into the future, as a kind of aesthetic preservation. That’s what permits us to pluck from complete obscurity a fine album composed two decades ago and realize that it sounds just as good now as it did back then. As the great Southern novelist William Faulkner famously put it in one of his later books, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Maybe the most obscure of the three records that I’ll be critiquing here, The Painted Word’s Lovelife (BMG/RCA Records, 1989) brims and sometimes nearly overflows with melodic ’80s pop of the very highest order. In the tradition of Aztec Camera’s Love (1987) and The Blue Nile’s Hats (1989), there’s something almost emblematic about this album. And like those other two albums, it was created with one young British man primarily at its center. In the case of The Painted Word, that young singer/songwriter was Alan McCusker-Thompson. Pictured hazily out of focus on the album’s cover, but nonetheless dapperly dressed, his image often seems to glow when the CD is sitting under the lamplight on my desk, beckoning to me from across the room in his crisp white shirt-sleeves and snug red vest, floating up from an otherworldly little sea of aquamarine.

The Painted Word surfaced in 1986, when U2’s Mother Records label released the band’s moody yet uplifting first single, “Independence Day.” Three years later, in the waning afterglow of the New Romantic movement, the band’s full-length debut, Lovelife, quietly appeared on the British music scene. The album is sophisticated enough not to draw attention to itself, partly because it’s top-notch musical craftsmanship masquerading as mainstream pop. (Even “I Found Love Today,” a B-side for the album’s single “Worldwide,” easily trumps most other songs of the era.) The lyrics on Lovelife don’t intend to astound anybody. As the band’s name suggests, the words in the songs aren’t innately extraordinary; rather, they’re painted, stylized, customary but more colorful than the words that we use in daily life. True to the album’s title, Lovelife is entirely, jubilantly love-centric (“Yes it’s true / That the reason I’m alive / Is to be here by your side”). Or better yet, it’s surrounded by a buoyant cloud of what love might feel like to someone who’s young and overtaken by infatuation, with hardly even a tinge of romantic uncertainty about it all.

Ironically, these love-filled songs somehow avoid clichés through total immersion in them. On the aptly named “Joie de Vivre,” McCusker-Thompson’s delivery strikes a balance between innocence and seduction as he croons (swoons, really) in a resonant voice that bears a distinct resemblance to Sting’s, “We’ll go out tonight / Forget the danger signs / Tonight this world is mine.” Indeed, the song succeeds by creating and spinning itself out into its own little world, beginning with soft piano chords and synth-based rhythms. Midway through the track, the singer’s joined by a joyful chorus of background vocalists, then a full-tilt horns section, along with galloping strings orchestrated by the famed pop arranger Anne Dudley. The man at the song’s helm excels at impassioned refrains and chants, and the one that he riffs on here — “When they take you down, they take you down for good” — propels the song and its singer toward an ecstatic sense of liberation.

The slightly more down-tempo “Wilderness,” with strings that echo classic Burt Bacharach hits, accomplishes a similar openness (“Take your love into the world”), while pensive numbers like “24 Hours” and the nostalgia-limned “boy I once was” of “’77” penetrate through the more somber layers of ’60s-influenced orchestral pop. “Worldwide” readily demonstrates through its catchiness why it was one of Lovelife’s singles, even if the album version’s lingering, soul-inflected outro is what most makes the song worth hearing. And the lazily tender but no less passionate “I Want It Here and I Want It Now” might just be the record’s finest cut, with its smitten young couple strolling through sun-struck Paris, holding hands “beneath the blue armistice sky.”

Although The Painted Word did record another album, Universal, in 1995, the disc was never officially released, and only a handful of promotional copies found their way into the world. Like many other musicians who recorded just one or two albums at some point in the distant past, Alan McCusker-Thompson works in academia today. He lectures on commercial music at the University of the West of Scotland, where he leads the Master’s Program in Music Innovation and Entrepreneurship, among the first academic programs of its kind. He also currently manages musicians with independent and major labels.

Andy Pawlak, another British musician whose first and only album debuted in the same year as The Painted Word’s, has apparently disappeared from the music business far more thoroughly since the release of Shoebox Full of Secrets (Phonogram/Fontana Records, 1989). Some random comments online mention that Pawlak now works as a driving instructor in the far north of England, though like McCusker-Thompson, Pawlak also recorded a second unreleased album, Low Beat Folk, in 2003 under the moniker Monkey.

