“No New Tale to Tell” (1987) – Love and Rockets * Written by David J (words) and Love and Rockets (music) * Produced by Love and Rockets * 45: “No New Tale to Tell” / “Earth Sun Moon” * LP: Earth Sun Moon * Label: Beggar’s Banquet * Billboard charts: #18 (Rock Tracks)
Although they were offshoots of Bauhaus, who were goth rock royalty, Love and Rockets (named after the Hernandez Brothers cult comic) offset their alt aura with a certain bloke-iness. The sounds and personae leaned toward hooks, power chords and male camaraderie, but then leaned further still toward socially trangressive, “going against nature” subject matter.
The lean was the thing. Their 1987 “No New Tale to Tell” is exhibit A: an acoustic chord sequence strums its way through a paradoxical harmonic minor neighborhood (like the Flirtations’ “Nothing But a Heartache”) with a halt-then-skitter cadence like we hear in Manfred Mann’s (not Sweet’s) “Fox on the Run.” If you draw dot-to-dot lines on its notes as played on the bass guitar (D-F-C-A on the fifth and third frets), you get a leaning column, an italicized lower case L, as in “leaning” (not straight) and “love and rockets.”
The title refrain nods toward Ecclesiastes’ “nothing new under the sun” motif and the lyrics equate the complications of human nature with the complexities of a flower. Natural but hardly black-and-white. This was a favorite theme of theirs, cf. “Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man)” and also “Holiday on the Moon,” wherein the lyrical theme of “having a wonderful time” pairs up with with pop music’s traditionally mopiest sequence (Im – VI – VIIb – Im). Love and Rockets’ formula, surprisingly, seemed more palatable to American radio, who gave them the attention that the stations in their native UK did not.
P.S. That’s British flautist Mel Thorpe taking the solo, not Ian Anderson, as you might have suspected.