Love and Rockets’ ‘Express’ turns 40 on 15 September
Love and Rockets released “Express” on 15 September 1986 through Beggars Banquet, produced with John A. Rivers at Woodbine Street in Leamington Spa.
Love and Rockets, the English trio that Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins started after Bauhaus split, released their second album “Express” on 15 September 1986 through Beggars Banquet. The album turns 40 this year. John A. Rivers produced it with the band at his own Woodbine Street Recording Studios in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and played additional keyboards on the sessions.
The record arrived eleven months after the debut, “Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven”, and pushed the pop side of the trio’s guitar rock further forward.
How Love and Rockets recorded ‘Express’ at Woodbine Street
The original UK LP on Beggars Banquet ran eight tracks: “It Could Be Sunshine”, “Kundalini Express”, “All in My Mind” and “Life in Laralay” on side one, then “Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man)”, “Love Me”, “All in My Mind (Acoustic Version)” and “An American Dream”. Ash sang and played guitar and saxophone, David J played bass and sang, Haskins played drums and synthesiser. A choir closed the album on “An American Dream”, with Allan Baker as choir master and Alan Brookes, James Lowry and Robert Willey singing. The band designed the sleeve themselves from photography by Mitch Jenkins, and first UK copies came with a single-sided 35 x 24 inch poster carrying the lyrics.
Three singles came off the album. “Kundalini Express” led on 2 June 1986, more than three months ahead of the LP, and later turned up in the 1986 Italian horror film “Demons 2” and in an episode of “Miami Vice”. “Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man)” followed on 8 September, a week before release day, and “All in My Mind” closed the run that November. The American edition, issued by Big Time Records, differed from the British one: it added the band’s cover of “Ball of Confusion”, the Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield song they had already put out as a single in 1985.
Beggars Banquet remastered and expanded the album in 2001, adding two single remixes, contemporaneous B-sides including a reading of Pink Floyd’s “Lucifer Sam”, and two short experimental pieces found on the studio tape masters labelled “B Side #1” and “B Side #2”. The USA mix of “Ball of Confusion” was appended to that edition as well, since it would not fit on the reissue of “Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven”. That 15-track version is the one now streaming.
About Love and Rockets
Love and Rockets formed in Northampton in 1985, two years after Bauhaus broke up. Daniel Ash took vocals, guitar and saxophone, David J bass and vocals, Kevin Haskins drums and synthesiser. Ash and Haskins had already spent 1982 to 1984 in Tones on Tail, the project Side-Line looked back at in 80sObscurities presents: Tones on Tail – ‘Christian Says’. The three took their name from the Hernandez brothers’ comic series, and moved away from the gothic rock their previous band was known for towards a brighter, pop-leaning sound.
Their first release was a cover of the Motown song “Ball of Confusion”, which reached number 18 on the Canadian singles chart in January 1986. The debut album “Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven” came out on Beggars Banquet on 11 October 1985, “Express” followed on 15 September 1986, and “Earth, Sun, Moon” on 9 September 1987 with a more acoustic arrangement and the single “No New Tale to Tell”. In 1988 the trio issued “The Bubblemen Are Coming” under the alias The Bubblemen, backed on its various formats by “Bubblemen Rap”, “Bubblemen Rap (Dub Version)” and “Bees”.
The self-titled fourth album arrived on 7 March 1989. Its second single, “So Alive”, reached number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, a chart placing no other Bauhaus-related act has matched. RCA dropped the band after they turned towards electronics, and they signed to Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, releasing “Hot Trip to Heaven” on 26 September 1994 and “Sweet F.A.” on 19 March 1996. In April 1995, during the “Sweet F.A.” sessions, fire broke out at the label-owned house where the band were living and recording. No member was hurt, but their visiting friend Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV was injured escaping, and the band lost their equipment along with months of work. A photograph of a burnt guitar became the album cover. “Lift” came out on Red Ant Records on 13 October 1998, and the band split after a Toronto show in April 1999.
They reunited on 22 December 2007 to play the Joe Strummer tribute “Cast a Long Shadow” at the Key Club in West Hollywood, then appeared at Coachella on 27 April 2008 and at Lollapalooza in Chicago on 3 August 2008, before stopping again. The tribute album “New Tales to Tell: A Tribute to Love and Rockets” was released on 18 August 2009 with contributions from The Flaming Lips, The Dandy Warhols, Monster Magnet and others. On 23 January 2023 the trio announced a return for Cruel World Festival in Pasadena on 20 May, their first concert in fifteen years, and expanded it into a North American tour. A 2024 run supporting Jane’s Addiction was announced that May and cut short mid-tour.
Each member has kept a separate line of work running. David J has been the most active on record in recent years, covered here in David J (Bauhaus/Love and Rockets) announces decade-spanning retrospective new album, David J (Bauhaus) to release career-spanning triple album: ‘Tracks from the Attic’, David J (Bauhaus) rebuilds attic demos for new album ‘Tracks From the Attic Revisited’ and the conversation in David J Opens the Attic: old ghosts, new bloom, and songs still in motion. Haskins turned archivist for the book reported in Founding Bauhaus member Kevin Haskins to release coffee table book on Bauhaus: ‘Bauhaus – The Archives’. Forty years on, “Express” is the album where the trio settled the sound they carried through the rest of the decade.
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