As it were, Shoebox Full of Secrets is itself exactly that, a musical shoebox full of tiny secret gems, and a shimmering and vastly overlooked pop masterpiece. I was mesmerized by the cover photo and purchased the album, sound unheard, when I stumbled upon the CD at a used record shop in London’s Notting Hill district. It was a wise investment; today, the disc is worth twentyfold what I paid for it. And for only three quid back then, what a sterling album it turned out to be, flawless from beginning to end: thirteen dreamy, hard-to-categorize songs that proved just as beguiling as the album’s cover.

From the playful opening title track, “Secrets,” these songs are largely for and about “lovers keeping lovers warm.” Just as unashamedly romantic as the songs by The Painted Word, Andy Pawlak’s tunes feel like they’ve been partially beamed in from an earlier decade, reviving soulful ’60s and ’70s American pop values more authentically than most ’80s American pop musicians ever did. Rhythmic guitar hooks, chiming piano interludes, and especially the doo-wop harmonies of background vocalists Dee and Shirley Lewis all contribute to the album’s genuine throwback aura.

“Mermaids” may be the best example of this, with lyrics that are whimsical enough to match the boundless energy of the music: “We should be swimming with mermaids / Not praying for rain / In puddles of lace / Watching tumbleweeds tumbling / Feeding ice cream to rattlesnakes.” Sometimes darkness creeps in beneath the cheerful, polished surface of the songs. “Best Regards” tells an abstract wartime tale with tragic swerves throughout its verses:

“And all the children swam

Among the floating bombs

A gift from Uncle Sam

Sent with his best regards

Another boy was took last night

He had his hands and ankles tied

He tasted gun oil in his mouth

And never heard another sound.”

Yet Pawlak’s toughly exuberant vocals help to keep even his darker poetic narratives hopeful. The central figure of “Mother’s Day,” as Pawlak sings of her, rises above the surrounding squalor (“When it all came down around her feet / In the soggy paper maché streets / She kept a hold of love”). “All That’s Left of Me” and “Eskimo Kissing” are punctuated with similar bursts of fresh, surprising imagery, while “Love Letters” and “For Better or for Worse” rely more on lovelorn character sketches to drive the songs gently forward.

Finally, Eg and Alice’s 24 Years of Hunger (Warner Music/WEA Records, 1991) may be the best known of these three rare albums, mainly because of Francis “Eg” White’s still-thriving career as a songwriter for a wide array of major pop stars. White got his start as a bassist for the ’80s British boyband Brother Beyond, and he’s gone on to compose massively successful hits for everyone from Kylie Minogue to James Morrison to Joss Stone to Will Young. In addition to producing tracks for artists like Pink and Sam Sparro, Eg also penned Grammy Award winner Adele’s song “Chasing Pavements,” as well as Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue,” the most unforgettable cut on her debut album, Rockferry.

In between his boyband days and his current status as one of the world’s most successful pop songsmiths, Eg White wrote and recorded one ultra-sublime album with his friend Alice Temple, who was formerly a model in London and a BMX bike-racing champion. (Though first glances may prove deceptive, that’s Temple posing in the striking photo for Eg and Alice’s cover artwork at the beginning of this post.) 24 Years of Hunger has stood the test of time just as well as the albums by The Painted Word and Andy Pawlak, and perhaps even a little bit better, since Eg and Alice’s album doesn’t bear the somewhat outdated stamp of trademark ’80s production and instrumentation quite as much.

The songs on Eg and Alice’s debut rank among the moodiest of pop music, and their greatest appeal is that the lyrics never feel the need to spell everything out. Poetic abstraction is a very difficult feat to pull off well in the setting of a pop song. The disc’s opening number, “Rockets,” achieves this on a variety of levels, gradually but surely working its way into the listener’s consciousness, as Eg and Alice sing about how a bittersweet relationship can make a person want to take off right into space: “And when I touch my baby / So blue, she’s sad too . . . / Send us a rocket or two.” Against a backdrop of light electronics, percussion, and delicate crescendos, Eg’s straightforward vocals intertwine with Alice’s raspy, shy delivery, and the effect is almost indescribably gorgeous.

Elsewhere, “In a Cold Way” courts a distinctively jazzy sensibility in a pleading wake-up call to a depressed friend, while “And I Have Seen Myself” sounds indebted equally to Southern gospel and Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” One of the album’s two singles, “Doesn’t Mean That Much to Me,” faithfully recreates early Prince-variety funk and R&B (“The same key that will let you into heaven / Will open every door in hell”).

