It's graduation day at Basher Street School: the time's come for the kids to move on, find a new career in a new town. But the leap from the funnies page to the glossies isn't that awesome — both are equally as shallow, serving similar purposes for different age groups. And that is to entertain in the least offensive way as possible.
Basher and the boys, however, are very loathe to grow up; incorrigible as they are, their comic-strip humour of yore (Little Hitler, doggy dinner tales), as yellowed and curled at the edges as it might be, pervades their new pages, making Labour Of Lust the aural equivalent of Oui magazine — very soft, shiny and slick porn juggled with easily-assimilated AOR rock.
Expertly packaged, this particular product makes no bones about what's contained herein. The title itself continues the Bowie joke through to the boy's Iggy Pop period. On the inside sleeve, Lowe smiles goofily at the camera, full of Lust for Life. And the very name Nick Lowe is now synonymous with clear, diamond-hard perfection in the production department.
Inside, the music is meticulously performed by Nick and Rockpile mates Dave Edmunds and Billy Bremner (guitars) and Terry Williams (drums), with a little help from friends Bob Andrews and Huey Lewis. The songs are invested with a muckle-mouthed charm by Nick's curled-lip, country-tinged delivery.
The form's fine. What about the content? Gone are the quirky oddities of the Jesus of Cool. Instead you get a few playboy cartoons, the odd romance, cocky Cagney snippets and an endless road fable. The musical accompaniments become a running Spot The Sources quiz: a touch of Shirley Ellis's "Clapping Song" in "Big Kick, Plain Scrap!" and country references dominate the early part of side two. But why spoil the fun? Spot the others yourself — except to say one of the album's best tunes sounds very similar to "Green Green Grass of Home," when the yearning emotions of the Tom Jones hit lends itself nicely to the trucker's lament, "Endless Grey Ribbon." Another country-rocker, "Without Love," is almost as good, featuring some neat guitar from Edmunds and Bremner.
Mostly, Labour Of Lust is marred by the nagging familiarity of the music and its insistence on little games and wordplays. Some are amusing — "A moment to treasure / Is just a matter of time" — others, with their sniggeringly ambiguous delivery, are just plain offputting — i.e. "Dose Of You."
Lowe's ability to achieve perfection incites a deal of admiration, if not outright enjoyment. And because of his conceit in concentrating on form over content — except where the two gell perfectly, as in the excellent single "Cracking Up" — Labour Of Lust has the attractive aura of a dumb blonde: good to look at, but not much beneath the skin, unless you're prepared to ogle the technical skill of the make-up.
It's perfect coffee-table music, despite Lowe's insistence (on "Born Fighter") that "In between the pages of a glossy magazine / Is a coffee-table world I would never fit in."
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