The Flatmates-Love and Death: The Flatmates 86-89

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The Flatmates-Love and Death: The Flatmates 86-89 CD
Clairecords is mighty pleased to announce the reissue of the long-out-of-print recordings by original C86 brilliant popsters The Flatmates!!
Formed when Morrissey fantasied about Margaret on that guillotine, The Flatmates are still regarded as bastions of
mid-80s Britpop, an upbeat, idiosyncratic alternative to the unrelenting miserablism of many of their contemporaries. The group joined Husker Du and Elvis Costello at Glastonbury 1987, released a steady stream of well-received EPs and singles and taped live sessions with legendary BBC-1 radio personality John Peel before calling it a day in March of 1989. Former guitarist Martin Whitehead's view fondly remembers the band as "geeky outsiders, just ploughing their own furrow." Despite the group's meagre commercial success and short lifetime, that furrow proved to be a fertile one, and ideal for nurturing the kind of timeless pop for which the Flatmates are still known and loved.
"I find it quite a pleasing irony that The Flatmates have weathered the years better than many of their contemporaries," Whitehead says. "I listen to a lot of our stuff now, 18 or 19 years after the early songs were written, and it really hasn't aged that badly. We used to get stick for failing to express the rage of living in Thatcher's Britain, or not pushing back the boundaries of sonic experimentation. I think it's because we didn't do those very things that our music hasn't dated. There was no blueprint or masterplan to what we did. We simply played what we thought were good popsongs, that came from inside us, in a style that we enjoyed."
Written and recorded between July 1986 and November 1989, the songs on Love and Death were originally intended for release on an LP for London Records-- a project that, sadly, never materialized. But with such a strong resurgence of interest in the Flatmates as of late, there's hardly a better time to introduce them to the legions of new fans this collection is bound to attract. Whitehead welcomes them warmly: "It just makes it all the better that people still get off on what we wrote and recorded back then!"