But it’s the album’s other single, “Indian,” that provides 24 Years of Hunger with its most alluring, remarkable track. On the surface, the lyrics of the chorus suggest a typical “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” sort of moral (“If you tell me I’m an Indian / You’re an Indian too”). Repeated listening reveals a deeper theme of outsiderdom and feeling like a misfit amongst one’s peers, the word “Indian” perhaps being a kind of lyrical substitute for lesbianism, since Temple sings the majority of the song:

“For several years I have been

On the edge of every scene

A stranger in my town

And even though they say hello

They would not be seen with me

I guess they’ve never known . . .

I wonder how come they can turn me away

I think it’s so sad, we may never be the same again.”

As sonically beautiful, radio-friendly, and unassumingly moving as “Indian” is, it’s unlikely that such a song could ever have been a mainstream hit. That’s a sad fact indeed, considering that pop music listeners would certainly benefit from the clever indirection and thematic seriousness that the song offers. Its message is a potent and universal one: discriminating against people or treating them like outcasts for being perceived as different also places the prejudiced individual firmly in the realm of “difference,” separate from the majority of human beings who attempt to treat each other with dignity.

Although they collaborated as a duo on only one full-length album, both Eg White and Alice Temple recorded subsequent solo projects. Eg’s two solo albums, Turn Me On, I’m a Rocket Man (WEA Records, 1996) and Adventure Man (Spilt Milk Records, 2009), were both quietly well-received by fans and critics. White worked with Temple on her harder-edged debut, Hang Over (V2 Records, 1999), and in 2008 Temple recorded an independently-released album titled Be With You in a Minute. She also contributed lead vocals to “Pull Me Through,” a track on Eg’s Adventure Man.

So why are these three lost albums from decades past significant enough for me to write about now? When we suddenly hear a snippet of a nearly forgotten song from long ago, the feeling that we get of being carried back to our younger days isn’t merely nostalgic. The greatest songs and albums emphasize how memory actually functions. During the different phases of our lives, we move through time in ways that are both continuous and discontinuous at once, experiencing “a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability,” as the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space. Pop songs are like indelible gemstones that don’t ever change, but we do. And so they open a bright path back to those unchanged versions of our younger selves that remain trapped in time, the people we were before we became who we are today.

The Music of Gregg Alexander

The best defense I’ve ever read of a musical performer who’s managed to remain both lightly mainstream and discreetly underground was found, oddly enough, in a thread of comments on YouTube. It was posted by someone who’s clearly a cult fan, in response to an unreleased track by Gregg Alexander. When another listener posted a brief comment criticizing Alexander for singing out of key, the fan stood up for him with a truthful, spot-on retort: “He MADE the key.”

Gregg Alexander (born Gregory Aiuto in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in 1970) is best known as the songwriter and frontman of the short-lived late-’90s pop/rock outfit New Radicals. Short-lived, indeed; the band released just one album, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, on MCA Records in 1998. The album did, however, spawn one hit song that barely grazed the Top 40, “You Get What You Give,” which spent four weeks on the charts, peaking at #36 in early 1999.

A rollicking, infectious pop number not a little indebted to the likes of The Beatles and David Bowie, “You Get What You Give” is authentically inspirational in its message, while also raising an extended middle finger to the music industry and celebrity culture: “Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson / Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson / you’re all fakes, run to your mansions / come around, we’ll kick your ass in.” Sing along, everybody! Ironically, the track garnered a devoted following among celebrity musicians themselves, with none other than Joni Mitchell proclaiming in an interview that “You Get What You Give” was one of her favorite pop songs at the time.

Regardless, Gregg Alexander wouldn’t be nearly as patient with a mainstream career as Joni Mitchell has been. Disenchanted with touring and the public-relations side of the music business, the shadowy, enigmatic Alexander — who often appeared in publicity photographs with a hat pulled down over his eyes — disbanded New Radicals just days after the release of their album’s less successful second single, the sublime “Someday We’ll Know,” agreeing only to shoot a video for the song. Then he went his own way.

Fortunately, he’s been writing and producing songs for many other pop music acts ever since, and to much acclaim. His most notable accomplishment was winning a Grammy Award in 2003 for co-writing “The Game of Love,” performed by Santana and Michelle Branch. Other artists to whom Alexander has loaned his talents throughout his career include Belinda Carlisle of The Go-Go’s, Ronan Keating of Boyzone, Enrique Iglesias, Taylor Dayne, the UK band Texas, and American Idol cast-offs Justin Guarini and Carly Smithson (recording as Carly Hennessy at the time).

