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Stew's Writing Written For Love

Razorcuts album reissue sleevenotes

By Stewart Lee in Razorcuts Sleeve Notes Posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Stumbled upon unwares upstairs in an Oxford pub, in the Winter of 1986, Razorcuts were the coolest looking band I’d seen to date. Magnificently stylish beatniks, but clad in threads you could snag from charity shops, beamed in from bohemia. For the next three years it seemed impossible to avoid them.

And the sound was like nothing around. Summer of ’66 psychedelia slashed with a summer of ’76 sneer. Today there’s fifty years of rock and roll source material instantly downloadable to young hipsters the world over, but in 1986, the flavours of 1976 and 1966 were distanced from us by un-navigable dimensions, apparently lost for ever. Achieveing this apparently effortless fusion would have taken Razorcuts real dedication.

Razorcuts were The Byrds playing The Buzzcocks, lyrically emboldened by Morrissey’s winsome wordplay and the bookish Postcard records crowd, not embarssed to write a song with the word ’embarass’ in its title. But they were here and now, four feet away, at The Jericho Tavern and The Ice rink, and slinking through the streets in pointy shoes carrying skinny guitar cases.

I was eighteen. I never saw The Byrds, or spat at The Sex Pistols, but stepping out into the frosty north Oxford night, the 12-string guitar parts of that song about the snowbirds still ringing in my ears, I couldn’t imagine that the after-buzz of either could have been much better.

A quarter of a century later, revisiting the things that spun you out as an impressionable teenager, it’s clear we often mistake objective excellence with the hormonal rush that made everything we experienced seem special. How graitifying to realise that Razorcuts, however briefly, really were that good.

Written by Stewart Lee in Razorcuts Sleeve Notes on 1st September 2010. Filed Under: Stew's Writing, Written For Love
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