So at some point the lads inevitably went off to pursue “solo projects”; Gabriel cosied up to mad-aunt-in-the-attic Kate Bush and turned his primal scream therapy into artsy chart music; Collins bounced around like a coked up Border Collie and recorded a succession of yuppie rock albums for senior vice presidents to listen to while dismembering their secretaries; Tony Banks, well… what did Tony do again? Sat sobbing in the corner while begging his wife not to leave him, probably, which few would have blamed her for after his floppy-dicked turn on “Shortcut to Somewhere”, the sad twat.
But what of Rutherford, the preternaturally tall village pastor-cum-scarecrow turned otherwordly string-picker? As befitting a backwoods-dwelling yeoman with a tendency to hear the voice of god while herding sheep, Rutherford’s trajectory was the darkest of all; he founded Mike + the Mechanics, the dadrockiest outfit in the inglorious two-millennia history of popular music, soundscapers of sole-trading 4×4 drivers with SSRI-addicted wives, and the favourite band of hip-to-be-square sociopath Gareth Keenan from The Office. It literally does not get naffer than Mike + the Mechanics, right down to that execrable “+” instead of the appropriate conjunction in their name, an obtuse move that Rutherford no doubt considered more leftfield than anything Gabriel had attempted on Melt, the massive prat.
And yet, as breathtakingly embarrassing as Mike + the Mechanics were and are and shall ever be, I’m forced to admit that I have a bit of a twisted history with them. Back in the 90s, my dad’s shiny new BMW had a pre-loaded CD player and, as a greasy goth liable to piss his frilly knickers if a girl so much as fluttered her eyelids at him, my selection was Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, whereas his was Mike + the Mechanics’ greatest hits. We had an unspoken arrangement that, for every four minutes that I was permitted to enjoy Trent Reznor screaming into a biscuit tin while mincing his testicles in a food blender, he was allotted four minutes of Rutherford setting fridge-magnet-life-advice lyrics to mid-80s Mondeo Rock
Transitioning from “March of the Pigs” to “Everybody Gets a Second Chance” made for some discombobulating trips through the Trough of Bowland, to say the very least, but the time wasn’t entirely wasted, because it furnished me with the following segue; fathers and their passing are the key theme of the “The Living Years”, the title track of M+M’s second album and an international hit about the death of Rutherford’s dad. There’s no point denying that this soppy adult pop record is a great song; the synths, the choral singing, the oedipal lyrics – it’s as drearily petit bourgeois as Homes under the Hammer, but it fits like a glove, and there’s not much else like it in rock history, quite honestly.
The obvious problem is that the rest of the album is nowhere near as seminal as its title track. It’s basically just late Genesis, but stripped of Collins’ cockney spunk. Nonetheless, and I’m not really supposed to openly admit this, but I kind of like the first half of The Living Years. And why shouldn’t I? Yes, “Nobody’s Perfect”, “Nobody Knows”, “Seeing is Believing”, and “Poor Boy Down” are overly earnest sacks of syrup for philistine class traitors who made loadsamoney under Thatcher, but they are also polished, easily digestible slices of middle-aged pop that waft by as sweetly and silkily as one of Tony Banks’ farts.
Unfortunately, the second half of the album is a bit of a dog’s dinner; “Blame” and “Beautiful Day”, for example, sound like (and were surely conceived as) soundtracks for television commercials – the former, a line of Made In China action figures that are in bits by Boxing Day; the latter, Arnold pumping iron and insisting that you buy some dubious muscle-building powder originally commissioned by the US military for eradicating Third World revolutionaries. And the less said about “experimental” numbers such as “Don’t” and “Black and Blue” the better, except that, in their own way, they also succeed in delivering hackneyed life advice: stick to what you’re good at.
There’s an argument that, in an age when the anti-establishment, fuck-everything spirit of punk has been coopted and commercialised by a cynical establishment, wilfully championing a band as anodyne and unfashionable as Mike + the Mechanics actually constitutes a kind of punk move. I’m partial to that argument, but it doesn’t change the fact that, in the cold light of day, The Living Years mostly comprises forgettable 80s softrock that secures an unlikely place in the cultural memory solely on the strength of its title track. Faint praise, perhaps, but it’s more than you can say for Bankstatement.
Rating: * * *
Standout track: “The Living Years”