Of all the Don't Look Back shows, the House of Love playing their perfect, self-titled 1988 debut is the most poignant. Not really part of any scene, it was simply itself, and its perfection proved unrepeatable. Guitarist Terry Bickers left to form the frequently impenetrable Levitation, before dropping out of music entirely. Singer Guy Chadwick and the rest of the band left Creation records, signed to a major label and were never as good again.
Almost 20 years on, Chadwick, a man whose face always appeared weirdly folded in on itself, looks like what he is: a man pushing 50.
Bickers, remarkably, appears barely to have aged at all. Hearing the opening chords of Christine again is overwhelmingly evocative, like suddenly being back in the bedroom you had when you were a child. Bickers plays clusters of notes that make you feel the song could dissolve at any minute.
It is odd to think that the House of Love were Creation's great white hopes.Unlike Ride (who were appealingly blank) and Oasis (bullish, triumphalist) the House of Love wrote bitter, dark, introverted songs. A song such as Hope still sounds marvellously enervated and effete. Chadwick is, largely, a reserved frontman, not someone you would consider particularly cool, and he always looks a little pained while singing. By contrast, Bickers whirls about the stage as he joins the dots between the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie, Echo & the Bunnymen's Will Sergeant and Bernard Butler. Butler must have been a fan - watching Bickers now, you realise their stage personas are near-identical.
"Jesus, where did the time go," sings Chadwick in Man to Child. Then, in Love in a Car, a gorgeous aqueous ripple of a song in which Bickers' sparse solo glimmers like silver thread, "I feel just like yesterday's boy." These songs don't need the passage of time to feel nostalgic. They featured in a debut album that was already looking back, at lost time, lost innocence and lost love. There is an encore - an initially wobbly, then devastating Destroy the Heart; lovely fluttery B-side Blind - but now, as then, it is the first act that counts. Perfectly composed, unaffected by the passage of time, the House of Love is like a photograph that falls out of a long-unread book: wonderful and heartbreaking. I feel just like yesterday's boy.
