Love – Forever Changes

In the summer of 1967 we planned to go to Llandudno on holiday, but my brother got rubella (which everyone called German measles back then), and instead we spent a week at Westward Ho!, which, though not as exciting as north Wales, I really enjoyed. In the same summer, Arthur Lee’s band Love recorded this wonderful, wonderful album.

I heard this for the first time last year, and loved it. I thought that on coming back to it I might be disappointed, but I’m not. It’s as wonderful as ever. So I played it a second and third time. I said I loved “Forever Changes” the first time. Actually, when I heard the opening track, “Alone Again Or”, I hated it – I remember thinking “This sounds like CAT BLOODY STEVENS” and I nearly didn’t listen to any more. I’m glad I did.

The songs which stand out for me are still “The Red Telephone” (harrowing and beautiful: I still haven’t got completely to the bottom of the lyrics, beyond that it is sort of about madness in a mad world) and “You Set The Scene”. But also “Andmoreagain”, which deserves a place on the pantheon of Great Neurotic Love Songs, (alongside the likes of Talking Heads’ “The Book I Read” and, of course, Syd Barrett’s “Terrapin”). As does the aforesaid “Alone Again Or”. And the audaciously cheesy arrangements, which somehow add another dimension to the music.

None of the tracks could be called weak: the least strong are the unconvincingly callous-sounding “Bummer In The Summer” (though it is growing on me), and “Maybe The People (etc)” (I do NOT pander on this blog to unnecessarily long song titles – come and haunt me if you don’t like it, Mr Lee), which is sorely in need of a middle eight.

But the songs that fascinate me the most were the ones that defy gravity. “The Good Humor Man (etc)” should have collapsed under the weight of its own tweeness even before it acquired the pizzicato strings, but somehow it doesn’t. And “The Old Man”, which should simply be too weird to work, but isn’t.