Then, of course, there’s Danielle Brisebois — the singer and former child star, who played a character on the TV sitcom All in the Family. Along with working on each other's solo albums, she was Alexander’s closest sidekick in New Radicals and has remained so throughout much of both of their lengthy music careers. In addition to being musical collaborators, they were also on-again, off-again romantic partners, until their personal and professional lives eventually led them to take somewhat more separate paths. (Brisebois has gone on to write hit songs for such artists as Kelly Clarkson and Natasha Bedingfield, and she’s now married to UK guitarist Nick Lashley.)

But before all of Gregg Alexander’s hard-earned success had even begun to come to fruition, back when he was still in his late teens/early 20s, he’d already recorded and released two impressive but little-heard albums for major labels, his mature yet precocious debut, Michigan Rain (A&M Records, 1989), and the rambunctiously conceived, hilariously titled Intoxifornication (Epic Records, 1992). As intriguing as that early music of Alexander’s is, the story leading up to it is equally fascinating. Let me quote the following excerpt from the liner notes of Michigan Rain, written by the famed songwriter and producer Rick Nowels, dated January, 1989:

“In the summer of ’86 I got a message on my answering service from a Mr. Alexander regarding production on a song for a movie. When I returned the call, the voice on the other end informed me that he was a 16-year-old singer/musician from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who has ‘Thousands of songs,’ and would like me to produce one of them for, oh . . . why not a film soundtrack?

‘Can you send me a tape?’

‘Well, I don’t like to leave tapes around.’

‘Okay, play me something over the phone.’

The next thing I knew, I was driving down the freeway to meet Mr. Alexander. We sat in my car listening to his strange home demos, and after 15 minutes I told him we would make an album together. Gregg has been in my life, studio and refrigerator for over two years. Now he’s yours. Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the soundtrack to Gregg Alexander’s home movie.”

I still laugh out loud every single time I read this message from Mr. Nowels in the liner notes. I remember trying similar stunts to get interviews with pop stars back when I was the entertainment editor of my high school newspaper, but I never aimed quite as high at age sixteen as Gregg Alexander did. Rick Nowels, at that point in his career, had already written and produced top-selling songs and solo albums for Stevie Nicks and Belinda Carlisle, and he’d soon do the same for Anita Baker, Celine Dion, Cher, Darren Hayes, Dido, Jewel, and Madonna. To grab the attention of someone of Nowels’ professional stature, especially out of the clear blue, takes not only some serious guts, but also a tremendous amount of talent and luck.

As fate would have it, A&M Records was going through some severe turbulence right around the time of the release of Michigan Rain, so the album got hardly any public attention at all before being almost entirely forgotten. The record label’s confusion is made obvious by the last-minute change of the album’s title, as indicated on the promotional single for the album’s first track, “In the Neighborhood,” which lists the title of the then-forthcoming album as Save Me from Myself, a title shared with perhaps the album’s best song.

For those who took the time to seek out Michigan Rain and listen to its ten playfully ambitious tracks, they discovered a musical and lyrical pop palette that was nearly unprecedented for someone of Gregg Alexander’s tender age. What do the songs sound like? Exactly what you’d expect: finely groomed versions of a 16-year-old prodigy’s bedroom daydreams, funneled through a jangly sheen of ’60s- and ’70s-inspired guitar rock. Alexander was still on leave from high school in suburban Michigan, but on the album’s title cut, he’s imagining himself looking for bar fights, being picked up by some hot babe at a club — except that, unlike many of his peers, his particular daydreams are being fully realized and projected in all of their widescreen, Technicolor glory by a chart-topping record producer. Therefore, the song’s catchy choral refrain: “We made the fallin’ snow so hot / it turned to Michigan rain.”

That song and a couple of others — the anthemic heartbreaker “Loving You Sets Me Free” and the gorgeous, explosive mini-symphony “Save Me from Myself” — could have been massive hits in their late-’80s timeframe, were it not for the deliberately outright quirkiness of Alexander’s howling, pseudo-tortured vocals and coyly over-the-top idiosyncrasies. Religion looms large in other songs, since Alexander was raised, apparently, by conservative Jehovah’s Witness parents. His stance on the punk-lite romp “Sinner Times Ten” is, of course, interrogative, as is the case for most teenagers (“Did we have to bring God into this?”). He's even assisted on this track by the banshee-like background vocals of a young N’Dea Davenport.

