Song of the Day 2/3: The House of Love, “Beatles and the Stones”

As El Somnambulo noted, last night’s Grammy Awards handed out trophies to both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones – the Beatles for “Now and Then,” a John Lennon demo that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr massaged into one last Fab Four record, and the Stones for “Hackney Diamonds,” an album that plowed over old ground but surprisingly didn’t suck.

This makes the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences seem like it’s stuck in the past. Was the video collage assembled for “Now and Then” really the best performance of the year? Was “Hackney Diamonds” really the best rock album, or did voters just like another effects-enhanced video featuring Sydney Sweeney‘s opulent decolletage? (For what it’s worth, the Stones weren’t even the oldest winners – 100-year-old Jimmy Carter, who died last December, won a spoken word Grammy, his fourth, for “Last Sundays in Plains,” a collection of his final Sunday school lessons.)

Calling the Beatles and the Stones old hat was already old hat when this song was released in 1990. The Beatles were 20 years gone and John Lennon dead for 10. The Rolling Stones nearly broke up in the mid-’80s, so 1989’s “Steel Wheels” LP and tour were regarded as a comeback, though lots of people referred to the tour as “Steel Wheelchairs.” They weren’t current. They were history.

The House of Love, on the other hand, was a band ahead of its time. Formed in south London in 1986 by singer-songwriter Guy Chadwick and guitarist Terry Bickers, their sound anticipated Britain’s shoegaze movement and were cited as an influence by some the genre’s better-known bands, including Ride. Several of their singles made the lower reaches of the UK charts in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but “Beatles and the Stones,” from their second LP, was the last to make the top 40.

The band never broke through in the U.S., but they had several singles make Billboard’s alternative rock chart, including this No. 2 entry from 1989.

Bickers left after that album and the group broke up in 1993, then reformed 10 years later when Bickers and Chadwick buried the hatchet. That didn’t last either, but Chadwick assembled a new lineup that’s still performing.