In a sense Alexander’s extreme persona throughout the album is a safe embodiment of rebellion, whimsically lashing out against the strictures within which he was raised. As a fictive character in his own songs, he drinks, dances, loves, hates, sleeps around, steals, kills, gets thrown in jail for twenty years. The album’s soaring closing track, “The World We Love So Much,” embraces “all the beautiful things / we’re not allowed to touch” and contains glimpses of epic grandeur, the kind that also hint at what’s yet to come from Mr. Alexander in his later work.

Because Michigan Rain barely even saw the light of day, Epic Records re-packaged half of its songs in 1992 for Alexander’s equally disregarded sophomore effort, Intoxifornication. Two sexy, risqué new singles, “Smokin’ in Bed” and “The Truth,” were released from that album. The lyrics of the latter song make it clear why Alexander’s music was such a hard sell for a mainstream pop audience. His propensity for intense metaphors and point-blank exaggerations run the risk of making the listener take him too seriously. Early in “The Truth,” he croons, “I don’t follow fashion / ‘cuz man it’s such a drag / I got 77 women / and damn am I a fag.” Later, and far more provocatively: “I ask the question / but you are the riddle / I am a Jew / and you’re my Hitler.” What’s clear in the context of his body of work, however, is that Alexander’s lyrics are both sharp and blunt enough to be not just intentionally sensationalistic, but also a clever critique of sensationalism itself.

Two other tracks from Intoxifornication, “I Wanna Seduce You” and “Electric Girlfriend,” seethe with an adrenaline and sexual energy that only someone who’s approaching twenty could conjure up. The effect is youthfully direct and raw (“In you / it feels so good / when I go / under your hood”), but Alexander sings the lines like Disneyland on cocaine. By this point in Alexander’s career, Danielle Brisebois had replaced N’Dea Davenport as his principal vocal counterpoint; Brisebois’ wails, moans, and sighs are as vital to the songs as Alexander’s own. Regarding his penchant for debauchery, Alexander commented in an interview around this time, “I’ve tried most drugs, most positions under the guise of most religions with most genders on most continents.” It’s a brilliant statement that tells you everything you need to know, without really revealing anything at all.

With two self-penned major-label albums under his belt by the time most people are just finishing college, Alexander had experienced the best apprenticeship that he could possibly find in the music industry at the time. He continued to make connections in Los Angeles and London, while living in New York City, where he often made spare cash and tested out new songs as a busker in Central Park and Tompkins Square Park. The two New Radicals singles, “You Get What You Give” and “Someday We’ll Know,” actually garnered a huge following just from being heard on the streets there, well before the album itself had even been recorded.

New Radicals’ sole album-length release, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, sold over one million copies internationally, mainly based on the strength and notoriety of its two aforementioned singles. It’s also, without question, one of the most solid and just plain enjoyable albums in the history of American pop music. The dizzying reach and full-throttle personality of the album’s twelve cuts have never quite been paralleled in the twelve years since those songs first hit the airwaves. From Danielle Brisebois’ unaccompanied opening words on “Mother, We Just Can’t Get Enough” (“Make my nipples hard, let’s GO”), swiftly followed by swirling guitar riffs, bluesy plinking piano lines, and lone hip-hop shouts, we know that we’re not in for the usual pop/rock rollercoaster ride.

This first track, along with most of the others on the album, is about unabashedly finding delight in a kind of controlled excess. Note Alexander’s bombastic vocal attack and improvised rush of quasi-Eastern chanting near the song’s end, along with Brisebois’ breathtaking spoken-word interlude, just prior to an immense breakdown of percussion:

“Social Security number, please.

Credit card number, please.

Money, please.

Money, please.

Money, please.

Soul, please.

Please deposit $85 for the next three minutes, please

(or your call will be fucking disconnected immediately).”

Alexander and Brisebois know they’re making music to be sold to the masses, and they bash that fact about as much as they can possibly get away with on a mainstream, major-label album, right down to the UPC barcode that’s tattooed on Alexander’s hand and shoes in the album’s artwork. Despite their respective successes as songwriters and producers since that time, the sentiment registers as sincere here. Then again, they’re getting stoned in the lyrics of the majority of the songs on the album, too, so it’s not as though their judgment would have been perfectly clear-headed back in those days!

Since the album includes a track titled “Gotta Stay High,” this should really come as no surprise. Surely, getting themselves high fueled the album's manic story-songs — “I Hope I Didn’t Just Give Away the Ending,” “Jehovah Made This Whole Joint for You,” and “Technicolor Lover” — not to mention the funk-inflected, headlong rant of the album’s title track, on which the lyrics that Alexander sings don’t match up at all with those that are printed in the CD booklet: “I bet you trust your bank / just wait until it tanks . . . / And politics, a fuckin’ joke / Right and left, they’re both a hoax.”

To prove that he’s not all post-adolescent posturing, Alexander shows his softer, less combative side on bittersweet ballads like “Someday We’ll Know” (“Who holds the stars up in the sky? / Is true love once in a lifetime? / Did the captain of the Titanic cry?”) and “Flowers” (“My love is real / as real as the flowers you smoke to get high . . . / as real as our god who has spoken on how we can fly”). The album’s closing number, “Crying Like a Church on Monday,” even fuses pure power-pop with tinges of gospel to achieve its transcendent, melancholy heights.

So with that final, graceful bow, Gregg Alexander largely retreated to studio work behind the scenes. Most recently, with the exception of a track that he wrote with Danielle Brisebois for a new Boyzone album this year, he’s disappeared back into private life, no doubt enjoying the royalties he’s earned from songwriting over the years. I actually like it that way, as much as I love all of his music. It makes his earlier work, in relief, seem even more like the truly ingenious pop music that it is.

Robert Hamberger, The Smug Bridegroom (Five Leaves Publications, 2002)

I’ve always said that the greatest untold story in literature is the tale of what’s been going on for decades now at rest-areas off of every highway around the globe — and between married, supposedly “straight” men. Then in 2005, along came Ang Lee’s cinematic masterpiece Brokeback Mountain, which became an overnight cultural phenomenon — but not a Best Picture winner at the Oscars, although it deserved to be — for the very reason that’s stated above. Sure, the film was adapted from Annie Proulx’s moving short story of the same name, but few people had read her story before the movie’s release.

Leave it to a straight female fiction writer and a straight male film director to be the first people to tell this story to a wide audience and receive international acclaim for it. Such has been the homophobia of our society, and such has been the internalized fear amongst closeted (or formerly closeted) gay and bisexual men, who it seems have been unwilling or unable to tell the story themselves. Society doesn’t even remotely comprehend the depth and complexity of this subject, because society is what still forces many men to endure that difficult life of secrecy today. If the culture failed to coerce such men into covertly leading double lives, so the twisted logic goes, then the heterosexual and familial backbone of the culture itself would crumble.

Nevermind that it’s already crumbling anyway. As gay and bisexual identity has become more openly accepted in cultures worldwide, some — but not nearly all — of these closeted men have gradually ended their deceptive marriages of convenience, and society has begun to wake up to one of its most desperately hidden truths. The timeframe of Brokeback Mountain begins in 1963, and nearly half a century later, it’s obvious that we’re not living in 1963 anymore.

Eight years ago now, a little book titled The Smug Bridegroom quietly made its way into the world. It addresses the aforementioned themes more directly and more personally than either Proulx’s short story or Lee’s film. It’s a collection of poetry, so again, there’s no doubt that relatively few people have read it. This was the second book written by Robert Hamberger, an English poet who was born in East London in 1957. Hamberger, the author of six poetry pamphlets and three full-length poetry collections — Warpaint Angel (1997) was his first book, and Torso (2007) is his third and most recent — has been publishing his poems since the late 1970s. At that time he was married to a woman with whom he had three children, then he got divorced, came out as gay, and found a long-term male partner seventeen years his senior, who lived with the hardships of heart disease. Hamberger currently resides in Brighton, on England’s southern coast.

The scope of The Smug Bridegroom is vast and impressive, given that Hamberger’s book explores almost his entire biographical trajectory. Whereas many volumes of poetry loosely or even randomly link together poems within several subtitled sections, the four subtitled sequences that comprise The Smug Bridegroom tightly cohere both individually and together, arriving at a structure whose integrity feels completely solid from start to finish. The opening sequence, “Mountains,” involves commentaries on parenthood and the descent into illness of the author’s mother, to whom the book is dedicated. The second section, “Die Bravely,” closely details Hamberger’s marriage, from early courtship to the trials of separation. “The Wolf’s Tale” and “The Rule of Earth,” the latter of which was shortlisted for a Forward Prize and was previously published as a self-contained pamphlet, examine the pain of divorce and coming out as gay at middle age, alongside the poet’s figurative rebirth in a meaningful domestic relationship with another man.

The Smug Bridegroom draws its title from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear himself speaks the lines late in the play’s fourth act, once he’s suddenly realized, in his old age and delirium, that his two eldest daughters have betrayed him: “Why this would make a man a man of salt, / To use his eyes for garden water-pots, / Ay, and laying autumn’s dust. I will die bravely, / Like a smug bridegroom.” These lines also serve as the epigraph to the section that’s subtitled “Die Bravely” in Hamberger’s book. This allusion is affecting and works on numerous levels, conveying at once the deep sorrow that the poet feels about the dissolution of his marriage, the sense of deception involved in “betraying” his wife and children, and the guilty knowledge that he may have intuited he was gay all along on some level, but remained “smug” enough to avoid the open recognition of that fact. In Shakespeare’s play, these lines are also rife with sexual connotations, which are certainly appropriate to the moments of both gay and heterosexual physicality that punctuate Hamberger’s text.

The book’s opening poem, “Mountains,” situates the poet in relation to his parents and to his own children. It’s a fascinating place to stand, both as a writer and as a reader, in the middle of this generational divide. What does it mean to be a son in relation to his beloved aging mother and his absent father? What does it mean to be a father to three young children when one still feels very much like a son himself? Hamberger skillfully evokes and unfolds the intricacies of these relationships, without reducing their infinite nuances: “Looking up (say a year old, sixteen months) / she was a glacier forty foot high . . . / her voice coming from the summit down to me.” Then later:

“At sixteen months

my daughter’s at my feet: far down there,

her cries grapple-hooks pinning their hopes.

Any minute she’ll climb inside me.

I want to be ice. She can’t move mountains.

The season’s shifting. I want to give way.”

All of this is further complicated in that the poet’s mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease and nearing her own death. The poem “Mother’s Son” deftly synthesizes fragments from remembered experiences throughout their relationship, from the poet’s earliest memories (“Yanking my hand to Infants that first morning, / me gripping doorjambs and radiators / while everyone gawped”) to disorientingly sad visits to his mother at her retirement home (“Taking my hand / when we walk the corridor saying ‘Allright Dad’”). Hamberger carefully arranges these potentially sentimental images and phrases with exactly the right touch of humanity and restraint, making those moments real to the reader, rather than mere cultural clichés.

Hamberger is also terrifically adept when working in poetic form. The sonnet is the most overused form these days, to say the least, but in his hands, each instance of using the sonnet structure fits because he stays true to this form’s song-like origins, while never calling too much attention to his rhyme schemes or metrical patterns. I’m moved by his sonnet “Your First Words” every single time I read it. The poem describes his initial encounter with his wife-to-be, on their very first day at university:

“‘Can I say hello to you?’ We were eighteen

first night away from home, and I said yes.

You thought I looked safe. How could you guess

in years to come I’d sometimes leave the room when

you were talking, annul you like that, how often

I’d stone you with silence. If I managed to impress

that night with quotes from Plath, it didn’t take us

long to learn no-one lives by poetry alone.”

The next few lines adroitly trace the ensuing years of their courtship, hesitant sexual exploration, and eventual coupledom, with a distinctly effective turn at the poem’s close: “Twenty years on I barely know you, but thanks for asking. / Go back to that night and I’d say yes again.” I can’t think of another excellent lyric poem that deals with this theme in the exact same context, nor can I think of another emotionally precise sonnet that employs the form quite so well in contemporary terms. Such an honest poem within the setting of a book like Hamberger’s was long overdue by the time The Smug Bridegroom was published in 2002. As one acquaintance and literary critic suggested when I asked him about it, perhaps the topic of a previous heterosexual marriage is simply too painful for most gay writers to confront in their work.

Even more admiration is due to Hamberger, in that case, for addressing the subject so thoughtfully here. While the marriage itself may have ended, the wife is not disrespected or left out of the picture. Another of the collection’s sonnets, “Five Years After,” again roused my interest when depicting an amicable post-divorce meeting between the poet’s ex-wife, her second husband, the poet’s male partner, and the poet himself, with an embodiment of elation in the poem’s final image:

“We leave them to their new home, as if we’ve granted

each other a blessing, another chance:

regret and anger trickling into grass,

or away into weather we all moved under once.

Next morning you bend to press

seed-potatoes into the vegetable patch. I balance

to paint our hall like a big yellow yes.”

The aspect of Hamberger’s poems that I most enjoy is their capacity for authentic empathy. These moments of connection manage to feel both vivid and relaxed in Hamberger’s poems, the same way that they so often feel in daily life. In each case they are emblematic, as in the sonnet “In Front of the Kids”: “When I cried in front of the kids they asked why. / ‘I’ve made you unhappy.’ That was enough. / . . . My tough / son ran for toilet-paper to dry / my eyes. He said ‘I want to see you’ / and gently held my face between his hands.” Or in the spare and direct poem “The Coming Out Group”: “He said ‘We’ve always been honest / so I told my wife I’m gay. Five minutes later / she was throwing my clothes out the window… / At work they wrote queer on my windscreen. / I’ve lost everything but it’s worth it. / I’m true to myself’, and he punched his chest / once, hard.”

The two most affecting poems in the book for me, perhaps, are printed side-by-side right in the center of the collection. “A Tree in the Wood” might be one of the most devastating poems I’ve ever read on the subject of gay men and suicide. The poem is preceded by a news-article excerpt from the UK magazine Gay Times, which recounts the story of a Conservative councillor and 40-year-old father of two in Leeds, England, who slashed his wrists and hanged himself on the same day that he was scheduled to appear in court to face gross indecency charges subsequent to his arrest for having sex with another man in a public bathroom. Hamberger courageously elects to re-imagine the man’s sexual encounter itself, a way of focusing on pleasure and desire, rather than emphasizing the social punishment for enacting that desire. The sexually charged imagery is powerfully interspliced with images of violence and self-injury:

“If it’s love I must be cut in two:

stop the body to stop its feelings.

If this sense floods my skin for minutes,

eating a man hungry into my mouth,

swallowing swords, kneading his inches,

feeling good alive together in our sweat

my neck must need rope’s love-bites,

my wrists loosening their grip as he shoots

deserve these slits. My blood can wipe me clean.”

This heartbreaking poem is immediately followed by the equally moving sonnet titled “Sisters,” a piece that’s somehow both antithetical and complementary to “A Tree in the Wood” in tone. The poem playfully recalls the poet and two of his boyhood friends, “[t]hree mummy’s-boy first years at an all boys school, / standing out like cockatoos at a wake” as they together sang and mimed songs by the famed British trio the Beverley Sisters: “We sashayed and fingerclicked thirty years ago. / Months before you died we met in London again: / you two gay, me halfway there. Brothers under the skin.”

The book’s final sequence, “The Rule of Earth,” provides a redemptive ballast to much of the darker content that precedes it in the collection. All twenty-one sonnets in this section of the book chronicle the poet’s romantic relationship with his long-term male partner, from their earliest sexual encounter after meeting over drinks at a pub, to their shared everyday domestic life. The trials that they encounter along the way — suspicious suburban neighbors, being tested for HIV together, spells of silence and depression, the older partner’s heart surgery — are all handled with resilient strength throughout the poems. “The Thought” delicately opens with a strategically repeated phrase: “If I lose you. Watch how I bear the thought: / if I lose you. Never to sense again / your palm against my face while we explain / the way this day has gone, each night / across the pillows, talking late / with kisses when we should have slept.”

There’s both an ease and an intensity in the way that Hamberger navigates these lines, qualities that one rarely finds paired together in formal poetry, or in any poetry, period. To me the scene seems perfectly situated, romantic yet down-to-earth, fully envisioned yet without unnecessary adornment. That same calm emotional exactitude can be felt in “Walking Together,” the book’s dream-like closing poem, which I’ll quote here in its entirety, in order to let the poem’s quiet impact register in full:

“I’m learning to slow my steps in time with yours.

There’s seventeen years between us: a gap

I called a challenge once, the way love ignores

any barrier, mountain, distance. I’d stop

a minute to let you catch up in those early days.

Carried away by how often we said

‘Let’s go for it’ when we met, I read that phrase

as my green light, the same light we saw ahead

walking back last night to our posh hotel.

It glowed at the crest of an avenue of trees

still young and green, while a heart-shadow fell

at our feet from a streetlamp through leaves.

We paused, and in that gap I took your arm

for a few yards of dark, with miles to get home.”

Robert Hamberger’s The Smug Bridegroom is one of the finest poetry books of the past decade. These poems are grounded in hard-won truths and are powered by humanely bracing honesty. Their bravery and expert craft deserve widespread appreciation, as well as a long-standing readership.